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Comment by SecretDreams | Hacker News Reader

Social media is a plague, including LinkedIn. Anything that lets you follow others and/or erodes your anonymity is just different degrees of cancer waiting to happen.

The best I ever enjoyed the internet was the sweet spot between dial up and DSL where I was gaming in text based/turn based games, talking on forums, and chatting using IRC.

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Agreed. I wasn't particularly hooked, didn't use it very much already. As an architect, designer, and professor I had ig, and for the last five years basically only for work. But the feeling of freedom in its absence these past few months has been palpable.

Early fb reconnecting with people I hadn't seen since high school was okay. The blog / Google Reader era happening at the same time was the real golden age for me. And it's been all downhill since.

Agreed. This is where HN and reddit still smells a little bit like the good old times ;)

I use both, and even Reddit has issues. Likewise, HN is topically more like a single, insufficiently modded, subreddit. Still enjoyable, but easily brigades on certain topics. This is most readily seen for anything political.

Strongly agree. It's fascinating to me how faster broadband and selfie cameras led to more slop content.

Reducing the effort to produce content enabled a larger audience to contribute. This degrades average content.

The term "eternal september" dates back to the 90s, referring to the phenomenon where new undergraduates would arrive and suddenly have access to USENET to make bad posts.

We can think of fast internet and phones as like supercharging progress. Except, in this case, it just accelerated how quickly humans ruin it.

This brings me back to the days of Nukezone.

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