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The internet used to be fun
- Tommy430 3y agoThe internet can still be fun but I see what the author means. At most I just use a few modern social media sites, some with frontends (Nitter, YT2009) and visit a few obscure sites.
- cranberryturkey 3y agoadd this to zapwebring.com
- spirit557 3y agoI like looking at any site with a background that is not plain white.
- causi 3y agoI miss when my bookmarks folder had a hundred entries in it instead of not needing bookmarks because there are only five websites. One out of a dozen people is capable of producing something interesting on a consistent basis, yet we've become convinced that each of us is somehow deficient if we aren't capable of convincing a mass of strangers to engage with our thoughts and opinions. The dung beetle internet is just a bunch of people pushing bullshit around a table as if them touching the bullshit makes it more interesting for the next person who touches the bullshit.
- rchaud 3y agoOur bookmarks are now the list of open tabs in our browsers. I have over 100 tabs open on my phone. They are saved in storage somewhere, so even if I reboot my phone, the tabs will be there when I pull up the app again. They're actually better than bookmarks IMO because they save a snapshot of the page, which helps jog the memory better than the Favicon that browser bookmarks usually save.
- johnny99k 3y agoEverything is fun in the beginning. Then it gets commercialized and regulated and it's no longer fun.
- brvsft 3y agoNot trying to detract from your point, but the internet is still surprisingly unregulated, although I think we're at the early stages of seeing that change.
- rchaud 3y agoThe Internet is heavily regulated, just by web hosts and payment processors instead of government.
- Ezhik 3y agoA while back I heard an interesting observation: coffee shop conversations in the Bay Area went from being about cool tech to being about money. I can't help but feel that this is a deeper change beyond just me facing the usual disillusionment of growing up.
- rchaud 3y agoCool tech doesn't fill VC stockings at Christmas. Making B2B SaaS crap however....
- reustle 3y agoTech started with a bunch of nerds. Those nerds made loads of money, which attracted the non-nerds. The non-nerds were better at marketing themselves and talking their way up the ladder. Now tech is mostly non-nerds.
- mcpar-land 3y agoRegulation is what keeps things fun after commercialization kicks in. You aren't currently being gouged for the price of your internet by the Bell monopoly thanks to antitrust regulation enforced in the eighties!
- mberger 3y agoThat's because it used to be young
- thfuran 3y agoSo did we.
- dinkleberg 3y agoNostalgia is one hell of a drug.
- sph 3y agoWhile rose-tinted glasses are a common bias, it is likewise a simplistic fallacy to assume that things only improve with time. The Internet WAS more fun.
- strict9 3y agoThe internet is still fun. I was on bulletin board systems pre-internet as a kid and spent too much time on the web in the late 90s. I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better. Though I don't like social media much anymore and worry about the effect of screens on kids, I still love the internet and value what it makes possible. I don't buy into these arguments of things used to be better. It's the same argument that older generations used with younger generations for music, cars, or clothes. The list goes on. It's subjective. Technology enables new possibilities. Everything grows or dies and life moves on. It's not that the internet used to be fun. It's that the internet changed and people tend to stay the same and not want things to change around them.
- doublerabbit 3y ago> flash to something better Please enlighten me on something better. Nothing has enabled me to create in the same way of creativity and fun than Flash did; for me at least. It was so practical that my mother made her first website in Flash.
- strict9 3y agoFlash was a nice tool for creators and it enabled some interesting ways to present information. Flash gaming was a very interesting niche. But on the whole I think it made the web worse. Lots of sites had microscopic text that you couldn't enlarge, no bookmarking pages or maintaining state, no right click, never ending security holes, invisible to search, inaccessible to those with vision or hearing assistants. The list goes on and on.
- doublerabbit 3y agoI'm not saying Flash was the key to website design or the web as a whole but it was definitely a key to animation, visual creativity and the likes. As FruitLoops Studio is for Audio. If you want to do the same you have to now know JavaScript, some library and some UI frontend. Flash enabled you to add interactive to other than just a straight up black text on a white page. You can't even copy text now on some SPA sites nor head back in browser history without being hijacked to their home page. What we got isn't it either.
