People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
That's not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.
some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.
You pay a monthly fee? Mine's free. You do Nitro or something?
AIM also had built in file sharing.
People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.
Well, then the Internet wasn't a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
Fuck that, I'm nostalgic because there was an actual aesthetic with character. "Modern" flat UIs are boring and flat.
I almost cried reading the explanation.
Really, because I'm more nostalgic for having hope for the future.
"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.
In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.
They literally said in the opening sentence: "the best thing about early internet wasn't AIM or MySpace"
The post isn't about individual technology at all, but how relationship with technology changed.
They literally said in the opening sentence: "the best thing about early internet wasn't AIM or MySpace"
Yes I literally also read the OP. I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment.
The post isn't about individual technology at all, but how relationship with technology changed.
So...its about technology?
clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later
Email is actually great, it's the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn't need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.
It's not great at all. It's messy and disorganized and confusing and very much not private, and people don't use it properly. No client can fix that. If it was "the original fediverse" we wouldn't need a new one.
I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.
No, it's because it wasn't full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fan and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the "small" internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the ".com" was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were ".com"
The old internet was decidedly anti-commercial.
I remember very well people being revolted by online advertising and how it commercialized a free place.
They were right.
everybody knows its the nostalgia for GEOCITIES AESTHETIC
-Under Construction-
Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.
Do you have any recommendations for good forums?
Search your hobbies, there are tons that are still around and busy. Some that i like to visit are grassrootsmotorsports.com and hobby-machinest.com, but you can just search for "%hobby% forum" and you'll probably find something decent.
For the majority of people the internet used to be a room, a place you went and accessed a device.
The device wasn’t mobile, we usually didn’t carry around the thick laptops of the time around.
At first using the device would disconnect the phone, and you couldn’t carry it around easily.
As times changed and it’s mobility shifted it became more and more commercially viable and then it was invaded by corporate interests.
Now it’s not just a room, it’s everywhere and it’s allows all sorts of powerful groups to exert influence over every single person that connects with it
I have a 20 year old coworker I constantly ask probing questions about what it's like never having not had the internet. It's so weird.
I mean crushing boredom isn't a thing anymore because of it, which is cool and I can acknowledge that. But there's also something very dystopian about it and clearly it's having pretty serious negative effects on society, politics in particular. So yeah....not really sure how to feel about it.
I just went camping and put the goddamn thing in a bag for 4 days and forgot about it. Friends and I only brought the internet up once during the trip to joke that we hoped when we got back into reception we'd find out he had died. It's funny cuz I don't even need to say who.
Crushing boredom is absolutely still a thing. I guess you could move it over into mind-numbing boredom if you really wanted to get pedantic. If anything, it actually makes boredom more likely. The internet has caused a severe amount of overstimulation in most people, and so now things that they used to take enjoyment in mean nothing to them.
The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.
I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it's just promoted content. Second--related to the post--is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people's behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don't know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I've ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Very nicely put
Smartphones ruined the internet.
When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.
Plus, there's just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.
Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that's really when the internet went to shit.
Smart phones ruined everything. It was fun when I was the only one, hyperbole. I had smart phones while my peers in grade school finally started getting hand me down flip phones. I was like this is great; playing Zelda on a gameboy emulator, or on the next phone that had the same specs as my first pc and playing Duke Nukem 3D. Being able to browse the internet.
Now it's devolved to a chain collar on your neck as you're expected to answer the phone all the time and even places of work require you to have a phone to use their cr'apps. Scan this QR code. Ram this up yass, oh wait. At this point I hate phones. I plan to switch to a garmin watch with phone capabilities. I mean 95% is just spam these days for me.
Nah, I'm nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.