Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.

Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).

For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.

I'm a massive AI skeptic, and I think the amount of money being spent is astonishing, but I really don't want to go back to searching the web the old way.

Asking Gemini _is_ just much better at finding you the answers you need, _and_ providing links for you to verify that information.

It will be a sad day when they start injecting ads, I really hope the foss alternatives catch up.

Of course fairly quick progress was made - a truly astounding amount of money was poured into this industry in a short timeframe. The thing is, now it’s clear that AI isn’t really valuable enough to justify investment on the same scale anymore.

I definitely know people who do almost nothing (they mostly show up to meetings and don't talk), and get paid really well because they can tell stories decently about their impact, and nobody seemingly has the stomach to throw them under the bus. I get paid better than them for sure, but I'm also at risk of getting laid off because of the practical upshot of being a top contributor. I am sure I will eventually get laid off, and they will outlast me at this company.

The tech industry is insane. While my "Nothing from my end" joke was tongue-in-cheek, it's parodying a very real dynamic.

Flash was great, but abused to do bad things (like all good tech)

The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions.

What it got right:

Design once, looks the same anywhere

reasonably powerful scripting language

Vectors as a first party drawing primitive

abstracted OS hooks

This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life.

There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom.

The closest thing to it now is unity.

Page refresh between pages is ok. Lag when updating a form based on your inputs isn't. Frontend UI is like a bigger monitor or faster PC - you may not have known what you were missing, but once you've experienced it it's very frustrating to go back to the clunky old thing.