Slashdot Mirror
Web Surfing Losing Its Luster
asv108 writes "The New York Times has an article about how trolling the web is not nearly as much fun as it used to be. Reasons for the decline cited in the article include: commercialization, lack of compelling content, instant messaging, P2P, and the fact that it's been mainstream for a couple of years now. The average online session decreased from 90 (March 2000) to 83 minutes in March of 2001."
It'll be interesting to see where the Net fits in relative to TV and movies
for pure entertainment.
Time to put ads everywhere! The growth of the web is limited only buy your imagination! Make big bucks now!!!
i thought the net was about disemination (sp) of information, not really entertainment. the entertaining aspects can be accomplished elsewhere (online games, downloading music, etc).
:)
i REALLY hope my online session times start to decrease, productivity needs to increase
Reasons for the decline cited in the article include: commercialization, lack of compelling content, instant messaging, P2P...
Big Fucking Ads...
The New York Times has an article about how trolling the web is not nearly as much fun as it used to be. ;)
It seems that there are still plenty of trolls on Slashdot who still think it's as fun as ever.
------
Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
I'm sure I've shaved off 7 minutes of online time by just having a faster connection...
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
In case you don't want to register.
Yahoo link
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
And the hidden variable is...broadband. Faster access = less surf time. Lets see a comparison of bytes downloaded to avoid a flawed conclusion, like the RIAA's conclusion that Napster caused the drop in CD sales during the middle of a recession that ate up a lot of disposable income...
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I'm not sure a decrease from 90 to 83 minutes per session means that people don't find the internet as compelling. First off, I wonder how that relates to the average TV watching session?
Second, people using the internet are more aware of how to find what they're looking for. Think just a few years back, comparing researching using AltaVista & Yahoo to using Google these days. Finding things faster lets you spend less time online.
Finally, isn't it also possible that more people have faster connections now? In March 2000, probably 40% of the population was still on 33.6 modems, and only 5-10% had broadband. Just about everyone has 56K at least now, and a lot more have broadband than ever before. Faster connections mean you need less time to get the same amount done.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
First, I'd like to say that the little fucking remark about "trolling" was tits. _Trolling_ is just as fun, but _browsing_ or, as fucktard journalists and OfficeMax associates like to call it _surfing_, is banal and extremely fucking base.
I've seen all the fucking snatch and tits I care to see, have more fucking music that I can even listen to in my life, posess in excess of 100 fucking thousand dollars of commercial apps and games, and chewed my motherfucking wrists to shit playing Quake and MOHAA online.I was so fucking burned out on the web that I, get this cocksucking shit, I bought a shitfucking load of books. Some damn fine books too.
It took countless sessions of late night porn, orgiastic download sessions of mp3s and obscene amounts of time reading banal and entirely fucking base blogger bullshit before I got bored. I have the attention span of a 7 month old embryo. That's no fucking joke. But I managed to find joy in the web for at least 7 years. But, this fucker is tired hack now. All that's left for me is the random search on google for "fucking profanity, motherfucker" to find neat and exciting cuss words, and slashdot to use them.
I know when I was first on the web there was a plethora (I have always wanted to use that word) of information to be discovered. Now days I sometimes find myself struggling to find good information to read. I read Slashdot, and then go to [H]ardOCP and Gameguru - I get almost identical stories. In the past I would stay on the 'net to chat to people, until one day when I realized that the people you chatted to online weren't real people, they were just the identities they projected on the web. BBSing and MUDing are becoming more irrelevent. Also, today people have maybe finished looking for what really happened on Babylon 5/Neo Genesis and only use the web for roles (messaging/email)
Goodbye 14 hour telnet bbs/mud sessions, I won't miss you.
Error: Erection reset by beer.
There's no point in surfing for surfing's sake anymore, not for me at least. I reached the End of the Internet a couple months ago.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
When people went to their mailboxes expecting things like personal correspondence and the most annoying thing were the bills sent by creditors.
Now, I spend almost 10 minutes a week culling spam from my post office box.
The medium isn't fun any more.
Likewise, while the total amount of content has gone up on the web, the ratio of spam to content has increased.
One of the many without broadband at home, I can testify that waiting for advertising images to download over a 56k line has made web browsing a less frequent part of my life.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
But radio requires less user interaction. I can listen to the radio and garden, or wathc my kids, or.. you get the picture.
Even TV requires less interaction, I can walk into and out of the living room, and still keep up on whats going on in whatever I happen to be watching.
The "net" has is losing its "new car smell" as it were. People are relizing most people have nothing interesting to say, and quite frankly, don't need to see a picture of yet another cat.
I would suspect, most people, like to get up and do things with there life.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now, I wasn't there for this, but I do recall a few stories of how, when TV first became a household item, people would watch constantly, even taking it into the dining room to watch during dinner.
/.), unless something's relevent to me personally (local news for example), I'm just not interested in surfing the net for nonsense anymore. The sheer glut of porn and badly designed, useless sites has increased to an insane degree; the new sites i find that actually hold my interest for more than two clicks of a mouse are few and far between. Sure, it was fun when the net was new, but nowadays I'd sooner read a book.
The novelty soon wore off, with the parental units now demanding that the tv be off during mealtimes (at least in my home), and that tv was for after homework.
The same goes for the Net as an entertainment medium. While the use of the net for work (email, conferencing, etc) has increased steadily, the stats have been showing for quite some time that pure 'silly' surfing has declined. And after using a computer all day, every day for years during my work life, the LAST thing i want to do when I get home is sit in front of another computer screen.
