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.
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.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
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?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you’ll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
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.
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You’d accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn’t all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it’s honest. Even the stuff that’s true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it’s style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Very nicely put
Nah, I’m nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.
Yeah, it was cool exploring the space without being monitized.
And when chat logs were just saved as text files on your PC.
Can confirm, 39 year old here. The internet was fun from the mid 90s to mid 00s. People made content for fun, educational purposes, or to provide a service someone needs or would find useful. You “went on the internet” to chat with weird strangers and download media. It was fun. Now almost my entire life is the internet - my job, errands (banking, shopping, appointments) relaxation time (tv shows on streaming service, music and podcasts in one app). And in each of those things, bombarded with ads, privacy invaded, personal data stolen… we are way too reliant on the internet
That’s not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bring on NomadNet!!!
or Gemini Protocol,
They’re both great retro, but sadly they’re largely missing interesting content ;(
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
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn’t a parody, it’s just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte–! Stooore!
The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.
One of the core features of AIM was an away message. I’m not here, fuck off.
Even better was if someone sent a message and then you set yourself as away.
… 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.
Or a few years later: the microwave forcibly logged you off. (microwave interfered with the WiFi).
The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.
I was using the Internet at a time when people took it being non-commercial completely seriously. You never saw ads because, as a community, we had decided that ads were not allowed. It was completely decentralized, so you might be running your own server, but if you put an ad on your server other people would get mad at you for it. This was pre-WWW and then a bit of the early days of the WWW.
Then there was a period where ads, commerce, shopping, etc. were possible and permitted. But, that was still the minority of things. There were thousands of web pages full of mythology and folklore for example, that people had just put up because that was something they were interested in. Running a web page cost you next to nothing, so there was no need to put ads on it. You could use Yahoo to find those sites, and I guess Yahoo was commercial by that point, but if it had ads they were small and unobtrusive.
Over time, things got more and more commercial. You saw ads more and more often. But, at least then it was ads on static content, or ads on a forum or something. It wasn’t an infinite algorithmically-generated feed optimized to keep you engaged.
There was a lot to like about that super early non-commercial Internet. But, I don’t think that was the peak moment though. Some ads and early for-profit services made it better. I think the thing that really wrecked it was the lack of competition. When there are 100 commercial services fighting over your attention, they can’t collude, you can boycott one, etc. When there are 5, you basically have to accept whatever they give you.
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.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
Still is
Sometimes I get done of posting on Lemmy and I go out and take pictures.
… To post on Lemmy?
You all are cool and deserve good art! :D
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 fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
GenX version of the internet:
Then log into a BBS.
ASCII Pr0n and 8 bit music…
Ground Zero BBS Tri-cities Washington Sysop Nemesis checking in. I can confirm I had fidonet mail before email was a thing. Playing door games and posting on the wall for all to see. Great times.
Actually, it was geocities that made the internet so much fun
