Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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Two observations:

Bill Watterson did return to public cartooning, if briefly, in 2014. There's a reference here:[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55321/first-new-bill-wat...

Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" shares a similar cultural and temporal space (1980--1989 initial run) with "Calvin and Hobbes", and I was going to comment that for the most part Breathed's also avoided commercialisation. Only to learn that there's an animated series planned to appear on Fox:

https://collider.com/bloom-county-animated-series-berkeley-b...

In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me. The 1980s and early 1990s were something of a spiritual child / echo of the 1960s, within the digital realm, and there was a promise of possibilities which ... have to a large extent failed to materialise.

The cesspits of Facebook and Twitter are the Altemont to Usenet and the WELL's Woodstock. Reality, bad trips, and Hells Angels have intruded.

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Notes:

1. Stealth footnote edit: thaumaturgy's commented with the strip in question, Pearls Before Swine, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116647

> In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me.

You get shanghaied into a way of thinking. I recently wrote a simple 1998 style (flask.py + mongodb) web thing for someone hosted on the other side of the Atlantic to me.

A domain.com/search page with results below the search box loaded on a page refresh

Even before adding pagination the clicking a search->query with 10k rows of results->return and render on a different page with a full page refresh was faster than any other site i had used recently doing a fraction of the information display. I was shocked that i was able to do all that in less than a second... because my brain had been conditioned by the modern web

I had become used to news website which take 15 seconds to fully render the content using 25MB of data or react apps or wordpress sites with dozens of fade in animations and the like.

I am fully blackpilled on the present state of the web. Outside HN it is basically unusable

The problem is advertising.

The reason we have come to this is because there is real FOMO in Megacorp marketing departments across the globe.

The way to solve it is to bring forward evidence that despite the info graphics and impression statistics and dashboards, targeted advertising by tracking users does not bring in more sales than say showing your ad on a relevant content page.

Showing me ads for bicycle helmets because from my profile you know I bought one on another site is idiotic. However, showing me an ad for fishing rods when I'm looking for fishing supplies stores would probably be a good idea.

If you can prove that than all of ad words and facebook non-sense and user tracking is busy work with no value added.

Then maybe we could go back to a saner web.

No, but there's always someone listening in from the outside. Woodstock wasn't pure, like...some people were just there to sell bad weed. There is no purity.

This is purity, like a gold coin is .999 pure, that's what you get, this. Hacker News was created with the intent of avoiding the Neverending September that happened when Usenet was opened up in ¿1993 was it? So that led to a series of attempts to cling to a more beautiful time, until Reddit, and in response to Reddit getting massified, this pretty small forum that lost a lot of its inertia it had seven years ago, and it's cool, it's a joint that's out of the way and few know about but it's a cool place. I'm rate-limited on here, which I embrace as a way of spending less time saying my words. I say a lot of things that make people's head hurt. Like there's stuff I only tell friends if there is aspirin on hand.

And the other thing is it has to be subsidized in some way. So this forum is subsidized by Y Combinator Management LLC (I think that's what it's called) and even though it is very synergistic, like...it's not as synergistic now. Well I don't know. I didn't do winter during Covid, until now which I regret, winter sucks. But there has to be a winter for there to be a spring...I'm losing conviction in what I just wrote as I continue writing. Like why lose when you can win and win forever?

It's less that Woodstock was pure and more that it was idealistic, and ... mostly, the idealism held / didn't break.

Altamont wasn't necessarily bad. But reality intruded to an extent it hadn't at the earlier festival.

The idealism of the 1960s stumbled heavily when it hit the Real World. Communes often proved to be unsustainable, tremendously unequal, and microcosms of the outer world of The Man that they were intended as an antidote / counterpoint to. Collective and cooperative organisations folded. Or evolved --- Whole Foods didn't simply out-compete many local and regional "natural food stores", but often bought them out.

It's not possible to simply wish (or mission-statement) away human behaviour and it's darker nature. I'm not sure if Mark Zuckerberg really believed that most people are good and privacy was obsolete, though those are principles he said and promoted aggressively ... which haven't worked out so well.

Part of me regrets tremendously that the idealism didn't deliver. Another part recognises that the idealist model of reality was fundamentally flawed. The questions of how and why it was flawed, if there's some way to redeem or resurrect parts, or if there are alternative ways to deliver on some of those principles or goals ... I'm not sure of.

Looking at the present state of things, its systems and organisations and institutions, I'm strongly disinclined to participate at all. Watterson's very few public comments don't seem to indicate he feels this way, and I don't want to put words in his mouth. The commentary on selling out ... suggests at least some alignment with this philosophy.

Among the things I've focused on over the past decade or so has been trying to understand media, its interactions with society (there's a bidirectional feedback), and both its capabilties and limitations. If I'd known then (in the late 1980s / early 1990s) what I know now ... I don't know how my activities would have differed, though I suspect my outlook would have been vastly less idealistic.[1] As I've come to hold that view myself it seems also to have become far more prominent generally, I don't know if I've led or followed that path to any particular extent.

Understanding who was promoting what visions of the future of technology, and what their own motiviations, beliefs, and priors were, has also been illuminating.

HN has been extraordinarily durable for an online forum, even by historical standards. Usenet's heyday was about a decade (mid-1980s -- mid-1990s), Slashdot only about 5 years (1999--2004). Reddit and Facebook both grew far too large for meaningful discussion (as well as suffering numerous other failings[2]). A large part of HN's success has been in remaining reasonably small, and it is of course dilligently moderated. Despite that, there are topics HN really can't discuss, and I'm often frustrated by the shallowness with which meatier topics and articles are addressed. But relative to other general online fora it really does excel. Applying my lens, perhaps it has the right ballance of ideal vs. pragmatism.

PSA: Don't take the brown acid.

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Notes:

1. The "light reading list" I've occasionally linked in earlier HN comments gives a pretty good grounding in my thinking / reading. It's incomplete and probably always will be, but should give good initial vectoring and velocity. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

2. I don't, and never have, participated in Facebook, so can't comment on its dynamics. I was an active participant on the conceptually similar platform Google+ where a "salon-style" form of discussion emerged around a few dilligent hosts. I've discussed Reddit's issues numerous times at my now all-but-entirely-defunct subreddit, with several of those addressed / linked here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...

I say this to people frequently: don't confuse the way things are vs the way you wish things were. It seems to be the source of so much poor decision-making and misery.

I'm not entirely sure I'm following.

There's the is-ought fallacy.

There's also wishful thinking: believing that what you want / would prefer is what should be, or that a realistic but unpleasant appraisal is wrong or false because it is painful to consider. (Truth and reality don't much care about your preferences.)

Or are you referring to something else?

I also feel very strongly about the failure of the digital era. Understanding that society moves in weird curves and is rarely self aware enough to do good things in one shot. Maybe it will have to crash and rebuild using some valuable bits and a better insight (or hindsight).

Breathed was always hyper-conscious of selling out in the comics industry and elsewhere; his approach was just to create Bill the Cat as an anti-Garfield. It was only later that irony became the only thing that sells.

Bloom County was revived in 2015 - when I saw Breathed speak at the National Book Festival the next year he indicated Trump’s resurgence was “not unrelated”

I'm aware of that.

I was speaking more to the aversion to commercialising the comic or its characters.

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