What do you get out of the internet (besides porn)?

liah

The internet has an awful lot of information and cool stuff to be found, what do you get out of the internet? Do you contribute to websites? Have blogs on your RSS? Even know what an RSS feed is?

I get an awful lot out of the internet-- learning languages for free on Livemocha, finding and getting feedback about art on Deviantart, having basically all music ever at my fingertips for free with Last.fm + Chrome, keep connected with friends on Facebook, game on Kongregate and through Steam, keep updated on news with Digg and Reddit, spend hours reading random articles on Wikipedia, free calls to the US and Canada (landlines) in Gmail, post and contribute on/for various websites, etc.

Other people I know are content with facebook, email, youtube and porn.

So what do you get out of it? Do you make the best of the 'net?

Links234

shopping!

Kimono-Girl

information!!! :cool:

liah

Oh, and in before "there's more to the internet than porn?" paired with the ":eek:" smiley.

candy-gal1

Boards, social networking, watching movies-youtubeing.

neilthefunkeone

Proving people wrong....

NoQuarter

liah wrote: »

Other people I know are content with facebook, email, youtube and porn.

Add boards to that and thats me about summed up.

RoyalMarine

liah, they have porn on the internet now?

google faps

FBI warnings

OutlawPete

I use it for most media now.

Not just movies but I also watch most of my TV online now too.

BBC iPlayer, 4OD, RTE Player etc.

I use YouTube and Grooveshark for music..

Watch Horse Racing online and bet online too of course.

Rarely buy newspapers these days, so also use it as news source.

Pauleta

Catch up on tv or get tv programmes earlier
Facebook how i dont have to socialise
online gaming
Free sport and music
sports results

liah

I like the fact that with the internet one would literally never have to leave the house if they wanted to. You can get online jobs, online degrees, learn languages for free, order groceries and other shopping items online, pay your bills online, do your banking online, download any media you want to consume, view the entire world through images and Google maps, find any information you want, interact with millions of people.

It's actually kind of scary how all-consuming it has the potential to be. It's an Agoraphobic's dream. :pac:

Mr Benevolent

Porn.

Aldebaran

Funny pictures of cats.

scientific1982

Knowledge.
Poker.
Entertainment.
Free stuff.

KeithM89_old

This, tv and films, eBay and hundreds of wasted hours

Lorcan78

Well i live abroad so i mostly use it for irish news and for keeping in touch with family and freind's .

St._Andalou

Well someone may as well post it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc

dvpower

liah wrote: »

Do you contribute to websites?

No.





D'oh.

poppyvalley

I just love utube. Instant gratification (when it comes to choice of music)

Sanjuro

Movie news.
Regular news.
Sci-Fi news.
Downloading and watching movies and television shows.
Shopping.
Have two blogs, but haven't updated them in a while (see sig).
Transfer files to and from work.
Research.
Lots and lots of gaming.
Oh, and one other thing... what is it again... oh yeah. Porn.

CrazyRabbit

A realisation that I'm not the only idiot on the planet.

Riesen_Meal

poppyvalley wrote: »

I just love utube. Instant gratification (when it comes to choice of music)

Really?

A lot of the stuff I listen to I cant find on youtube, may have to upload some of it!

Asphyxia

- Shopping
- Watching TV/Music/Make-up and Beauty Tutorials (4OD, BBC iplayer, Youtube)
- Getting music
- Facebook
- A good old rant on forums (Boards, SomethingAwful)
- News and information (Google, Wikipedia, Sparknotes)
- Gossip (Perez Hilton, TMZ)
- Posting on my blog (Tumblr)
- Posting my Art (DeviantArt)

So much more stuff I love the internet

MJ23

donedeal.ie
amazon.com
nba.com
wrc.com
adverts.ie
ebay.ie
xhamster.com
tube8.com
paypal.com
newstalk.ie
youtube.com

Teutorix

Homework

El Horseboxo

Rape Paddy Power.

Dante

Besides porn? Absolutely nothing, I'm not gonna lie...

skyhighflyer

Saving money by learning how to do things myself. Latest example, my laptop would boot up but the screen stayed blank. A quick google and a youtube instructional video later and the problem was fixed by ordering an €4 ribbon cable, rather than by shipping it back to HP and paying €200 for the privilege.

