The article is a bit too nostalgic for my tastes, and hyping 4chan or Web 1.0 surrogates is not going to put the Internet back into users’ hands.
Everybody should rather take a look at what Ari Balkan is doing with the Small Web concept over at his blog. He’s also on Mastodon and generally seems like a great guy.
The personalized, colorful web pages became streamlined, conforming to modern design standards and sacrificing individuality for uniformity.
There are some pretty big advantages to ‘modern design standards.’ For one, they make the Internet a less hostile place to users with accessibility needs. I don’t have problems viewing clashing colors, flying gifs, jumbled pages with no sanity, etc, but a hell of a lot of people with various disabilities sure do. I don’t want to even think about how screen readers try to deal with pages like that. Web1.0 offered absolutely nothing for those users who needed accessibility.
This kind of reminds me of the car nostalgia and the complaint that nowadays they all look samey. Turns out it’s not because they’re built by big soulless corporations (they are though), but because that vaguely roundish running shoe look is what you get when you optimize for efficiency and you apply safety regulations.
I feel like both things are true with this one. I mean, at least they could be more creative with the paint, surely? Or detailing? Maybe some fun etchings? Fun car interior designs?
It’s a mass-market product so I do get why they don’t, but man, there are way too many boring gray and white cars that just match the pavement.
And I love it
Come to think of it, are there any noteworthy sites besides tumblr that let you customize web pages like those latter two screenshots? Say what you will about the aesthetic, it definitely has personality.
Blog writer with vague complaint and no solutions stumbles across popular headline - more at 11.
The issue at play is the big corporate companies, that pretended to be public services, had their venture capital dry up and felt pressure to become profitable. The subsequent monetization and censorship within those systems had significant impact on the quality of content, but outside of those systems the internet has continued to flourish. I suggest the author get off of Reddit/Meta/TwitX, use a better search engine than Google, and start checking out the Fediverse.
Remember kids, the big social media companies will always want you to think that they are the entirety of the internet. But the internet is not a network of machines. It’s a network of human minds, and no organization will ever be able to contain the raw chaos that is the collective force of human imagination.
Agreed. As soon as a web service decides to prioritise revenue growth above the user experience, it’s over. This is usually in the form of an IPO, so if you happen to be a fan of a particular service, as soon as they start talking about going public, start looking for a free / open-source alternative.
The issue at play is the big corporate companies
I’m guessing you weren’t around before these guys ate up the internet?
The issue at play IS the big corporate companies. Period.
They didn’t eat it up, although they certainly want you to think they did, and it’s clear they convinced you.
I’ve been on the internet since the BBS days. Centralized services rise and fall, and people said the internet was dead when AOL became the big portal, and then they said it with Yahoo, and Digg, and Facebook, and now Reddit and Twitter. It’s kinda like people who are always saying the world is gonna end - it never ends - it just changes.
I’d actually argue that we’re at a point of an internet renaissance spurred by the combined failures of Reddit, Twitter, and Meta to maintain contributor trust. They can’t control the flow of human imagination that pulses through the internet, they can only channel it. If they try to dam it, well, it’s just gonna overflow into fuckSpezicles all over /r/place and carry the cream to the Fediverse and beyond.
I’m not saying that big corporations aren’t a problem, I’m saying they don’t have to be our problem now that we’re here, and anyone who says the internet is dead isn’t looking in the right places.
It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”
Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.
If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.
I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.
