This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think monetization ruined it. There's a lot more trash to sift through.
Globalization ruined it.
Not like in politics (though similar), but in the sense that instead of a space of generally sane people where you don't have to follow any conventions of fashion or social expectations of idiots, like a park where people sit in grass and eat sandwiches, it has turned into something like a mall built in place of that park, with guards, ads, bullshit and shopping apes.
There definitely was trash. You just didn't have to see it. You'd not go to a central recommendations system, like in social nets or search engines. You'd go to web directories and your friends. Like for many things you still do.
Now there's the fake social pressure of being on corporate platforms. Why fake? Because you still really need and talk to the same amount people you would back then, even fewer.
That fake social pressure was their killer invention. Human psychology is unprepared for critically evaluating the emotions from being able to scroll through half the world of other people right now. They don't generally use that seemingly easy ability to reach anyone anywhere, while when it was a bit harder, they would, but the fake feeling of having it is very strong.
It's a mouse trap.
To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.
Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world's population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.
For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there's barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The "old" internet is still there, it's just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.
Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today's standards, but wouldn't be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.
Some things are gone and won't come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to "rent" than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it's cheaper than streaming).
Well, actually:
When Online Content Disappears
"38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later"
I would say internet "in kind", not necesarily verbatim the content from back then. I think if someone inventoried the subset of the internet that was "like the good old days" more or less that it would probably match in scale 1997 internet or so, or be larger. Styles may change and content, but the general spirit and approaches persist, just as a now minority in a much bigger sea of crap that came to join it.
True. Heck, even ol' Slashdot is still kicking around and I think it was the first website discussion board I'd encountered (or maybe that was Fark? which is also kicking around still!)
Yeah, and the ol' "slashdot effect" is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn't grow.
I'm sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe "slashdotting" that slashdot ever could inflict back then.
To deal with 'modern internet scale', you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the 'like 90s subset', little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.
I've actually been visiting Fark a few times a week ever since the Reddit boycott last year! I didn't realize how much I had missed it.
However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be.
IRC was a ghost town the last time I checked in on it. In the mid-90s there were constantly thousands of people on it.
A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I'd say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of "IRC-like" mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people's worth of "internet" that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.
One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.
Yes, I understand your point and agree with you for the most part.
I feel like there was a turning point in the Internet though, where the federation of user identities basically ended for most Internet users. I track it to the advent of MySpace and Facebook. People started using their actual identities on these sites (most likely, at first, to attempt to get laid), and our privacy began being flushed down the toilet then. I also think the creation of Google Chrome with Google's all-consuming want for private data and to tie all of your Internet activity to a real person had a big hand in this as well. The modern Internet is a surveillance Internet.
As the article states, it's no longer true that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". They hook you to your actual physical identity the instant you do anything on your phone, search using a logged in account, browse one of their sites with your logged in cookie, or generally browse anything after you've touched any of the major social media sites because they added trackers to everything.
In some ways, this is beneficial because many cannot handle anonymity, but the bad parts of the Internet have largely drowned out the good. As the Internet has scaled, more and more of the bad side of humanity is reflected digitally. To add to that mix, the major sites in their fun house mirror algorithms supposedly designed to amplify engagement (or "enragement algorithms" as I sometimes say) constantly amplify items posted by the most degenerate among us.
This. Lemmy is the way to go. Decentralized Communities connected via API.
I don't see many other possibilities. The system needs a "free for ever" mechanic or big money shits into everything.
Lemmy is the way to go. Decentralized Communities connected via API.
This only works to a degree. Eventually, the communities that allow people to register most easily and see the most active content become the overwhelming majority of the content on the system. And if these communities don't do a good job of self-policing, they just become mini-2008-style Reddits, filling up with the same bot accounts and serial assholes and sex pests that degraded the original.
Bigger sites start swamping smaller sites with traffic and overwhelming the capacity of smaller communities, so you get waves of defederation and new Walled Gardens of content.
The issue isn't the technology, its the participants in that technology. Too many malicious actors piling onto a platform and either corrupting the administration or degrading the quality of content will inevitably lead to enshitification.
