10 ms·

Beautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this. I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers. For

Beautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this. I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers. For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed something dynamic so as to save your screen from burn in. In the 90's, having a cool custom screensaver was cool (around the same time that having a custom ringtone on your 3210 was cool), and you'd pay money for software like After Dark.

cesaref 5y ago
On the subject of options, I seem to remember being able to alter how toasted the toast was!
- fredley 5y ago
  You're totally right! I think you could have flying fish too!
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.
- willis936 5y ago
  The electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    Uhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.
    - willis936 5y ago
      When was the last time you looked at one? Was it todsy? I own half a dozen PVMs and two PC monitors and have been looking at CRTs consistently since the 90s.
  - citrin_ru 5y ago
    It takes about 5 second for my LCD monitor to wake-up after a sleep, which is a bit annoying. A screen saver disappears in a fraction of a second even on old hardware.
- donatj 5y ago
  In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class. It was dumb harmless fun.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    I was always fond of this one. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bluescreen https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule
  - willis936 5y ago
    It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation. What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment? Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.
      - willis936 5y ago
        It's a relatively small lab in a university and part of my job is keeping the computers running. I could wipe, but I want to make as little work for my replacement as possible. Well, maybe a few minutes of extra work to get rid of a screensaver.
      - 5y ago
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  The new nintendo switch has an oled screen. Is that likely to be vulnerable to burn in due to game ui staying constant?
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-switch-oled-burn-in-read-this-first/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-s... > We've designed the OLED screen to aim for longevity as much as possible, but OLED displays can experience image retention if subjected to static visuals over a long period of time. However, users can take preventative measures to preserve the screen [by] utilizing features included in the Nintendo Switch systems by default, such as auto-brightness function to prevent the screen from getting too bright, and the auto-sleep function to go into 'auto sleep' mode after short periods of time.
- elondaits 5y ago
  The Apple TV 4k screensavers (city flyovers filmed in slow motion with a drone) are beautiful and I always end up staring at the screen for a while. https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc
  - cwizou 5y ago
    That's a horribly outdated version linked in that video sadly, and that one no longer runs on recent macOS (because it's not notarized). Just in case anyone wants to try it, please grab latest build here instead : https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases Or if you want an installer with auto updates, get it here : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io https://aerialscreensaver.github.io Latest betas include Apple Music/Spotify integration, Speed control, and brings back the ability to put your videos anywhere (including an external drive!) on Monterey.
    - jdmichal 5y ago
      Wow! Is there anything similar that you know of for Android TV? I would love to have something like this over the stock photo slideshow.
      - cwizou 5y ago
        I only make the mac version, but I've seen this "port" for Android TV. No guarantees from me that it's any good : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuffalo.aerialdream https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff... It's open source too, according to the description, it streams and doesn't cache videos and apparently it handles 4K HDR. If data usage is a concern to you, be aware that some videos are close to 1 GB.
        danudey 5y ago
        I use this one on my TV, and it's great, highly recommend. If bandwidth is a concern, you can also point it towards a local JSON file with whatever URLs you want, so you can mirror the screensavers locally and then stream them from there.
- kergonath 5y ago
  I used to change my screensaver every week or so. These days, I’m really happy with a slightly customised Flurry on macOS, or an clone on Linux.
- rideontime 5y ago
  > Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.
- fubar2018aug 5y ago
  Working on a next-gen operating system for a large tech company in the Pacific NorthWest in the previous century, I was able to reliably bluescreen the OS when stressing the network using an internal network protocol driver. Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver. 1+1 = 2 Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity. Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver. They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard. The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops. A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project. When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted. So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Not just CRTs - I had an LCD around 2006 that I left on a browser window for hours and I had the browser's window & menu bar slightly burned in for a good few months after that.
- donatj 5y ago
  I had this happen a couple times to my iMac. The worst time I went on a week long vacation and my screen never went to sleep. I used to use this program that flashed the screen white and black rapidly and it would clear it up in about an hour. Haven’t seen any trouble in a few years, is this a solved problem now?
