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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

#191

Post by darkwater »

btheconqueror wrote: post #39
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 was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...

I'm in your same age bracket (a bit older actually) and joined Internet mid-90's and there were already plenty of trolls and nasty, mean people. They were just fewer in absolute numbers because statistics.

Also, as youngsters, we probably tolerated those that were there much more - at least if the trolling wasn't directed at us - because teenagers are still learning life and emotions.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#192

Post by vaylian »

glaslong wrote: post #160
DavidPiper wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere! This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

Right? The 2000-2010s saw a massive rejection of popups. Blockers became common. Best practices emerged that avoided them like the plague. I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop. Now popups are fully back as login, sign up, cookie and deal spam. We've actively regressed on this front back to "pop-ups everywhere!"

> I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop.

I hate modals even more than pop-ups. There are valid reasons to use either, but in most cases they are a form of abuse.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#193

Post by DaedalusII »

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…

until mid 00s broadband internet was not widely available outside US/Europe/Japan. At one point I think over 10% of the internet was just Russia. Even today Russia and Japan make up about 5% of the internet each. you can see this in early 4ch culture especially

this meant most of the people on the internet were middle class suburban from the developed world, educated, literate, and technical. importantly, 3rd world bot farms and relentless content grinding had not yet taken off. that is a big difference

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#194

Post by mathgeek »

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…

The structure is there, but the community is not. There will always be some holdouts (thus the age old trope of the older generations longing for the golden days).

Essentially the internet as we once knew it is a proxy for the world as we once knew it. We older folks can't go back in time to it, any more than someone in the 1950s could go back to their youth in the 1920s.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#195

Post by goodroot »

shimman wrote: post #181
goodroot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, crucial omission - and that was 1996!

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#196

Post by mghackerlady »

1over137 wrote: post #185
mghackerlady wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gopher is still kinda active, usenet has a few holdouts, email is as alive as ever, gemini is niche but there, IRC refuses to die, atproto is just getting off the ground, activitypub is a thing in some circles, matrix is around in some circles, xmpp is the only non-shit messaging standard, and I'd argue the "platforms" of today (facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, youtube, etc.) aren't really the web despite being web based

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#197

Post by ghaff »

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.

It wasn't that anonymous. A lot of people were posting from work accounts with full email and other contact info.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#198

Post by toyg »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #140
rootusrootus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.

And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.

yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#200

Post by StilesCrisis »

goodroot wrote: post #195
shimman wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, crucial omission - and that was 1996!

One big difference to note: Quake in 1996 didn't host central infrastructure or have any expectations of recurring revenue. By 2007 things had changed. WOW was built around Blizzard-hosted infra and recurring revenue as central design pillars.
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