I went to graduate school in 1998, coming back from Japan, and it was the first time I went online on a regular basis (as was true of many people at the time). I had a fast connection in the Purdue computer lab, and suddenly there was… online chess! Free! And not just on Yahoo but also on a long-dead portal called Excite. Stuff like this was blowing up online. It was a world of new wonders.
I played on Yahoo Chess from 1998 to 2013, when Yahoo just said, “Fuck it, we can’t be assed to do this.” They shut down most or all of their multiplayer games that year, but the puzzle games you could play against the computer remained. This year, games.yahoo.com ceased to exist completely. I saw no outcry about this anywhere unless I googled for it, and even then there wasn’t much at all.
To me, however, it seems like a major milestone. There are several layers of sad here:
• Yahoo used to be a great company. Big. Important. And it gave you a bunch of free information and stuff. Now it’s a pathetic dying POS that is leaking private information.
• No game site that I know of has come along to replace the game experience on Yahoo. There was sooo much stuff on there. I also played hearts, spades, and a lot of the puzzle games. Please tell me if there is a site where you can do all that now. Obviously, there are good chess sites (I still mean to join one one of these days).
• So the Internet can’t really support a fun portal with all kinds of stuff like that? Apparently not. And if you were old enough to go online in the late 90s, you remember how much potential it all seemed to have. We are living in a time of diminished fun and expectations online.
Now wait before you slam me for that last line about diminished fun and expectations. I am not comparing 2016 and 1998. We have it much better now. But if you compare 2016 and, say, 2012, what is better? In 2012, we had Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… pretty much everything we have now. But things seemed a lot more hopeful and “up” then. Still on the rise. Here are some things that have changed since then:
• RIP Yahoo Games.
• I can’t find the link, but I read an article on Salon the other day about a ton of websites laying off personnel. No one can make money at this shit any more, it seems. Salon has been delivering less and less since like 2002, it seems, but it too just announced more layoffs: http://www.politico.com/media/story/2016/04/layoffs-hit-salon-004466
• People have basically quit blogging. Andrew Sullivan burned out, for example. A ton of blogs I used to read are defunct or close to it. (I haven’t updated my own blog since 2009. Why? I don’t feel like the level of attention I would get would be worth the effort. I have guest-posted frequently on a blog that does get a lot of views, however.)
• People on YouTube are burning out. Here’s a funny guy I watch on YT with over 3M subscribers talking about how it’s no fun for him any more: I Do Not Enjoy Making YouTube Videos (+ End Mini Vlog) - YouTube I am seeing major channels crash and burn in real time: people with huge subscriber bases just not adding content any more.
• Twitter’s user base growth has stalled. The site makes no money. The nastiness of the trolls on there is also causing power users to burn out and quit.
• And what is new and exciting online? In mobile, there are some fairly recent things like Uber and Tinder. Airbnb, I guess. If I’m missing something mind-blowing, let me know.
Let me contextualize all the above by saying I am grateful for the online experience and would not choose to do without it. I would also say the above is part of a society-wide burnout with respect to media, content, work, politics, the economy… basically everything. And this is global society, not just US society. I would describe our current times as a very Yin era in which people find it hard to get off the dime and make things happen. And it seems like the only websites that are making real coin these days are Facebook and Google. Which, if we go back to the late 1990s, early 2000s, everyone was dreaming big: I’ll make a website… and advertise! I’ll promote myself online!
It doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. Thoughts?