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I remember "going on the Internet" (with a capital "I" back then) as an activity. It felt like walking through a forest with its vast ecosystem; a colored, rich

by aib 5y ago

I remember "going on the Internet" (with a capital "I" back then) as an activity. It felt like walking through a forest with its vast ecosystem; a colored, rich variety of life, an intriguing mixture of things both alien and familiar, tiny niches all around and a delightful surprise never too far away. Nowadays browsing the web feels more like a walk in the concrete jungle; bland, bleak and teams of people paid to promptly rectify anything improper

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
You can still find lots of intriguing people and interesting stuff, you just have to look harder for it in the current landscape. And to be honest, as a person in the 20s sometimes seeing what the “old web” actually was through survived sites and archives… I really wonder if you guys were actually that better than the Internet today, I think a lot of positive thinking about the past is just nostalgia. I saw people were always fighting for Internet clout since the beginning, and all kinds of bland stupidity and toxicity happened through IRC, forums, and blogs. (And yes, the web was always plastered by awful ads since its inception.)
- datavirtue 5y ago
  It is not nostalgia. There is a definite odor now emanating from big tech. The stink is on everything.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    There was also a LOT of awful stink in the dot-com boom era. Right now the stink is more prominent because the bubble isn't bursting as fast as expected (or, the power of a few investors became too strong because of increasing financial inequality and rampant money printing, and they are all backing on all these shitty tech stuff that doesn't even improve anything, and nobody can do anything about it. Techno-feudalism, ho!)
- mc32 5y ago
  Two things are different now: 1. commercialization. Most properties that people engage in are monetized and thus algorithmically manipulated. 2. things were smaller. communities were smaller and had little spill-over into other areas. What someone said on some forum wouldn't get picked up by media[1] to amplify whatever it was. [1] with the exception of "leaks" new CPU, VGA, Apple device, etc.
  - cyber_kinetist 5y ago
    1) The Internet was quite monetized with ads from almost its inception, and things like targeted advertising, ROI tracking, and sponsored searches were already rampant in the 90s, though it expanded even more in the 21st century. 2) You can still find lots of smaller communities and websites (that don't get reported to the mainstream) today, probably even more than before. An incredible number of blogs, forums, niche subreddits, Twitter groups, fandom communities, Discord servers, you name it.
    - mc32 5y ago
      There were ads but content wasn’t manipulated algorithmically for engagement and “eyeballs” as mr Grove put it or outrage as we see today. Moreover the monetization was by the website so the content creator wasn’t optimizing for engagement themselves. With most services having some kind of API “journalists” set triggers or scour for particular things so they can write about something scandalous two people said on some service somewhere so they can present it as zeitgeist.

by aib 5y ago

cyber_kinetist 5y ago

You can still find lots of intriguing people and interesting stuff, you just have to look harder for it in the current landscape. And to be honest, as a person in the 20s sometimes seeing what the “old web” actually was through survived sites and archives… I really wonder if you guys were actually that better than the Internet today, I think a lot of positive thinking about the past is just nostalgia. I saw people were always fighting for Internet clout since the beginning, and all kinds of bland stupidity and toxicity happened through IRC, forums, and blogs. (And yes, the web was always plastered by awful ads since its inception.)

datavirtue 5y ago
It is not nostalgia. There is a definite odor now emanating from big tech. The stink is on everything.
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  There was also a LOT of awful stink in the dot-com boom era. Right now the stink is more prominent because the bubble isn't bursting as fast as expected (or, the power of a few investors became too strong because of increasing financial inequality and rampant money printing, and they are all backing on all these shitty tech stuff that doesn't even improve anything, and nobody can do anything about it. Techno-feudalism, ho!)
mc32 5y ago
Two things are different now: 1. commercialization. Most properties that people engage in are monetized and thus algorithmically manipulated. 2. things were smaller. communities were smaller and had little spill-over into other areas. What someone said on some forum wouldn't get picked up by media[1] to amplify whatever it was. [1] with the exception of "leaks" new CPU, VGA, Apple device, etc.
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  1) The Internet was quite monetized with ads from almost its inception, and things like targeted advertising, ROI tracking, and sponsored searches were already rampant in the 90s, though it expanded even more in the 21st century. 2) You can still find lots of smaller communities and websites (that don't get reported to the mainstream) today, probably even more than before. An incredible number of blogs, forums, niche subreddits, Twitter groups, fandom communities, Discord servers, you name it.
  - mc32 5y ago
    There were ads but content wasn’t manipulated algorithmically for engagement and “eyeballs” as mr Grove put it or outrage as we see today. Moreover the monetization was by the website so the content creator wasn’t optimizing for engagement themselves. With most services having some kind of API “journalists” set triggers or scour for particular things so they can write about something scandalous two people said on some service somewhere so they can present it as zeitgeist.