I used to go online to escape the boring, unimaginative people and the world they create. Now I have to disconnect to escape them.

You have to know where to look online, very rare these days.

FWIW, Siemens recently bought hackaday (or well, Siemens bought a company called Supplyframe which was the owner of Hackaday), so lets see how long that will last..

>Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space.

Entire new genres of creative output - music, fiction, fandom, films, cosplay, hobbyist and enthusiast communities have been spawned by the modern web. It's never been more vibrant.

I'll never understand why people on Hacker News seem to believe the internet stopped evolving as an expressive space just because services replaced the need to design websites by hand. That's like believing literature ended once scribes were replaced by the printing press.

Yeah, the internet is bigger now - all of the weird fringe stuff from enthusiasts is still there and there's even more of it. One thing that has happened is that the mainstream is there too now, so if you don't venture outside that its easier to not see the more interesting stuff. In the old days, when just having a "homepage" placed you a bit outside the norm, stumbling on something non-mainstream was more of a given.

And the mainstream has become more interesting as a result. It's not uncommon to watch anime now, D&D and video games are no longer niche, people's interests are becoming more diverse as media is no longer being gatekept by communities, geography or publishers, and everything becomes available to everyone. People might see that as a negative, the Eternal September effect eating their favorite thing, but I see it as a positive.

> Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space.

Have they or have you stopped looking? I'd say the former.