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A retrospective of my time on the internet

cleberg.net

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Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#21

Post by Habgdnv »

Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating.

The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#22

Post by MarkusWandel »

To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.

Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#23

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

timcobb wrote: post #5

Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.

That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#24

Post by gspr »

hypfer wrote: post #12

It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it. And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness. It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always. I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the…

> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.

I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#25

Post by EliRivers »

Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:

We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.

It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?

I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#26

Post by dn3500 »

I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#28

Post by pluc »

I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.

The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.

Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.

Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#29

Post by c16 »

I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.

Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#30

Post by api »

> 2012: When Everything Started Changing

I have independently dated it to that same year.

Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.

The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.

This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.

Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."

I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.

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