7 ms·

As someone with extremely deep contempt for Silicon Valley, Big Tech monopolies, and modern social media culture, this brought a tear to my eye.It was so easy t

As someone with extremely deep contempt for Silicon Valley, Big Tech monopolies, and modern social media culture, this brought a tear to my eye.It was so easy to make new friends online once upon a time. The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms has left a generation creatively stifled and alienated from each other. I miss the ugly comet cursors, the crummy MIDI tunes, the bad HTML, the encouragement to make new friends, and the ability to reach people without paying thousands in garbage ads. I miss dating online without bribing some shitty algorithm. It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. Don't trust anyone (except for us, the tech company. Give us all your data for free.) The internet used to be bohemian, weird, creative, tacky, and friendly. It was my favorite place to be. Where did that joy go? What have we become in the last 8 years?

corytheboyd 6y ago
> The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms It’s funny, because when Facebook was new my friends and I flocked to it FOR the uniformity! Little did we know we helped contribute to the downfall of the free and fun internet :/
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Also democracy, don't forget democracy is also a victim. :P
  - adventured 6y ago
    It is a well known fact that the 20th century was overflowing with amazing democracy. We had democracy coming out of ears back then. Then Facebook came along and destroyed all that vast success humans have had with implementing and upholding fair democratic systems all over the world. It was utopia until 2007-2008 when Facebook went mainstream. Wait, I got that all backwards. The world is more democratic today than it was in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Facebook is a recent convenient scapegoat for the same problems humanity has had with organizing fair systems of government for thousands of years, and it's a particularly intellectually lazy scapegoat at that.
    - corytheboyd 6y ago
      I think the comment above yours was mostly joking, or at least deliberately simplifying things. But since we’re here and I can’t resist, I agree with you that statements like “x is destroying democracy” are meaningless hyperbole. Social media has a role in influencing the outcome of the democratic process, sure, but to say it is ERASING DEMOCRACY is ridiculous. It doesn’t mean anything. We still vote, and those votes still matter. My nostalgia for the internet of yore and the affects of social media on democracy are pretty much divorced ideas anyway, I really did just mean for my original comment to be a funnysad observation
      - crusty 6y ago
        We may still vote but we aren't the only democracy under strain and the pressures bring put on it are even more exaggerated in other places, like those where Facebook is the internet ala mid-90's AOL, accessed on phones for free or cheap, and separate from general data plans.
visiblink 6y ago
I try to get away from all that by hosting a site on gopher. Neocities would be another option, if you need the eye candy. I hate social media, going so far as to delete both my reddit and Mastodon accounts. But this is tempting. It gives me the feeling I used to get when listening to tunes and surfing last.fm
- ncfausti 6y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you hate Mastodon as well? I signed up, never really got into it, but kind of always intended to.
  - meekmockmook 6y ago
    I personally don't hate Mastodon but I've never found an instance that clicked for me. Feels like a more confusing Twitter but happy to be re-educated
Aldipower 6y ago
These words are so true. I feel the same way. Nothing to add.
- PicassoCTs 6y ago
  This. I miss that refugee camp of misfits, outcast from society, before that which haunted us came back with a vengeance. There should be a non-cooperate sector of the web. Where all is GPL and this taint on the world could be removed.
  - meekmockmook 6y ago
    A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.
    - selfhoster11 6y ago
      That was the original dream of the internet, except replace these concerns with period-specific equivalents.
  - endgame 6y ago
    Ironically, meekmockmook's sibling comment to mine is [dead] for no discernible reason: > A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.
    - matt_kantor 6y ago
      FYI you can vouch for [dead] comments (click the direct link to that comment, then click "vouch" at the top). I just did so this one is no longer dead.
  - easton 6y ago
    Like the indieweb? I think there’s a webring that takes you through it. https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/
meekmockmook 6y ago
BTW: Come say hi. http://spacehey.com/jdb http://spacehey.com/jdb
cutler 6y ago
Those were also the days when you could run your own mailserver without being subject to Google and Microsoft's arbitrary blacklisting. Days when embedding a url in an email didn't risk it being treated as junk. Days when every barely-more-than-static website wasn't an SPA carved up into components. Days when PHP was gloriously procedural. Days when Perl was still cool.
iankp 6y ago
The most interesting thing to note is that MySpace was personal. The smallest facet of what MySpace was, the 50px tall little "Bulletin" feature, was the place where you talk to yourself at everyone. This, however, is what the entire internet has become, the social paradigm shift, thanks to Facebook's sterile data output container superseding it. Facebook is the MySpace "Bulletin" blown to full size, and that's what we've come to believe the web and networking are. The only saving grace for Twitter is that it's where you follow people you DON'T know, and they tend to be industry experts.
