There is a lot to be said about the death of the shared experience, I wish I had the energy and writing talent to actually write a book about it because I think it deserves one. It's shaping our world from our politics to our culture. There are many positives and negatives about it.

I think since 2010 so many shared experiences coming from the internet that it actually became rare to learn new stuff from conversations.

That's a huge pet peeve of mine. All my guitar playing friends watch the same fucking videos on Youtube, so they just repeat what the people say on the videos and there's no opinion anymore. Everyone watches Tom Scott videos and whenever I mention "Autotune" they go "They actually use Melodyne because someone on a Tom Scott video said Autotune is just an effect and every non-T-Pain vocal is Melodyne". Autotune can actually just auto tune, very happy for my Bavarian buddies for their success, but sometimes Autotune is just Autotune. I must have heard this about 10 times already.

On Hacker News there's always those little memes... XKCD 927 (Jesus I wish it would die), Betteridge law of headlines, Gell-Mann Amnesia. It's the same things over and over.

Even conspiracy theories have become homogenised, and now there's no new crazy cuckoo theory coming out of nowhere anymore that you can laugh about with your friends.

Before that the only shared experiences were things like the Friends last episode or news, or sports, or things like that, and that was MORE than enough.

It's great that the new generations are learning that people can know about different things and share experiences orally rather than via a screen.

Sorry for the rant.

One of the last examples I remember is about 18 months ago I noticed everyone, everywhere, as if coordinated by some unseen entity, started replying "oof" to everything. Maybe this really is just a variant of the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon (another one of "those little memes" you mentioned, heh).

You would have hated it, then, in the days of only one or two TV channels, and in towns where there weren't many newspapers.

Which I suppose is a gloomy point: people have always been like this so it's unlikely to change.

I watched that episode in the last year and didn't make the meme connection until I was reading someone mention it somewhere. It would be interesting to have a modern take on that episode. The thing with memes is they don't necessarily convey an idea or a point that furthers a discussion. They're often just a way to relate something in the current context with a past idea (for a laugh), so it almost seems that a language based on memes would just end up stagnating culture.

Maybe I should start participating in Star Trek discussions!

Maybe but I think it is just more social signalling, to either show you are part of the opposition or to highlight the comment for like minded people. Similar to other comments : Yikes, Wrong side of history, a bad look, etc. Most of these comments are made on highly political threads, highly controversial topics such as system-d don't seem to evoke these kind of comments. That leads me to think that they are more emotional in nature than analytical.

I’m seeing lots of “r00d” these days

One of the parts of this that you didn't mention is politics, which irks me in particular. I can barely bring up any political topic without incurring a strong emotional reaction that causes the other to close off their mind - and that includes with people that I mostly agree with!

There's even this politics-like part of homogenized programming subculture - strong emotional reactions to things like webtech, Electron, C++, Rust, Windows, Apple - and you see the same "arguments" over and over (because I don't believe that there's really "critical thought with the intent to convince" happening - just talking points regurgitated over and over).

In the particular case of HN, many of these memes just straight-up break the guidelines, and many users don't care, because they'll upvote or vouch low-quality content that fits their worldview. (I'm guilty of this myself, even when I'm specifically watching myself to try to avoid it)

This kinda thing definitely seeped into politics. Especially with Facebook memes, even my parents couldn't escape those :(

And yep, programmers in 2022 are definitely not a group known for originality! Even (we) the dissenters walk in step...

The results of this are evident everywhere. Fashion, music, web design, food, academic writing. In any discipline or artistic endeavor, it's like the whole world decided this is the one best way to do things and nothing outside of that norm receives the nourishment (capital, time, attention, thought, support) that it needs to develop.

I see the echo chamber effect in a lot of these communities. You need one of the 5 approved amps for X style, or are you even a guitarist? These arguments amuse me more than anything.

But is everybody really like that? If I'm watching YouTube videos on guitar gear I'm trying to get a feel for something, and then I try stuff. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't, but at the end of the day I choose what I like.

I hadn't played in quite a few years and am recently back at it. Back then, I certainly owned things the Internet community collectively agreed sucked. Now that I'm back at it, some of this gear is now considered good to great, and I have to laugh about it. No regrets for having my own opinions.

I don't have many friends who play though, so perhaps being all on my own shelters me from the monotony. Or perhaps you need to find different people?

In those internet communities there’s people who don’t play this game but they barely post. In real life, there’s also the people who don’t care, but then again they won’t really talk about it as a hobby.

