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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

#171

Post by StilesCrisis »

chasd00 wrote: post #155
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.

Doesn't Everquest pre-date Wow? There were support groups for people married/in a relationship with someone addicted to Everquest. I know someone personally that almost dropped out of college because of "Evercrack".

Yes, it does, and also quite lucrative AIUI.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#172

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#173

Post by t-3 »

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.

I think you're both right. It was around that time that internet and real-life culture started fusing together increasingly. Internet became more political, including in the tactics used, real life became /b/, even the president is an internet troll. When everyone is on the internet, all of a sudden our socioeconomic and political differences are magnified and the narcissists and sadists have a never ending feeding-trough.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#174

Post by anthk »

airstrike wrote: post #4
anthk wrote: post #2

It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP. There are still niche blogs and even phlogs . And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to…

Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online

I can chat with my SO over Jabber/Telegram with Biltbee+IRC or Pidgin thanks to Libpurple plugins.

On Usenet, being the only decentralized platform without neither corporation nor goverment control, it will come back, as it's being one of the major points for compsci (esp. comp.arch, where the Comp Sci -actual one- level it's far beyond HN and Slashdot combined). On sci.* you can have both PhD's, crackpot scientists... or both.

Ah, yes, no images/binaries ... but for a special case or a major ground discovery people could make an exception, such as a cure for the Alzheimer and the like. Just uuencode the image and attach it after the post, and at least downsize it to ~640x480 or 720x480 and dither it (if the detail level is not that important).

Ditto with IRC, tons of tech channels are not found anywhere else.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#175

Post by goodroot »

scrapcode wrote: post #149

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…

Love the post. It brought me back.

The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

But now the vast majority of people have their own hyper lanes on the Worldwide Information Superhighway.

And geez, isn't that a noisy highway? We're somewhere way under that thing.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#176

Post by TacticalCoder »

Not a bad TFA but half of the author's issues would be solved by not using Windows (all the first bullet points he complains about are Microsoftisms).

Then half of the other half would be solved by taking some agency back: self-host stuff.

I can disconnect my LAN from my router --which I often do-- and be fully operational. I can dev. I've got servers, VMs, containers, etc. I can rip audio CDs I own, I can play my music offline (I also have Qobuz: they're not mutually exclusive), I can watch movies offline (I have a lot of family movies and I know a friend who's sailing the digital high-seas), I can model 3D parts to fix stuff around the house than I then 3D print --all fully done offline.

My car, which is an incredibly comfy high-end luxury car, has no Internet connection. It's got its own memory for music files: no need to be connected.

And I don't always leave home with my phone. My phone has got two apps installed: the mandatory state-related ID thing (sad but this one I need) and one app for my stocks broker 2FA. And that's it. I don't believe in smartphone apps. Heck, I don't believe in smartphones: tiny, inferior, computing devices that are really more spies than (underperforming) computers.

You don't need to be a victim of Microsoft and you're not forced to waste your life on a phone that spies on you.

I never had any Meta account: like is better without Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. I use Telegram: 1 billion monthly active users now. Sure, it's not that better but at least it's not from mediocre Meta.

Really: give Microsoft the middle finger once and for all. Give the Zuck the middle finger. And spend less time on your phone.

Install Linux. If you're anything of a techie, do yourself a favor and run a server at home, try to host some stuff on it: it's never been easier. Doesn't even need to be a real server with ECC: a NUC will do. Heck, a Pi may do (although I'd advice buying a used Xeon with ECC).

Life's already going to feel better.

And I'm no luddite: I've got a sweet setup, with desktops, laptops, servers, NUCs and Pi (lots of Pi) at home.

It's just that you don't have to be a slave to the big tech slavers.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#177

Post by 1over137 »

forshaper wrote: post #156
reaperducer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't know, in the mid to late 90s I was a child on BBS, and a lot of those were semi-anonymous. Perhaps it was just scale, for that. A couple hundred to a few thousand people at most seemed enough, but also mods did work. I guess there was a certain amount of effort to get going, and maybe that was also a gate. Even the speeds, perhaps, acted as a filter.

Semi-anon yes, but also often with real world fet togethers.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#178

Post by goodroot »

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.

Agreed.

It's a fair point, but there's definitely more to the history.

Ten years earlier, let's look at 1997:

- Final Fantasy VII

- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

- GoldenEye 007

- Banjo-Kazooie

- Fallout

- Age of Empires

- Diablo

- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

- Grand Theft Auto

- Planescape: Torment

And crucially... It was 2000 when we received Counter-Strike. This game undoubtedly started the competitive gaming scene, and opened up new avenues for expansion and profitability, with the potential of vast sportlike eyeballs and sponsorships.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#179

Post by anthk »

fluoridation wrote: post #92
iamnothere wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

The early internet predates imageboards. You found GB/SNES/MD emulators in personal pages. JS was almost not used, active X crap was everywhere. Installing GNU/Linux was really difficult, but you could set it all offline. Getting a multi-CD or DVD release was a bargain instead of downloading everything.

*BSD where for corporations or universities with ISDN/broadband and tons of time to build ports, because OpenBSD CD's were copyrighted. You could get a floppy and netinstall, better if you had a fast connection.

Fora were far more ubiquituous and streaming as they said was so-so. Even 480p was something like "HD" for its day, at least for streamed video for 1024x768 resolutions. The rest was a blocky mess with low bitrate DivX videos. You know what DivX/XVid is right?

The 2000's were more like bridge era as tons of people still pirated tons of good 90's series such as Northern Exposure and The X Files among blockbusters.

Lots of people escaped to the internet to get what they coudln't IRL. Movies, scifi-books, GNU/Linux and indie games, manganimes, a truckload of them.

After that you just got the corporate internet with streaming platforms offering even worse products than the ones we got in the 90's and not to mention the shitty cinema and subpar from the mid 2000's anywhere modulo HL2 and a few exceptions.

You have bug ridden games with DLC's, bot infected propaganda sites like X and walled gardens as Discord and the like.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#180

Post by shimman »

alaudet wrote: post #74

The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website. You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away fr…

Yeah, consuming corporate internet you'll get corporate results. The internet of yore is still out there, it's drastically smaller and requires more effort to find but worth it.

Have to put in that effort tho.

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