Things we don't have to worry about anymore: 10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers... Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere! Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves…
> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere! This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)
Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'
In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.
Most of the old internet could be restored with the right search engine and browser. Index all of the invasive BS to page 100 or the results, and put the interesting/relevant things up front. People might pay for it. You could do some of it with an extension.
Things we don't have to worry about anymore: 10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers... Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere! Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves…
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.
Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.
Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.
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 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.
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 faceboo…
I have PTCD. Post traumatic cookie disorder. Seriously. If I see one more of those I am going to throw my PC out the window
Apparently you can hide these with a ublock (origin) filter but I haven't found it and I know people have made separate extensions for this
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11. > You open your default browser - most likely Chrome. > …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary… > Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options: > Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents. Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even ma…
This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue
The average joe is a fundamental reason the internet he grew up with no longer exists. It’s not black and white, but away from average joe communities, there’s something almost like the old internet.
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…
You think a teacher gets fed up of having to teach the same units of education every year?
"How can I read a file and split the line obtaining a pipe symbol and send it via a socket server" but the angst of "WHY DO DO YOU WANT TO DO THAT", "You shouldn't do that in X-Lang" ... well maybe because I wish to execute commands on the socket server when based on the value of the pipe.
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…
When the "mobile first" design pattern really took off is when the Internet was handed to the masses IMO. That's when it became accessible to everyone's mom and grandparents through their phone and that really changed things from a user base perspective. At the same time, all the mobile apps started getting published and the internet, to most people, became answering the question "which app do i tap on?". Honestly, it's pretty much that way for me. The Internet, outside of work, consists of this website, my youtube app, my wikipedia app, spotify app, and maybe google news app.
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new
*.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
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…