For me, I just got bored with the whole thing. Other than a few staples (like uffie and
At one point I'd probably have qualified as an internet 'compulsive', chatting constantly, losing out on sleep and socializing cause I HAD to be on the net, surfing with one hand while typing frantically in chat rooms with the other... now I chat rarely (in 5 to 10 minute bursts every few days), and my morning surf lasts about 30 minutes tops as I check news and information sites for my fix. Things change, people evolve... personally, I see this as A Good Thing (tm). If i ever started slipping back into my old habits, i'd toss my computer straight onto the garbage heap.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
9:00 - Start with hotmail and yahoo checking email and deciding that I dont want to view webcams/ dont want to increase my penis size and deciding against making 20,000 under an hour. Increasingly, of the 20 emails on my hotmail folder over night, only one is of relevance a whopping 19:1 ratio, where as my yahoo folder has very less spam (3-4 per week).
9:15 - Trolling on Slashdot. Usually refrain from commenting on articles.
9:30 - Manager comes by, hides slashdot under IDE.
9:35 - Back on Slashdot. hitting F5 every one minute.
9:45 - TheRegister, Cnet.com, Wired.com, and Nytimes.com. Finally gave in and registered at NYTimes.com. Not much spam from them anyway.
10:00 - Meeting to decide whether DTDs or Schemas make sense. Must stay awake till lunchtime..
11:30 - Register,Cnet,Wired,NyTimes and Slashdot. Have to check for new stories.
And the saga continuess...
Rapid Nirvana
Web-browsing used to being up a plethora of intelligent, well-written, interesting pages back in the days of the Internet being a largely academic arena. Now that everybody and their pet dingo are online, the quality of content has gone down dramatically; especially on unmoderated forums. Proper spelling and grammar have all but disappeared from the 'net, and only us "old timers" bother with things like netiquette.
Sure, it's cute that Grandma can email her grandkids whenever she feels the need, but with that comes a thousand hastily-designed pages on Geocities, all alike, proclaiming between BLINK tags how different and special each one of them is.
I've retreated almost totally into USENET, mailing lists, and a few IRC channels that still offer a modicum of intelligent conversation and interesting information. I don't accept HTML email, and although I still browse slashdot and K5, I don't post as regularly as I used to.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
I hardly think this a slow news day. Perhaps if you had read any non-tech sites you would have seen that Israel was hit by a particurally evil suicide bomb last night. Dudley Moore -AND- Milton Berle both died late yesterday. Arab piece talks. Reving up for war in Iraq. Energy meeting papers scandal.
Hardly a slow day for news.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
I'm finding that the good useless information is dying out slowly. I keep getting page not found errors when I try finding good garbage. It seems like half the time I try to get something (like a new MUGEN character) the file/page is nowhere to be found. Of course I look for some obscure things now and then, but that's what I love(d) about the internet.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
How do they measure "online sessions"? Is this for dial-up connections? Those people who stay on for hours at a time will be the most likely to have upgraded to an always-on DSL or cable line, and would've skewed the measurements.
Except that 99% of the sites out there use fixed font stylesheets that dont let you use larger font sizes.
that the comparison to TV and other outlets for entertainment will continue to be more popular, not just because they have been around much longer, but because they are not there mainly to feed the brain with information, but to entertain... It is just like the Playstation/XBox -vs- GameCube argument: the latter are both _entertainment_ systems and are advertised as such, whereas the former is a _gaming_ platform. The internet is an information platform and communications media. Not the best place to have entertainment, unless you really like watching public television(which most here do, I'm sure lol)
How many people actually sit down at the computer, open a browser, and think to themselves "Let's see what's on the Internet tonight" ?
/., the reason I come here is to find out what's going on in the sci/tech/geek world.
While there are some very entertaining threads on message boards like
I do searches for programming reference, I look up maps and driving directions, I occaisionally buy stuff. I know that some people like to stream/download lots of music/video clips, but your average AOL dialup user? It doesn't seem likely.
I use the internet all the damn time, but it would never occur to me to draw some kind of correlation between how much TV I watch per week and how much time I spend on the internet, and come up with some kind of conclusion re: the internet as entertainment medium.
Here's my half-serious theory - given how many dot coms went under between 3/2000 and 3/2001, maybe we can attribute some of that decline in web surfing to the those thousands of dot com employees who were suddenly wrenched from the teat of the company T1.
Hey NYT, if you're reading: stick a fork in it.
sulli
RTFJ.
I believe there are a number of reasons why the whole surfing thing is beginning to fade. First, the true jems of the Web are no longer free or easy to access. I used to be able to point people to quite a number of free encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. While they still exist, many of these resources now pop banners and make it quite difficult to find anything enjoyable about using the service. Also, so much of the content is now out of date. Those businesses who jumped into the fray a few years ago seemingly did not reap any benefits from their actions so they allowed their sites to collect dust bunnies. Maintaining a large Web site, while not technically difficult, is somewhat time consuming and offers little in terms of physical gratification. If the money's not pouring in from such a venture, I highly suspect most small to medium businesses are going to give it much of a thought. Finally, every time we turn around we hear of another really neat application of this thing we call the Net being beaten down into the ground because it infringes on some thing's right to exist, or make money, or, you get the point. Why in the world would I want to develop something new and fresh with the knowledge that my efforts will land me in jail. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have better things to do with my time than join the prison boxing team because I allowed somebody halfway around the world to download a file from my machine. I'm a Webmaster and developer and to be honest with you the whole thing makes me sick at times. If it's not crappy, useless, out-of-date content, then it's time to bone up the money. Let's see, 20 bucks for Web access (piss-poor performance at 37K or so), 40 bucks for a cell phone, 15 bucks for a pager, 60 bucks for a satellite, blah, blah, tivo, blah, satellite radio, blah, a couple of pay-for-access sites, blah, blah. Where will it end. I personally cannot afford to continue to allow content providers to suck every last lincoln out of my pocket, even if the content was enough to make me do so. If somebody wants any more of the pie, they better damn well be offering something that a) I cannot get anywhere else, b) is better than any of its competitors, c) etc. Time to step down, ooooo -- PenguinDung
P2P, IM, online gaming... Instead of 'Trolling the web' looking for something to do, people have actually FOUND something to do..