  - kergonath 5y ago
    Can’t recall any burn-in with recent LED displays. AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still.
    - Arrath 5y ago
      Sure is. My Galaxy S7 has the keyboard and some of the WhatsApp top bar interface (from texting my wife so much) burned in.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Weren’t these OLED, though?
        Arrath 5y ago
        > "AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still" Indeed they are, I was confirming your recollection that the issue affects OLED screens.
  - yreg 5y ago
    I have a 2017 5K iMac and don't use screensaver. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that the Dock and menu bar is very slightly burned in.
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
Oh, so that's why! Until now, I believed they were used to reduce energy consumption when the screen wasn't used. That's why I believed they were just some gimmicky, useless piece of software. A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?
- fredley 5y ago
  You mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs
  - ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
    Yes, that's the one. I totally forgot that there were other options too. It's sad that such cultural artifacts are more ephemeral than a mesopotamian clay tablet. Humans four thousand years from now may wonder what happened that made us culturally unproductive, unaware that almost everything we made didn't even exist.
    - fredley 5y ago
      The same goes for mesopotamia. We know a bit from the clay tablets, but we don't know anything about the ephemoral memes of the time.
      - moftz 5y ago
        Occasionally we find clay tablets like the one where the guy is bitching about quality of copper ingots he was supposed to buy for his boss. It's kind of a fun look into normal, everyday life that almost never made it past the recycle bin of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
    - galdosdi 5y ago
      This reminds me of recently learning more about ancient Rome. Since most stuff except for some monuments was built with wood, it's all gone now. Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts. I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of) Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us. Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone. Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings? (IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)
chrisseaton 5y ago
> screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long Why didn't we just show a black image?
- fredley 5y ago
  You could, but it was (and is?) cooler to have flying toasters.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    That's not the whole reason, though (at least for the original intent). Turning off CRT monitors means both a cycle added (which is not good for the electromagnets and capacitors) and diminished brightness due to cycling (this is due to the "warming up" needed to ensure that the screen is as bright as it can be, which takes up to around 30 minutes).
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Turning off and showing a black image are not the same thing. Some old CRTs had a low power most where the power was on - thus the parts stayed warm - but no image was displayed. Though too be fair, I think the low power mode wasn't signaled by a black image but instead turning off the sync signals or something like that. (I hope you get the idea that I don't know how it worked here)
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Show a black image, not turn off.
- phicoh 5y ago
  Could be a UI thing. When the screen is black you expect the monitor to be off and press the on-off switch. Same thing with switching monitors off after work. Though same screensavers would run for a while and then switch the monitor to power saving mode, effectively turning it off.
joezydeco 5y ago
Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/ https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/
- fredley 5y ago
  Man I miss the enthusiasm and optimism of the 90's
  - zippergz 5y ago
    I keep trying to figure out if the internet really was more fun back then, or if I was just younger and less jaded. Maybe both?
    - tekproxy 5y ago
      Both. The internet was full of early adopter, tech enthusiast types. You'd certainly pickup on this. Maybe a bit of the magic was your youth, but the tech was new and magical to everyone. Every article I read back then was written by a real person about something they cared about. Now it feels like every search result is just 100 pages of AI generated, generic content used to drive clicks to the site. And what content is actually written by a real person, it's in service to their brand and it's tuned for engagement and sharing on social media. A lot of software back then was open and didn't hide too many of the details. Today, all the technical bits are hidden away and user experiences are carefully controlled and tuned for engagement. Think IRC vs Slack or FB messenger. On irc, you can whois, dcc, technical bits everywhere in the UI. In the 90s, there was a question whether or not you should include ads and banners on your site. Later, it seemed like the ads went away but actually they took over. So much of the internet experience now is about monetization. Even malware is about making money. You gotta jump into the new tech to get that feeling of wonder and possibly.
      - queuebert 5y ago
        Exactly. When it was young, the internet was about communication. Now it is about money and all the tackiness that comes with it.
basseq 5y ago
I can hear the 8-bit flapping sounds in my head, even though I haven't heard them in at least 2 decades.

cesaref 5y ago

On the subject of options, I seem to remember being able to alter how toasted the toast was!

fredley 5y ago
You're totally right! I think you could have flying fish too!