But the people who actually had some interesting insights 10 years ago are now only parroting the “mainstream” guitar influencers. Which themselves are often parroting things from 10 years ago.

I’m not complaining, btw: it is what it is. It’s just that it is homogeneous and boring!

For instance, most of my friend group watched CGP Grey for a while, and we don't debate how to choose a movie or restaurant anymore, we just choose one quickly via either approval or veto voting. Or online someone mentioned XKCD 927 and then we can discuss the finer points of the new standard instead of just how it's going to replace all the others (for instance, instead of saying Matrix is just the chat protocol to unite everything else, talk about how it's an eventually consistent graph replication protocol and how that differs from XMPP's point-to-point system).

It feels like this shared culture and background can serve the same purpose as like shared education in math, literature, and history - to provide ground knowledge and references as a jumping off point to discuss more in depth, or with more nuance.

But the things I'm complaining about don't really become part of "shared culture". They're more like temporary "memes" that people use to show off they're interesting. Which is perfectly fine, we all do it! But the issue for me is that those little trivia tidbits that people are using are repeated so often that they start to irk and people look deeply uninteresting. :(

>> "What a shocking bad hat!' was the phrase that was next in vogue"

-- Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, 1841

Memetic culture is older than you think. That book covers a lot of different types of group behavior that could be called "memes".

All my friends, acquaintances and groups that I see daily are also kinda new, seeing I moved countries and barely see old pals, so I doubt it's about being stuck in a group.

And it's not really about hearing the same things as from N years ago. It's more about hearing the same information from 10 different people. Before I would hear a piece of information from one or two, despite having access to pretty much the same number of people. There is definitely more information online, but people are looking at the same things! Things weren’t as homogeneous as they are now.

I kinda expect old forums (and old friends!) to have the same old lingo from before and be set in their ways. But the crazy thing to me is that this happens with new venues and new people too.

I not-so-recently moved countries, and also moved cities, and it's definitely crazy how even completely new people still talk about the samey internet things as the other city. I did the same 15 years ago, and it was completely different.

I'll check your link for fun stuff later!

Dudes a creep.

It's only about the "money shot" the punch line and that's it.

I've had existential crosses about this and wondered if I had an original thought. Even having an existential crisis seems trite.

I'm not sure the alternative of everybody having unique ideas would be preferable though because most of them would almost by necessity suck.

Funny, that's another pet peeve with Hacker News. Posts that are phrased as if there's only two ways things could go and they're black or white, and completely unrealistic to anyone spending more than two seconds thinking about it.

The alternative is the one I presented (watching an actual variety of stuff), not some unrealistic crap.

Also let me flesh out my "alternative", which is starts with suggesting that perhaps people aren't being too unoriginal and that them changing their behaviour would be for the worse. Maybe the true alternative is changing your own behaviour so you're exposed to people culturally different than yourself just like the person who you first responded to.

Well, and the really old ones that are just him writing passive aggressive comics about his ex-gf.

Overused crap that kills discussions, overused by uncreative people.

The person arguing the affirmative called out something I’d not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time TV was a great provider of shared experiences most weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV blockbuster. And we’d roll into the office the next day and “omg! Did you see X last night?!” Of course they did, there was only like 3 channels back then (I’m in Australia, don’t laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched them all. But you cant remember exactly about… “episode 2, is that the one… oh no that’s episode 3! Never mind”. We’re not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much as it can unite us.

That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of hostility to others that seems prevalent online.

I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated with my own experience, I’ve just not found the destination we’re at quite as bleak.

There's nothing more civically uniting (in my city) than taking about the Ravens.

If you can get over the geek, middlebrow dismissal of "sports ball" and the whole CTE thing, live local sports on TV crosses racial and class boundaries more than anything else I've witnessed in my 18 years living here.

One thing that helps me get interested in sports I don't otherwise care about is to think of them like a board-game, thinking through the math of various possibilities and optimal strategies.

Another thing, if you live in a state that's amenable, is to bet small amounts on the outcomes of games. Betting $20 on a game makes it way more entertaining (for me anyway), and when I lose, it was worth the money just to enjoy the game more.

The last thing that helps is to think of it as a purely physical performance. Going to watch live sports can help with this - but for people who haven't spent much time in the sporting world, it's hard to understand how big, how fast, how strong, how coordinated, professional athletes are, and it's possible to just enjoy watching people running and jumping and throwing the same way you'd enjoy watching people dance or play music or esports or whatever, just people with exceptional skills doing exceptional things.

