reddit is shit and makes me annoyed, twitter is shit and makes me annoyed, tiktok is shit and makes me annoyed, pure news sites are boring, cracked is dead, google doesn’t work anymore, lemmy is only memes and news and fairly slow
i feel like i used to be able to sink into an activity on this machine, but now i just spend 5 minutes somewhere, the algorithm runs out of content, i get annoyed and go somewhere else, same process happens. i feel like i have amnesia, i used to enjoy this but i have no idea how.
I like to play games and watch youtube in the background
Kbin, online shopping and streaming music or video. The time surfing the world wide web for me is over. Most websites I used to visit have anti woke folk and other asocials now. It’s depressing…
Before the reddit api, I used to read around 24-28 books a year depending on length (Sanderson’s tomes will always change that number because it’s like reading 2 or 3 regular books)
Last year I hit 35. I didn’t really read books over 1000 pages much last year but I definitely know I’m reaching for a book when I would normally doomscroll reddit.
YouTube
Lemmy
NPR
Discord
I spend more time sorting my weapons and gear and creating loadouts on a 3rd party app for Destiny 2 than I actually spend playing the game
Pinterest
Recipe hunting on various websites
Still browse Reddit but less and less every day
Never look at Twitter unless something else linked to it, and I don’t have an account
Never look at Instagram, I don’t have an account
Facebook once a week at best, though only on my PC, I deleted the app from my phone ages ago
I tutor, lead a dumb mobile game clan of around 100 people, read, listen to music and watch youtube videos.
Lemmy, YouTube. There’s so many good videos on YouTube that I don’t have time to watch. Searching up how to do something online. There’s always some Linux programs I don’t know to use. Currently I am also watching The Computer Chronicles on archive.org. There’s also some sort of hidden parts of online you may not be realizing are there, though I haven’t spent basically any time there yet. For example Gopherspace. Gopher is an old protocol that used to compete with HTTP. It still has some people using it, just for fun. Of course, you won’t just find those gopher holes as the protocol isn’t supported by modern browsers. You can use Lynx.
You can use Veronica 2 search engine here: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/I visit forums that are associated with my hobbies, like satellite forums, tech forum etc. I also listen music, and post NSFW content(when I can) in other platforms(not in Reddit).
Hobbies are the only thing that keep me on the internet, apart from news and memes.
Satellite forums sounds like a very specific hobby, but I can’t quite tell which one:
- forums where all the remote sensing / OSINT / geospatial nerds gather.
- forums for satellite broadcast enthousiasts.
- forums for discussion on space exploration and satellites carrying scientific equipment or actual satellite astronomical bodies.
- forums that are called satellite forums as some form of jargon I am about to learn about for the first time.
What are people into these days?
TV satellite of course! Watching tv over the internet(IPTV, OTT) sounds good, but satellite tv is far better IMO(so far, wont last long). Anything related to new satellites, transponders, epg, FTA(free to air) channels and scrambled channels(when they are open), also there are linux boxes like octagon and vu +, where the users create images and addons. I don’t know for USA, but in EU with a big dish you can get lots of things.
This week at 13.0E, they added some Bulgarian channels, but the signal was low?, people started wondering why they added them, since it already in another sat. Probably tests.
Ah second category it is. Well met!
As a category one nerd with a susceptibility to new kinds of gadget-related hobbies I’m not sure SAT TV is something I should be getting into. Sounds like an absolute blast to tinker with all kinds of setups though.
Do you just buy a dish and a receiver en get going? Or is there more to it?
I read the news once a day from the BBC equivalance of my country. I check the DayZ and Combat Footage subreddits few times a day. Other than that I’m either on YouTube, Lemmy or watching porn. That’s literally covers over 99% of what I do online.
Currently spending a lot of time on Lemmy. Best wholesome time for me online is Pixelfed tho - it’s relaxing to just sit and look at beautiful art people have made. Especially with some nice music in the background from something like @radiofreefedi@musician.social (comfy channel). In fact, having a beer and a joint to go with it makes for a really nice time too. Overall though I’m starting to feel a bit like I’ve ‘done’ the internet and trying to get real pleasure from it is clutching at straws.
This is so true. I try to explain this to my wife and she doesn’t understand.
If I’m on my phone I’m either:
- Answering endless Teams chats or emails (I get work messages well outside of normal business hours because of my job—it’s annoying but I’ve also gotten used to it because we basically do everything async)
- Doom scrolling
I hate social media. I’ve hated Reddit since API. Lemmy is great but I’ll go days sometimes with the same home page. So I basically cycle through the same 3 sites endlessly. I got a Steam Deck to try and help with this, but when I hop on it my wife thinks I’m “playing video games so should be working on something.” I’ve tried to explain that using a Steam Deck is the equivalent of her scrolling social media, but alas.
So yeah. Basically nothing to do these days. I think the most frustrating part to me is how most content seems to be geared towards making me angry. I never remember it being like that.
I’ve been doing more stuff offline these days. I’ve been making music that about 10% of people actually like, which is a pretty decent ratio, I think ( https://songwhip.com/thethreeleonards ). between music and board-gaming and TV the hours fill up.
I’ve been on The Internet since 1995. I, too, used to enjoy this. There is enjoyment to be found, but most of that is in finding people I can sincerely connect with, which is difficult. Treating The Internet like it’s the Mirror Of Erised is not the way to happiness.
I spend a lot of time on Lemmy, sorted by Top>Day or whatever, which seems to provide mostly fresh stuff every morning. I’m on Telegram being an attention whore in my local art community/fandom/convention planning spaces. I browse art on websites, and Google like a madman in relation to my broken project car that I’m trying to restore. I am big into Outer Wilds, and was spending a lot of time on that up until recently. YouTube for offroad recovery videos (Trail Mater and Matt’s Offroad Recovery), which is silly because I don’t like offloading. It is fun to see the physics/mechanical aspect of how big truck recoveries work
I like to work with artists from Europe, so sometimes I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to track people down on Russian Google/Facebook (Yandex/VK) haha
Can you recommend some good art sites? I’ve been really enjoying Pixelfed.
I await death, that’s what I do
Honestly I have more IRL hobbies now.
I still end up on Quora too much. It was a great place to learn until about 2018 when the investors really started making decisions, taking Quora away from the mission towards ad revenue at any cost to the community. The enshittification hasn’t damaged it to the level of Yahoo Answers yet, but there’s nothing to stop the slide.
My ability to shape my feed took the biggest big hit when they dumped the topic ontology ~2022 IIRC and went with bots all the way. You used to able to follow extremely specific topics and tag questions with them so that your feed was all gold. No more - my feed is full of “viral” now.
Yahoo answers was a lot of fun when it was newer!