HenryBemis 6y ago
> Modern social media is cold and hostile. Υou misspelled "monitized". I tried to play TribalWars. I remember playing this game a decade ago. It was fun. Stil it. There are so many things that could be done with 2 clicks, instead of 10. But, hey, they can be! As long as you buy/spend "premium points". I deleted my account after two weeks playing 30mins per day. To grow further I would either have to spend 1h per day (then 2h, 3h, and so on) or buy the click-reducers. I will go back to my AoE2-AOK)!! The internet/websites/services have vastly improved. AND the pricing model has too. There are plenty of discussions in HN about "setting the correct price". That sweet spot that will yield YOU (the maker) the most profit. You don't want 1bn customers giving you $1. You want 1k customers that will give you $1.5m instead. This way you got less costs and more revenue. And you got better marketing ("everyone has an android but who can afford a cool $1k rose gold (puke) iphone???) You want that cute guy/lady? You have to pay! (See Ashley Madison and their business model/practices)(https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924 https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...) You don't pay? It's ok, someone else will and will get ahead in line, and you then will suffer from FOMO (ok not exactly but you still reduce your opportunities)(gotta make it rain to the company!).
- scrollaway 6y ago
  I normally don't call people out for it but you actually did misspell "monetized". ;)
slightwinder 6y ago
> It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Maybe this digital cat-calling lead to this: > Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. People just don't like to be annoyed by random strangers. Especially woman and specificaly when it's about molesting them.
- brandall10 6y ago
  With all due respect, MySpace was a dating site for many of both sexes. They even had a search filter based on physical attributes like any dating site. I had a female friend set up my profile specifically for this purpose in early 2006. Within hours after signing up a random girl sent me a message to ask if I had a girlfriend. The following week I went out on 3 dates. By the end of the year I met about 30 women in person and probably went out with a dozen multiple times, until shutting things when one became my girlfriend. Facebook was setup to work differently and I never used it for this purpose, instead moving on to OKCupid when I was single again in 2011.
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    It wasn't build as a dating-site and it wasn't sold as a dating-place. That some people misused it that way, doesn't mean every user is ok with this and likes to be annoyed by sex-spam. Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast... We have the algorithm-drived services with all their control and reduced friction because some people just can't behave well and must destroy the nice things for everyone.
    - totony 6y ago
      There are inherent sexual dynamics in any social circle, be it myspace, facebook or the workplace. I don't think the current trend of perceiving any unwanted sexual interest as inherently bad is at all healthy for society. P.S: i know and remember a lot of my friends who found their S.O. through facebook so it being alive arguanly disproves the assumption behind >Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast...
friendlybus 6y ago
Reminds me of Howard Beale's closing speech in Network. What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things...
alelos 6y ago
Try the 'small web', I'm enjoying gemini, https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Here's the thing: gopher & gemini are, in a sense, like Facebook: extremely uniform. In that sense, they are not even BBSes, because it's practically impossible to convey self expression beyond text. Don't get me wrong: one can easily get lost in gopherholes with 20+ years of content, but it's always only content. In contrast the web of the early 2000s was awesome, because you already could do a lot of really weird things (bouncing mouse trailing balls, anyone?) resulting in self-expressing art-like sites - the pinnacle of these kind of sites were undoubtedly the Flash era. So yes, depends on what one is after. Maybe both are needed.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    Graphics or audio needs some sort of talent and ever-so-tiny amount of skills with some editing program to make it work. Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice (which most are able to do by the age of 10, barring low-literacy areas). In that sense, text is much cheaper to use for self-expression, even though necessarily limited. On the other hand, Gemini/Gopher is near-symbiotic with BBS and IRC-based communities, which are a decent text-based interactive media that could be useful for self-expression in the hands of the right people. I agree that multimedia-based networked self-expression is limited these days, but maybe something else will spark a Gemini-like comback for multimedia in the future.
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      > Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice Writing is a lot more harder, than, for example, drawing. You said it yourself: "by the age of 10" compared to drawing, basically since someone can hold a crayon.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
Is Zeronet what you're looking for? That allows anyone to share their creative content / website with low entry barrier.

