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The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

muddy.jprs.me

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Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#91

Post by DarkNova6 »

munificent wrote: post #53

I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake. But that…

The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.

This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#92

Post by bonesss »

joenot443 wrote: post #21

I think we just got older. People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers. Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs. There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.

Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.

Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.

And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.

I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.

Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#95

Post by inagiledev »

The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#96

Post by pfannkuchen »

John23832 wrote: post #46
jonas21 wrote: post #14

> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special. It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).

I believe it was “Eternal September”.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#97

Post by ErneX »

jonas21 wrote: post #14

> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special. It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#98

Post by DarkNova6 »

quxbar wrote: post #8

I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.

Sure they exist. But nobody knows they exist because everyone just uses apps and SEO punishes actual good websites.

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#99

Post by threepts »

jonas21 wrote: post #14

> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special. It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.

I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".

Re: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

#100

Post by fullstop »

chrisallick wrote: post #75

disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.

Maybe this is just a personal thing for me, but I have difficulty saying that anything that Claude creates as "my own stuff".
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