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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

#161

Post by fluoridation »

doublerabbit wrote: post #147
fluoridation wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [lindex [split $variable "|" 1]

A teacher gets paid to do their job.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#162

Post by anthk »

bluedino wrote: post #87

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…

Win 98 was 32 bit but half-an OS, NT and GNU/Linux were far better.

- Terrible streaming.

WMA files too.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#163

Post by chasd00 »

felix-the-cat wrote: post #36

I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.

when they went bust all their fancy furniture showed up on ebay and second hand stores. I know an attorney that bought Herman Miller Aerons by the dozens. It was like the startup chair in those days haha.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#164

Post by anthk »

zackkitzmiller wrote: post #58
Sophira wrote: post #35

> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95. In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive. It ran pretty well from what I recall.

Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.

In the XP erea, potentially they were.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#165

Post by chasd00 »

randusername wrote: post #134

There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III > We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physica…

> That's how I feel about the internet.

are you talking about the internet or are you talking about yourself though?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#166

Post by doublerabbit »

fluoridation wrote: post #161
doublerabbit wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [lindex [split $variable "|" 1]

A teacher gets paid to do their job.

Bad analogy on my part, but my point still stands. That was the experience I encountered on the early net. Now everyone can use ChatGPT and SO is a coma slowly being leeched to death so you know you no longer have to worry about being asked or tested on your skills.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#167

Post by chasd00 »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #6

The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.

> low brow entertainment

it used to be much worse in this department. Many mainstream or at least popular websites in the early 2000s would be non-starters today.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#168

Post by thegrim33 »

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 was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012

Facebook didn't even exist 10 years before 2012 ..

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#169

Post by dmonitor »

dom96 wrote: post #135
AlexandrB wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected. It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.

Yeah, whatever pretenses gamergate started with, they got brushed aside pretty quickly in favor of right wing outrage politics. The beginning issue (games journalism being a big club of hollywood wanabes supported by corporate bootlicking) was quickly turned into an angry mob of misogyny and anti-intellectualism.

Around 2015-16 the same stategy was deployed to mainstream politics, which is when I feel internet culture truly died for good. Social media went from a pastime to an engine that fueled real world events.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#170

Post by thegrim33 »

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

A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc

B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture

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