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
"- Abuse of Registration practices (forced to register for everything, even WAITING IN LINE hint hint FILEPLANET)"
It drives me nuts dude. I thought that by now every website would be using Passport or Sun's Liberty. But nah, you have to register with hundreds of websites, come back a month later and you've already forgotten your username/password so you have to register yet again, and finally you give up.
Oh yes, the Flash stuff drive me nuts and it's pretty confusing.
But also the number of sites being visited is decreasing. Patterns are showing that surfers are visiting the same sites over and over and not visiting new sites. Just like television viewing habits, where a family gets a set schedule of watching the same shows over and over, the same is happening to the web. I find myself with the same set of bookmarks and using those to find the information I need. For instance, the average British user visits only 12 sites a week. I feel like I'm stuck in a rut sometimes when I'm surfing.
I can't be compelled anymore usually to surf beyond the usual dynamic sites i check(livejournal, slashdot, fark, and any forum I'm a regular on), but it seems to me the web is just getting slower and slower. Nope, it's not my connection it seems. I get the same random DNS errors and such at work, or even at a friend's house. It gets to the point where if the page I'm looking for on a list of search engine results doesn't come up within x seconds, screwit.
:)
Another thing is that the pop-up ads have got to go. Remember when it was just ONE pop-up ad from ONE website, that being Geocities? Now it's on practically every website out there, minus Slashdot, thank you. I don't believe everyone's website is so dang popular they can't afford the bandwidth charges, forcing them to get pop-up ads. Yes, I know you can stop them, but think of how much pop-up ad banner traffic is taking up on a global scale.
And yes, the search engine results are getting slopper and sloppier. Any search on google will get you 50% 404 errors, or horribly-done web pages usually on angelfire or geoshitties.
Livejournal? Great concept, if you don't mind taking a crap shoot trying to load up a page. it's down about half the time now, if not totally overrun by drama queens.
Oh where have the days of the creative web pages gone done by university students on their spare time?
I've found myself watching TV more nowadays, and I don't even have cable.
It takes about 7 minutes for me to kill popups after looking at Porn. I switched to Opera in the last year and don't have that problem now.
Sorry guys, didn't mean to throw the curve.
"Derp de derp."
Or did slashdot intentionally pick this article to change the ad server from m.doubleclick.net to m2.doubleclick.net?
Does anyone know if *.doubleclick.net works for mozilla image blocking?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
The decreasing time people spend online could be the result of:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Today, Mr. Davis has not only kicked his Web habit but also almost completely given up the medium." *Sigh* I remember some news articles suggesting that people were spending too much time on the web. They made it out like the web was addictive and that kids would trade social lives for it. I hated this assumption. I knew people that spent lots of time on IRC, heck I was one of them. It wasnt an addiction so much as just hanging out. Most of the time I was on IRC I was also reading about stuff on the net, trying out new apps, etc. Nowadays, I've achieved some skills that I'm really interested in sharpening. So now a lot of my 'net time' is being spent developing new artwork. I found a place to show off my art, get some critique, and measure myself against the other people out there. I've really integrated the net into my life. I know use both email and instant messaging to keep tabs on my friends, I use tools like Mapquest to get directions to where I'm going, I even get movie reviews and showtimes! I'm not just hunting around the web anymore, I've figured out where I need to go. It's still a very important part of my life. Am I spending less time on it? Yes, I think so. That time's being spent to contribute to the net, though. For example, I post here waaaay too much. Heh. I'm sick of surfing the web being called 'an addiction' like it needs to be treated. That'd be like saying Nasa scientists are addicted to surfing the universe for interesting things.
"Derp de derp."
You mean people don't like pop-ups anymore?
What is this? Have the New York Times checked their facts?? Oh, forget it, people don't know have to have fun anymore.... back in the days, my friends and I would spend endless hours closing pop-ups, seeing who could close the most! What was GREAT was when closing one opened up another twenty! oh the laughs we had....
how does one change his
Blogs. People can spend less time randomly browsing, and go to their favorite, trusted, reliably interesting link-centric Blogs (as opposed to content-manufacturing, often more journal-y blogs) and see a plethora of interesting stuff: a much higher cool stuff / filler ratio than if you start with, say, a typical search engine.
I think one effect of this is even the Blog compilers do less random surfing, and in fact depend a bit on other blogs. So there's a bit of a circle jerk effect, though enough incidental stuff gets added in from the occassional surfer or tangent to a websearch (for instance, my own gets an infusion from outside sources like Usenet) that over all things don't get too stale.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
LOL! I think it's funny you were modded down for that. It seems pretty obvious you were joking.
Somebody's trigger finger is itchy today!!
Could somebody mod him back up again? He was illustrating my point.
"Derp de derp."
This is a natural economic process. When it was complicated and expensive to use web, only people that were heavy consumers used it (read: long sessions). As time goes on and it becomes easier and cheaper less intense consumers will get it. Therefore, we should expect the average user surf time to go down. What would be interesting to see is a statistic that breaks down average surfing time by how many years consumer has had internet access (e.g., avg for newbie users, avg for 1 year users, 2 years, etc).
Since web browsing lost its lustre for me, I've found that the sites that hold my interest most are (gasp!) membership sites that bring together folks with similar tastes. My current favorite is David Lynch's web site. I don't want to sound like an advertisement, but there's frequently updated content, things you won't get anywhere else like a few different "series" David's putting on just for the site, and there's a very, VERY strong member following centered around two chat areas (which David himself as well as some of the folks behind David's movies frequent). Yes, I pay to be there. But in my opinion, it's worth it. I get no advertisements, I get to filter out all but a segment of our planet that has similar interests to mine, and I get to chat with my favorite movie director (and some actors, and writers, and other directors, and... well, you know).
That, in my opinion, is what the "new" web will be about. There's a lot of free stuff out there, and occasionally some of it is good, but more often than not I find myself "turning it off" like I do with my TV nowadays. More now than ever, on the web you get what you pay for. If I have to pay for quality content, I'm going to.
The same way Neilson knows what you watch on TV.
