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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

#111

Post by windexh8er »

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.

Yeah, I definitely remember Jennicam now that you bring it up. There were a lot of people vying for cam attention back then, I think it's basically the inception of the influencers we see today. Then again I don't know that anyone thought it was really something of a way to make a living. Maybe a very small few, but if any of those early day cammers/streamers had tried to get a discount at a restaurant for a positive review that would have been met with confusion for sure. I guess when one calls themselves an "influencer" they know what they're after.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#113

Post by reaperducer »

myself248 wrote: post #96
randallsquared wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 get…

what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000.

I guess you never lived in a place with public access cable. This has been going on for 50 years. It's not new at all.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#114

Post by baron3dl »

Aurornis wrote: post #105
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 think everything changed when Eternal September happened. The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation: The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later. That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline bec…

like the old slashdot min(uid) flex

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#115

Post by smackeyacky »

Delphiza wrote: post #69
smackeyacky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid. Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.

Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.

I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was.

Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#116

Post by reaperducer »

Delphiza wrote: post #20
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 had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along.

I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures.

Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty.

Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#117

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #105
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 think everything changed when Eternal September happened. The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation: The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later. That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline bec…

[deleted]

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#118

Post by ileonichwiesz »

jdw64 wrote: post #84

The internet has changed because attempts to bring commercial interests into it have been too successful. In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hat…

> For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same.

I’d argue the opposite. On the old internet we all used nicknames, and everyone knew not to share their personal info. These days nearly everyone posts stuff on social media using their real name and a photo of their face.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#119

Post by HappMacDonald »

myself248 wrote: post #96
randallsquared wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 get…

If only someone would just bump up the size of the address space, so that there would be enough to go around again.

I mean, it's kinda like Y2K, isn't it? We're stuck with this old addressing scheme that chose 32 bits per address back when that was a lot for any computer to comfortably handle. But today if we used up twice.. no, even four times as many bits no PC would bat an eyelash and the increase in address space would be truly exponential.

It's just a shame that so much built infrastructure expects the current addressing system that it would probably take a life time to phase out. Plus that if anyone tried to rebuild it from scratch they would probably forget to make it backwards compatible, and also change so many things about it that it becomes a nightmare for anyone to try to implement. It's like trying to pass a new law and it gets infected by death-by-a-thousand-riders as a prerequisite to passing. :'(

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#120

Post by baron3dl »

jameshart wrote: post #56
EliRivers wrote: post #25

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…

There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.

i wonder if there's a niche market for an oled screen with a 100lbs glass surface for the hipsters out there. all the weight without that pesky electron cannon.
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