- xnx 3y agoTikTok is where I find fun on the current internet. It's hilarious (Taylor Swift private jet memes), weird (grimace shake), surprising, emotionally moving (hopecore), educational (how to adjust a door closer), and always exposing me to things I've never seen (starting process for a diesel locomotive). It contains ads, but they're pretty easy to identify and very easy to skip.
- pachouli-please 3y agoconsuuuume
- notso411 3y ago[dead]
- infinityobject 3y agoLike it or not, its interaction model lends to readily democratized production more than anything — making memorable artifacts out of interactions that would be as low in effort as the above comment.
- rconti 3y agoI am allergic to video content. I don't use the tiktok app or website, and I only ever watch a facebook or instagram reel if someone sends it to me, I never click through the UI to get to them. There's something so infuriating about not knowing how long you're going to be held hostage for, whether it will be worth it, whether the volume will be on or off... I just hate it.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoThis is a tragic comment because 1) TikTok never holds you hostage, you can flip through all videos (including ads) instantly. 2) TikTok content is an order of magnitude better than what makes its way to reels. 3) TikTok's algorithm customizes itself to your interests based on what you watch so effortlessly and quickly.
- cba85 3y agoNice! Would be nice if you could add a RSS feed
- fullshark 3y agoYou used to be young
- doublerabbit 3y agoThe internet isn't fun. - If not all, most sites now force you to inhumanly deselect all cookies and "legit" consents that without would be making cash off your data. - Most blogs have a ever so annoying scroll model of "Subscribe to my blog, enter your email" or prompts of: "Login with your gmail/apple mail". (medium) The same goes for "Do you wish to visit this in said mobile $app?" restricting any UI interaction until you click a tiny "no" button. (Reddit) - Web Pages now hijack the back button to the home page. - Loading times are abysmal, over 2mb to load what? From when, where you could hop over the small rainbow coloured fence and enter a whole new lush garden, full of organic nature and green with a forest leading you to the backtracks... Your now encaged and faced with a dull grey corporatised agendaed wall. Locked in to an garden with over-beaten grass; divided and with less equality unless you're willing to sacrifice everything. Where's the interoperability? Discord isn't fun. Servers die quickly, subscription models, forced UI changes. Nothing fun with Facebook, Twitter and what they push. Removal of dedicated server's from online games takes away individually. You rarely are able to play with others on other consoles. And then your at the mercy that $corp doesn't cripple the game; let alone plying without internet. You had clients. ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! BBSes, forums... and now your kept to being a slave of what, two? WhatsApp, Discord? Sure, outside, the niches of Telegram, matrix, slack et cetera all exist but the general populist don't follow those. VR isn't it either. It has -it- but I can't wait 15 minutes for a VR room to load because I'm stuck on 2mb broadband. Anything else interactive is gate kept and freedom is kept non-existent as that if you try, your thrown against an electric fence of Terms & Conditions threatening electrocution if you do.
- InCityDreams 3y ago8-10 regular sites, then mindless scrolling. Hundreds of bookmarks I'll never re-visit. I do miss forums.
- readingnews 3y ago>> Hundreds of bookmarks I'll never re-visit. It is like the books on our shelves and the proverbial pictures in our parents shoeboxes. I recall when I was very very young, my parents would break out the shoeboxes at holiday gatherings (usually Christmas and Thanksgiving) and rummage through the pictures with family members. Other than those times, they were just boxes in the back of a closet. Perhaps we should do that with our bookmarks... break them out once a year and see if there are any ones left keeping, and ones that just need to go to the back of the closet.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoThe Internet is still fun! It's actually way more fun than I remember it being as a kid now.
- JohnFen 3y agoSerious and honest question: what do you find fun about it?