Surveys.
It'll be interesting to see where the Net fits in relative to TV and movies for pure entertainment.
When the internet goes the way of the TV, I'm sure we'll end up with a device like TiVo which will do my internet surfing for me. I'll tell it what I like and it'll do searches daily for any content relating to that subject. Oh, and it'll eliminate pop-up ads for me.
Of course, by then there will probably be a __AA which will complain that I'm depriving them of precious revenues that they might be getting from pop-up ads. Then they'll tell me I'm breaking the law by saving the content for later viewing.
Ahhh, things to look forward to.
All things in moderation. Get out there and exercise. Get a date. Paint your house. Its just text on a screen.
...or the content has gotten stupid. Ads and spam don't bother me at all. The problem is the content- there isn't any. For awhile, the best and timliest content was on the web. Now it's been displaced by meaningless advertorial drivel. It's looking more and more like network television- a breadcrumb trail of blurbs and teasers, leading to nothing but more blurbs and teasers.
Don't you remember how much better Slashdot was in March 2000? I could read it for hours. Nowadays, I only go into comments for karma.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
i can vouch for the fact that i don't surf as much because i can't stand that just about every useful site has way too much advertising. i don't see why it's completely necessary for all this advertising. i realize it costs money to run a large website but to companies really dislike the normal non-nitrusive banner ads? i don't even mind the ads that i've seen on slashdot as much as some of the other forms of ads i've seen. the big ads that popup and cover the window that i'm trying to look at are really annoying (hollywood.com is a good example of this). luckily they still have a close option so you can stop it before it finishes. i pray that the day doesn't come when there's a full screen ad that doesn't allow you to do anything until it's completely over. that'll be the day i stop using the internet. i don't even mind popups as much as those stupid ads that cover the window. at least you can close popups. the only thing about popups is that they're fine until they start getting intrusive and one page opens up like 15-20 popup ads (i've seen this and it wasn't a porn site). that's obnoxious and unnecessary. the way i look at things is if a company has to go through very intrusive means of advertising, then i will stop buying from them. they lose at least one customer from that. so that's the reason i have cutback on surfing. it's just too annoying and takes too much time to load the ads and close the popups.
i will admit that another reason i don't surf as much is because good content is harder to find, but i have found that it's harder to find because of all the stupid ads, and everyone wants you to click click click to get something, or register to use the website for free or something. free registration is a pain in teh ass too. if i want to read something, i don't want to have to take the time to register. it's a pain in the ass.
please me, have no regrets.
"Lee deBoer, former chief executive of Automatic Media, believes that the downturn in the Web is temporary. In the summer of 2000, his company bought Feed and Suck, two popular online magazines, and started Plastic.com, a Web site that allows users to filter interesting Web content for one another. After just a year, Mr. deBoer's company was forced to close its doors, killing both magazines and relinquishing Plastic.com to a group of investors. (The site still exists, run almost entirely by volunteers.)
Even after the bruising taken by his company, Mr. deBoer is not prepared to declare the Web dead. "We've taken a pause," he said, citing a tough advertising climate, a lagging economy and a seriousness that has infused society since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "But I don't think it's much more than a pause."
yeah, someone pull this guys head out of his ass. It's gonna be a long pause, as everyone I know is sick of the ads. Here's a newsflash Mr DeBoer: If you have good content, people will still hit your site. (Slashdot anyone?) If you have 17 pop-unders, flashing links (click now, you just won $500.00), etc., then you WILL FAIL. How and why are these people still trying so hard to use this out-dated crap model? You wanna know why the web is not being surfed as much?
PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THE BULLSHIT that goes along with trying to get info.
Sent from your iPad.
Okay, we all hate ads. Animated banner ads are a shameless attempt to burn a little ad-shaped hole in your brain, dumping their talentless, artless ad copy right down your optic nerve and into your delicate brain. But let's face it, a lot of websites which could not ordinarily afford to exist are paid for in this manner.
Also, for those who remember the web before search engines, you know, in that supposed golden age, you couldn't FIND anything. I mean, it usually looked like there wasn't that much content out there, but I doubt that was ever true, at least once the universities started taking it seriously, well ahead of everyone else. You could have a good time browsing around, but if you wanted information on a specific topic you had to get lucky, or follow an awful lot of links.
Let's especially not forget the fact that google caches things, so as long as people put their information in ordinary HTML (A trend which is becoming less and less common these days) google will hang onto the data for some time, making the web more persistent.
Sure, commercialization hurts, but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth, all these sites, the hosting... Suck it up. Enjoy the fact that all you have to pay for is your connection. It's worth remembering that access outside of a university or corporation used to be hellishly expensive. Compu$erve charged by the minute, and didn't even have internet access for the longest time, though there was internet mail.
So it's cheaper and faster today than it's ever been. There's more content, useful and not, and more search engines (though google is the only one I use any more, since they're least offensive and most useful) to find information inside of it. Sure, the fact that any asshole can put together a webpage means there's more useless crap, but it also means you have access to data you wouldn't otherwise see.
And for those who cannot find anything to read on the web: Become involved in a community site. Slashdot is just one example, and perhaps not the best, because it's (ostensibly) news-driven. That, plus a blip on the radar every time Katz squats and squeezes out another pearl. But there are sites like Everything2 which can keep you busy for many hours if you're possessed of the necessary pedanticism. Hell, even livejournal can hold your interest.
In general, whiners need to spend their time developing content. I like E2 because it's a resource which can help people well into the future, and which helps me now. I also develop my own content; I run one of the larger drinking game sites on the internet (hyperlogos.org) which I should really spend more time on, but I'm too busy putting work into E2 :)
More pages, more search engines, more content, faster connections. When I started using webpages, modems were the standard, and MANY MANY sites were on nothing faster than a 28.8k modem, including The Circus where I lived - And we had a Class C from scruz.net at the time. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What I used to do: get online, troll the web for about 90 minutes, get bored, get offline.
