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I think your post feels overly cynical. It doesn't seem to really address any of the points in the article, and it doesn't really give any examples to support y

by 1dom 2y ago

I think your post feels overly cynical. It doesn't seem to really address any of the points in the article, and it doesn't really give any examples to support your argument against it. > A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption. Isn't this the point the original article is trying to make? All the good old simple stuff is still there (neocities) but now it's relatively undiscoverable to the average internet user, because big money interests exploit fundamental weaknesses in human nature for attention. > Be selective in your consumption. I feel like you're not really considering the nature of addiction. I agree with you these posts are getting a bit tiresome too. But I'd much rather they get more tiresome, and maybe lead to change vs letting the problems they're highlighting get worse. I was there in the 90's too, let's not pull up the ladder behind us.

mattlondon 2y ago
The old stuff was largely undiscoverable back then too. Perhaps someone sent you a link, or perhaps you clicked on a link from some other site or Usenet, and if you were lucky it was not a broken link. It's not like you'd just open your browser and be inundated with this cornucopia of wonderful, thoughtful , high-quality content (let's face it a lot of stuff online then was crap). You had to find it, often by chance. I don't think things have changed that much, only today there are a lot of alternatives that give a quick hit when in the old days you'd probably give up instead. The vast majority of geocities were essentially empty sites. The ones that were interesting and with decent content were not from the same sort of people shit-posting on twitter today. It takes time and effort and dedication to curate something and put something useful and interesting together - people who are in that category will still be doing that even with or without tiktok (and indeed if someone wants to host their collection of cat pictures on tiktok and not geocities then why not?). The content is still there, but the internet is a whole lot better today - there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today. Nobody missed out on anything apart from a whole load of GIFs.
- 1dom 2y ago
  I'll concede the ratio of crap:good might not have changed, but I feel the point being made is the nature of the crap has changed to be louder. Also, the time spent across the web has changed as do-it-all companies like Google or Amazon came along: why go find 5 different perfect services, when Google has an alright implementation of them? Sure, you can say "well just discipline yourself to go look at it", but like I said, that's not how human nature/addiction work. And even if I as an individual am some sort of dopamine-free superhuman immune to manipulation (I'm not) the average human isn't, so this means the average conversation about the web is more focused on fewer centralised services, as that's what people spend more of their time on. All of this makes it a lot harder to "just go and browse some personal websites" compared to the early internet. I agree with you that there are many services on the web that weren't around before, and lots of things we could do now that we couldn't before. But that's not the point of the post, the point is specifically saying they preferred the compromise of personal, slightly rustier, less featureful web, compared to the modern, sterile, polished, depersonalised web. > there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today. That's your opinion, and the upvotes and frequency of these posts suggests it's an unpopular (although still valid!) opinion. It's clearly not a fact though. You know there are also an increasing amount of people who had smartphones who now have dumb phones? It's not unheard of for people to want to step back in preference of simplicity.

by 1dom 2y ago

mattlondon 2y ago

The old stuff was largely undiscoverable back then too. Perhaps someone sent you a link, or perhaps you clicked on a link from some other site or Usenet, and if you were lucky it was not a broken link. It's not like you'd just open your browser and be inundated with this cornucopia of wonderful, thoughtful , high-quality content (let's face it a lot of stuff online then was crap). You had to find it, often by chance. I don't think things have changed that much, only today there are a lot of alternatives that give a quick hit when in the old days you'd probably give up instead. The vast majority of geocities were essentially empty sites. The ones that were interesting and with decent content were not from the same sort of people shit-posting on twitter today. It takes time and effort and dedication to curate something and put something useful and interesting together - people who are in that category will still be doing that even with or without tiktok (and indeed if someone wants to host their collection of cat pictures on tiktok and not geocities then why not?). The content is still there, but the internet is a whole lot better today - there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today. Nobody missed out on anything apart from a whole load of GIFs.

1dom 2y ago
I'll concede the ratio of crap:good might not have changed, but I feel the point being made is the nature of the crap has changed to be louder. Also, the time spent across the web has changed as do-it-all companies like Google or Amazon came along: why go find 5 different perfect services, when Google has an alright implementation of them? Sure, you can say "well just discipline yourself to go look at it", but like I said, that's not how human nature/addiction work. And even if I as an individual am some sort of dopamine-free superhuman immune to manipulation (I'm not) the average human isn't, so this means the average conversation about the web is more focused on fewer centralised services, as that's what people spend more of their time on. All of this makes it a lot harder to "just go and browse some personal websites" compared to the early internet. I agree with you that there are many services on the web that weren't around before, and lots of things we could do now that we couldn't before. But that's not the point of the post, the point is specifically saying they preferred the compromise of personal, slightly rustier, less featureful web, compared to the modern, sterile, polished, depersonalised web. > there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today. That's your opinion, and the upvotes and frequency of these posts suggests it's an unpopular (although still valid!) opinion. It's clearly not a fact though. You know there are also an increasing amount of people who had smartphones who now have dumb phones? It's not unheard of for people to want to step back in preference of simplicity.