Now I dont feel too well.
There is still lots of creative content but because of the sheer amount of people using the internet good content is drowned out by low effort engagement bait.
I know that flash animation alone was a HUGE part of the old internet. At least there is an archive for some of them called “flashpoint”.
Flashpoint is awesome. Makes me feel old to go back and watch old flash (and even shockwave) animations!
It’s not the realization of the years that have passed that makes you old. It’s the belief that the things that you loved when you were younger are somehow better than what exists now that makes you old.
Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn’t as funny as it was in 2011.
Which I’d say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn’t really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.
For mainstream culture, there’s still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.
Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.
This is most evident when it comes to music. I see loads of older musicians, producers, and listeners constantly trashing new music, when the reality is there is loads of great, new music coming into existence regularly. It’s just harder to find since the tools are so accessible now, everyone and his dog can make a “professional” sounding recording. And then, the top 40 or whatever has always just been the lowest common denominator.
The switch from PC usage to locked down devices has made things worse and more expensive and less creative.
Remember, Apple invented the PC but IBM democratized it.
We didn’t get the same thing again.
Apple invented the Smartphone and Google also contributed locked down devices.
I can’t believe thanks to the internet undergoing enshittification I’m actually nostalgic for a time when it was casually racist, because that’s somehow better then this “Watching the words that we say, big brother corponet is listening.” bullshit
I’ve always said the best type of media on the internet is almost no moderation because that means anyone can post anything.
People who post stupid or nonsensical things would just get ignored anyway, there’s no need for a mod tram to dictate what can and cannot be posted online. They should only exist to remove spam or brigading.
The wild west internet was great at this, we got some of the coolest communities and memes from all over the world.
Right around MySpace falling off, Facebook started agregiously taking over the majority of social media. Lots of forum sites are now dead or empty.
The Internet didn’t so much get less racist as it simply got sanitized because they realized that they weren’t extracting maximum dollar from non-white users. The hate simply got pushed further down into the dank miserable depths to fester while the rest of us get to pretend that racism isn’t still a massive problem because black people are a marketing demographic now…
Somehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.
Back then the bigotry were mostly jokes than actual serious unironic targeting which you see festering nowadays.
A lot of it was ironic “It’s funny because we know it’s fucked up and wrong, if we legitimately agreed we wouldn’t think it was funny.”