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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

#181

Post by shimman »

goodroot wrote: post #178
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 g…

Don't disagree, but Quake already had a competitive scene before counterstrike with prize pools + tournaments too.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#183

Post by darkwater »

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…

> 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.

And you can also replace "Internet" with any other concept and you will find a lot of people in their early 40s and over (sometimes even earlier) bitching about how everything changed and it's now messed up.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#184

Post by layer8 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #168
sanderjd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ..

They said it in reference to web 2.0 and Facebook (“those”), and the start of both fell into that 5-10 year window.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#185

Post by 1over137 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #97
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 feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is

But what non-web parts are left? email lists, usenet, gopher, etc. are deathly quiet.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#187

Post by blendo »

bitwize wrote: post #150
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…

[flagged]

Like Chuck Norris, chuds don't sleep. They wait.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#188

Post by dasil003 »

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.

How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.

I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.

I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#189

Post by LastTrain »

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’s far easier to host a website now than it has ever been.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#190

Post by chasd00 »

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.

there use to be a saying "on the Internet, the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was very anonymous.
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