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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.
I'm sure I've shaved off 7 minutes of online time by just having a faster connection...
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."
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
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.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
not nearly enough people have broadband to impact the figure that large. /. from my dial up connection any more.
Plus, its a prett specious(sp) argument ayways.
How many people sit down and go "I'm going to surf until I download X amount of data, then quit?
I had broadband, I surfed more. There are all kinds of things I won't even attempt with dial-up. Its too damn slow, and advertising kills my speed. I won't even go to
Well for years I was saying need faster connect, from 2400, to 9600, to14.4m to 28, then 56. well the universe gets a little laugh now that I have 56K, but web site take even longer to download do to bad programing and advertisment. mostly bad programing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, but did you reach them ALL?