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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

#241

Post by blooalien »

darkwater wrote: post #183
Aurornis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ev…

> 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.

Maybe we (humanity in general) should take a hint from that and stop messin' shit up?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#242

Post by someonebaggy »

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…

It's more specific - the Eternal September concept is also about gatekeeping, and how a moderate barrier to entry is often good for a social space.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#243

Post by someonebaggy »

darkwater wrote: post #183
Aurornis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ev…

I'm trying to avoid this feeling but how do I tell the difference between nostalgia and things actually getting worse?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#244

Post by psadauskas »

sanderjd wrote: post #67
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.

[1]: https://clownworld.news/epstein-gamergate-chan-culture

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#245

Post by freakynit »

Might be weird, but, I have heard this "2012" reference many many times when things started to change (for worse), and then "2020" when it all started to go downhill with an ever-accelerating pace. Very consistently these two years from multiple people.

Any rational explanation for this?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#246

Post by someonebaggy »

doublerabbit wrote: post #166
fluoridation wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI SO is dead. Not dying, dead. The rate of questions now is lower than its first month of existence when barely anyone knew about it, and they've recently tried to rebrand themselves as a forum for agents to talk to each other.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#247

Post by someonebaggy »

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.

Torrents?

I think most of these things still exist, but as a tiny proportion of traffic, because total traffic grew so much while these old protocols shrank somewhat, but they are certainly still there.

The focus is now on applications rather than protocols, that's the bigger difference. One uses Discord, or Slack, not IRC, because their centralised nature enables them to iterate much more rapidly (IRC has barely changed in 30 years while Slack has emojis) and this leads to them simply being much better products. Email still isn't reliably encrypted.

Back in the 80s you didn't have a choice - you couldn't create a worldwide app network, so you had to design a distributed protocol that could be operated independently by the sysadmin at each site. In 2026 (really 2005+) we can do global centralised systems and we mostly don't have independent sites (as in locations) with sysadmins, so it worked out differently. There are a few "digital cooperatives" that try to bring the old model back - nonprofits that host services for their members - but there aren't many and there isn't really a good reason for a layperson to join a digital cooperative and use IRC instead of using Discord, which is where all their friends are anyway.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#248

Post by alex1138 »

nicbou wrote: post #224
alex1138 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have PTCD. Post traumatic cookie disorder. Seriously. If I see one more of those I am going to throw my PC out the window Apparently you can hide these with a ublock (origin) filter but I haven't found it and I know people have made separate extensions for this

It's the "annoyances" filter lists. Takes a few seconds to turn on in the settings, works like a charm.

I have them all enabled yet still get them

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#249

Post by glaslong »

reaperducer wrote: post #238
glaslong wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is already typically enough information to contact people's family, employers, or (as was popular / horrific for a moment) send SWAT to your house.

Real names and contact info don't stop people, and worse, they expose everyone to these tactics. If I read a comment of yours that I don't like, I can asymmetrically punish you by signing you up for spam or worse, and you'd never know who did it or why.

We do need solutions where people stake value (like their real identity) and have to contend with real repercussions. But I don't think identity like this actually gets us there.

The reason Old Internet felt better is probably still the solution: smaller online communities, where you have a sustained presence, and getting account banned would meaningfully disconnect you from your social group.

Algorithmic feed / Front Page effect seems to be the main cause of the problem, since you get a flood of people disconnected from the community or topic, having no context, piling on, then leaving.

YouTube seems to have recovered from being a toxic pit and now manages this well. But I haven't found a good writeup of how they made the shift.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#250

Post by giobox »

ramijames wrote: post #88
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…

And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!

I don't think I'll ever stop pressing ctrl + s/cmd + s every 5 minutes, the habit is too deeply ingrained at this stage!
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