It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It's not a big deal, we've made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can't rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
It’s not a big deal
It's absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of "making niches for ourselves" will save us from that.
Normies ruined the internet
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself ... and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
90's internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.
I was playing with some old UNIX software, and in the help text the dev said they were collecting foreign currency and asked people to send postcards with foreign currency, listing their full name and personal address. It was last updated in 1995.
Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You'll find some if you poke around the small web enough.
A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren't the default Internet experience, they're hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it's very inspiring and comforting.
Thank you for mentioning neocities. I did not stumble over this project until now and I love it!
On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I'd made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun...
That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.
I always look back to the 1960s visionaries and their charmingly naive ideas about the future use of computers.
I suspect that if they could have seen the actual future they would have become plumbers.
Whomever wrote this had to have been a child during that time because this doesn’t describe the internet I saw.
The 1990s internet was closer to this fantastical notion.
No, 1990s internet just hadn't actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don't realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple's website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn't use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
People's identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn't just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000's. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn't ruin everything.
It's a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.
These days it's entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it's still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.
Trolls actually saw themselves as an art from. Everyone else saw them as annoying cretins.
I agree with your comment.
Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
Self hosting and federated social media. Take back control. Fuck the corporations.
This is why I'm a big fan of Lemmy and federated social media. It removes the monetization incentive, and it's obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far). The remaining piece that is still an issue, in my opinion, is that we're still engulfed in the more modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.
I'll take two wins out of three any day though.
I miss old YouTube so much it hurts omg. i miss how it wasn't about engagement, branding, money or camera quality, it was about broadcasting yourself and having fun. now it's become a bland corporate shell of what it used to be and half of my recommendations are AI slop lol
source: I'm so old I remember when YouTube vids were rated with stars and everyone had neon channels with funky text
The Internet was even better before 2001. Around 2002 is when paywalls started becoming a thing along with the increased enforcement of the DMCA.
Yeah, I remember when I first got access to the internet in the 90s and it was mostly forums and whatnot run by hobbyists. Finding stuff was a bit tricky, but Yahoo was largely usable to find stuff. Wikipedia didn't exist, but encyclopedia brittanica or whatever was a thing and worked somewhat okay online. Pictures bigger than a thumbnail loaded like a slideshow on dialup, but text was responsive, and text-based online games were becoming more and more common.
It really doesn't need to be this way.
At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.
If we don't like them, we don't need to use them, and just switch off.
you can publish independently, but it's hard to get found. Search engines are cluttered with nonsensical link farms these days :-(
"The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization..."
they were spot on.
Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.
I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the tag finally fell out of fashion.
There was no better internet than going to college in the late '90s. You go from a 56Kbps modem with hundreds of milliseconds of latency being a GOOD setup, to being directly on a 10Mbps LAN with everybody else in your class. It was right before Napster started and people were sharing entire discographies of MP3s via network file share from their own machines.
this is exactly what i said to a friend today
actually, in a few years, maybe the young people won't spend their time on instagram, because it's all bots anyways. maybe then the young people will enjoy living outside of their screen-devices again, and physical life could get a revival.
Capitalism
Well... the type of stuff we long for are still around, it's just that we don't visit it as much anymore. Lemmy is a perfect example of this - it's around, it's better, but people still default to Reddit instead.
Old habits die hard. Plus reddit has a long-lasting reputation of hosting a lot of really awesome communities and discussion. It's a trove of knowledge lost in enshittification
It was so human a lot of usenet was properly unsavory.
Because that's what humans are, mostly.
It's so interesting. My partner is still on Reddit and she was complaining to me about the massive amount of bots, trolls and general negativity. My response was basically, yeah, that's why I left and don't miss it one bit. I found a much better place that has actual discussion and nowhere near that level of toxicity. I asked her if she wanted to know about it and her answer was just "No". LOL. She's also a fan of super drama filled reality TV so I guess if you like one you like the other.
Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube's reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I'm not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn't profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).
Women used to post sexy photos of themselves just for the joy of getting a few people's attention.
It was, but... this morning I pulled out my pocket computer that also can make calls, started streaming the Disco Elysium soundtrack, and proceeded to drive across two cities. There were no pauses or hiccups in the stream.
The early 2000s mind cannot comprehend this.
But surely if you hit any bumps while driving, the disc skipped, right?
Between SEO and Googles own bullshit finding information online feels like trying to find the milk in a supermarket or the exit in a casino, designed to make you pass through as much bullshit that's completely unrelated to what you actually want as possible.
I can literally never use Reddit again but all.my search results keep taking me there
At least you have something to search unlike with discord servers.
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.
completely ahistorical, the Internet has had the same problems for basic its entire existence
It was for sure toxic af, but a lot less commercial. Actually the early internet was incredibly hostile to corps, but then the banner ads came, and the eyeballs, and the ads started actually making more money than just server costs, and it was all over.
I'm so old I remember webrings.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
