Man, this is depressing. While I wasn’t “raised online” since I was raised on dialup and couldn’t block the phone line all that long.
I still remember when google was the new kid on the block and the general feeling about them across early Internet forums.
Microsoft was evil because they copied everybody else’s stuff and wanted to charge for it. Apple was clueless making expensive junk. Sun was a darling for a while at least until they started pulling shit.
Enter mother-fucking-Google. Ethical. Honest. Not evil. Smart. Supporting open source. And on top of all that, FREE to use. Like Microsoft wants to charge you for hotmail if you want an inbox > 2MB? Fucking EVIL!!! Google is ethical because they are completely free!!! And I hear they are working on an email service too. Google just wants to shepherd the internet and protect it from companies like Microsoft, Apple, and AOL.
Oh Google.
A company that survives long enough eventually gets turned to the dark $ide. Greedy asshats will always ruin a good thing for their own benefit
Any company that becomes publicly traded gets turned to the dark side. That’s the factor that does it because they have a legal requirement to do everything they can to maximize profits.
Trying to sustain perpetual growth will always lead to companies fucking over their customers and employees.
While I feel this is true there are so few privately owned companies that prove this as fact. Holds breath that steam never fucks over its customers
The biggest problem in my opinion is, when companies stop to be companies and instead turn into glorified money trees whose only purpose is to shake all value from, value generated by the people who have to work there.
Once a company sells its soul to investors, it becomes nothing more than a human in the Matrix: a thing to harvest, to be kept alive until nothing of value remains, then thrown aside and disposed.
Source: I speak from experience, worked at one investor-driven enterprise and one that is listed on exchanges
It’s why I think worker-owned coops should be more common. Research shows that they’re a more resilient business model than hierarchical businesses. I think it’s because they can largely avoid the principle-agent problem, wherein executives and investors act on behalf of the company, but their personal incentives do not necessarily align with the company’s. For example, a CEO has a vested interest in pumping up profitability in the short term, even if it’s by slashing R&D funding and alienating customers long-term, so they can get nice numbers to pad their resumé. Likewise, investors just want their investment back.
With a coop, overall control of the company’s decisions is guided more by the long-term health of the company, as that’s what is best for the workers. It aligns incentives, avoiding the perverse incentives that cause hierarchical businesses to make unsustainable, short-term business decisions.
Being good is good for growth, but investors eventually want that payout.
Google also had, realistically, no competition in the online ads business for most of that time. Microsoft tried so hard but never broke into that market. No other online ad company could even come close to google 2000-2010 in terms of scale, technical chops, etc.
It’s easy to have principals, it’s hard to live up to them. The first real competitor to Google’s online ads dominance was Facebook and has caused Google to completely shit the bed (from practices and policy, they’re obviously doing well money wise)
This made me really nostalgic for times when the internet still felt new and promising…
Shoutout to Deviantart, they a real one
All of this led to me ditching all of those (except YouTube, this is without a real alternative due to the content exclusively hosted there) and starting to self-host my stuff and joining the Fediverse.
you can use invidious or piped on PC and newpipe on a phone. just be careful cause i heard google removed newpipe from the playstore and someone put something malicious with the same name, but im not sure how that situation is going
I use the NewPipe fork with Sponsorblock as an optional feature. You can get NewPipe on F-Droid here and the fork with Sponsorblock here.
As a rule of thumb, I always check their respective GitHub pages for links, I don’t really trust the Google Store. There are too many spam duplicates of various apps, especially FOSS ones.
To have some sort of viable fediverse alternative to YouTube, the developers of it would have to abandon some of the free software principles that current fediverse platforms uphold. There needs to be a way to monetize to attract creators and get people to host the servers
Free in software should stand for freedom, not money. We need better ways for financing such software projects and creators making content on them.
Lemmy seems to be trying its best to teach me about furry porn.
While I’m not into furry porn, I love the community around it. I’ve actually had random encounters with a few furies and they are awesome peeps.
Someone’s underestimating the age of the internet.
Yeah but…ordinary people were not dialing into BBS forums back then. We weren’t “raised” online like kids now are, we were able to log off anytime and not ever need it to function in society. That started changing in the early 2000s. All my kid’s school assignments are now done on a laptop on a district-owned cloud system. He hasn’t needed a pencil and paper in…I forgot how long.
If you’re around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
If you’re around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
This is why I always insist that the cutoff between millenial and Gen Z is 1995. There’s a pretty obvious generational split along this topic and 1995 seems to be the birth year of the divide
Eh. But what does it mean to be raised online? I think for that you need the availability of ever present internet connections in the form of mobile devices. I think the first kids raised online would have been born in 2003, and would have been 4, preschool age, in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Those kids are 16 now. If we want to set the standard for “raised online” as being “digital native” then I think we should dial back the range to when AIM was popular. Again, setting the standard for who could have been raised with that constant interconnectedness as being someone who was 4 at time of introduction would give us the first AIM connected people reaching age 30 right now.
The reality is, I think, in the middle. The first generation we could say was raised online is basically right in between those two ages, 23. The other standard we could try to set is, who is the first generation who doesn’t remember the internet as exciting, just instead a daily part of life
I am sorry to disappoint but people born in 2003 would be either 19 or 20 years old now. I know that it is hard to accept getting old.
I think it’s fair to say that those in their late teens now are the first generation raised online. Sure, previous generations where raised alongside the internet, but the current generation is raised with a much larger presence of the internet.
Nah, the zoomers are IMO the second generation to grow up with the internet. Sure it’s even more present for them and gen alpha, but I’d argue us millennials are the ones who first really grew up with the net. While we weren’t on the net all the time back then, we were the generation that grew up with the net as it became what it is today, for better or for worse.
