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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

#91

Post by amelius »

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…

If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#92

Post by fluoridation »

iamnothere wrote: post #34
intended wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This framing sets up variables incorrectly. People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day. People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier. There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.

“People” != Internet people. “People” at large were not part of the early Internet. They came much later and turned it into a shopping mall/surveillance hub. I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses. We did just fine.

>I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses.

Really? I would consider myself an "Internet person" in the sense you're saying. I spend most of my time, if not on old-school forums, certainly on discussion forums like this one and imageboards. I don't find that the existence of those other platforms affects me much, besides allowing me to use them when I'm the mood to do so, and if they went away I would neither mourn it nor cheer it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#93

Post by sire-vc »

freehorse wrote: post #83
sire-vc wrote: post #37

This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.

> The world changed for a reason. Sure, but the actual reasons matter. A big part of it changed due to making the internet primarily a place for circulating ads, and that's a change many may not like.

I don't like ads either, but there are ad-free corners of the internet. If you don't like Facebook then don't use it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#94

Post by lordloki »

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…

It was the smartphone that completely ruined the internet. Once everyone was connected 24/7 it became the ultimate eternal September.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#95

Post by eska »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #66

This bit feels naive, in 2007: > While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity. 2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.

For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#96

Post by myself248 »

randallsquared wrote: post #54
windexh8er wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early. Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game. I a…

> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.

Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000.

What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#97

Post by mghackerlady »

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 feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#98

Post by watwut »

sire-vc wrote: post #37

This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.

The world can change both toward better and toward worst. The countries go from peaceful to war obsessed, from autocracy to genocide and from peaceful democratic to pogroms. Women or minorities can gain rights and loose rights.

The algorithmic propagation of toxicity is changing it towards worst. And internet is actively used to incite some of the things I listed above. And major companies actively facilitated those changes towards the worst. And by actively I mean "we now know they were actively helping the bad stuff to happen".

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#99

Post by TrackerFF »

My recollection, growing up and living mostly in Scandinavia

90s - mid 2000s:

- Pre social media days, you visited home pages. - Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you. - Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.

mid 2000s - early 2010s:

- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes. - Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all. - Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus. - Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.

Early 2010s - late 2010s:

- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms. - Personal websites die off. - Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc. - Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services. - The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed. - Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.

Late 2010s - now:

- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players. - It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present. - Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it. - You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan. - Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.

Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.

Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#100

Post by fluoridation »

doublerabbit wrote: post #89
dlkasajiewo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.

Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding. The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the…

That's rose-tinted glasses. You're not describing a trend of the Internet, but of individual insular communities. It happens in every community that eventually people get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. I was part of a C++ forum for a long time, and I lost count how times I answered that both template definitions and declarations must be visible at the point of usage, and then of mentioning that I'd answered that exact thing many times already.

PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.

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