No, it’s because it wasn’t full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fan and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
everybody knows its the nostalgia for GEOCITIES AESTHETIC
-Under Construction-
Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.
Do you have any recommendations for good forums?
I have a 20 year old coworker I constantly ask probing questions about what it’s like never having not had the internet. It’s so weird.
I mean crushing boredom isn’t a thing anymore because of it, which is cool and I can acknowledge that. But there’s also something very dystopian about it and clearly it’s having pretty serious negative effects on society, politics in particular. So yeah…not really sure how to feel about it.
I just went camping and put the goddamn thing in a bag for 4 days and forgot about it. Friends and I only brought the internet up once during the trip to joke that we hoped when we got back into reception we’d find out he had died. It’s funny cuz I don’t even need to say who.
Crushing boredom is absolutely still a thing. I guess you could move it over into mind-numbing boredom if you really wanted to get pedantic. If anything, it actually makes boredom more likely. The internet has caused a severe amount of overstimulation in most people, and so now things that they used to take enjoyment in mean nothing to them.
I thought you meant the internet was a he
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the “small” internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the “.com” was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were “.com”
The old internet was decidedly anti-commercial.
I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.
They were right.
yeah once you found a niche community you had knowledgeable people that would at least reply by the weekend, and expert advice would be free just because some guy was happy a stranger liked the same things.
You just had to be confidently wrong enough to aggro the guy that actually knows his shit.
Maybe that strat was always around but I associate it more with the later 2.0 web
ASL?
26/Heli/Iranian airspace
Wanna meet? Send coordinates
19/f/definitely not Tehran
I’ve been considering getting rid of my mobile data for this reason and force people to call or text.
It’s worked out well so far for me without a data plan. My family is fine with call, text, or e-mail options for talking to me or sending me things like their football picks. The only time it sucks is when I lose power and have to resort to sparing use of mobile data to know when it’s coming back on.
It’s also filtered out a decent bit of text spam because the ones with pictures are MMS instead of SMS and the former requires mobile data.
The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.
It’s not figuring out but just waiting until there are more non-nerds moving in that new market and then start monetizing as the market reaches critical mass for their particular niche.
Based J3NNA_88
No, I lived on the Internet it was my connection out of a small town into the wider world.
What’s making the Internet shit was capitalism monetising everything and making us a product just to use it.
Smartphones ruined the internet.
When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.
Plus, there’s just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.
Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that’s really when the internet went to shit.
I put off getting a smartphone until like 2015. I was 21 and was one of the last of my friends not to have one. My argument against it was precisely that: “I don’t want to be online all day and I know that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
I didn’t even buy my first smartphone. My sister gave it to me. It stayed in the box for six months. I so so did not fucking want it.
Work forced me into keeping a smart phone. The key fob I was using for MFA died and they were no longer replacing them so I had to use the app.
We could create forums that can only be logged on to using a desktop browser. Sure, some mobile users with basic tech savvy could install some spoofer that still let them access the site. But that’s still mission accomplished. You’re still requiring some technical competence.
I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it’s just promoted content. Second–related to the post–is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people’s behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don’t know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, “install our app!”, etc. We didn’t have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
You’re not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What’s before then then?
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y’all. Sorry gen Z.
Nah, I’m nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.
And when chat logs were just saved as text files on your PC.
Yeah, it was cool exploring the space without being monitized.
… eventually, you logged off.
Maybe you logged off. Quitters.
You had to log off when someone wanted to use the phone
We got a second phone line explicitly for this purpose, lol.