What I do now: log on to FTP, download a pile of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, troll the web for about 45 minutes, get bored, get offline and watch the episodes I downloaded.
Though I spend less time browsing the web now, the Internet enables much more of my entertainment than it did in the past. Though I spent only 45 minutes online, If I downloaded three episodes of TSFS in that 45 minutes my total entertainment time is 45+60 or 105 minutes, a longer time than what I have spent in the past.
-inq
The folks who have been saying "Broadband" are on the right track. I can think of two more factors which have cut my home web surfing time.
:( ) which means when I get home, I'm in the mood for something else. I only surf from home when I'm looking for something specific, which brings me to my second point.
Work Connections
At work, I've got a lot of time for web surfing while waiting for processes to finish (they won't buy me a second processor
Google
Google has cut the time it takes me to find the exact info I'm looking for. I don't spend so much time dealing with extraneous crap, and find exactly what I want.
Of course, I don't create web pages any more either, so I'm not out there looking for ideas.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
1) a few people in a few places know about it - it's useful or fun or whatever
2) more people find out about it - it becomes broadly interesting
3) everyone knows about it, but only a few people can get it - it's cool
4) everyone can get it - it becomes passe
We're now entering step 4.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I recall when I first came online in (I think) '96 or '97 for the first time. Not only was the Internet new to me, but computers as well were new to me - my family got our first computer in mid-96, which was a 66Mhz Pentium with 8M of RAM, 14.4kbps modem, and Windows 95.
:) )
At the time, it took ages for things to load, download, and such. I was inexperienced with computers, as well as the Internet, so I was quite innept with what I was doing. All these things combined to create a longer period of time spent online. (I recall spending 5 hours at a time spent -just- surfing - I recall this, because that's how long I could stay connected to my ISP at a time
Another factor, I think, is that there were a lot more things that I found interesting back then. For instance, my younger brother and I spent a lot of time trying to find cool programs to theme win95 in a more asthetic manner (higher quality icons, for instance, backgrounds,etc), as well as the actual media. These things simply aren't that interesting any more, and my overall online time is spent checking a dozen to two dozen sites a day, quickly (including online comics), and browsing several sites similar to slashdot, occasionally posting, and IM/IRC. I'll occassionally see something interesting on a site I'm looking at, follow the link, and have my mental process trail off and direct me to search for other things for the next hour or two.
I think that the majority of the people now online have already established their browsing habits, and aren't interested in the other information out there. Most people I know don't spend 80 minutes 'surfing' - most of their time online is spent chatting and occasionally looking at a web site, etc.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Is it possible that this significant change in time has come about because people have started getting broadband connections?
The time I spend looking for things at home on my 24.4kbps dialup connection is signficantly more than the time I spend at work on the T-1. I would be willing to bet there is at least a ten minute difference. And if I got broadband at home next year (I wish), then the change would be noted in my internet habits too.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I remember years ago hearing about the "talk to my cat" site. You could go ONLINE, find this guy's WEB PAGE, and type a sentence, and his voice-synthesizer would say it in the room in which his CAT was kept! I could TALK TO HIS CAT! That was such a hilarious thing!
And I could go to this other WEB PAGE, and find out the temperature of the can of Coke in this one graduate student's REFRIGERATOR! Can you believe it?
Now? I'm sure there is lots of fun stuff like that out there, but it isn't as interesting to me anymore. I still think its cool that people CAN do stuff like that, but I don't feel a need to go to the actual site and witness the effect.
...and Radiskull hasn't been updated in months.
DJS
God is real unless declared integer
Maybe wouldn't have anything to do with the failure of broadband, the fact that pretty much anything worth looking at on the net is going pay-per-page when it used to be free, the fact that ISPs are starting to charge much more for hosting, and are limiting standard accounts so that if you want to host from your own machine you have to pay much more, or the fact that armies of hungry lawyers are scouring the net looking for anything that might be construed as copyrighted.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A while ago (3 years in fact) I wrote a small column for a different forum (now defunct). That basically stated that the web should be stay free and that the web should be used for informational not transactional operations. IE: A company should post all information about a product but the purchase by that product should be handled by a different protocol not http. https should be used to create virtual communities and http for a public web page.
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And also that advertising on the web should be banned. The reasons was that I was sure that if the web became to much of a commerical it would lose it's usefulness and become stale and boring. It's an excellent medium for many to many communications (and that's why the goverment has had a hard time of passing the CDA I & II theres not a one to many medium like public television so it's protected.) but not I great idea for high commercialization because if you want commercials watch TV! People are now getting tired of entering search requests for information but instead are getting companies websites selling the product.
Also, because of commercialization it becomes easier for the goverment to say it's less of a many to many medium and predomiately a one to many medium. Once that happens watch how fast the CDA's will come back and censor the web. It's bad enough when the ISP's have censored things just think how it will be when the goverment starts...I'll see if I can find that article for reposting here at
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
It's funny in a way, because last week my (crappy Verizon POS lousy customer service unreliable) DSL connection was down for a day and a half. My wife suggested that I call an alternative provider, and my answer was, "I was going to, but I can't find the number because the 'net connection is down." It was only when she looked at me as if I'd suddenly sprouted a dead weasel on my forehead that I realized that phone books still exist.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
"The New York Times has an article about how trolling the web is not nearly as much fun as it used to be.
Sure, but trolling Slashdot is still a well-respected pastime.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I've found that instead of surfing the web, I get my web needs filled by building new pages. Trying to create something that can contribute to the web, not just trying to find something out there. But then again, I now have a son, so maybe that's why I'm online less.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
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"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Am I the only one who considers a drop in usage from two years ago to one year ago to be somewhat useless today?
First off, forgetting even that the trend is a year old, and that that amounts to a whopping 10% of the internet's life (and something like half its life in the popular vein), the internet of 2000 was vastly different from the internet of 2001. Search engines and "best of breed" info sites had gotten smarter. If you don't have to search as hard, you don't spend as much time. Natch.
