Umm annon that was not the wild web. The wild web was in the 90’s and early 00’s. That was truly the wild web.
Nah I think they’re more or less right. I’d maybe pull it back 3 or 4 years, but not as far as 2004.
What killed off the old wild web was the popularity of centralised platforms. Facebook (open since 2006, really started taking off more around 2008/9), YouTube (first video 2005, really takes off from 2007/8), and Reddit (self posts first allowed in 2008), and other things like that which were admittedly great for allowing more people to share their creations with the world, but we’re disastrous for the open web, because they killed off independent blogs, forums, and other smaller websites.
MySpace was huge before Facebook, and it killed off a lot of blogs. Late 90s and early 2000s were truly the wild web IMO. I had a geocities page with its own forum before MySpace made me abandon it due to inactivity.
Webrings, RSS and dedicated blogs and forums were how we got around, Alta Vista would give you 1-2 relevant links eventually (after digging thing keyword spam) and then you’d follow the clues and links from each result and eventually strike gold. It was a skill that gate kept certain areas of the web, but in a good way.
But google was pretty awesome before it enshitification, same with Reddit and instagram (pre Facebook takeover).
We need a good non-profit search engine that can re-open the independent web that’s still there under the spam somewhere. But it sounds about as likely as overhauling the us election system, or reigning in capitalism in any way. Hard and expensive to rich people.
So it sounds like the Internet died in 2008.
I would say it contracted a terminal illness at some point around 2006±1 and went into palliative care in 2008±1, but didn’t fully die for another 5ish years. The death of Google Reader seems a good landmark to use, since RSS was a really helpful tool that became less necessary as sites became more centralised.
Right about with the uprise of the smartphone i guess
When people without computers were let loose onto the web.
Not me browsing this from my phone app, no siree.
It’s true that my original comment was also from my phone haha.
I remember watching saddam hussein hanging video when i was 12, good times
Ah the good old “korn_music_vide.wmv” that immediately cuts to someone in an orange jump suit on their knees.
Korn really getting intense with the new music videos
Ya, I remember the first time I went on rotten and my young mind was not prepared for it. Honestly I miss the good old days when the most shocking thing was lemonparty and tubgirl.
This sounds fucked but my mom actually was showing me these videos lol
Good god lemon.
Don’t forget about the goatse man
No, that one is burned into my eyes forever.
Too many beheadings in the wild web. But yeah, those years were really the wild web.
Googling CD Keys, Torrents and Cracks was easy back then. DC++ was the way to go and Limewire was not yet Infested with CP and Viruses. There was a sweet spot but only for 2 years. After that, the golden age of Piracy with the File-Hosters came and Reddit wasn’t shit.
If I have to pinpoint the timeframe: When 4Chan got really unironic racist (and the Stromfront forum leaked to the rest)… oh and Facebook…
Oh man, we had DC++ semi-officially endorsed by the inter-college IT department at my university in 2013/14. It was fantastic, especially since in my first year we only got 5 GB of data per month (with a large number of unmetered sites, including anything from Google), so without the unmetered file intranet it’d have been really hard to manage. Unfortunately as they increased the data caps it killed the popularity of DC++, which ended up getting killed off not long after I left.
“I’m old” vs “I MOLD”
I like the latter more, said like Dr. Weird.
I didn’t realize it was supposed to be “I’m old” until your comment
Same here - and i like “i mold” a lot.
i thought it was L mold, as in the way memes what have gone through a lot of “right click save” cycles have the jpeg artifacts described as mold, and that it was somehow lame
Anyone has one of those lists? Can we move these memes to peertube or something?
The ancient legendary YT meme that Anon has as his profile pic is Leek Spin by Xyliex, created 18 years ago! I think it also popularized the Levan Polka as a meme song staple long before it’s revival with Bilal the street drummer/cat vibing video.
And luckily it’s already on archive.org so we’ve got one down!
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
But they were all of them deceived, for another meme was made. In the land of YTMND, to the music of Three Six Mafia, the Edge Lord forged, in secret, a meatspin meme to troll all others.
And into this meme he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One meme to rule them all.
Profile pic, good one.
It’s the Ievan Polkka, “Ieva’s polka” where Ieva is a Finnish/Baltic variation of the name Eva.
Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja RÕÕM!!
Mine too (well, not my country but my joy, yes. What a beautiful and chill and foresty country. I miss it immediately when I leave.)
no way, another estonian.
I’m not Estonian, sorry, but I like to visit. It’s a beautiful country. I immediately recognized you by the õ 😄
ok
I can hear that!
Kinda sad that it’s almost never mentioned that this is just a scene with Inoue Orihime from Bleach.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano
AYBABTU is Lord!
This didn;t aged so well…
There is still lots of creative content but because of the sheer amount of people using the internet good content is drowned out by low effort engagement bait.
We live in an internet.
you dont miss old roblox, you miss having fun , a Roblox YouTuber
Exactly like this.
Veteran internet people sometimes go on about everything was smaller, different, blah blah blah, but I do always smell some sort of a nostalgia bias in their coments. Sure, there was some things that are better compared to now, but this is normal! Every decade has its ups and downs, and while not everything is perfect, you can’t forget the improvements that happened since then.
There’s plenty of new good stuff on youtube still. Just a lot more junk as well
I know that flash animation alone was a HUGE part of the old internet. At least there is an archive for some of them called “flashpoint”.
Flashpoint is awesome. Makes me feel old to go back and watch old flash (and even shockwave) animations!
We can make it anew! I feel like Activitypub and federation has given us the tools to revive the old internet, made by our own hands.
I’m working on a decentralised sharing protocol, so that anyone can have their own website, I just have to find some people interested in testing it out 😊
Similar concept?
The internet is now just a bunch of segregated echo chambers.
It always was in a way. In the early days only people with interest in the technology went online. Then, in the forum era, people found their communities and stuck with it. Only because of the rise of social media were suddenly all people on the same few platforms, which is now naturally splitting apart again into groups, subs, feds, etc
my knees hurt
Luckily for me it’s just my right big toe knuckle.
It’s not the realization of the years that have passed that makes you old. It’s the belief that the things that you loved when you were younger are somehow better than what exists now that makes you old.
Don’t pretend that enshittifiation isn’t real.
Enshittification of services is real, but the linked greentext complains about something cultural: that internet humor isn’t as funny as it was in 2011.
Which I’d say is a matter of taste, and probably wrong. There are still new greentexts being written that make me laugh. Plenty of tweets/toots/other microblog posts still make me laugh out loud. There are video memes that are pretty funny, and that format wasn’t really feasible until Vine in 2012, and more recently has been made more accessible through simpler editing apps for splicing videos.
For mainstream culture, there’s still great standup comedy out there, good TV comedies, podcasts, etc.
Yes, I love the old stuff. But I like the new stuff, too.
This is most evident when it comes to music. I see loads of older musicians, producers, and listeners constantly trashing new music, when the reality is there is loads of great, new music coming into existence regularly. It’s just harder to find since the tools are so accessible now, everyone and his dog can make a “professional” sounding recording. And then, the top 40 or whatever has always just been the lowest common denominator.
I feel like more people need to just take a chance on new music and new to them music genres. I locked myself into the rock of the ‘60s-‘70s for a long time and refused to open up to other genres.
But I got over myself and I love the current wave of pop. There are always new good songs coming out and the best way to find it is to plug into online communities that like music generally. The radio and things like Spotify are terrible at helping you find things.
60s-70s rock is pretty darn good, but like you say, there are a lot of people who think music begins and ends there. They’re so wrong.
Yeah back in the '90s Hootie and the Blowfish was one of the top bands and all of their music is just fucking super mid-tier garbage. And that’s completely because of its extremely broad appeal.
Yeah, for every Pearl Jam, Nirvana, or Soundgarden, there was a Counting Crows, Bush, or Ben Folds Five. Not to mention the boy bands that absolutely dominated the late 90s charts.
It’s real, it’s just not exclusive to the internet. Anything capitalism touches becomes in enshittified eventually.
The switch from PC usage to locked down devices has made things worse and more expensive and less creative.
Remember, Apple invented the PC but IBM democratized it.
We didn’t get the same thing again.
Apple invented the Smartphone and Google also contributed locked down devices.
