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A retrospective of my time on the internet
231–240 of 317 posts
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#232It 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 call this the first wave of Eternal September. Then you had Facebook, where all the "normies" joined the internet because of Facebook.
Then you had smartphones, people no longer needed to be home to be online.
These major events have impacted the internet greatly. I'd argue that everything and everyone being primarily on phones has impacted the web negatively since less and less people even bother using computers.
Facebook increased the interest for the average person in order to re-connect with old high school friends, then with family.
Mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry by becoming the standard gadget everyone had, and the main way people access websites and services.
I do wonder if society / the internet would be better off if we didn't all have it on our phones and would login after hours.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#233[dead]
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
SO’s policies always seemed like a valid, but failed attempt to “solve” this part of the human equation through policy. It was genuinely useful until it outgrew itself.
Language barriers also didn’t help, you had people who could barely speak English asking questions, and unable to understand the answers. Then those people started giving answers too. I wonder if things would have been a little better with today’s improved translation tools.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#235It 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.
IMHO, it's more about being a community of choice rather than elitism.
When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to dis…
ejecting jerks is something forums did better than social media, even if the definition of jerk varied widely and was forum-specific. I can't imagine a forum doing something like promoting the user with the most interacted with posts; they'd probably lock the thread and consider banning
And if you did that now you'd probably have no forum left because everyone has been trained to generate engagement.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#238Earlier 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…
A lot of Facebook is people with their real names posting vitriolic bile in full view of their entire real life family and friends. I don't think Real Name policies are the solve. It still doesn't matter when you interact with 1,000 random real names in the comments whom you'll never have to reconcile with in real life. The latter is the important part. The medium itself reduces people to content and encourages conte…
Read what I wrote again. It's not just names, but names and contact information.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
> The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots to be fair, I found eggdrop on almost every single corporate Linux server in all my clients in those days.
eggdrop responds to explicit commands, yeah? Very different from the ones that infest the modern internet.
Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet
#240Earlier 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…
Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.
Web 2.0 has a few different definitions but one of them is when HTML pages started to contain significant JavaScript, and another is when websites started to be middlemen between users rather than users interacting only with the website operators.