Second: since the internet has continued to evolve into 2002, we find that these numbers probably have less bearing than ever before. There is no longer as big of a problem with getting online, in part thanks to broadband and the prevalence of huge modem arrays at the biggest ISPs, but also because machines are generally left logged in. If you don't need to set aside all your internet time at once. Furthermore, the sites visited now are different sites than a year ago; many of the old big'uns are gone, and there are new big'uns in their place. Not to mention that a lot of browser time is being eaten up deleting spam and searching kazaa.
In the end, a metric from a year ago is the most useless thing the internet can have -- so useless that the Times should be embarrassed that they wasted newsprint that could have held a hawt Donna Karran ad with this piece of trash article. The internet, which has become like language and culture in that it is a tremulous, uncertain entity that can only be defined in snapshots, craves instant data. It needs the archive.orgs and Jupiter mm's of the world to tell us what's really going on at the moment...not what was going on at this moment last year.
Might as well tell us what heiroglyphic porn sites the Pharoahs visited, or Judas Iscariot's favorite message board on Freenet.
Maybe I shouldn't have had all those lunchbeers...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A long, long time ago... I can still remember how The net used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance, That I could make Web Sites that danced, And maybe they'd stay up for a while. But February made me shiver, With every 404 I'd was delivered, Bad news on the net Napster's death was eminent. I can't remember if I cried When I read about Metalica's pride But something touched me deep inside, The day the RIAA cried... Bye, bye Mr. Pirate type guy we shut Down Napster, and their partners cause our pockets were dry... Sued those good ol' boys with our lawyers paid high, Singing this will be the day the net dies, this will be the day net dies... Did you steal the book of love? And do you have faith in the laws above If their lawyer tells you so Do you believe in rock n roll Then pay too much for the CD and save your soul So you can pay and pay the artist real slow Well they knew we were in love with the net 'Cause they watched us downloading kilobits We didn't think they'd sue off napster's shoes No more downloading those rhythm and blues! They were a corporation scared to lose a buck To students downloading music by the truck they made sure our searches were out of luck The day that napster died They started singin'... Bye, bye Mr. Pirate type guy we shut Down Napster, and their partners cause our pockets were dry... Sued those good ol' boys with our lawyers paid high, Singing this will be the day the net dies, this will be the day net dies... Now for 2 years we've been on our own using DC, Kazaa and GNUtella and others unknown But that's not how it used to be When the 56k was the fastest speed there were no ebay bids for a coat from James Dean Just a free net-voice that came from you and me And while the company profits weren't looking down commercialization stole the net's true crown The courtroom was adjourned New verdicts were returned While companies registered their trade marks We used screen names like YoGrark And kept downloading in the dark The day that napster died But they kept singin' Bye, bye Mr. Pirate type guy we shut Down Napster, and their partners cause our pockets were dry... Sued those good ol' boys with our lawyers paid high, Singing this will be the day the net dies, this will be the day net dies... Helter Skelter in a summer swelter We surfed free services in AC'd shelters Broadband Eighty bucks/month and falling fast IPO's coming out our ass The dot-com's CEO's held a silent mass With the accountant's on the sidelines in a cast Now the Millenium air was sweet perfume While free-ISP's played a marching tune We all got up to dance Oh, but we never got the chance 'Cause the bankrupt players tried to take the field, And 404's refused to yield. Do you recall what was revealed, The day that napster died? We heard them singing Bye, bye Mr.. Pirate type guy we shut Down Napster, and their partners cause our pockets were dry... Sued those good ol' boys with our lawyers paid high, Singing this will be the day the net dies, this will be the day net dies... There we were all in one place A generation lost in space With no time left to start our download again So come on Metalica be nimble, Metalica be quick variations would soon stick 'Cause free is the pirater's only friend. As we watched them on the Legal stage My hands were clenched in fists of rage No angel born in hell Could take our right to miss-spel And as lawyers fees climbed high into the night To light the digital millenium's rite I saw satan laughing with delight the day that napster's died. I met a girl who downloaded all the blues And I asked her for some downloads too But she just cried and turned away I went back to my bookmark stored Where I'd downloaded MP3's years before But the injunction there said the music wouldn't play And in the chatrooms the users screamed The l33t survived and newbies dreamed But not a word was spoken The MP3 links all were broken And the Program we admired most was shut down, now Napster's toast We heard courts decision from coast The day that napster died The lawyers were singin' Bye, bye Mr. Pirate type guy we shut Down Napster, and their partners cause our pockets were dry... Sued those good ol' boys with our lawyers paid high, Singing this will be the day the net dies, this will be the day net dies. - That's the version Madonna should have sang. -YoGrark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Actually it would be significant. It's an indicator of people's behavior. A relatively constant session time would indicate people are most likely browsing, following links and wandering around in the on-line equivalent of window-shopping at the mall. A steadily decreasing session time would indicate that people are instead using search engines, bookmarks or some other method of locating what they need/want, going there, doing what they need done and then leaving. The first would be indicative of entertainment or casual use, the second is more indicative of purposeful, goal-directed use, with all the implications for things like advertising the different entails.
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"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
This is not news, folks. Most of the web is crap.
That's why I've always maintained the belief that your favorite friendly interactive BBS is still a better place to spend your online time. There are people there. People to interact with. People to share views, opinions, and feelings with. The web is a one-way medium, and with the commercialization of it, it has become as boring and sterile as the rest of mainstream media. The BBS is not, and never will be. That's why small, friendly online communities are thriving.
Go ahead. Visit a BBS and get back to what we all know the real online experience is all about!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Now that all those media giants with their "creaative talent" and "amazing content" are on-line, that ads and Flash applets blink at us from everywhere, how could the web possibly be less fun than when it was mostly pages created by amateurs for fun? Maybe Americans have more taste and community spirit than the media giants and politicians give them credit for after all. Let's hope politicians will take that into account when drawing the line between the rights of Disney and the rights of grandma.
