I miss it. It was great back when it wasn't the domain of our glorious benevolent corporate overlords.
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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I remember reading somewhere that people follow a predictable course when they're new to the internet:
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Curiosity - use the internet to search for and look up info directly on your interests, or go down the wikipedia rabbit hole, look up lyrics of songs you like, etc.
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entertainment - internet culture specific communities and their entertainment. This is the bit about memes and cat pictures and things.
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Infotainment - spending all time steeped in new evolving news, whether thats politics or media news or sports related or whatever.
Most of the western world has gone through this together, but other countries (such as India) have had internet come to the masses with mobile internet and are following this path now.
But the majority of the developed world is on the deep end of constant streams of infotainment on current events and politics. This constant exposure and decrying the downfall of humanity looks set to continue. I wonder what comes after.
I wonder what the next stage could be...
It also had porn.
It still does, but it used to too.
Panda_Abyss! What are you doing!?
Oh step-MinnesotaGoddam! Help im stuck in the comment section!
Pepperidge Farms remembers the nsa wiretapping at&t since 03 or earlier, and assumingly some or most of the internet traffic.
and most of what the internet from 95-03 was just newbs getting on AOL,IRC, ICQ, or email for the first time and discovering games porn, websites, hacking, anime, etc.
i mean the 90s were funner but frustrating hardware and connectivity meant only us patient nerds would be online. now it's ubiquitous on purpose. for marketing and other nefarious reasons. as if 5g or LTE have been secure. might as well say WEP was good enough too.
with more advanced traffic analytics available, it's wayyyy harder to hide in the noise.
in this essay I wi-
HEY!
We also had weird ass chatrooms.
i mean the 90s were funner but frustrating hardware and connectivity meant only us patient nerds would be online.
The 90s had ample supply of weird gross freaks who were just smart enough to get dial-up working because they needed it to trade child porn and post racist screeds on sports talk forums.
Caturday was a good day.
and being watched 24/7
what do you mean was
Smartphones killed the internet. Normies should have never been allowed access to the internet
I think when everything started to be called "apps" was the fall.
I think when social media gets more popular, everything went downhill.
I think that was around the same time, a lot of things went to shit before we noticed.
Youβre right.
soon as anything is popular enough for marketers to move in, it's soul dies
Agreed. No one even uses the word program now which I find weird.
so windows they're executables. what are they on linux? i am learnding
They used to all just be "programs".
Appimage?
My normie mom sent my techie dad an email in 1982 announcing that she was pregnant.
Normies have always been on the internet.
The pattern I see, over and over again, is that "Things really started going downhill right after I graduated high school / college and stopped having enough free time to fuck around, but not enough interest in global news / national politics to be inundated with The Existential Horror."
And if you grab names out of a bag, you'll find people from every generation insisting the Olds Ruined Everything For Me and The Youngs Can't Do Anything Right. Somehow, they're always living in the sweet spot of history.
Your mom sending an email in 1984 is not normie behaviour
Using a computer isn't that hard. Sending an email isn't that hard.
No, but normal people didn't own a computer then really haha
I was there, Gandalf. 3000 years ago... (well, it feels like it)
The Internet will one day be a place where the revolution will be organized, planned and such
The revolution will not be hosted.
Nor streamed.
This cat playing piano came out in what, 2007? So 1 year before the world economy almost collapsed. We were just oblivious, it's not like the world wasn't already falling apart because of corporate greed and wall street gamblers
We still have cat videos...
The internet was once a fun place
glances at the 1990s Internet
Jesus fuck, that's a lot of links to Stormfront getting passed around. Also, a whole lot of pedophilia. I'm sure that'll clear itself up, though.
Maybe if I flip forward to the '00s...
Jesus fuck that's a lot of Islamophobia and Homophobia. Also, it appears we are in somewhere between two and five wars, and everyone is homeless all of a sudden. Still tons of pedophilia, too... Hmmm.
Maybe '10s?...
Wow, that's a lot of misogynism and outright racism! Also, I hope all this anti-vax click-bait I see popping up everywhere isn't a portent of something bad happening in the future. Oh! Bad news, everybody. We've still got pedophilia.
Damn, here we are in the '20s.
It appears they haven't fixed the racism or the sexism or the warmongering or the pseudo-science or the child pornography. But I'll admit, I'm seeing significantly fewer "cute cat videos" now.
Really? Sounds too good to be true
It all went to hell once the normies got iPhones.
All this war, tax cuts for the wealthy, and inflation are funded by money printing, due to the government taking over currencies and enacting large government policy using trillions of printed money. Is that still free market capitalism when the lifeblood of society is being siphoned off?
Well I think seeing the late stage of Capitalism collapsing is also fun
Money ruins everything.