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.

willis936 5y ago
The electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.
- vidanay 5y ago
  Uhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.
  - willis936 5y ago
    When was the last time you looked at one? Was it todsy? I own half a dozen PVMs and two PC monitors and have been looking at CRTs consistently since the 90s.
- citrin_ru 5y ago
  It takes about 5 second for my LCD monitor to wake-up after a sleep, which is a bit annoying. A screen saver disappears in a fraction of a second even on old hardware.
donatj 5y ago
In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class. It was dumb harmless fun.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  I was always fond of this one. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bluescreen https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...
- dylan604 5y ago
  I knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule
- willis936 5y ago
  It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation. What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment? Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.
    - willis936 5y ago
      It's a relatively small lab in a university and part of my job is keeping the computers running. I could wipe, but I want to make as little work for my replacement as possible. Well, maybe a few minutes of extra work to get rid of a screensaver.
    - 5y ago
spywaregorilla 5y ago
The new nintendo switch has an oled screen. Is that likely to be vulnerable to burn in due to game ui staying constant?
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-switch-oled-burn-in-read-this-first/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-s... > We've designed the OLED screen to aim for longevity as much as possible, but OLED displays can experience image retention if subjected to static visuals over a long period of time. However, users can take preventative measures to preserve the screen [by] utilizing features included in the Nintendo Switch systems by default, such as auto-brightness function to prevent the screen from getting too bright, and the auto-sleep function to go into 'auto sleep' mode after short periods of time.
elondaits 5y ago
The Apple TV 4k screensavers (city flyovers filmed in slow motion with a drone) are beautiful and I always end up staring at the screen for a while. https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc
- cwizou 5y ago
  That's a horribly outdated version linked in that video sadly, and that one no longer runs on recent macOS (because it's not notarized). Just in case anyone wants to try it, please grab latest build here instead : https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases Or if you want an installer with auto updates, get it here : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io https://aerialscreensaver.github.io Latest betas include Apple Music/Spotify integration, Speed control, and brings back the ability to put your videos anywhere (including an external drive!) on Monterey.
  - jdmichal 5y ago
    Wow! Is there anything similar that you know of for Android TV? I would love to have something like this over the stock photo slideshow.
    - cwizou 5y ago
      I only make the mac version, but I've seen this "port" for Android TV. No guarantees from me that it's any good : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuffalo.aerialdream https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff... It's open source too, according to the description, it streams and doesn't cache videos and apparently it handles 4K HDR. If data usage is a concern to you, be aware that some videos are close to 1 GB.
      - danudey 5y ago
        I use this one on my TV, and it's great, highly recommend. If bandwidth is a concern, you can also point it towards a local JSON file with whatever URLs you want, so you can mirror the screensavers locally and then stream them from there.
kergonath 5y ago
I used to change my screensaver every week or so. These days, I’m really happy with a slightly customised Flurry on macOS, or an clone on Linux.
rideontime 5y ago
> Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.
fubar2018aug 5y ago
Working on a next-gen operating system for a large tech company in the Pacific NorthWest in the previous century, I was able to reliably bluescreen the OS when stressing the network using an internal network protocol driver. Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver. 1+1 = 2 Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity. Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver. They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard. The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops. A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project. When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted. So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.

