I've been around these godforsaken textboards for too long and it's undeniable that it went from a friendly network of communities populated by a handful of friendly NEETs to a decayed ruin squatted by a half dozen mentally deranged individuals.
Everybody used to be friends back then. Everybody talked to each other. Now everyone in IRC is either gone or idling. What's the point of sticking around?
I feel like everyone has moved to greener pastures, not because the format is old, or that textboards are obsolete or whatever, but because the userbase has grown up. They're either finding their source of joy somewhere else on the Internet or completely outside of it.
This is a pretty terrible year to be online anyway. The Internet's a fucking mess. You could argue that only the places we all visit (imageboards, etc) are a fucking mess because of the clusterfuck of the past two or so years (how many goddamn times did we hear the word Gamergate? For how long am I going to have to withstand written crusades against the alt-right boogeyman?). When 0037 made this in 2011 the Internet was an easier place to be. Sure, we still had our share of the mentally ill, but SAoVQ was alive and people could interact with each other. Now everything is a fucking mess.
Or was that because we were more innocent back then?
I wonder what 0037 is doing nowadays. You still show up here but you don't interact with us as you used to. Are you busy? Did we scare you off? In a sense I kinda wish I knew more about you because you seem like a decent guy but it's totally understandable that you run away from this place. Archduke scares me a little bit even if probably harmless.
It's not like I'm digging through this and feel like I'm wasting my time, but it's more like a faint feeling of wrongness. Maybe I'm too stuck in the past and don't belong here anymore? Have we abandoned this place and left it ripe for ransacking by net nomads?
I feel these people are happier somewhere else. Or maybe I feel that I've -wasted- time in the past, if these places ended up as dead as they look.
Or am I just trying to develop meaningful relationships and things to do on the Internet and I'm looking at the wrong places...?
And why did I even make this thread in the first place knowing that in five replies or less it's going to derail hard into a thread about bas[0-9]que niggers...?
Sorry, I fucked it up and deleted it. I'm high as shit right now so you can just ignore all this
It's hard to make anything fun for the depressed.
I like your post
This, combined with "Think of me as Evil" [ http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/think_of_me_as_evil.pdf ] makes me despair for the state of the world.
You can't close Pandora's box, we're stuck with this. There are huge economic incentives to keep it going and most of the general public don't want to stop it. The power to change the world lies in the hands of marketers and companies encouraging people to buy buy buy. This of course creates perverse incentives to destroy privacy. The more they know about you, the more accurately they can sell to you. With no public outcry ("I don't care that Google knows what porn I watch") no regulation will ever be put in place, doubly so when any country to do so would come under fire thanks to the interconnected nature of modern economies.
I feel like an old Bolshevik awaiting his show-trial. The utopian dreams of what a global computer network could do for human understanding and relationships hijacked by marketers to encourage you to mass upload worthless photographs so that friends you've not spoken to in years who live in your own city can ignore them. It's as though the entire point of social interaction has been missed.
Combine this with all the terrible UI decisions in that article [endemic in modern UI design, even for desktop operating systems.] leaving this nightmare inescapable even if I don't use social media sites (In a fun case of misfortune turned fortune, my often bleak worldview tends to make most attempts at faux-niceness/obligated reciprocation fall flat because I'm already subconsciously seeking excuses to reject validation.) and the future becomes very upsetting indeed.
The worst thing is, one can no longer retreat into real life. One cannot "grow out of the internet" anymore - it's no longer an option. Even old people are on Facebook. If I stick to the computer, I use 4-ch all day and miss what everyone else is talking about: If I stick to real life, I sit in a corner while everyone else uses their phones. There is no winning option. As time moves on and these limited choices and market-driven intrusion into our lives become more common - Glass style headwear putting everyone in front of a viewfinder whenever they're in public, Automated cars logging your every journey, Google Loon style projects ensuring that even if you flee to the ends of the earth you'll still be within range of the internet's tentacles.
All this from what should have been a simple computer network. We've lost control of the revolution and now it's going awry. Hurry up with that ice pick.
> we should be able to move in public spaces without being exposed to advertising
I strongly agree with this. I'm ad-phobic and it's very frustrating to see this gigantic bill boards.
w you did Kindaoor 6 years. Tried to get where the old people went to. Got banned from every place after a while. Just couldn't jive in.
Bam happy mods ruin communities
>>10
"Ban happy mods" or "Bam! Happy mods?" I hope it's the latter, like you've come to a realization and are expressing it with the word BAM for some reason.
Bam!
Boom!
Shakalakalaka!
looking through old /b/ screencaps and thinking "this is retarded, but it was good retardation. now everyone's retarded, but acting differently and it's bad."
perhaps thinking of "the internet" as a coherent object is my folly. i don't recognize it's just a part of real life now. each year i waste in mourning, a year closer to my tomb.