Remeber how great gopher used to be? It was the shit for those of us on terminal connections back in the day. Forget Lynx, with gopher you had everything right there in a logically organized menu system. Find what you need & the read the text file or save the gif to your server to be transmitted to you via xmodem, zmodem, kermit, etc. And chatting? Who could beat the old-school Unix chat client or command-line IRC... damn, now I feel old (and I'm still 2 weeks from 24 *sigh*).
Now people not only know the basics of how to surf, they have gravitated toward familiar sites. Sure, there's the occasional search, but most folks have a staple of "go-to" URLs.
Even you geeks. How many of you have bookmarks categorized by topics? News. Sports. Weather. Technical references. Pr0n.
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"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I don't think so.
I think we've all become more savvy in our surfing. We don't just click and hope it will take us where we want to go, I think we are simply finding that the information we're looking for is easier to find, and that having to "look" for it easier. We don't have the "onion layered" websites anymore. For me, I know that when I go to a site, I'll find what I want quickly and without having to wait while the page is being downloaded. Most sites now opt for smaller images to help save bandwidth and to speed page loads. Programmed their sites better to make the code cleaner, and the cross-platform viewing better.
Lost its luster? Not hardly. Up to the second news reporting, better product information, buying guides, and direct contact with companies when you're shopping. The net is still growing, and I don't think we've even got a clue of how much it will play a role in peoples lives.
Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
In the good ol' days of the web I could chew up hours looking around for what I wanted ("web browser" is an apt name for that style of searching). Today, I just go to portals that usually link to content I'm interested in, and spend more time reading content instead of looking for it.
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Contrary to the opinion of some, I don't think that some day way back when there was meaningful content on the web. There's always the gems but they are usually floating in a sea of crap. Out of 100 websites on just about any subject there were a couple with anything at all meaningful and the rest just copied .gif files from the meaningful sites and always said "Welcome to..." on their damn home page.
While lack of good content is probably a signifigant factor in making people use the web less it is a factor that has always been present. It isn't like suddenly all the web content disappeared or something. It has never realy been there in spades. The dot com fallout has made it difficult to provide any content on the web without beating the shit out of viewers with advertisement enshrouded baseball bats. Where you used to be able to look at some dorky homepage with pictures of someone's cats with relative ease, now hosts want you to oogle at flashing ads that promote epilepsy and are just a plain practice of advertising jackassery. I'm not going to bother looking at a page requiring me to jump through hoops, I don't have that sort of attention span.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I loved this topic so I thought I would bring it up with my wife....Who although a technophobe, discovered the web and email a few years back -- and learned to use search engines and email clients. I noticed that her use is down a bunch in the last year, so I asked her why --- and it boiled down to the constant bombardment from companies splattering flashy ads and countless popups in her face.....And her amount of Spam easily hides any legitimate emails that might creep through. She says she is tired digging through 40 junk emails to find the 1 email from her sister. I myself have countered the effect fairly well by using procmail filters and the new features of decent browsers that let you turn off popups. But you can't expect your casual, non tech user to take all of these steps. (Yet these people still get annoyed with spam, in your face flashing ads, and popups flying all over their desktops...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I agree with your "wanton abuse of statistics" description of this bunk.
My theory - Maybe they just learned to read.
My experience:
1) Started BBSing. 300 baud. Could read it on the fly. Was wowed by 1200 baud. Could read it on the fly after about a week.
2) Went to 2400 baud. Seemed to be the top of my reading speed. Learned to skim.
3) Found USENET. Learned to read non-quoted stuff, and lightly skim the quoted portions of posts.
3.1) I don't top-post when I reply. (#include <op_posters_suck.h>). Sometimes I get questions from lusers^W asking me why my mails are so long.
I asked one of them what the beef was, and discovered that this person was reading all my quoted material, word for word, no matter how deeply-quoted it was. (After all, because I take the time to excerpt only the relevant portions of the article or email when I quote, it must all be worth reading. That's how you read memos in the office of the 1970s, right? Read every word, or if you're referring to an old memo, attach a full copy of the old memo to yours. Word processors didn't exist, so a "memo" or "mail" was an atomic object; the notion of quoting a sentence or paragraph in context was completely alien to them. This person's mental model - without their consciously realizing it - was that one could no more subdivide an email and quote a portion of it than you could physically cut and paste a sentence out of a photocopied departmental memo!)
4) Learning to read efficiently. I don't need to download five news articles from five news sites to realize that "yes, a bunch of people killed a bunch of other people in the Middle East yesterday". (And for that matter, since I've seen that headline every day for all my life, the whole friggin' region's in my mental killfile. Wake me when something important happens.)
4.1) Corollary -- no report on "current events" is likely to offer me more than any other report, so even if I was interested in Middle East politics, I'd still only read one or two reports to get an idea of who killed whom, where, when, and the final body count. Like I said, wake me when there's a significant military or economic development. (And no, aother "peace plan" or offer of cease-fire doesn't count. Those are a dime a dozen, just as the mass murders are. I said a significant development, like a high-level assassination on either side, a hundredfold increase in body count on either side, or deployment of WMD by either side.)
5) Learning to filter out "news" from "ad copy pretending to be news" and handed to news departments by PR agents. After a few weeks of reading online news, I noticed that some articles were even more full of breathless prose and light on detail than others. I soon learned to detect PR within the first paragraph, sometimes within just the article title, and no longer even read it.
5.1) Example - currently on cnn.com Stay tuned for new TV sport: 'SlamBall'. Even if I'm interested in new sports, I don't have to read that article to know a priori that it's an advertisement for whatever TV network is launching a new show. Is it paid advertising? Probably not. But it's clearly a case of the SlamBall PR guy sending a prepackaged story (with print copy and videotape) to CNN's editorial desk with a note saying "Hey, one of your journalists should run this on a slow news day, because it costs you nothing to produce this piece."
(I'm not picking on CNN here - all the mainstream news outlets do this. They're just the nearest target.)
