Fuck you, yes it was perfect.

So glad RSS is still around. My beloved

There's still rss.
There's still email.
There are still blogs.

And there's gemini.

i donno man. i still use rss, and they solved tracking by not putting the article in the xml, just a link that ends in source rss.

We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.

Absolutely miss that old internet.

It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.

I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.

RSS still works pretty well.

The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.

Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline.. cause people don't just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.

Its toxic as fuck.

Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just..exist.

Blogs never begged for dopamine

The little counter I put on my page certainly did! Got so excited when it reached 100, even though it was mostly me.

I still use my feed reader ever day.

Forums. Good old days.

past tense

I still use these things. People who post this shit are telling on themselves.

We used to make our own WEB PAGES!

I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.

I still is if you avoid the dumbassery of social media.

Bring back local BBSes. With monthly GTs.

Also, you didn't need to have a mobile phone just to sign up on a site.

Still is.

Email may not have throttled you but your 9600 baud modem sure did.

Pocket is shutting down on July 8th, but you can retake control of your reading with Wallabag, a self-hostable read-it-later app.

For RSS, try FreshRSS--simple, private, and available to run however you'd like.

The tools are out there. The web can still be yours.

I miss vBulletin boards.

Guess I'm the only old-school ThrottleMail user who used to follow The Dopamine Fiend on Xanga.

Pretty sure podcasts “tracked" you RSS usage since there's an entire analytics industry around podcasts driven through RSS but you agree with the sentiment.