Federation only mitigates this by allowing smaller instances to break away and abandon larger ones. It does nothing to screen the sincere and human actors from the malicious and automatic accounts.
the communities that allow people to register most easily and see the most active content become the overwhelming majority of the content on the system.
hasnt this already happened with lemmy.world being the Big One?
They're leading the pack. Although, that could change if some supermassive community like Threads ever implemented a Lemmy API.
Still a relatively slight difference in scale between .world and Reddit compared to, say, .world and shi.tjustworks or lem.ee.
Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000's web.
All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.
Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000's as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.
The Fediverse is pretty great too.
I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I've been using that to help build my personal content feed.
Oh my gosh, there's webrings! That used to be such a good way to find new websites in a given topic.
Yes!
neocities
this is very nice thank you
Absolutely!
Since when internet usage became wide spread enough that it could be used to make billions and/or promote political propaganda (which really ties back to again making money in most cases).
Anything that becomes used by a reasonable fraction of the whole world will be in the target of governments, venture capitalists (i.e individuals seeking for en masse manipulation). There is no way to prevent this as long as both exist.
Creating a lot of small communities rather than one large community is a good incentive but I think it fails to completely address this issue as long as they are interconnected in some way.
I'm still glad for online ordering, wikipedia, small digital communities, youtube, email, and lots of stuff.
The rest of it is inevitable. And it requires being able to put down the phone and step away from the keyboard.
That is what we need to be able to do.
Move away from the shiny rectangle for a bit for eye contact socializing, too.
Saying the internet was better is a haze of nostalgia, a gross underappreciation of new technologies, and a smattering of truth.
Over 38% of the stuff I flush down the toilet is gone forever, too, and that's ok.
The early Internet was interesting only because it was new and different. Most of the stuff out there was low-quality stuff just for funsies projects. The barrier to entry is still very low. Anyone who wants to put up a website with whatever they're interested in requires no technical expertise and isn't even expensive. But you don't see a lot of that because it's not new or exciting and few people are going to waste their time on it. On the upside, you can now throw up your own federated content system with relatively little work and have a huge community for very very little. Things are gone chiefly because they weren't worth saving. Sure, there are exceptions like DPReview, but they even got a reprieve because they were worth keeping.
Before the advent of filter bubbles, the internet was a creative playground where people explored different ideas, discussed varying perspectives, and collaborated with individuals from “outgroups” – those outside their social circles who may hold opposing views.
And how did anyone find those varying perspectives? Everything was unindexed, even search engines were crap. Fark, Digg and Slashdot, link aggregators and forums are the same as they've always been. Are the majority of those conversations gone? Sure, but you can find another 25,000 of them on Reddit, x, Instagram, and Lemmy, and when those are gone, some other service will replace them.
If people are moving to algo-driven social media, it's because they perceive it as advantageous to them. I found the algo ate too much of my time and moved back to diverse and static youtube clients.
Back in the days of the wild frontier things were chaotic, anarchic, violent, and unconstrained.
Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road
And now we're all fenced in, regulated, allowed to wander only in approved lanes... oh, wait, sorry, we're talking about the internet, not real life!
I really hate to argue in favor of all those scary things, but with those things in the old west came education and improvements to quality of life; better protections for the vulnerable and cures and prevention of disease.
Same could be said of the internet if we follow the analogy.
improvements to quality of life;
Native Americans: "Beg your pardon?"
I think the analogy holds. Communities destroyed in favor of the powerful’s whims
Kind of my point. We gained ecommerce, streaming services, platforms such as this one, online gaming, mapping services, and others - at the cost of the freedoms for which people are nostalgic. And now we have ads, personalization, tracking, and inevitable enshitification.
This pretty much. It got 'civilized'
'monetized'
Nah, people got changed too. The younger generation is not interested in the technology that much otherwise then usage of it. Also even the older generation lost its interests because of getting older and family
New rule: programmatic advertising is illegal
Capitalism. No.
How did we get here? Adtech, tracking, monetization.
Can we go back? By removing the ubiquitous affiliate marketing financial incentives, so no.
Go back to site directories.
Curate your news feed.
Stop using a single corporate search engine.
Participate in online social communities, not in social media.
