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View Full Version : Have internet users become boring?



Stephen Coates
27th June 2010, 23:11
5 or 6 years ago, I often found funny things on websites and on discussion boards that I would not stop laughing at for ages :lol:.

This is now not the case.

Have internet users just become boring, or has my sense of humour just changed?:unsure:

Shoonay
28th June 2010, 12:13
No. You've just got used to some jokes on some sites and they're not new to you anymore, you're bored of everyday browsing the same pages over and over.
I felt the exact same thing a few years ago, before I found those cool sites like Digg or StumbleUpon (or my local wykop.pl) that gathers people who find and post some of the most engenious and hilarious stuff.
Check those, you will not be disappointed. I especially recommend to install the StumbleUpon toolbar, that has a magic one-button-random-fun-finder, and, really, the Internet CAN surprise me to this day.

Stephen Coates
22nd July 2010, 11:09
This isn't related to humour, but I find I rarely even have to post on forums if I want to know something these days. I wasn't sure whether I had just run out of things to be curious about or whether most things have already been asked/answered.

But I am confident it is the latter. At one time, I could search for something and would either find very little/nothing, or quite a few web pages about it. Whereas now, I can search for just about anything and find endless blogs/yahoo questions/forum posts on it. Often I can find pages that ask the exact same question that I wanted answering.

Harrison
22nd July 2010, 11:37
That was inevitable really. As the internet continued to be used and grow, its content ever expanding and search engines cataloguing it all for quick search results, the answers to most things would eventually start to saturate its content and something about most subjects or questions can now be found. This is quite an achievement when you take a step back and consider that the modern internet as we know it only really began about 20 years ago. In 1992 there were so few sites that one man called Tim Berners-Lee was hosting and maintaining/editing a list of all known (useful) webservers on the CERN webserver, and this was the central resource to navigate and find all known websites in the world. Imagine trying to manually edit and maintain a list of all known websites today? :blink:

However, the internet is still a very fragmented place with information dotted around all over the place, and often you can't find a single central resource for the complete or direct answer to a question or information you are seeking. I think that is the next stage in the future of the internet, if it is to evolve. To start to combine all of this information into a more coherent whole; creating resources that collect it all together and make it truly a useful resource. Turning the internet from a series of fragmented data, into a central resource database that draws this information into a more centralised interactive encyclopaedia style resource. We need more powerful servers to achieve this goal, but people are already starting to work on the idea, with projects such as Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) showing the first steps in this direction.