I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
sffworld.com
I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
1–10 of 435 posts
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#2Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author:
* https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/
* https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
* https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...
Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.
Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#3I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#4In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021.
I wonder what they will miss.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#5"I miss old ATX."
"I miss old [X]."
There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#6Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of expressing what was not possible with the old means. After adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again.
I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?
Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.
EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.
Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).
Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#7In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
Memes, Discord, the “old” Twitter, and either having ad supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#8In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
Less-invasive advertisements.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#9Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.
Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
#10> All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion.
Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.
What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.
Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.