corytheboyd 6y ago

> The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms It’s funny, because when Facebook was new my friends and I flocked to it FOR the uniformity! Little did we know we helped contribute to the downfall of the free and fun internet :/

gonzo41 6y ago
Also democracy, don't forget democracy is also a victim. :P
- adventured 6y ago
  It is a well known fact that the 20th century was overflowing with amazing democracy. We had democracy coming out of ears back then. Then Facebook came along and destroyed all that vast success humans have had with implementing and upholding fair democratic systems all over the world. It was utopia until 2007-2008 when Facebook went mainstream. Wait, I got that all backwards. The world is more democratic today than it was in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Facebook is a recent convenient scapegoat for the same problems humanity has had with organizing fair systems of government for thousands of years, and it's a particularly intellectually lazy scapegoat at that.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    I think the comment above yours was mostly joking, or at least deliberately simplifying things. But since we’re here and I can’t resist, I agree with you that statements like “x is destroying democracy” are meaningless hyperbole. Social media has a role in influencing the outcome of the democratic process, sure, but to say it is ERASING DEMOCRACY is ridiculous. It doesn’t mean anything. We still vote, and those votes still matter. My nostalgia for the internet of yore and the affects of social media on democracy are pretty much divorced ideas anyway, I really did just mean for my original comment to be a funnysad observation
    - crusty 6y ago
      We may still vote but we aren't the only democracy under strain and the pressures bring put on it are even more exaggerated in other places, like those where Facebook is the internet ala mid-90's AOL, accessed on phones for free or cheap, and separate from general data plans.

visiblink 6y ago

I try to get away from all that by hosting a site on gopher. Neocities would be another option, if you need the eye candy. I hate social media, going so far as to delete both my reddit and Mastodon accounts. But this is tempting. It gives me the feeling I used to get when listening to tunes and surfing last.fm

ncfausti 6y ago
Can you elaborate on why you hate Mastodon as well? I signed up, never really got into it, but kind of always intended to.
- meekmockmook 6y ago
  I personally don't hate Mastodon but I've never found an instance that clicked for me. Feels like a more confusing Twitter but happy to be re-educated

Aldipower 6y ago

These words are so true. I feel the same way. Nothing to add.

PicassoCTs 6y ago
This. I miss that refugee camp of misfits, outcast from society, before that which haunted us came back with a vengeance. There should be a non-cooperate sector of the web. Where all is GPL and this taint on the world could be removed.
- meekmockmook 6y ago
  A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.
  - selfhoster11 6y ago
    That was the original dream of the internet, except replace these concerns with period-specific equivalents.
- endgame 6y ago
  Ironically, meekmockmook's sibling comment to mine is [dead] for no discernible reason: > A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.
  - matt_kantor 6y ago
    FYI you can vouch for [dead] comments (click the direct link to that comment, then click "vouch" at the top). I just did so this one is no longer dead.
- easton 6y ago
  Like the indieweb? I think there’s a webring that takes you through it. https://indieweb.org/ https://indieweb.org/

meekmockmook 6y ago

BTW: Come say hi. http://spacehey.com/jdb http://spacehey.com/jdb

cutler 6y ago

Those were also the days when you could run your own mailserver without being subject to Google and Microsoft's arbitrary blacklisting. Days when embedding a url in an email didn't risk it being treated as junk. Days when every barely-more-than-static website wasn't an SPA carved up into components. Days when PHP was gloriously procedural. Days when Perl was still cool.

iankp 6y ago

The most interesting thing to note is that MySpace was personal. The smallest facet of what MySpace was, the 50px tall little "Bulletin" feature, was the place where you talk to yourself at everyone. This, however, is what the entire internet has become, the social paradigm shift, thanks to Facebook's sterile data output container superseding it. Facebook is the MySpace "Bulletin" blown to full size, and that's what we've come to believe the web and networking are. The only saving grace for Twitter is that it's where you follow people you DON'T know, and they tend to be industry experts.

