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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

#121

Post by AlexandrB »

sanderjd wrote: post #67
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#122

Post by dn3500 »

jameshart wrote: post #59
dn3500 wrote: post #26

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 o…

The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?

You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#123

Post by HappMacDonald »

reaperducer wrote: post #116
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accountabilit…

I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#124

Post by tristor »

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 also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.

I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.

By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#125

Post by basisword »

I think the biggest 'change' was when 'online' went from an activity you sat down in a specific spot in your house to enjoy for a couple of hours to something we have on our person 24/7 (sometimes via multiple devices). Less constant communication via SMS, Call, online messenger (on desktop) was very different from what we have now.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#126

Post by fluoridation »

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.

>It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free.

Oh, you mean hosting as in, from your home. I wouldn't say hosting from a provider is significantly harder than at home. It might be philosophically more attractive. Serving the data (whether from rented or own hardware) is probably the least of the technical hurdles, especially compared to actually designing the site.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#127

Post by brodouevencode »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #22

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?

> I used 2012 as an example because that's when I was in my first year of high school

I don't think this person has the experience required to make a qualifiable judgement on what the internet was.

There is a large block of (Internet) time missing from this analysis.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#129

Post by StilesCrisis »

eska wrote: post #95
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)

The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS)

Source: was there

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#130

Post by jdw64 »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #118
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.

Reading your comment, I realize that the local context was something I had been missing, and your point makes a lot of sense. I think I should revise it like this

"The online self used to be an identity that was managed within small, persistent communities. Now, that self is easily discarded and reformed."

Thanks for the insight

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