Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.

2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

1. Take a break. I don't mean stop working, just fill your free time with other stuff, but if you don't code at work, it is a bonus. Try other things. I was in a position you describe, and I took a break, dived into studying psychology, you can choose anything you like, like keeping stray cat population in your neighborhood fed and sufficiently stroked behind their ears. Or can you play a harp? You can learn it, you know. (Speaking about psychology: your condition is a middle age crisis. Self-realization is done, all immediate goals are reached, you've got more freedom to choose next goals, and everything is increasingly becoming a routine. Nothing bad is happening, you just need to adapt. You will adapt, you don't need to do anything special, it will happen all by itself. Just exercise your new freedom a little, and in a couple of years new goals will find you.)

2. Stop thinking of important things. Had you read "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman!"? If not, I suggest to read just for fun of it, but among all the jokes Feynman describes a period in his life when he felt like you. He couldn't find any good ideas what he could do in physics. At some point he took a seemingly silly problem, and solved it. And he came back to physics with it, later he discovered the differential equations from that silly problem in another "serious" problem and eventually got a Nobel Prize.

The moral is: you are overthinking it. You are looking for ideas for programs but you use too narrow filters. Like the problem should match your skills. Or the problem should be important enough to work on it.

So just take a break and look for some interesting problem. If you find any, you find some other way to entertain yourself, so not a big deal. Just stop obsessing about it and I'm sure it will come naturally.

I think they become less fun sometimes during the later stage Web 2.0 era as everything shifted toward services. For most, computers became a thin client to access services on the Internet. To me, this isn’t very fun. The computer becomes an appliance to access services rather than one used to run programs that can be customized and tailored to the user. Of course that local experience can still exist, but only for users who are very intentional. For shared experiences, it’s only for users whose friends are also intentional. This intentionality usually means doing a lot of extra work. This work was not an issue when the pay off of new functionality was there, but is harder to justify when it’s often less functionality for more work… the main upside being freedom and agency over the experience.

Seemingly every service being a front to collect and sell data also makes things less fun. There is a certain level of trust that needs to exist when running software and that trust relationship has been broken, even by real companies. It makes it hard to trust anything, which pushes me away from trying new things that might be fun.

This change coincided with my transition to adulthood, where priorities shift. It’s impossible to say if I’d still find computers fun in 2026 if I was 19 again, but my gut tells me I’d be a lot less interested.

If there is a path back, I think it might be along the lines of Pewdiepie’s newfound love of Linux. He seems to be having a ball.

That left "desktop" computing as no longer where the action was, but just a legacy platform for people doing their day jobs, and most things being dumbed down into single-purpose apps that cannot be modified, customized, combined, or anything fun/interesting/not intended by the vendor.

Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.

"I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)"

I'm not sure if you mean "code gen without a plan/expertise" or just code gen. If you found joy because you enjoyed building things, now be the best time to explore and prototype something you've always dreamt of.

If you found joy because of the craft itself, low-level hands-on stuff (breadboards, esp32s, soldering, ..) can scratch that itch too.

With due respect, are you sure you aren't just burned out? Not finding joy or even meaning in the thing you used to do for decades and justifying your disinterest by saying it is all pointless and futile sounds like typical burnout symptoms to me.

Surely there are many bad things about modern computing. And yet when I look around I see people — especially young people — still out there making silly stuffs on computers like we used to. Baby's first ray tracer, baby's first JS runtime, make for fun's sake with no intention nor possibility of profit in sight.

I don't know you well, but from the way you talked about your feelings, I feel you might be too harsh on yourself. You don't need to manage all the complexity of a side project. You can take the first step first before deciding how far you want to really get into it. And you should not just dismiss "mindless entertainment" — perhaps that is exactly what people need to recharge themselves.

As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).

My local area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.

I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that atproto hosts (some technical quibles about use of "hosts" allows here) all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi

The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)

Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able and interested in engaging the world.