HenryBemis 6y ago

> Modern social media is cold and hostile. Υou misspelled "monitized". I tried to play TribalWars. I remember playing this game a decade ago. It was fun. Stil it. There are so many things that could be done with 2 clicks, instead of 10. But, hey, they can be! As long as you buy/spend "premium points". I deleted my account after two weeks playing 30mins per day. To grow further I would either have to spend 1h per day (then 2h, 3h, and so on) or buy the click-reducers. I will go back to my AoE2-AOK)!! The internet/websites/services have vastly improved. AND the pricing model has too. There are plenty of discussions in HN about "setting the correct price". That sweet spot that will yield YOU (the maker) the most profit. You don't want 1bn customers giving you $1. You want 1k customers that will give you $1.5m instead. This way you got less costs and more revenue. And you got better marketing ("everyone has an android but who can afford a cool $1k rose gold (puke) iphone???) You want that cute guy/lady? You have to pay! (See Ashley Madison and their business model/practices)(https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924 https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...) You don't pay? It's ok, someone else will and will get ahead in line, and you then will suffer from FOMO (ok not exactly but you still reduce your opportunities)(gotta make it rain to the company!).

scrollaway 6y ago
I normally don't call people out for it but you actually did misspell "monetized". ;)

slightwinder 6y ago

> It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Maybe this digital cat-calling lead to this: > Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. People just don't like to be annoyed by random strangers. Especially woman and specificaly when it's about molesting them.

brandall10 6y ago
With all due respect, MySpace was a dating site for many of both sexes. They even had a search filter based on physical attributes like any dating site. I had a female friend set up my profile specifically for this purpose in early 2006. Within hours after signing up a random girl sent me a message to ask if I had a girlfriend. The following week I went out on 3 dates. By the end of the year I met about 30 women in person and probably went out with a dozen multiple times, until shutting things when one became my girlfriend. Facebook was setup to work differently and I never used it for this purpose, instead moving on to OKCupid when I was single again in 2011.
- slightwinder 6y ago
  It wasn't build as a dating-site and it wasn't sold as a dating-place. That some people misused it that way, doesn't mean every user is ok with this and likes to be annoyed by sex-spam. Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast... We have the algorithm-drived services with all their control and reduced friction because some people just can't behave well and must destroy the nice things for everyone.
  - totony 6y ago
    There are inherent sexual dynamics in any social circle, be it myspace, facebook or the workplace. I don't think the current trend of perceiving any unwanted sexual interest as inherently bad is at all healthy for society. P.S: i know and remember a lot of my friends who found their S.O. through facebook so it being alive arguanly disproves the assumption behind >Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast...

friendlybus 6y ago

Reminds me of Howard Beale's closing speech in Network. What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things...

alelos 6y ago

Try the 'small web', I'm enjoying gemini, https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

pmlnr 6y ago
Here's the thing: gopher & gemini are, in a sense, like Facebook: extremely uniform. In that sense, they are not even BBSes, because it's practically impossible to convey self expression beyond text. Don't get me wrong: one can easily get lost in gopherholes with 20+ years of content, but it's always only content. In contrast the web of the early 2000s was awesome, because you already could do a lot of really weird things (bouncing mouse trailing balls, anyone?) resulting in self-expressing art-like sites - the pinnacle of these kind of sites were undoubtedly the Flash era. So yes, depends on what one is after. Maybe both are needed.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Graphics or audio needs some sort of talent and ever-so-tiny amount of skills with some editing program to make it work. Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice (which most are able to do by the age of 10, barring low-literacy areas). In that sense, text is much cheaper to use for self-expression, even though necessarily limited. On the other hand, Gemini/Gopher is near-symbiotic with BBS and IRC-based communities, which are a decent text-based interactive media that could be useful for self-expression in the hands of the right people. I agree that multimedia-based networked self-expression is limited these days, but maybe something else will spark a Gemini-like comback for multimedia in the future.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice Writing is a lot more harder, than, for example, drawing. You said it yourself: "by the age of 10" compared to drawing, basically since someone can hold a crayon.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

Is Zeronet what you're looking for? That allows anyone to share their creative content / website with low entry barrier.