At this point in my life, I emphatically do not enjoy sports for their own sake, I pay attention to them for the social aspect and for the reasons mentioned above, but I couldn't care less about the outcomes of anything. It's a far cry from how I felt about them as a young person, but it's evidence, perhaps, that not being interested in them doesn't mean I can't still connect with people over them.

The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all.

I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.

Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would be Lost and Westworld I think.

But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection with this phenomenon.

Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema played the role of providing that shared cultural experience.

Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that experience to continue in another form.

Furthermore, as streaming options proliferate, I assume that more people are hopping between services. Episodic releases don't totally solve that problem--but it does add some friction. Someone can't now signup for a service to watch the new hotness lots of people are talking about, binge watch, and then cancel their subscription.

Other stuff can still happen, eg. a colleague enthusiastically sharing something they learned or a discovery they made ("did you know how to properly use a paperclip?!").

But yeah, there's significantly less "things you probably also saw since yesterday and have an opinion about" stuff.

There's kind of still tentpole film releases, but Covid put a serious damper on that for a few years, and globally the market is splitting with China and India developing their own gigantic film industries equal to Hollywood.

Can you share the name of this podcast please? Sounds very interesting.

Church and community groups played a much larger role. Sport was still as popular. You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today.

My earlier comment wasn’t about people having something to talk about. It was that people were able to talk about an experience they both shared. Regularly. Like every week, if not every day (about watched they watched the previous night).

I think maybe the other observation here is that before TV people were more likely to actually experience things together with others, and not just talk about them after the fact. Way out of my wheelhouse here though as I’m no historian.

I'm not sure that's true. The studio system in Hollywood churned out a huge number of movies.

Today (and really for a long time) my sense has been that going to the movies tends to be about younger people on dates, getting together with friends for a fairly low effort, not too expensive activity. And, probably for this reason, from what I can tell cinema attendance has sprung back better than a lot of people expected.

But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too. "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today, even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.

Compare that to, the other day I uploaded my first TikTok about some obscure bit of Lord of the Rings appendices minutiae[1] and got 1500 views. Not going to be the next John Green here, but it felt cool to just try something on a whim and have some success. The algorithm spread that viewership out and made things more "equal", I guess. Plus, it made the "niche lord of the rings content" genre possible, since it wouldn't merit 1/15th of all TikTok viewership in the "TikTok has a fixed Etsy-style FYP with 15 videos" alternate universe. I wonder what the most popular 15 videos on TikTok are right now...

That's all to say, you should write that book (or essay!), I'd read it :-)

[1] Middle-third-age Gondor looks a lot like a mirrored Tang dynasty China, and has other similarities

And even when it is shared on a wider scale l, it is filtered thru your filter bubble and social bubble.

And now every joke starts to be more of an inside joke.

It will be interesting to see how shared experiences evolve. We used to be limited by geography and subsequently cultures were geographic in origin. As geography becomes less of a limiting factor to how we share experiences, cultures and sub cultures will co-exist with the geographical cultures as well.

I feel like we are in a transitional phase. Marketing works most efficiently when everyone has the same shared experiences. When marketers and widget makers have to increasingly create for niche sub cultures, the profits are less. Instead of making one ad for the super bowl, now marketers have to make an ad for each social platform. Instead of making one style iphone cover, there now has to be custom or curated designs for all the markets.

I think eventually the profits will win out and or people will recognize the detrimental effects of lack of shared experiences, and somehow technology and society will coalesce around a broader shared experience environment.

A hurdle to this happening is the fact that people love being part of sub cultures or "scenes". It may take a while.

It is getting increasingly harder to socialize with people in general. There are so many references that the conversation has to stop, everyone has to view the video/tik tok/post, then the conversation can move forward again. Professional and educational settings I do not think are immune either. People are becoming so much more specialized in their fields that it is harder to identify with others. This would be less of a hinderance to socializing if everyone had a larger portion of shared experiences.

This makes so much more small things viable.

Look at the custom keyboard scene. There are now multiple companies and people making their living selling keycaps for keyboards!

This sure was not viable before.

Customised feeds took this away from us, disconnecting us even further. I guess the Metaverse (or anything alike product) will try to exploit this and reconnect users in the virtual reality. Being connected is okay, but the context will be controlled by someone else.

I miss that experience when reading novels. Best I can do is go online and find some people who read the same book 3, 8, 20 years ago. That's not the same.

Think about the emperor's new clothes, but instead of the kid shouting his message in the town square, the kid privately sent the message to each of the same people. Not the same result, is it?