I think this depends a lot on the operating system, desktop environment/window manager, and tools you are using. Tools that are more opinionated are naturally going to have less need for additional niche software to accommodate different workflows. Of course it goes the other way as well.

If you are using Linux and a tiling WM like i3wm, xmonad, hyprland, sway then you quickly find there are many different tools that don't exist that would be beneficial to your workflow.

Just some examples from my time spent using i3wm as my primary WM:

1. key hinting (like which-key for vim)

2. drawing on desktop

3. non-visible window / workspace previews

4. key hints for qt/gtk/etc buttons (like vimium)

5. detection and automatic mode bindings for communication with applications through ipc (most likely using dbus)

I will say coming up with ideas for a project with a non-niche/tech focused audience is significantly more difficult, but the most fun I have programming is when I am building stuff that would help me.

> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.

Computers are tools. I challenge the notion that Computers ought to be intrinsically entertaining. If you no longer have fun on your Computer then it's probably best to focus on other things.

To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)

My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).

Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.

Read manifestos from Anytype [0] and Reticulum [1].

Contribute or implement something using GrapheneOS, Nix/NixOS, Immich, Tailscale/Headscale, Home Assistant, SQLite, BespokeSynth, OpenStreetMap, Organic Maps, Columba, FluffyChat.

Maybe run local LLM and integrate it with your workflows/lifeflows?

Hardcore is not dead. [2]

0 https://anytype.io/why/manifesto/ 1 https://github.com/FreeTAKTeam/Reticulum-Community-Hub/blob/... 2 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gh3mFO1nwa0

You will never have a system as productive yet user friendly for building programs ever again.

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

I don't know when it stopped being fun, I don't recall hating Facebook in 2008, but I do know that it had pissed me off on more than one occasion by 2012.

I think community building is what's been missing or done badly for the last 15+ years. I can find a few subreddits where I like the community, but Discord and similar have never worked for me. I don't think that live chat suits my temperament. I also suspect that up and down votes have been corrosive for social media in general.

I don't know that you can get the feeling back without either building and maintaining your own communities using the tools the corporatized Internet makes available to you, or finding and participating in the communities that you like. I do know that five years ago when the fediverse was a topic of conversation that there was a thread that content moderation and curation was going to be the only valuable work to be done in social media.

tl;dr: I suspect it's a community building and maintenance problem, not a coding problem.

Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.

As a short history of fun in no particular order:

First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.

Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.

Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.

Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.

Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core

Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.

Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.

I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.

I think its partially as you say: "everything I may need either already exists". Through the connection over the internet (as great as it is) you see things already done already and often better than I would be able to do it myself with the limited time I got.

Also generally the large amount of things going on, its just a lot one could try, much more than in former times. So for people with focus problems its also a question of, yeah: focus.

For me I still code enough for work (as long as they let me do it - looking at the AI push) so I am fine but I still think back to the old times (C64, Amiga, 90s PC, rise of Linux on the Desktop) where I had more fun. So I guess its the technology getting more mature and personally its also getting older and maybe burned out a bit.

After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.

Not saying that's what is going on here, but maybe it is helpful.

I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.

I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.

He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.

I can learn “ten things a computer can do” from twelve minutes on TicTube. But non-trivial things I am motivated to do play out over years. Also, I no longer fret missing out…fomo is a young person’s malady.

You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).

It was too complex for me to create when I started, so I learned as I went.

In personal projects, I only use LLMs for when I don't care and I don't want to learn. For example, all the WebGL APIs. I am perfectly fine not knowing how to allocate, initialize, and bind a shaderbufferindexobjectstoragehandlepointerarray. But I'll do the fun parts, the interface design and algorithms, by myself.

As for coding in particular, I think it's natural to move on from certain hobbies. I don't have the same hobbies I did 5 years ago, and recreational coding has come and gone for me in waves.

At the moment I've got a fun project where I'm learning something new (local-first apps, podcasts), so the excitement is there, but I wasn't coding recreationally at the same rate a few months ago when I didn't have a goal.