Being old means you have the knowledge of what was. Whether you look at the past objectively or with rose-tinted glasses is irrelevant.
As a nearly full time internet user since dialup, the web has changed a lot. Dynamic updates to websites is one of the nice things that’s changed. You no longer need to mash F5 to keep up to date on anything. Wifi is way better, though for a while there it wasn’t really a “thing”.
The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate. Most people online had similar hobbies and interests, so most people online were similar, and their interests varied only a little on specific things.
Ads were basically a joke. Everyone had a website, usually on Geocities or something. You’d spend hours painstakingly putting together your website, then when you went to other people’s websites, you’d skim over it and never look at it again.
No bots existed, if someone was talking to you, then you probably knew them somehow, or you were on a public forum/IRC. No YouTube, no Netflix, but mp3 file sharing was happening even before Napster.
There wasn’t a lot to do at first, but after you found a few websites you liked, whether Slashdot or fark, 4chan or something else, you were hooked. People were brutally mean, especially for sites like hotornot. No social media or social networks, no corporations, just people mostly. Most sites selling stuff were scams. Early eBay was a trip.
This all morphed into a more congealed mass when social media became a thing and “high-speed internet” was more readily available. WiFi g ERA, back when it was always referred to by the standard, 802.11g. only laptops for a while then the iPhone dropped and it’s been a steady downhill after that.
Now the internet is huge, everyone and their fridge is on social media. Ads are everywhere and worse than ever. Almost everything is trying to funnel you into one of a handful of categories that you don’t fit into to sell you something. A few gems still exist, like the Foss community and stuff like Lemmy.
IDK, the old web sucked in some ways, but was awesome in other ways. Now there’s just too much to keep up on, and unless you spend every waking moment consuming content, it’s basically impossible to do. Some people have staked their entire career on basically aggregating memes and popular stuff, to give an overview to those who don’t have the time to do it themselves.
Media streaming is pretty good, though, media companies keep trying to make it into the next cable TV bundle package, and keep raising the prices and enforcing rules that were not possible 20 years ago, and that sucks.
I’m don’t think that this is better. It’s certainly different, but not better. The way things are going well cause the internet to become a wasteland of AI bots and advertisements all run my corpos because everyone else will be unemployed and unable to find work because their job has been replaced by some AI or other technology that doesn’t cost the corp as much as humans do. I’m sure minimum wage and salaries will be corrected to match inflation right after the majority of the workforce is laid off to be replaced with whatever technology does their job for them, which will create an elite class of super rich (moreso than they already are) who own the company either through shares or by being in an upper management kind of position, and a “middle” class of the people hired to maintain and fix the technology… There will be no lower class, just a massive pool of unemployed people, unable to work because all the jobs have gone to, what is essentially, bots.
My prediction is that when that happens, it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet, or we’ll have to move to something that’s not capitalism to survive. I’m rooting for a star trek like economy, where your status is determined by reputation, and money no longer exists. Unlikely, but I still want it.
No idea when things will start to shift, but IMO, Amazon (the company) will make the first major move, since they burnout their workers so quickly (specifically in the warehouse and item delivery segment) that they’re already seeing the effects of running out of people willing to work in their warehouses in some areas, and as a consequence of them being unwilling to pay appropriately for the work, and/or afford the workers enough latitude to handle the work without burning out, by either hiring more people to reduce the workload, or give people… IDK, breaks to use the bathroom… They will very likely turn to robots to do the work instead. Once they get to that point, it’s all downhill as other companies will follow suit.
The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate
I agree, you had a lot of tech folks. But I think this undersells how many tech-proficient artists you had. Lots of people who knew just enough to get a website off the ground (or just knew who to ask for the answers) and then spent the balance of their time doing music or webcomics or long form prose.
I think the thing that’s strangling the web now more than every isn’t even “AI” or “bots” or “evil foreigners” so much as “sales and marketing people”. They’re fucking everywhere. Filling up my inbox. Spamming my invites list in every form of social media. Blowing up my phone. Grabbing every spare inch of screen space on every commercialized website.
If AI really was just a tool for artists and developers, I am convinced it would be an enjoyable addition to the Internet ecosystem. If the only bots were written by Slashdot and Stack Exchange forum flunkies, we’d have a plethora of useful little scripts and automated tools.
