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A retrospective of my time on the internet

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Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#71

Post by fluoridation »

benfortuna wrote: post #60
lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#73

Post by icedchai »

lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#74

Post by alaudet »

The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.

You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#77

Post by BLKNSLVR »

noja wrote: post #42
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #18

On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase. https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.

> with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole This is your regular reminder that many websites you are visiting are proxying your data to facebook for them. There is no host to block here. Check out the Facebook Conversions API Gateway.

Does uBlock Origin block this by default?

If not, what are the counter-measures?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#78

Post by playorizaya »

Mostly agree with the timeline.

I would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.

(Anyone remember Klout?)

By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.

At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.

I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.

Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.

Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#79

Post by rootsudo »

lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.

Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.

I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.

"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'

All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.

2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#80

Post by microtonal »

sanderjd wrote: post #63
lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a spec…

Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.

But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.

Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.

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