Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.

And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.

Tech continues to change the world.

Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.

From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.

But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.

There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).