But because everything has to be marketing, and the shit that’s being marketed has to be as high margin as possible in order to capitalize on economies of scale, we are in an endless blizzard of shit I would never want and certainly never asked for.
Just a maelstrom of trash bombarding everyone who isn’t in a cubby hole like Lemmy.
it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet,
That last bit feels more likely than not, given the degree to which we’re churning up every acre of undeveloped real estate. We’re arguably already past the point of collapse.
But the idea that this will cause unemployment really hinges on the theory that AI can be cheaper and more ubiquitous than human labor. I’ve seen no evidence to support this.
On the contrary, AI is phenomenally expensive and inefficient. It’s a luxury (of sorts) that we’re subsidizing with longer working hours and a lower standard of living.
Modern AI is just another form of massive waste creation. When the bottom falls out of the market, it’s going to have to be one of the first things on the chopping block precisely because it is so resource intensive despite yielding so little
I suspect we’ll create a bunch of revisionist fantasies about how great 21st century AI was, a century from now when we’ve forgotten what it looks like. But in the meantime it’s not going to render us unemployed. It is going to bloat the economy with busy work jobs. Both on the front end fixing all the fuck ups that unmanaged automation creates and on the back end, as we scramble to clean up the mess it leaves behind.
There were plenty of bots, especially on IRC.
The difference is, those bots were useful. They’d send you MP3s, or Warez, or respond to prompts, or just hold down your channel in your absence. Until it got K-lined.
Those bots were good folk. They don’t speak until spoken to.
There were also bots in games which ruined things for the real players… and chat bots that tried to get you to download/install software which was actually a virus. Oh and tons of viruses back then, nothing like today.
the iPhone dropped and it’s been a steady downhill after that.
Mobile, always on Internet was a game changer.
We are still in a phase of evolution where being networked is not essential, but I expect that to disappear in a generation or two.
That’s not how unemployment benefits work
Depends on where you live.
Unemployment benefits in the US are a short term (usually less than 6months) insurance plan that pays out only under qualified situations. Eg fired and without cause, after having paid into the unemployment system for either a set amount of time or hours. Also, since it’s a temporary payment, people will exit the unemployment system as others enter it - no one can be on it indefinitely. And last, the insurance is paid for by the individual who gets the money - it’s their money.
In my country, Canada, it goes hand in hand with welfare. One will often lead into the other if things go on long enough.
There’s a lot of complexity to it that I won’t get into, but the unemployment system likely can’t handle a rapid influx of new request, even from those that have paid into it.
It appears in Canada, unemployment benefits are indeed an unemployment insurance. In the US, this is paid into automatically from our paychecks, and id assume it’s similar in Canada but I could be wrong.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei.html
Yes it would be bad if a ton of people went on unemployment, it just wouldn’t work exactly how you’re describing. Unemployment isn’t UBI.
There’s a lot I can say here, but to be terse, the money paid into (un) employment insurance is more than what is paid out normally, since some people will pay for it all their life without ever collecting, that money isn’t just stored indefinitely, it’s used for other things.
As a result, if a large portion of the population suddenly find themselves without work, the system will be unable to sustain itself, whether “short term” or not. All systems that rely on EI overflow funds would suddenly have a deficiency in their money flow, and considering they the people pay most of the taxes while billionaires and corporations get tax breaks so that they pay nothing, the entire social support systems would collapse quickly, as the country plunges further into debt, devaluing the countries currency.
The entire economic model is built upon things maintaining and continuing mostly as they are, pull any thread too far and the whole thing unravels.
Great now I have leekspin/levan polka stuck in my head. Thanks OP
That was
Let’s see if it works the other way around too:
What do you see when I say:
‘You spin me right round, baby Right round like a record, baby’
you are officially gay :-)
Took you for a spin, didn’t I?
I miss the 2000s…
I miss the 90s. Browsing the web (we’ll, few sites) at 33kbps with Voyager browser on Amiga… 😀
HOURS just typing [randomword].com and seeing what came up.
Please, stop… I can only take so much
Yeah, if used to be people made a comfortable living and if they had the time, shit posted on YouTube. Now to have time to make YT content you have to try to make a profit from it.
