listen weeb i will ****ing end you

Today's internet culture is so bad because it's mostly done by kids, these days. It was much better when we were the kids doing it.

I'll hazard to guess that things have improved in some ways. For example, I bet Stackexchange is better than Usenet was for curating good answers to questions.

Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture.

Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the 19th century. The big problem with our culture is that it's being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that's been worked on and developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels.

Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz.

Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

threaded bulletin board where questions and answers became discussions between professionals trying to provide the best advice

vs.

Q&A board where the only subjects that are allowed are the homework questions of moron first year undergrads, that punishes debate, and where the top promoted answer is chosen by the aforementioned clueless student

Unpopular opinion: freaking Reddit is a better format for Q&A than Stack Exchange is. The latter exists only because of a timely combination of aggressive SEO and the fact that they cloned existing popular sites with paywalls.

I don't doubt that you are right, but in terms of googling stuff? I would much rather sift through Stack Exchange than Google Groups (yes, I am aware that newsgroups used to be better than whatever the **** Google decided to mutilate them into). I'm not a big user of Stack Exchange myself, so I imagine I might feel differently if my question got shut down for being off-topic for dumb reasons, though.

Jeff Atwood visited SA a few years ago, while Discourse was still in planning stages, to ask what they thought was most important for forum software. At the time, SA was still one of the largest forums. Literally all of us said "no user moderation, it is toxic and will turn any forum into a ****hole like Stack Overflow".

Atwood spent the rest of the thread trying to explain why user moderation is actually good and that SA should switch to Discourse.

Infinite scrolling is bad user interface design, but it's difficult to explain why to a technodweeb without sounding like a troglodyte. It gives you fixed starting and stopping points, it lets you link to a section of the discussion quickly - ever hear of anchor tags?? It lets you map the discussion to your spatial memory -- ever hear of a search bar?


The real benefit of pagination is the emotional break. Flame wars tend to peter out between pages. Check for yourself. If you're designing forum software as a tool to facilitate communities (and not to satisfy your boredom as a web janitor) you need pages. Or anything else that puts a spotlight on short-term behavior.

As I like to say, if nobody hates what you're doing, it isn't very interesting.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm a total amateur when it comes to this stuff.

Well, folks: in my earnest effort to become less dated in taste of cartoons, and update myself for the 21st century with more recent anime, I have decided to supplement my Azumanga Daioh obsession with the following mangas/animes:

• Irresponsible Captain Tylor
• Excel Saga
• Cowboy Bebop

(How'd I do?)

lmao bebop is recent?

be sure to watch space dandy when youre done with it

hmm, wait a minute, I just listened to that Space Dandy music, sounds like porno music