Find a hobby that's fun for you, even if it's not coding.

You got old. The thing you loved became work. That's when most things stop being fun. Don't know what to tell you. Maybe collect stamps or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147793

It's easy and fairly cheap to get started. I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex to be a home server, and I am getting a lot of mileage out of it.

There's all sort of applications you can self host nowadays, it's highly cuatomizable, and can be extremely useful on top of it.

If you have an old computer lying around unused you can even try turning it into a home server to see if it suits your tastes.

At least for me was something highly addictive.

Now you are older, AI is the new thing, young people[0] are having a blast, pushing it to it's limits, what can it do?! they're hacking. But you're older so you're not interested in shiny new thing.

[0] and some older people to be clear, I admire them most, they keep their mind and curiosity young

I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.

Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.

But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.

Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.

Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.

You can still program in BASIC with PC-BASIC: https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ BASIC was always fun to use.

I'm slowly pushing towards electrical engineering but it's a steep hill to climb. Prefab modules get you a long way but it'd feel like an achievement to make my own PCB.

Every industry has a regression to the mean such that a normal workforce can support it. This is, good thing, but it makes the commercial side very boring (which is also a good thing).

With AI, I think makes it more permissible to do odd and unique things that see fun. Like, why not?

Tahrir Square, 2011 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square)

Wait until you get older. I did! And I have identified over the years tons of applications that would help seniors that nobody gives one iota of attention to, because "no get rich quick money in it"

The simplest example of all. Shopping.I can't read price labels on the lowest shelf [0], and as for use-by date and ingredients, my OE nearsighted as hell lenses can't read any of them. Seniors who didn't have a career in engineering and computers get scammed regularly, get information from the internet that is either garbage or outright malicious, the list goes on and on. I am using my remaining time to address these.

And how about students? Everything changed overnight. Rather than enriching them, they are using AI to cheat and avoid thinking and learning. What would you say to them? What would you teach? How would your life and work experience benefit them?

Way back when, I planned some after school labs (there was money for such things) where kids would go out and collect data, and then deal with it collectively (talking to other kids and instructors, not "Professor Claude", who didn't exist in those days, and if their computers were inadequate, give them bootable linux media (like Knoppix) or just time remotely accessible.

Hey, I'm excited at 77.

These things didn't happen because I never had a network. Great things happen when there's a Jobs and a Woz. Not in isolation.

Needs change. Invent that REALLY REAL exoskeleton now, the robotic "fetch my meds" robotic assistant now, and they'll be ready when you're ready for them.

[0] Only Trader Joe's provides big, legible labels.

Being able to plug a little intelligence into software with little effort makes many things a lot more convenient. One of my favorites is having an LLM monitoring a long running task and doing something about it if something goes off the rails.

The hurdle to seeing what an idea what look like in implementation has also decreased a lot, so I don't have to worry about picking something small enough to finish over a weekend or two.

Perhaps we need a new frontier?

Suddenly it's an always on resource that needs value extracting.

It's even worse nowadays, post COVID, with the insane hustle culture. I mean, yeah, these strats worked when it was the odd person doing it. But now.. nah thanks, you're trying to play on my basic human nature.

You want fun? Build shit. Stop being precious about vibe coding, it's a spectrum, nothing is too complex now.. learn from the LLM if you don't want to just let it run with the code.

Shit.. it's fun to finally build out a good portion of the never ending ideas list (and to realise half of those ideas just aren't worth the effort)

Shocker, you're 25 years older and feel nostalgia for the way things were when you were young.

> I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?

I mean, find out what the fun is in that? Or don't and cry on HN? Your choice.

> I don't care for coding new stuff.

OK, don't code new stuff then.

Take the opposite view that computers are more fun than ever and see if you can understand that perspective? What would someone who believes that be doing on their computer? Why would that be fun for them?

If you're not willing to consider that seriously then yeah you're probably just going to get sadder and sadder.

Or any of the trending variants.

Little computers are still fun.