It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.

90's internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.

Whomever wrote this had to have been a child during that time because this doesn’t describe the internet I saw.

The 1990s internet was closer to this fantastical notion.

Self hosting and federated social media. Take back control. Fuck the corporations.

On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I'd made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun...

That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.

I miss old YouTube so much it hurts omg. i miss how it wasn't about engagement, branding, money or camera quality, it was about broadcasting yourself and having fun. now it's become a bland corporate shell of what it used to be and half of my recommendations are AI slop lol

source: I'm so old I remember when YouTube vids were rated with stars and everyone had neon channels with funky text

"The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization..."

they were spot on.

It was so human a lot of usenet was properly unsavory.

Because that's what humans are, mostly.

It's a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.

These days it's entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it's still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.

I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.

Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the tag finally fell out of fashion.

It's so interesting. My partner is still on Reddit and she was complaining to me about the massive amount of bots, trolls and general negativity. My response was basically, yeah, that's why I left and don't miss it one bit. I found a much better place that has actual discussion and nowhere near that level of toxicity. I asked her if she wanted to know about it and her answer was just "No". LOL. She's also a fan of super drama filled reality TV so I guess if you like one you like the other.

this is exactly what i said to a friend today

actually, in a few years, maybe the young people won't spend their time on instagram, because it's all bots anyways. maybe then the young people will enjoy living outside of their screen-devices again, and physical life could get a revival.

Feels like we're all old men whose country was conquered

It really doesn't need to be this way.

At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.

If we don't like them, we don't need to use them, and just switch off.

There was no better internet than going to college in the late '90s. You go from a 56Kbps modem with hundreds of milliseconds of latency being a GOOD setup, to being directly on a 10Mbps LAN with everybody else in your class. It was right before Napster started and people were sharing entire discographies of MP3s via network file share from their own machines.

It was, but... this morning I pulled out my pocket computer that also can make calls, started streaming the Disco Elysium soundtrack, and proceeded to drive across two cities. There were no pauses or hiccups in the stream.

The early 2000s mind cannot comprehend this.

As per examples through history, greed and profit chasing have completely ruined what once belonged to the people.

Well... the type of stuff we long for are still around, it's just that we don't visit it as much anymore. Lemmy is a perfect example of this - it's around, it's better, but people still default to Reddit instead.

Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.

I mean... how old is 4chan? .../b/?

Lemmy is pretty chill. Combined with a rss feed viewer, a few youtube channel (ff+extension), Nexcloud, and my internet experience is cool. I don't care about tiktok, instagram and all that shit.

Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.

Capitalism

It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.

I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.

Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).

I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.

nothing was monetized.

Lmao.

Between SEO and Googles own bullshit finding information online feels like trying to find the milk in a supermarket or the exit in a casino, designed to make you pass through as much bullshit that's completely unrelated to what you actually want as possible.