Oi! Didn’t you hear? The internet is DEAD! All of its organs failed one by one.
Herein lies the sad timeline of the internet’s decline and demise:
BBSes are dead because nobody uses DOS anymore, grandpa. Also, when you want to go to a different BBS, you have to enter in a different number and wait for it to connect? Nuts to that jazz!
Legend of the Red Dragon is fun though…
Newsgroups are dead because giant of ASCII art signatures. Wow, you spent 3 days making a 100 line picture of Jean-Luc Picard out of commas and semi-colons? End every one of your messages with it!
Forums are dead because, really, forums are just newsgroups with an ugly backgrounds and annoying author avatars. Yes, I really think that the portrait that embodies you best is an animated .gif of an arch vile from DOOM. Plus, who wants to spend their time moderating a bunch of idiots?
Chatrooms are dead because of perverts.
Blogs are dead because the posts are too long and all the kids with the ADHD are too impatient to read them. Also, they update too infrequently. Today’s culture demands instant gratification.
Social networks are dead because everyone’s mom and boss has a profile now and it isn’t fun anymore. Nobody wants to interact in a place where all their actions will be under intense scrutiny.
Twitter is dead because of those goddamn hashtags. Also, everyone has updates from every service that they belong to funneled into Twitter. Nobody cares that you just favourited a video on Youtube or that you liked something on Facebook. Stop cluttering-up the feed with your inane noise!
Tumblr is dead because it’s horrible. Really, Tumblr should have been DOA, in my opinion. There are some absolutely stupid bits of Tumblr. The most egregious of which is that 4 out of the 7 posts types have no way for you to set a proper post title for them. Search engines and aggregators need titles to function properly!
Other things I dislike about Tumblr:
- There is no way to generate a list of all the tags you’ve use and their URLs, making it hard to construct tag archives
- Tumblr only keeps tacks of up to 200 posts with a certain tag, when you tag more than that the older posts start getting dropped from that tag’s archive
- There is no way to style your archives
- When a person likes one of your posts, they get a link in your post’s notes to their Tumblr, but you only get a link back from their Tumblr if they have decided to display their likes in their theme. This has created a culture of users liking everything that they see in order to generate a zillion backlinks for themselves, while suffering no consequences.
Anyway, go have a look at my Tumblr: tumblr.laurelgreen.com
Pinterest is dead because 99.99% of the content on Pinterest is stolen. I dislike that in our current culture that people seem to derive the same sense of achievement from finding great content as one would normally get from creating great content. Finding a bunch of beautiful paintings does not make you an artist, reposting other people’s delicious recipes does not make you a chef, and removing watermarks and origin URLs does not make that content yours. If you have the time to search through the internet to find 300 photos of organic freetrade purple felted wool hats, then you have the time to create something of your own to share with the world.
A strange thing, though, that despite being dead, all of these services are still used actively by many people. Maybe people should be more worried about which venue bests serves their particular audience, rather than caring about what’s the newest, coolest thing. The newest thing will be dead soon enough anyway.
