i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don’t miss the slow speeds.
Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.
Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson’s comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek
You’re right on the money.
The reason why the early web worked so well is exactly BECAUSE of that early adopter profile. Getting online was a nerd thing; it had a filtering effect of who could get online. And the ones that did all shared that same passion for the platform. There was an assumed baseline of shared knowledge and shared culture.
Today we consider such things problematic. Back then, that was just how it was. And why it worked.
Personally, I miss it.
A lot of it boils down to the users. Personally, I miss when the internet mostly consisted of us nerds.
Back in 1995 when I first got online, the web was very much a nerd domain. You needed a certain level of computer knowledge to get online, which really acted as a filter. It meant that most of us shared a certain level of understanding and the drive to use such a medium. We disagreed on Star Trek and Star Wars, but to the outside world, we were ALL nerds. Back then, the average person didn’t even think of going online.
These days, even the most tech illiterate can get online. In fact, they don’t even think about it; it’s that integrated in their daily life.
While growth also gave us nice things like large forums, web shopping, YouTube, etc… by and large I think we’d be better off if this was still a nerd domain.
I really miss those days.
Don’t gatekeep the internet. That’s what lobbying ISPs and telecom companies are for. /s
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot that Lemmy was filled to the brim with Linux nerds. The most-common nerd-gatekeepers, right before tabletop players. Explains the downvotes.
Personally, when I look at the average user on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (at least the blue checks), etcetera, it makes me wish we actually did gate keep.
Heads up: Lemmy will either get less popular or more popular over time. Neither is ideal.
And while it never feels like it when you say it, but these are [going to be] the good ol’ days.
Well that’s pretty much every platform’s lifecycle. Starts small, reaches a sweet spot and either implodes or sucks ass.
I was on Digg, I had a MySpace page, I was an early Twitter user, I had a Reddit account… who knows how long I’ll be on here. But for now, I’m happy to be one of the users on the upswing.
Yes! My ex and I used to build all kinds of computers back then. Of course they used to blow up rather quickly. It was a slog trying to figure out where I left off once I got up and running again. Shopping - I bought all kinds of stuff on the internet back then lol. Enough said.
The early days of web shopping sure were interesting. I was a very early adopter compared to most people.
The very first thing I ever bought online was a flashlight back in 1999. Which was such a novelty at the time that I actually visited the two guys who ran that shop from a literal broom closet in order to collect it. I was like their third customer ever. These days they have 75 employees and around 7 million euros of revenue.
Collecting a web order seems silly now, but at that time it basically avoided a two week wait. Back in 1998-2005, if you bought something online in the Netherlands, you usually had to transfer the money by bank. Which took a few days. After that, they would send the product, which again took a few days.
In 2005 we got a new online payment method that let you transfer the money immediately, much like paying at a register. That made it way more convenient for everyone and you saw massive increases in spending year over year.
Bulletin boards. I’m not the biggest fan of Reddit style boards. Because voting can hurt discussions. Due to users can just downvote you and call it a day. They don’t have to tell you why and how you’re wrong. So less discussions.
Downvotes are fine and good, but downvoting affecting the visibility of your content is insane. Screw Reddit for that.
A mechanism to promote quality on-topic content and demote noise can be pretty valuable, especially somewhere with a high population. The original thinking on Reddit (and I’ve been there long enough to know) was that people would use voting as moderation, not agreement or disagreement.
An upvote was to mean “content like this belongs here” and a downvote the opposite. There were no comments at first, but it reasonably applied to them as well once they were added. Unfortunately, votes are too simple and too opaque to maintain a norm like that. Were I designing a discussion system, it would probably use labeling like Slashdot rather than simple voting.
There is no way possible you can make humans actually follow that principle. People always dumb things down as much as possible, and “I like this” or “I dislike this” is default. That’s the problem.
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn’t.
- Don’t feed the trolls
- Don’t talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there’s a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you’re one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you’re a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn’t really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said “The internet is leaking, this won’t end well.”
Didn’t realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it’s cool. It’s so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being “cancelled”. Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around “you just can’t understand my experiences” rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from “we’re all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can” to “we’re all wannabe celebrities that don’t have time to explain anything to the losers who aren’t good enough to understand our experiences” it all went to shit.
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now
which is honestly and deeply confusing. because on the internet no one knows you’re a dog! (oh. you got back to that two sentences later)
i just don’t go in for identity. at all. no one knows i’m a dog, and i like it that way.
Don’t get me wrong, identity is important. Even on the internet it can make sense in certain contexts like if you have a community for people of that group. There’s a time and a place for that.
But in most contexts it’s really unimportant in internet conversations.
But with the rise in social media it’s become the most important thing on the internet to the point where people can’t express ideas or accept an idea without it being connected to a person’s identity. Back in the day when everyone was pseudo-anonymous there was a death of the author kind of thing on everything so it was 100% about ideas and 0% about identity.
Ytmnd
