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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

#281

Post by TFNA »

Aurornis wrote: post #204
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…

> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other. You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time. Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere. This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only rem…

I remember the bad parts, and they were less bad. Flame-war practitioners, racists, New Atheist axe-grinders, and mentally ill cranks were not exactly engaging in productive discussion, but they were still recognizable as authentic human beings with a life outside that particular obsession. Usenet and web forums allowed users to customize their self-presentation with avatars and sigs, and people often used the same nick across communities so you could see their range of interests in music or coding or whatever.

Compare that to e.g. Reddit today where successive redesigns reduced features that made each subreddit feel like a close-knit community of regulars, instead trying to get people addicted to endless-scroll engagement where everyone is a stranger. Or Twitter where, if you browse through the Nitter interface on a desktop browser, you can readily see that many strident political profiles are bots with a profile photo from “This Person Does not Exist” or African/Indian Subcontinent troll-farm employees.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#282

Post by BLKNSLVR »

not-kinsale-joe wrote: post #131
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #18

On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase. https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.

>so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user. What do you mean by friction?

All of the things that get in the way of what you actually want when you use the internet; the list of seventeen things in section 6 of the article.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#283

Post by TFNA »

iamnothere wrote: post #138
fluoridation wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 had many more small personal and hobby sites, and it was easier to find them. Some are still there, but they get drowned out in the noise. If the commercial noise were gone, in some hypothetical new web, personal sites would be all that remains. The Gemini protocol space is somewhat like this now, it’s very cozy. (But I’d prefer a Gemini-like web with guaranteed privacy and anonymity.)

I am a former blogger, people have regarded me as a entertaining writer with a knack for words, and yet I have zero interest in going back to writing things on the internet. The world has changed in key ways.

Firstly, the vast majority of people interested in topics and hobbies I’d like to write about no longer read longform text: the general public, and even many nerdier people, now prefer short videos, podcasts, or Instagram image posts. Younger people are unlikely to visit any third-party website at all outside of social-media walled gardens or phone apps. So, one simply cannot build much of an audience any more, except for bots.

Secondly, those bots can scrape the content that authentic human beings produce, then pass it through an LLM to rewrite, and repost it on a site laden with advertisements in order to generate profit. This is happening a lot now.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#285

Post by throw0101a »

Aurornis wrote: post #204
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…

> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other. You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time. Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere. This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only rem…

> Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars.

*plonk* (It's why kill files where created.)

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#286

Post by iamnothere »

TFNA wrote: post #283
iamnothere wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The early Internet had many more small personal and hobby sites, and it was easier to find them. Some are still there, but they get drowned out in the noise. If the commercial noise were gone, in some hypothetical new web, personal sites would be all that remains. The Gemini protocol space is somewhat like this now, it’s very cozy. (But I’d prefer a Gemini-like web with guaranteed privacy and anonymity.)

I am a former blogger, people have regarded me as a entertaining writer with a knack for words, and yet I have zero interest in going back to writing things on the internet. The world has changed in key ways. Firstly, the vast majority of people interested in topics and hobbies I’d like to write about no longer read longform text: the general public, and even many nerdier people, now prefer short videos, podcasts, or…

Have you looked into Gemini (the protocol)? Lots of people are expressing themselves there through text alone. And there’s a great culture of response-by-email that’s very reminiscent of the early (pre-blog) web.

Regardless, not all writers will write forever, not all writers have previously considered themselves as such. It’s good to reinvent yourself.

As for AI, the fear of bot scraping is something people are going to have to move past. AI training is ingesting almost all art regardless of medium. What are you going to do, abandon art to become an accountant? I suppose there is always live performance art. Cat’s out of the bag for everything else, though. Slop is slop, and it’s going to be around until we can’t make enough energy to churn it out anymore.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#287

Post by someonebaggy »

mghackerlady wrote: post #257
someonebaggy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

IRC should support emoji, it's just text and emoji are pretty much just text transformed in software the same way your computer turns the unicode of the text into into whatever glyph it represents

I meant emoji reactions

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#288

Post by someonebaggy »

darkwater wrote: post #259
someonebaggy wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's complicated indeed, and sometimes it seems that society/societies make 2 steps forward and 1 back, and other times 2 back and 1 forward. Staying on topic, Internet "at scale" brought many many positive things but also enabled bad things at the same scale. But in many minor changes, IMO nostalgia dominates over being factual.

How to tell if a thing is minor?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#289

Post by TFNA »

iamnothere wrote: post #286
TFNA wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a former blogger, people have regarded me as a entertaining writer with a knack for words, and yet I have zero interest in going back to writing things on the internet. The world has changed in key ways. Firstly, the vast majority of people interested in topics and hobbies I’d like to write about no longer read longform text: the general public, and even many nerdier people, now prefer short videos, podcasts, or…

Have you looked into Gemini (the protocol)? Lots of people are expressing themselves there through text alone. And there’s a great culture of response-by-email that’s very reminiscent of the early (pre-blog) web. Regardless, not all writers will write forever, not all writers have previously considered themselves as such. It’s good to reinvent yourself. As for AI, the fear of bot scraping is something people are goin…

In the heyday of blogging, it was pretty common when interacting IRL with someone interested in a particular hobby or interest, to hear that they followed certain blogs that served as a locus for the community. I have never heard anyone IRL bring up Gemini the protocol. Not even once. So, again, someone posting on Gemini will probably find almost no audience compared to the old blogosphere.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#290

Post by iamtheworstdev »

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.

also leaving out that real competitive gaming at that time was probably in Korea and involved Starcraft and others
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