My reaction to this post
Honestly I just jumped to Lemmy after dndmemes sent me this way and it feels like I’m delving into early internet forums back in the day, fresh and new and full of excitement for the future
I know exactly what you mean. Fresh optimism. For fun, not for money or algorithms.
Fresh optimism for the communities and the new apps all being furiously worked on right now. I’ve got Memmy, Mlem, and Voyager all installed currently and watching the rapid development of each is a hell of a lot more interesting than the one Reddit app that’s been dogshit since they bought it and stuffed it full of ads and is only getting worse.
I have like 5 android apps installed waiting until I’m reunited with my beloved !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
Remember when forums would let you put unsanitized HTML in your signature and people exploited it to flood them with pop ups and redirects? Lemmy’s bringing that back, too!
I was on a forum looking for something once and someone had a flash game as their sig. It was like Portal The Flash Version but the gun was on a rail. And the dimensions of the flash viewport were like a typical sig, so it was pretty interesting just to play a game in such a strange aspect ratio. Not really relevant to anything but I haven’t thought of that in a really long time.
put an old man face on that kid and you’ve nailed it
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.
Yes Geocities web rings with rotating skulls was the content king!
Or maybe people rapping in AOL chat rooms
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.
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 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.
This image brought to you by the time-period when anything with young people had to have skateboarding, surfing, or roller blading.
It was the law.
Hard to believe our hover-keyboards used to have wires!
