|
Internet access became a commodity, that's what's happened. Back in the days we had dial-up. I remember the rush. The excitement. The thought that every minute I was paying 6 cents. The monthly bill my parents received, and the (justified!) speech I got for being online too much. I remember downloading entire Usenet groups, reading them offline (cheap!). I also remember my browser crashing after I logged off [from the internet], while it contained various windows (tabs didn't exist yet), and it couldn't handle it for whatever reason. Session Restore? Haha, no, that didn't exist yet. It'd be like a reinstall of an OS: fresh. You'd have to put effort and patience into a post, too. Because you had to dial-in to post it, and who knows what might've been posted in the meantime? Now we got always-on. Everything is very graphical, Web 2.0. You can get any content you desire. Any movie, any music, any book. Its all available, without any issue. It devalues the works, as does Web 2.0 with templates and what not. Its the same with synthesizer-based music. Everything is VST now. Back in the days, you needed an expensive hardware synthesizer (e.g. a 303) which was a specific investment. Its like the difference between the bioindustry daily and eating a piece of free-range meat every once in a while. Not to mention, search engines have become so good, it defeats the purpose of manually exploring in your own way. Efficiency killed curiosity. And you grew up. As you grow up, things become less new and exciting. You can still explore though. For example, you could go to HN's newest submits [1] and upvote of the few which were worth reading. If a few do this, and its a match, interesting content gets more coverage on the HN front page. But that's the thing, too: you're doing work for other people. That's also part of what exploring is about: sharing your findings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newest |