7) Kill Your Television. As much as I've just ripped web-based mainstream news sites a new asshole up there, I still prefer them to watching TV news.
7.1) I timed myself - made up a "typical half-hour" news broadcast by reading every article on cnn.com. Read through it in 10 minutes.
7.2) Of course, the real time savings is that I don't need the whole website. I never watch the sports, weather, or "human interest" and "local criminal in media sensational trial" segments on the local news, and that's 2/3 of the broadcast. By the time I get home, I already know the "top story", and that's the other 1/3 of the broadcast. And I know the article about the Hubble restoration won't be on TV.
Why should I waste spend 22 minutes watching TV, and 10 minutes of ads, to get less information than I can now get within 30 seconds on the web?
Bottom line: I've spent my entire life reading textual media, starting with BBSes, USENET, email, and news sites. With each new medium I use, I start out slowly, then my brain adjusts to the rate of dataflow, and makes adaptations to deal with it. By skimming over text, skipping over quoted and redundant material, reflexively glancing down two inches to the next Slashdot post when I see "goatse.cx" or "penis bird", filtering out mentally-killfiled "news subjects that aren't really news" and "thinly-disguised PR puff pieces" on mainstream news sites, as every year passes, I find myself glean more information per day, keep the amount of raw data relatively constant, and to do so in less time than I was a year ago.
And that's why I spend less time reading news sites today than I did a year ago. I predict that newbie "business-only" web surfers will find similar reductions in the time it takes to "go through the day's news" during their first few years on the web, too.
It's quite possible that the folks present in the initial surge of Internet adoption have learned to be more efficient too. :)
Not to mention that the median age group has had a lot more computer training at school now than a decade ago.
The bigger portals (Yahoo etc.) are better designed now and more widely known as well.
Lots of possible explanations for a whopping 7-minute reduction!
Maybe we spend more time on the Web not because it is more mature, but we are more mature. In the early days I spent too much time looking at personal sites, reading comics, and watching fish cams. It took away from my other activities and left me with an icky "Dorito syndrome" feeling after a too-long session. Now I read just a few sites daily plus what's recommended to me by people I respect. And it's balanced by more time painting and programming, both of which get published to the Web. So my time spent online has gone down, but the quality of my contribution has gone up!
AlpineR
1. Web sites are becoming more and more offensive. I recently visited a site that wouldn't display properly in Opera so I used IE. Unfortunately, IE lacks Opera's ability to block pop-up windows, and I was so bombarded with pop-ups that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.
2. Search engines are all but useless. Type in any word or phrase and you get pr0n sites.
3. Your e-mail in-box is constantly flooded with spam.
4. The most popular Internet activities are message boards, instant messaging, chat rooms and e-mail. In other words, a high tech equivalent of the CB radio. Like the CB radio, the fad is passing.
5. Other than plain text and simple HTML, the Internet is worthless as a vehicle for delivering content. Which actually doesn't matter since most web sites have no content worth seeing.
I never paid a lot of attention to "The Cool Site of the Day", but if I wanted a substitute I might go over here: Infinite Matrix, where you'll find people like Bruce Sterling writing web log entries pointing at neat stuff they've come across: Schism Matrix.
So there are fewer stupid novelty sites on the web. Is that supposed to be something to be upset about?
Well, duh. That's supposed to be a *bad* sign? It's a great sign that (a) some totally mindless companies best thought of as venture capital backed stock scams and (b) some scuzzy domain name speculators have faded from the scene. Well, duh. Memo to web designers: put away your toys and do your job.Memo to NYT authors: when stuck for a story idea, you can always go for the "Is _____ Dead?" formula. Run a bunch of random comments slanted to make it sound like something's going wrong, then you can "provide balance" by running a bunch of quotes saying that it isn't really going wrong.
Back in the gold rush years, I think the majority of people were excited about the net because they could be heard.
Everyone has their own individual interests and expertise and they wanted to share them with the world.
The net made it easy. Sometimes it was just a "my home page" or "here's a picture of my girlfriend" (remember those?) or cars, or other hobbies like favorite band lyrics.
But a lot of people are well versed in certain subjects and they could now share this knowledge with an affordable accessibility that print and the airwaves didn't provide.
Then came the lawyers and the media and corporate IP money to back them up.
The law firms could hire cheap help to comb AltaVista for their client's keywords.
The law firm shows the giant list to the client, they get paid a bundle for easy work and out went the cease and desist letters.
This killed 90% of the personal interest websites.
These days, if you search for something, all you'll get back are offers to sell you what you probably already have.
In the gold rush days, you would actually get back somebody's personal opinion, insight or opinion. It was great, and that also fostered the desire to give back your contribution to the collective. Heady times and the possibility to be heard, to matter, to exist.
In about 8 years, greed has killed it all off almost completely. Now with Google, it's 2 billion channels with nothing on. That and spam.
It's a shame too. I don't think we'll ever have that chance again.
There are few people willing to wage the fight to present interesting content. Those that hold the keys to access are either owned by hollywood or are interested in making a buck off your ideas more than entertaining and sharing. If you are lucky or smart enough to get around that ass pain, then most people won't be able to look at your more interesting content anyway because M$ will break anything but the latest activeX crap. So why bother? Let all the greedheads suffer in their lack of creativity.
Sorry, but I'm keeping my little ftp site quiet and among friends. I'd like to share more, but I'd be shut down fast by the same dumb ass company that gave me a user name with an @, at, character in the midle of the username and who's tech told me I should use Outlook because Mozilla was "internet unfriendly"!
"Broadband" as presented by the senator from Disney will push more crap at you and further destroy the web.
Have a nice day, folks.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The early adopters of the web were the intellengsia, and they make good use of it. Now in the the USA that it has reached a majority of 50%, you are now including the people who barely make use of it. You've pretty much gotten more than all of the truely literate people in the country already.
Surely people's web browsing sessions are getting shorter because they've read most of it by now.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com