Celly Smunt

i love how i win a lot of lottery's from things i havent even entered! like today i got an e-mail which said i have one $100,000,000 dollars! then all i had to do was give my bank details so they can put the money in,i have finally dodged the recession with my win

orourkeda

http://www.geebag.com/word/

Ruu_Old

Aldebaran wrote: »

Funny pictures of cats.

Funny cakes (cakewrecks.com)

thenutflush

In my opinion, the broadband internet we have nowadays is as advanced as technology needs to be. It really is brilliant.

Like 20 years ago, the thought of having access to what we have nowadays would have been enormously exciting and like a dream come true.
We have:
- free access to any music, any tv shows, any films, radio stations, sports events coverage
- newspapers, books, forums
- reviews of many available goods, services and establishments like pubs, restaurants and businesses
- tv and cinema listings and descriptions and reviews of programmes and films
- online poker
- online gambling
- computer games (eg. simple flash games, downloaded console emulators and games for the consoles (eg. games that would have cost £40 each to buy 15 years ago which we can now download 100 at a time for nothing!!), any retro computer game imaginable)
- google maps (now with streetview, which is the first bit of technology in recent years to genuinely amaze me...massive kudos to google for getting that completed)
- educational resources for second level (eg. past exam papers with model answers) and third level (eg. blackboard in ucd, where you can get all your lecture notes)
- translation software and mountains of information to assist in learning languages
- ability to book flights, trains, bus tickets, pay bills
- buy and sell cars, view places to rent
- shop online and buy things on ebay
- search for jobs without leaving your bed!
- skype, facebook, windows messenger etc. to talk to friends and relatives
- wikipedia; one of the greatest sites on the internet. Information about everything.
- miscellaneous pointless time-wasting but boredom-defeating websites...the kind of websites and pages found using stumble-upon
- playing console games against others online (eg. mario kart, call of duty..)

Even just the ability to google for information about any conceivable topic is just taken for granted by us all nowadays. Ha, I remember having encyclopaedia encarta on the family pc around 2000 and thinking it was brilliant even though it would be considered useless nowadays!

Actually that's another thing; people tend to under-appreciate the huge leaps in technology which have happened over the last decade. In 2000, portable cd players were considered pretty up-to-date things to have and you were lucky to have games like snake on your phone. Now people have I-phones which perform the functions of those devices, along with many more. An I-phone would have absolutely mind-blowing to somebody in 2000. Computer games nowadays have graphics which would have stunned me 10 years ago. Sky digital can record programmes for us when we're too busy to watch them, and then we can watch our favourite shows for 8 hours straight when it suits us!! All inefficiency seems to just constantly be eliminated from our lives.

Apart from the broadband becoming faster and the availability of music/tv shows etc becoming more widespread, I can't see where there's room for improvement in our standard of technology nowadays...it's definitely as advanced as I could ever want it to be to be honest!! That said, I'm sure in 10 years I'll be saying the same thing while praising the inventions of the tens!

Earthhorse

My usage has changed a lot over the years.

When I first used it IRC was actually a pretty fun place to hang out and that's where I'd go a lot. Then I lost my internet connection for a good while. When I came back, IRC sucked!

boards was my next big port of call. I used to read it a lot and use it as a sort of news aggregator; you could be sure if something interesting was happening someone would start a thread on it. In more recent years I have also used it as a social outlet.

For a good while I would get a lot of my news online; would read Wired and Salon daily. Have left that habit behind thought I occassionally float back to both of them, amongst others.

In my job, I use the internet quite a lot. You can be sure if there's you're having a problem programming something someone else has already encountered it or something like it. I tend to use Google for such queries rather than rely on any specific site.

For the most part though I just use it as the vast information repository it is. For researching boardgames, travel, languages, history or whatever you care to mention, the internet is simply unbeatable, though I would like to use it less, or perhaps in a more productive way.

IrishZeus

Confab wrote: »

Porn.

Mmmm.... Porn.

