i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
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The creativity and willingness to share.
Anyone could make a crappy site.
Anyone could fire up some phpBB.
People created a lot of stuff that mainstream commercial developers weren’t willing to invest time in. Think windows power toys, mp3 players or converters, game mods, all the little things that filled the gaps in mainstream OS and other software. Add the free stuff that people made like Blender or other specialized software that did what commercial software did but for free.
Flash games.
Linux distros.
Hobbies and how-tos.
There was so much stuff. Now it’s all mostly locked down under DRM or whatever.
- less centralization
- obscure flash games
- random people’s crappy colorful html sites
- being able to find random people’s crappy html sites on search engines, despite not meeting the modern strict ranking criteria or being bloated with SEO
- being able to read fun, and sometimes unique and interesting ideas on said crappy html sites
- less DRM everywhere
- less commercialization and people trying to sell you crap (not saying less ads specifically because pop-up ads were everywhere)
- more people just sharing things for the sake of sharing even if it sucks
- anonymity
- just generally the more raw and people oriented feel and less of the corpo ridden EEE/data-sucking/cloud-for-everything/enshittification bullshit we have to deal with on a constant basis these years
The Flash games are what I actually miss the most, but all good points. My coworkers and I would pick a game from addictinggames.com every week and compete. No micro transactions, no intrusive ads, just mindless fun.
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn’t.
- Don’t feed the trolls
- Don’t talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there’s a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you’re one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you’re a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn’t really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said “The internet is leaking, this won’t end well.”
Didn’t realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it’s cool. It’s so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being “cancelled”. Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around “you just can’t understand my experiences” rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from “we’re all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can” to “we’re all wannabe celebrities that don’t have time to explain anything to the losers who aren’t good enough to understand our experiences” it all went to shit.
I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren’t wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there’s less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.
Lack of big corpos infecting everything.
The Fediverse is the closest thing to early internet rn, I fear for it because of the whole Threads thing
What’s up with Threads?
Threads is owned by Facebook (aka Meta), and recently integrated into Fediverse. Many instances defederated from it, some voted on this action. Basically the worry is the whole “embrace, extend, extinguish” threat. More on the phrase here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
There’s a certain scrappyness that has been lost. I think back to SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, that sort of stuff where people just made things, didn’t matter if they couldn’t draw, some of the best things were stick figure animations. Even on Youtube now people are doing ad reads to camera like a 1950’s talk show host.
I also miss the sort of folk mythologies that emerged from what I like to call the Contextless Era. The Napster/Limewire explosion pre-iTunes led to a lot of things being shared with no context except for chronically incorrect file names. Which is why at least one person who reads this sentence still thinks System Of A Down wrote a song about the Legend of Zelda.
I kinda miss the PC first internet. Just in general. I miss instant messenger clients. MSN, AIM and Yahoo! Facebook fucked it up. As Tom Scott once said, those style of messengers had the benefit of requiring users to log in, which meant being online was a signal you weren’t busy.
Link, he come to town!
Wait was that not system of a down???
Called it!
No; the song - simply titled “Zelda” is from the album Rabbit Joint, by the band Rabbit Joint. Singer Joe Pleiman wrote the lyrics to the tune of the Hyrule Overture by Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.
Back in the day, little known bands would attempt an early form of SEO, they’d put the names of more famous bands or artists in the file names of mp3s they would upload. Say you were an obscure (and for my purposes, fictional) metal band named Scorn Town, you might upload your newest track as “Blood of the Night - Scorn Town (metallica).mp3” to kind of trick Metallica fans into downloading and listening to your song.
But you did a stupid: It’s one of those songs whose title isn’t in the lyrics, but you wrote the band’s name into the chorus because you’re trying to get people to know who you are. So people think the file name is of the pattern “Flagpole Sitta - I’m Not Sick But I’m Not Well (Harvey Danger).mp3”. Actual title - what you think the actual title is (band name).extension. So a lot of small time acts accidentally attributed their own songs to more famous groups by incorrect titles. Or their fans did it for them; any prank phone call skits were attributed to the Jerky Boys, and any white man performing stand-up comedy who was even slightly southern (especially Bill Engval) was credited as Jeff Foxworthy.
And because this was the contextless era, no one even thinks to question this and if they do they don’t find anything because Scorn Town doesn’t and never will have a website and even if they did Alta Vista can’t find it. So it gets written into digital folk history at face value.
Pleiman’s vocals did bear quite a resemblance to that of System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and Chop Suey was HUGE at the time. And some unknown individual uploaded Zelda by Rabbit Joint to Napster with a file name similar to “SOAD - Legend Of Zelda.mp3.”
Similarly, “The end of the world” aka “H’okay, so. Here’s the Earth, s’chillin…” was NOT made by Group X.
