You're probably anticipating what my angle is immediately after reading this headline. It's going to be a hateful, insensitive article targeting these people and those people. Let's get straight into it.
Or... I don't know. Maybe this subject is too difficult for some.
I'm going to assume without preaching at you that you are decided to put an effort into using forums. Whether or not we think it would be a better use of our free time on the Internet than something like social media or an always-on chat app isn't something I'm going to go into. It doesn't matter if that's the case or not. We miss forums. We want to try forums. How do we build this behavior?
It's interesting that we're using language like "put an effort into" and "building this behavior." That is because reading forums is not as convenient as some of the mainstream, modern ways of using the Internet. And even if you're okay with putting in the work today, another thing you have to swallow is the glacial pacing that forums sometimes move at. So whether or not you become a forum user comes down to, "Do you return to the forum at any interval." There is a lot of room for that interval to vary. You can check boards everyday or you can check them one Sunday per month.
In this post we're going to assemble a list of forums to read. Each is going to fill a different niche, and we're going to subscribe to all of them like old men and women reading the newspaper.
Today we're looking at a special something -- not just any something, but -- the something.
clickity clickty clickity clack clack click
The most fun websites on the small web for me are homes for misfit programming projects: code that was written not because anyone needed it, but because it was interesting to make as a programmer and mildly amusing for a visitor.
We all know the feeling. You're browsing a site or using an app. It's black text on a perfectly white background. You don't notice until you click the dark mode toggle how painful it was. You can't imagine a circumstance where you would ever need the most blinding, bright #FFFFFF light in the galaxy shining directly in your face ever again, and from that day forward, in every app you use, the first thing you do is look for the dark mode. We all do it.
It raises the question, why do we even have a light mode option if the dark mode is objectively better? Is it so we can sell the dark mode as a premium feature? I'd say that adds up if more people were using that model.
What if I told you that dark mode isn't necessarily better?
The reason light mode is terrible is because UI frameworks that developers use to implement consistent design are doing it wrong.
I'm not much of an artist, so you'll have to imagine the cards below as panels of a comic.
I've always been bad about linking to external sites on my web pages. Maybe the biggest thing is that I only have so much real estate for my own content. If I'm being honest it's just pure self absorption. I'm thinking about whatever I'm doing at the moment and not about what other people are doing (at least not at the point when I update my site).
A lot of people have a dedicated section of links, and when I see links to my own sites in those lists, I feel somewhat guilty that I never take the time to give the courtesy back. A few times I aimed to give it a shot but found myself with ambivalence and indecision about what to include and exclude. So it just never happens.
Today I'm introducing Link of the Post, a column where I will take some time to look around the web -- as content!
click click click click click click
I will try to always give you the opportunity to just click on the link without too much context for the reader who doesn't want it. But of course I will have more to say about it.
Making websites was a hobby I started as a kid. My first site was a Dragon Ball Z fan page on Geocities. It was composed of images I saved from better fan pages than mine, and it was packaged with my role-playing scenarios where Frieza had returned to do...
Well it was something like that I'm sure.
There was an iframe menu along the bottom and an iframe header at the top with pages contained in the center. I can only imagine how small of a space that content must have been packed into. I know it was a red/orange-colored theme that somewhat matched the color of dragon balls, which were used to space out menu items arranged horizontally along the bottom.
If you wrote and published a 280 character anecdote to your website in 1999 about how Five Guys fucked you twice when they put onions on your burger for the second time this week when you specifically said, "No onions," many readers would have asked, "Why are they posting this? No one cares."
In the age of Twitter and selfie photos from smart phone cameras, it's hard to imagine a time period when the average Internet user was not already accustomed to what they would have called attention whores: people who posted self absorbed blurbs like the one above which are extremely commonplace today. Turning your digital camera around and snapping a pic of yourself was for the most part unthinkable back then. People sometimes did it but they walked with the mark of shame their attention whoring earned them for doing it and I can promise you they would have never let someone in real life see them doing it.
I'm not saying this was necessarily the right way to look at it, but people had certain expectations about what did and did not constitute post-worthy content. In this time period, the Internet was thought of as an information resource, not a dumping ground for minutia. But signs that the Internet was bound for shitposting no matter how much it was looked down upon were apparent even then.
Everybody knows the Internet sucks the same way a junkie knows looking down at his veins that it sucks while it continues to get worse. I wouldn't be the first to write this as the preface to an Internet manifesto, so I'll be brief and assume you're already caught up on what a plight we're in to be wasting our time this way, this profoundly.
At least I will. I have been horribly addicted to the Internet my entire life. In the past, this addiction had always been on my terms, but as the world progressed and people learned how to better manipulate Internet users, I became less in control than I realized.
I have weaned off of apps that were negatively impacting me into ones I'm more okay with using now that I'm aware what a problem it can be. We have to make good decisions about the Internet and how we are going to use it.
But how badly the Internet sucks does not stop when you decide. You find it festering with new smells in other places as you drift to other ways of using it.