[carguy1983]

Life before the internet was incredibly boring most of the time. You spent the majority of your free time figuring out ways to wring the most value from the 10% of time spent doing actual things with actual people.

A lot of it was filled with TV and moving around needlessly (to get things, to send things, to be somewhere at a certain time to pick up the phone...). It really sucked.

[narrator]

One thing about life before the Internet was that social connections were used for finding out information. Nowadays people just go on the Internet and find it. Knowing a lot about a lot of things doesn't really count for much. I used to program Macs in the 90s and you'd get these big old Inside Mac books and maybe a good Primer book and if you got stuck, there was no stack overflow. You just had to go ask somebody. People maintained friendships because they might need information from that person. Now that's become totally obsolete.

[aaronblohowiak]

I just find the questions I get asked are more interesting.

[noonespecial]

I used to get asked things that were effectively trivia, now I get asked things that are more about discernment.

[k-mcgrady]

It all depends on you and your lifestyle. I know a lot of people who rarely use computers and when they do they get what they need and shut it down again. I'm guessing you (,like me,) spend most of your work day and free time on a computer. Other people go outside, play sports, build physical things, play music etc. There are many opportunities for entertainment away from a computer.

I think this is important though. I was part of the last generation that spent most of my childhood without computers (born 1990). We didn't have our first computer until I was 6 (my uncle built it as a gift for me - it ran MSDOS + had 2 games on it). Most of my time was spent outside playing sports and building things. As I got older and go my first games console (N64) I spent more time using computers but most of it was still spent outside.

When I look at my younger family members who have grown up with the internet it surprises me how little time they spend outside. When they visit friends they play games on the computer. Being 'grounded' and not allowed out is no longer a punishment. Being made to go out and not use the computer is.

I think it will be very interesting to look back 50 years from now and see how much of an impact this has on peoples' development. Will people born with computers evolve significantly differently from those born without them?

[zerostar07]

It's not really a reversible change, but i do think it will eventually make people less reliant on each other, and societies will be much more diversified and fragmented than the current, mass-media-driven post-industrial city culture.

I grew up without the internet; i don't think we are that far apart or disconnected from the first internet generation.

[gouranga]

It was incredibly inconvenient you mean?

In the mid-90s, before broadband proliferation, I managed to get from London to Manchester via train (200 miles) which takes bloody forever. When I got there, I realised I'd forgotten the damn software I was supposed to be installing (100Mb of deployables). That resulted in an additional 400 mile round trip to London and back via slow train.

A 2 day install job took 4 days and several hundred pounds.

Now I'd just log in to their kit and install it from the comfort of my favourite chair in 10 minutes :)

[ars]

Wouldn't it have been cheaper to express mail it?

[gouranga]

Cheaper yes but if you know the courier services in the UK at the time, there is no guarantee it'd get there on time.

[IsaacL]

I tried Tim Ferris' "media fast" idea recently, though I only lasted 2 days (he recommends a week). No surfing, magazines, books, newspaper, TV...

I noticed I was bored, but I also felt that maybe it was good to be bored, at least once in a while. Having your desire for entertainment/attention constantly satisfied is just as unnatural as having your desire for sugar/fat/carbs constantly satisfied. Practicing meditation maybe helped me see that boredom can be beneficial.

Two other things I noticed: I suddenly had masses of free time. Previously, spare time was mopped up by surfing or reading books on my iPad. And while at the station I got the urge to look up something on my smartphone, remembered I wasn't allowed to, and rediscovered the forgotten experience musing about a question I had no way of finding the answer to.

[wavephorm]

  Life before the internet was incredibly boring most of the time.

It's pretty boring most of the time today too. It seems to me as if the more "painless" our society becomes (less hard labor, more free time, movies, and porn), the more boring it becomes. Reading Twitter gives me a headache these days. Oh, you retweeted that someone I don't know went to a concert that was good. That's nice. Really, I don't give a shit.

I constantly switch sides. The internet makes me think we're heading toward the Huxley scenario. And the government, with their SOPA/CISCPA actions make me thing we're heading toward the Orwellian scenario. And it is still to be decided which direction we end up.

[carguy1983]

What I meant was the internet helps me do things in the real world.

[drostie]

I thought that this attitude was sufficiently funny that I decided to put it into a Philosoraptor image, which I think is reasonably appropriate: http://drostie.org/before_lolcats.jpg

[ars]

You've been here long enough to know that this kind of stuff is not desired here.

[drostie]

The reactions still seem to be pretty random -- about as random as reactions on reddit, to be perfectly honest. If I were really focusing on points, I suspect I would adopt a strategy like "don't ever reply to a comment, nobody ever up-votes conversation" -- and then this comment wouldn't have been authored.

Just to quantify the above statement: there is a group of "typically good" posts which I often get 6 or 7 points for: this included 7 for explaining what a plasma is, 7 for explaining how to do square roots and complex numbers with 2x2 matrices; 7 for discussing WTFs on the IRS tax forms, 6 for re-encoding hard-to-read XML as easy-to-read JSON, 6 points for explaining how French copyright law doesn't recognize the public domain.

That's a pretty esoteric set right there. It pales in comparison to the "big hitters." I got an unexpected 27 points for rickrolling Hacker News. I got an unexpected 20 for speculating non-constructively on whether there is a programming "voltage" equivalent to match the metaphor that most programming instructions are like force fields.

Apparently overloading the words "life" and "lolcats" to metaphorically refer to a quality living and the distractions on the internet, and doing it in the only appropriate way possible, is offensive. Okay, I can accept that. The other thing I've discovered was offensive was pulling out a Linus Torvalds quote and saying "this is insanely important, here's why" is offensive if those reasons are ultimately religious in nature.

Those boundaries are not possible for me to know unless I test them, and no, I don't pretend to know what all of them are. It is again a bit of a religious thing, and sorry. It boils down to this: basically, I suck. I will make mistakes, cross boundaries, and not know what the hell I'm doing.

That is a most important thing for me. It means that I have room to grow. And that's what I strive to do whenever I see a comment getting modded steadily downward.

[ars]

There is no set type of post that gets votes. But the general rule is: Is it helpful? Does it teach? Does it detail interesting points? (If you notice all but one of the things that you posted that got points match those.)

Basically discourse. You don't always have to have super comments. You can just talk, and argue - you may not get points for it, but that's OK, and sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised. And you won't usually get downvotes. Unfortunately sometimes you will (like the Linus comment). I've had it happen to me too, it's not pleasant but you have to ignore it. If you know your comment was good, then just accept it and move on.

(Small message to newcomers: Don't post anything provocative until you build up a Karma cushion or you may end up with a killed account. And you won't be told if that happens!)

Things like that picture you posted are just stupid. Reddit makes you think people like it, but actually people find it annoying. Or perhaps people like it sometimes when they are in the mood. But that's not what this site is for - different sites for different purposes.

Jokes also don't go over well, except in rare cases (apparently your rickroll was - but don't do it often, it's rare). The reason people dislike jokes is that they have a tendency to take over sites, and people are very worried about that happening here. But they are accepted rarely - which is exactly what people want - mostly good stuff with a small smattering of levity.

So when you have a joke, combined with a stupid sentence like the one in the picture you get massive downvotes. You may think that overloading the meaning of the words is the problem. But if you had written "Was there quality of life before the internet?" you also would have gotten downvotes since it's an empty sentence - if you want to talk about that then keep going, don't just raise the question (if you notice other people did in fact talk about this very topic). Putting that in a image instead of in text made it much worse, using "lolcat" made it worse. Combine everything (joke, image, empty sentence, lolcat) together and the downvotes are quite expected.