- sydbarrett74 3y agoInternet fun is proportional to the degree of its decentralisation.
- rchaud 3y agoGeocities and Angelfire beg to differ.
- sydbarrett74 3y agoI question the aesthetic sensibilities of many content creators on those platforms, but the site content itself was sometimes whimsical and entertaining.
- rchaud 3y agoI think both sites required you to write actual HTML, with no WYSIWIG. I salute the efforts of the regular people who tried.
- dinkleberg 3y agoI can't help but observe that the majority of these sites linked are very ordinary looking sites. I don't see an abundance of "fun". In my opinion, if you don't think people are still out there having fun on the internet, you're looking in the wrong places.
- JohnFen 3y ago> you're looking in the wrong places. Could very well be, but I find it very difficult to locate the right places, then.
- MrVandemar 3y ago> ordinary looking sites That's an aesthetic judgement. A site doesn't have to "look" fun to be fun. It just has to present the content that the author, or audience, find engaging. An all-singing all-dancing website may well not be any kind of fun at all; a brutalist HTML 3.2 page might actually have something interesting written on it.
- Tommy430 3y ago> That's an aesthetic judgement. A site doesn't have to "look" fun to be fun. It just has to present the content that the author, or audience, find engaging. This right here. This here is why I visit this site, a bunch of other old sites, and use frontends for some modern social media sites. The recent trend of redesigning almost everything is insane. "Modern redesigns" that uses widescreen screens less efficiently than the old design used a 1024x768 display. No I don't care if it "looks old", if it functions good for me then I'll use it.
- auditor_3d 3y agoThe internet is being ruined in the same way most Art Deco, and Arts and Crafts architecture is being ruined in the US. Turned into cookie cutter, boxes with windows with absolutely no personality at all. Take a look at any shopping mall still alive today, and find pictures of it when it was first opened for example. From beautiful waterfalls and fountains with foliage, to dime store prints and pastel color patterns. The internet is the same now.
- nc0 3y agoIs it the Internet that has become unfunny, or just you that has become older? Think about it twice :)
- octopusRex 3y agoOld internet for me was pre AOL. Pre web browsers with graphics. Lynx browser. FTP, Archie, Veronica... Great Newsgroups. Commercial enterprises were hounded if they dared try to sell a product. Remember when the law firm's fax machine was crippled ( fax DDS attack?) in retaliation? If you wanted to see the Olympics up close, you posted what sports you were interested in and folks would take pics for you and upload them onto an FTP server. You only used the server during off hours out of politeness. Simtel is where you found your dos programs. You downloaded Linux one disk at a time. When AOL opened it up to its users, they destroyed many of the cozier aspects. But the porn definitely exploded. Life is change.
- sph 3y agoI have only one anecdote to compare the Internet of yesteryear with today. In 1998 when I was 14, on my ISP portal there was a link called "CHAT", with a list of channel and topics. In a channel targeted to teenagers, it was full of teenagers. No bots, no FBI, no creepy adults. Kids my age from all over the country talking and having fun, in a public space. I know because over the years I have met and even had my first real-life relationship with people met in there. I do not believe for a single second anyone that says today's Internet is more fun, safe, approachable, original than today.
- pram 3y agoIt gets a ton of shit here, but Discord reminds me of “the good ol’ days” when I was a teen on IRC and AIM. I think a lot of the problem today is there’s no continuity in community or conversations by design, so a lot of sites feel extremely transactional. For example: you might read a YouTube comment that makes you laugh, but you’ll likely never read anything else from that person as long as you live. On forums you had people putting absurd effort into their “posting persona” and these people would be around for years and decades. They weren’t motivated by likes or retweets. They weren’t trying to get you to listen to their podcast or subscribe to their Patreon. They were just humans having a conversation.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoIt still is. But it used to be, too.
- zem 3y agoah, another delightful throwback to the old, fun internet - a page that is nothing more than a collection of facts or links on a hyperspecific topic :)