I personally know some quite old people who seem to be into exploring all the time with periods of exploitation and all of them are people with mundane jobs that end when it ends. Their mental capacity is at their hobbies and they sometimes invest into their hobbies a lot, however they would come up with other hobbies all the time.
That’s in contrast to the white collar folks who’s life becomes work and all they do outside of work is to pay for some curated experience like vacation to Paris or Cooking lessons. They never have time for anything, they deeply specialize at something like building systems that catch people engaging in known money laundering schemes.
After some age you are in track to specialize a lot, make a lot of money and spends that money within the acceptable framework with your peers.
Also, the effects of the algorithms could be strong too. I noticed that it has been quite some time since the last time I was bored deeply. At the slightest sign of boredom I find myself getting entertained on one of the few apps and website I visit. It makes me feel like I’m exploring but in reality, I rarely see anything that is not a variation of something from the narrative of the platform.
My personal experience is that I've shifted away from "exploring the Internet" to exploring other domains of lived experience. I suppose in this sense, I am now "exploiting the Internet", but I would not say that I have overall shifted to a more exploit-focused regime.
Does it mean that young people are still exploring the internet and computer today the way I use to back when I was young?
Yes, but they're exploring TikTok, YouTube and to a lesser extent, Instagram. There are oceans of content to explore on those platforms.
But that sort of democratisation of view points and content is great.
This is essentially the reason advertisers tend to target the young - those over a certain age are more set in their ways and not looking for new options.
I do that "exploration vs exploitation" is a better name for it though.
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-to-Live-By-audiobook/dp/B0...
The wikipedia article also briefly mentions that it is observed in animals.
It can sound a bit simple at first, but the human - algo stories are terrific.
There is a problem known as the multi-armed bandit problem[0]. The problem deals with situations where you have to chose between different options you could take, but you don't start off with full knowledge of the options. You can spend time learning the options (exploring) or you can spend time using the best option you already know of (exploit). Importantly, you can't do both at the same time.
In general, good strategies start with a phase of exploring followed by exploiting.
Humans follow this pattern as well. For us, it seems we spend our late childhood, thru our teens, and into our early 20's in a heavily explore-biased state then switch to exploit biased for our 30's and later.
So the thing that happened to "exploring the internet" is you got older. Exploring for the sake of exploring is no longer as innately desirable to you know as it was when you were younger. You can still do it now. In many ways there are new tools that make it easier (see other posts) but it will likely feel more like work in a way which wasn't true when you were younger.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit