You might be right. I’m new here but so far I’m amused and surprised by the amount of ‘classic’ memes going around.
I think for many of us in the mid 30s early 40s it boils down to having experienced a version of the Internet where content was king, not personality. Anyone could get their website out there but it was what you put in it that mattered, not who put it there (unless you were an actual celebrity). You could bump into all sorts of new information just by clicking from link to link. Then we saw and experienced first hand the rise of the search algorithms, the echo chambers, click bait and the cult to fluff that social media became pretty much since the beginning.
The Internet we have now is certainly shinnier but only the way plastic is. When I look at the information being churned out and that gets passed around more often I can only think about it in terms of pollution. The equivalent of styrofoam pellets being manufactured for single immediate use that cover the information sphere and that just end up making people’s life worse in the long term. Twitter, Meta and the like (none holds a candle to TikTok though) are no different from the factories that have been spilling poison down the drain for decades. The latter pollute our physical space, the first pollute our emotional an mental environments.
I honestly don’t think I’m being a grumpy old fart (though I am). This is the reason I preferred reddit a while ago and why I now came here. It sort of feels like those days when ‘browsing’ was about stepping out of your own world experience and into completely different ones.
End of rant. Thanks if you made it here. :)
unless you were an actual celebrity
That didn’t matter, because without video there was no easy way to prove it.
Honestly, I think we have better content nowadays, but said content is harder and harder to find. At the same time, said content probably gets more and more viewership as well.
I feel like if I was born in the 90s, I would’ve killed to have content like Kurtzgesagt or LinusTechTips or Wendover or NileRed or Adam Ragusea etc etc. Although you had your Bill Nyes and Mythbusters and whatnot, there couldn’t have been a way to make high-quality content without the resources and reach that a platform like YouTube offers today.
Yes Geocities web rings with rotating skulls was the content king!
Or maybe people rapping in AOL chat rooms
Sure, yeah trash is trash. If that’s how far you wanted to go you’d have plenty of it. But the web didn’t necessarily trend towards it. Plenty of other spaces where to go. Later, in the mid-late 2000s marketing saw how eagerly people swallowed trash and so the race to the bottom took speed. Most of the web today is aimed at the lowest common denominator. The rotating skullz are but the grand-daddies of the Tiks and the Toks IMO.
You’re not alone. Most people I know don’t even sort their files into directories anymore, they just search for it (particularly in cloud storages like Google Drive).
In fact, when I took the introductory computer engineering course at my HS, the teacher made everyone sort their Google Drive files as an assignment.
I just found out that people use search on thier computers to find files and have no idea where anything is located. It hurts just thinking about it.
And paradoxically they refuse to use search engines to find anything on the Internet.
I completely lost control of my folder structure after keeping all my old backups (before i had a network storage) on HDDs and later copying them over as Backup-Pc-X, Backup-Pc-Y, etc. I should clean up since years. But hey, so far the search worked :D
Even worse that Windows search is slow as hell, can’t imagine the time wasted
How do they find anything on the internet without using a search engine? (I used to love Stumble Upon!)
I think there are a lot of computer illiterate people I most generations but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them as tech wasn’t as easy to use. Plus anyone older than that who used computers where more often considered nerds.
These days more and more people don’t even have a computer and just do everything through their phones.
but there seems to be an overlap of late gen x/early millennial thst kind of had to learn how computers and the internet worked if they wanted to use them…
That’s exactly what happened. It’s like how my grandfather knows absolutely everything about cars, he had to work on his if he wanted to use it.
oh the turntables, back in the 90’s the stereotype was the 10 year old showing the 60 year old how to use the “computator”, nowadays maybe it’s the 60 year old showing the 10 year old there are open source alternatives for image editing apps, office apps, and most things with a tappable tablet interface.
