Everyone's Packing Up

I spent a lot of my time on the internet because I was lonely in my teens and these connections were exciting. I learned software dev because I was a nerd that loved math and loved the concept of building software, having complete control on how it's done. That was the concept I signed up for.

Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.

I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering

Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.

Yahoo never should have given up their human-curated index, we need it now more than ever.

[citation-needed]

People don't loudly announce they're not going anywhere and not changing anything, of course you only perceive the ones who do otherwise.

It doesn't mean they there's a wide spread trend.

This sort of post is ridiculous ... the vast majority of people are not "packing up", and people are constantly arriving.

Probably more like "A lot of people want to pack up"

I stopped using Reddit after Apollo got blocked, well, I had it side-loaded for a while too with AltStore, but that stopped working

Lately I’ve found myself thinking about BBSes for the first time in ages.

Online used to feel like an actual place.

Twitter used to be a fantastic place to interact with other electronics hobbyist. Then it became the nazi bar and that was that. Every once in a while I go back out of morbid curiosity but the Following tab is barren and the For You tab is disgusting.

I found a place on Mastodon, but the critical mass just isn’t there.

It doesn’t help that many cool looking hobby projects are now just AI slop.

Things are bleak.

This post has a badge that says “written by a human not by AI”… but I noticed a lot of LLMisms, and Pangram says it’s 100% AI generated. The post also cites AI as a reason for everyone leaving everything…some kind of weird irony here :/

This is why I’m building all my own stuff.

Is this a real trend or like that time everyone abandoned Twitter for Mastodon?

This is an interesting idea but was too homogenized by the article. WordPress shouldn’t be lumped in with the rest. GitHub too.

It would have been better to categorize the reasons/platforms and then analyze if the farewell posts matched the crimes of the platforms.

The enshittification continues until there's nothing left.

Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.

> A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up

I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?

I part of the reason is Capthas, something is needed but Capthas are a pain to use.