Nextgrid 5y ago

Not just CRTs - I had an LCD around 2006 that I left on a browser window for hours and I had the browser's window & menu bar slightly burned in for a good few months after that.

donatj 5y ago
I had this happen a couple times to my iMac. The worst time I went on a week long vacation and my screen never went to sleep. I used to use this program that flashed the screen white and black rapidly and it would clear it up in about an hour. Haven’t seen any trouble in a few years, is this a solved problem now?
- kergonath 5y ago
  Can’t recall any burn-in with recent LED displays. AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Sure is. My Galaxy S7 has the keyboard and some of the WhatsApp top bar interface (from texting my wife so much) burned in.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Weren’t these OLED, though?
      - Arrath 5y ago
        > "AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still" Indeed they are, I was confirming your recollection that the issue affects OLED screens.
- yreg 5y ago
  I have a 2017 5K iMac and don't use screensaver. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that the Dock and menu bar is very slightly burned in.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

Oh, so that's why! Until now, I believed they were used to reduce energy consumption when the screen wasn't used. That's why I believed they were just some gimmicky, useless piece of software. A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?

fredley 5y ago
You mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs
- ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
  Yes, that's the one. I totally forgot that there were other options too. It's sad that such cultural artifacts are more ephemeral than a mesopotamian clay tablet. Humans four thousand years from now may wonder what happened that made us culturally unproductive, unaware that almost everything we made didn't even exist.
  - fredley 5y ago
    The same goes for mesopotamia. We know a bit from the clay tablets, but we don't know anything about the ephemoral memes of the time.
    - moftz 5y ago
      Occasionally we find clay tablets like the one where the guy is bitching about quality of copper ingots he was supposed to buy for his boss. It's kind of a fun look into normal, everyday life that almost never made it past the recycle bin of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
  - galdosdi 5y ago
    This reminds me of recently learning more about ancient Rome. Since most stuff except for some monuments was built with wood, it's all gone now. Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts. I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of) Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us. Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone. Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings? (IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)

chrisseaton 5y ago

> screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long Why didn't we just show a black image?

fredley 5y ago
You could, but it was (and is?) cooler to have flying toasters.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  That's not the whole reason, though (at least for the original intent). Turning off CRT monitors means both a cycle added (which is not good for the electromagnets and capacitors) and diminished brightness due to cycling (this is due to the "warming up" needed to ensure that the screen is as bright as it can be, which takes up to around 30 minutes).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Turning off and showing a black image are not the same thing. Some old CRTs had a low power most where the power was on - thus the parts stayed warm - but no image was displayed. Though too be fair, I think the low power mode wasn't signaled by a black image but instead turning off the sync signals or something like that. (I hope you get the idea that I don't know how it worked here)
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Show a black image, not turn off.
phicoh 5y ago
Could be a UI thing. When the screen is black you expect the monitor to be off and press the on-off switch. Same thing with switching monitors off after work. Though same screensavers would run for a while and then switch the monitor to power saving mode, effectively turning it off.

joezydeco 5y ago

Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/ https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

fredley 5y ago
Man I miss the enthusiasm and optimism of the 90's
- zippergz 5y ago
  I keep trying to figure out if the internet really was more fun back then, or if I was just younger and less jaded. Maybe both?
  - tekproxy 5y ago
    Both. The internet was full of early adopter, tech enthusiast types. You'd certainly pickup on this. Maybe a bit of the magic was your youth, but the tech was new and magical to everyone. Every article I read back then was written by a real person about something they cared about. Now it feels like every search result is just 100 pages of AI generated, generic content used to drive clicks to the site. And what content is actually written by a real person, it's in service to their brand and it's tuned for engagement and sharing on social media. A lot of software back then was open and didn't hide too many of the details. Today, all the technical bits are hidden away and user experiences are carefully controlled and tuned for engagement. Think IRC vs Slack or FB messenger. On irc, you can whois, dcc, technical bits everywhere in the UI. In the 90s, there was a question whether or not you should include ads and banners on your site. Later, it seemed like the ads went away but actually they took over. So much of the internet experience now is about monetization. Even malware is about making money. You gotta jump into the new tech to get that feeling of wonder and possibly.
    - queuebert 5y ago
      Exactly. When it was young, the internet was about communication. Now it is about money and all the tackiness that comes with it.

basseq 5y ago

I can hear the 8-bit flapping sounds in my head, even though I haven't heard them in at least 2 decades.