MGMTea

Omegle. fighting with strangers on the internet, could'nt be more fun

Gone West

A lot of folks like myself work in IT using the internet, so my answer is cash.
Lots and lots of it.

Also information, services, entertainment, etc.

strokemyclover

Stealing Irish passports, buying dark glasses, etc. etc.

Earthhorse

thenutflush wrote: »

Apart from the broadband becoming faster and the availability of music/tv shows etc becoming more widespread, I can't see where there's room for improvement in our standard of technology nowadays...it's definitely as advanced as I could ever want it to be to be honest!! That said, I'm sure in 10 years I'll be saying the same thing while praising the inventions of the tens!

We're nowhere near the end of where this technology is taking us. Not by a long shot.

thenutflush

Earthhorse wrote: »

We're nowhere near the end of where this technology is taking us. Not by a long shot.

You're probably right, but I would be just as happy if technology barely moved beyond what we have now...in technology terms, I think we have everything we could ever want.

Novella

I have a blog, use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, catch up with tv on channel4.com and rte player, watch movies, chat on msn the odd time, sometimes do my grocery shopping online and post on here, obviously. I dunno, I use the internet for loads of things.

MarkY91

liah wrote: »

The internet has an awful lot of information and cool stuff to be found, what do you get out of the internet? Do you contribute to websites? Have blogs on your RSS? Even know what an RSS feed is?

I get an awful lot out of the internet-- learning languages for free on Livemocha, finding and getting feedback about art on Deviantart, having basically all music ever at my fingertips for free with Last.fm + Chrome, keep connected with friends on Facebook, game on Kongregate and through Steam, keep updated on news with Digg and Reddit, spend hours reading random articles on Wikipedia, free calls to the US and Canada (landlines) in Gmail, post and contribute on/for various websites, etc.

Other people I know are content with facebook, email, youtube and porn.

So what do you get out of it? Do you make the best of the 'net?

i love how you and livemocha said learn a language for FREE then i sign up then BAMMMMM im smacked with a 14.95 starting price:rolleyes:

Sea Sharp

Porn, TV Shows, news, boards, facebook, train timetable (I should really just print one off.)
Plus I use it in work for researching topics. I can't imagine anyone doing software surviving without search engines.

stovelid

Maps.

Alter-Ego

Stumbleupon
Boards
Youtube

TPD

Communication, tv, films, music, odd bit of work through web design, shopping, banking, booking holidays etc. Education, from programming tips to photoshop tutorials. Most news I'd take in is through the internet, haven't much time for live TV or 'newspapers'. Recipes too, has come in handy a few times when I'm trying to decide on something to cook. Multiplayer gaming as well, though I don't do as much of that as I used to.

Standard enough use I guess.

Hail 2 Da Thief

Besides Boards, I post on two other forums relating to politics & martial arts.

I also do a fair bit of road cycling & use free online GPS mapping systems to plot the different routes that I cycle.

I like to travel & the internet makes travelling alot less stressful when you can book stuff online, review accommodation etc.

I do a bit of shopping online too. Sh!t is so inexpensive online compared to in shops its unreal.

Facebook is great for keeping in touch with friends & family living oversea's!

Pherekydes

News, sports news and results, fantasy football , shopping, youtube, occasional facebook, maths research (i.e. answers :rolleyes:), online forums, online banking.

That's about it. Porn? Never.

TimTim

My last two jobs.

Funny how things have changed over the last few years. I still remember using a 14.4k modem and netscape navigator 3 and now I'm watching hi-def movies via the internet.

Sisko

Information , knowledge, entertainment , communication.

I was always extremely inquisitive growing up , constant questions. I still am, but now the answers are a google away. Instead of pissing off parents making them question their own intelligence etc.


Still I'm very glad I mostly grew up without it , only fully came into my life in my teens. (in my mid twenties now)

Meanwhile all these kids, or hell people who are now only 19 who grew up chatting online and playing mmorpgs - well communication online is very aggressive and I've already noticed social effects on how those who've been online since they were children deal with people.

TimeToShine

Exam papersh and Marking SHchemes...mixed in with a good bit of porn