The creativity people were willing to share. Forums, DIY guides, blogs, neat yet crappy animations on Youtube. It’s all kind of still there, but it’s hard to find with how the internet is today.
It was full of passionate people who made things because they enjoyed it. Now, it’s either how-to sites written by bots/keyboard monkeys, or you’re fast-tracked to the #1 video. You have to really go looking for the human now.
I found a BBQ site that had a webring the other day.
I was so happy.
Please tell me they called it a “smokering”.
Lmao yes.
The internet is healing…
Could you elaborate a little please?
A webring was a group of sites that shared a common interest that agreed to link to each other, so that you’d browse around in a circle between them.
Nice, I’m sure I’ve encountered that before. Thanks for explaining
I just double checked it was this site: http://www.bbquepits.com/
But looks like the webring itself is no longer functional. Oops.
Search engines with actual results, now every search is about trying to sell you something. Searching for a product used to pull up its manufacturer and specs, now its just where to buy it or something like it.
Have you ever tried Kagi? It’s pretty interesting and I’m giving it a shot.
I am using it, it is good for me. Don’t miss google at all.
A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.
I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.
And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are “um,so”, and all we’re looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it… and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.
You also can’t ctrl-f a video. It’s by far the worst format for information.
And in terms of actual information per kilobyte, it’s often absolutely laughable compared to text.
Everyone’s using video for everything these days because that’s where the ad money is. Hooray, the tyranny of capitalism.
It’s very easy to process an actual article and evaluate whether it actually does what I’m looking for enough to read it properly.
Video doesn’t provide that. It’s a bad format unless what you’re doing is actually visual in nature. Reviewing a video game? Sure, provided you’re spending meaningful examples of the actual mechanics. Reviewing a video camera? Absolutely.
If your video is just you talking at a camera, it almost definitely shouldn’t be a video.
Googling so many “how do I do X?” type of questions have top-results of 10-minute videos where someone has their cluttered Desktop in full 1920x1080 and then they open the tiny command prompt in a small window (it’s clear they have no idea how to record a video), where they clumsily type commands they clearly don’t understand, and fumble through the entire process.
I just needed a single command. It should have been a 1-second result at the top of search, not shitty videos or SEO dynamically-generated shit site that are trying to sell me something.
Exactly this! My hearing problems don’t help the matter at all. Also they’re painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.
whats up guys in todays video I’ll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe
So today we’re going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I’m doing a video on tying shoes.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it’s something that you need to know. So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you’re in the right place! We’re talking about tying shoes.
So without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes … [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]
This is so accurate. I end up hitting the 1-9 numbers keys to see at what chunk of the video they get to the real meat.
Cue, 30 seconds of annoying intro music
I guess the catch is that I’d prefer to watch a video for information because the experience is better than the absolutely ad riddled text news sites.
thats not “the catch” its your preference
A lot of it boils down to the users. Personally, I miss when the internet mostly consisted of us nerds.
Back in 1995 when I first got online, the web was very much a nerd domain. You needed a certain level of computer knowledge to get online, which really acted as a filter. It meant that most of us shared a certain level of understanding and the drive to use such a medium. We disagreed on Star Trek and Star Wars, but to the outside world, we were ALL nerds. Back then, the average person didn’t even think of going online.
These days, even the most tech illiterate can get online. In fact, they don’t even think about it; it’s that integrated in their daily life.
While growth also gave us nice things like large forums, web shopping, YouTube, etc… by and large I think we’d be better off if this was still a nerd domain.
I really miss those days.
Heads up: Lemmy will either get less popular or more popular over time. Neither is ideal.
And while it never feels like it when you say it, but these are [going to be] the good ol’ days.
Don’t gatekeep the internet. That’s what lobbying ISPs and telecom companies are for. /s
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot that Lemmy was filled to the brim with Linux nerds. The most-common nerd-gatekeepers, right before tabletop players. Explains the downvotes.
Personally, when I look at the average user on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (at least the blue checks), etcetera, it makes me wish we actually did gate keep.
And here I thought Lemmy was smarter than Reddit.
I’m gld I could break that illusion for you.
My crush coming online. Miss you, •..••´¯``•.¸¸.•
psyko_love•.¸¸.•´´¯`••..•I kinda miss forums. I still use forums sometimes but it’s not the same. I miss the old YouTube. I miss the Internet feeling niche back when everything was still new on the Internet.
I miss the lack of misinformation. I remember when the news was relatively unbiased. Now everyone is selling fear and outrage.
Agree
I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.
Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here’s a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn’t worked for 5 years and isn’t actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you’ve viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here’s the next article on error -22.
Also, downloads were “here’s the link to it on our FTP server”, none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.
Unless you’re talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet
Yeah in the late 90s/early 2000s it wasn’t that predatory in my recollection.
Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn’t all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there’s not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You’d look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.
There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn’t a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you’re looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.
The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.
