• Naich@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    The old internet is still there. It’s just dwarfed by the colossal amount of shit piled up on the shit sites.

    As a general rule, stick to free and open stuff because the motivation of the people doing it is to give to the community, rather than make money. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin rather than Xitter and Reddit. Just stay away from Facebook. There are lots of old style bulletin boards still around for various interests, and they are often more used than FB groups.

    I stopped putting adverts on my sites ages ago because I hate them so much. I don’t want to be part of the enshittification.

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    I feel like it was the shift from having many small, tight-knit communities run by passionate people to having a couple massive, impersonal communities run by corporations.

    Like, for example, back in the day I spent all my time on Worm’s Sci Fi Haven. I knew everyone there, and built relationships with people. It was a healthy community run by a guy that really cared about fostering that community.

    These days, the closest thing you can really get to that is a subreddit or a Facebook group. Even Lemmy, for all its good points, it’s built to be a massive conglomeration of users - in opposition of the more “insular” communities of the past.

    • protist@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      “You’re definitely one of those girls I’ve been talking to in the chatroom.”

      -Flight of the Conchords, probably about AOL circa 1994

    • Blaze@reddthat.com
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      10 months ago

      Even Lemmy, for all its good points, it’s built to be a massive conglomeration of users - in opposition of the more “insular” communities of the past.

      Smaller communities can still be created here, such as Beehaw

    • Apollo2323@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      I remember when I was a kid I used to spent all day modding GTA San Andreas. I will visit GTA Mods , GTA Garage to change , install new textures and new cars the community were greats!

    • Monument@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      I really think that Facebook messed the internet up. Not even the giant data hungry behemoth it is today, but its success at becoming “the place” really killed the small community aspect of the internet.

      I remember in 2000-2001 being active in the yahoo chat rooms. I made friends there! As a 17-18 year old, I traveled hundreds of miles to meet people. I’m still friends with some of those people. I got into Neopets, joined a guild, and made friends in my guild - at least one of whom I’m social media friends with (and have met in real life - after our time on Neopets). Livejournal - same. But it shifted. Everything became big. Impersonal, just a way to get data.
      The last time I had community on the internet was in 2016, when carrot chat was a thing on Reddit. A small community I belonged to spun one up, and the folks who joined liked chatting so much that after Carrot imploded, we spun up a Slack channel. Ironically, the Reddit community grew to a point where it felt less like Cheers and more like a beer kiosk at the stadium, but our little Slack group stayed close. It’s fallen off a bit in the intervening years, but I did meet my wife in that group, so no complaints.

    • TheInsane42@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I’m still active on loads of specific fora, not on Facebook or Reddit (which now looks like Facebook, yuck). ‘Yea olde internet’ is still out there, you just need to know where to find those small communities. To be honest, I still prefer the subject specific websites and fora.

    • neidu2@feddit.nl
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      10 months ago

      Yup, I think this is pretty much it.

      Another factor was corporate interest. Now every corporation has an online presence and as such, everything is monetized one way or another.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
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    10 months ago

    It was new and exciting, you discovered all the interesting stuff you could do with it.

    Before the internet, you only compared yourself to your friends in terms of skill, it fostered healthy competition that drove your skills to be better.

    Then came the internet, and it was great, specialist forums showed up, with roughly a few hundred members, may be a few thousand members for the really big ones, these were still small communities and you still could compete with your skill in a friendly manner.

    Then came the big generic social media sites, and they were great, you could talk to anyone, share experiences with a truly gigantic audience and browse a never ending stream of content.

    Then the big generic social media sites stayed, and their members created groups about the same thing that they used to go to specialist forums for a few years earlier. Why would you go to a specialist forum when you had a social media group available with just one click?

    Then the admins of the old forums saw that users left the forums, and after a while with few updates and fewer new users, they saw that it wasn’t worth it anymore, and closed the doors.

    Over at the social media group, user’s no longer competed with their skill against a small group of their peers, but against a truly gigantic group with people many, many times better than themselves, this have and will continue to kill enthusiasm for their work.

    Then a switch flipped in the social media sites, content is no longer sorted by timelines or likes, but what drives engagement, still this seemed fine, as people obviously enjoyed engaging content, but trouble was brewing…

    Members soon learned that they could game the system, the social media sites all uses a complex system to determine the best way to display content for maximum engagement, and members learned what made the system promote their content.

    Somewhere along the line, sponsors came in, and started paying for ads in the content, then they started demanding that the rest of the content outside of their ads also conform to their standards, this made the content even more generic and formulaic, few content creators dared to be too different.

    This is about where we are now, everybody is talking, but few are saying something.

  • TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    You know? It wasn’t always like this

    Not very long ago, just before your time

    Right before the towers fell, circa '99

    This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two

    • Bo Burnham Welcome to the Internet

    It was innocence. Before you were suddenly bombarded with every horrible thing man can do via sensory overload. I remember going on in 95-96 and it was chat rooms far as the eye can see. Now we have 8k war footage and carnage livestreamed 24/7.

  • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    It was a luxury. Now it’s a necessity. If we don’t have access it causes anxiety. If we have access we’re being tracked

    • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      a long time ago, before it was corporatized and SEOptimized, there was a sense of adventure and excitement. You were a brave explorer stepping foot into virgin lands to discover the bounties within.

      Following a link trail to weird and incredible new sites.

      Following a ring network for amazing indepth information on subjects beyond your wildest dreams.

      Chat rooms with normal people having normal conversations across the globe, before upvotes/downvotes and gamification of human interaction skewed discourse and interaction to dopamine driven extremes.

      All of it peoples works of passion, ad free and real.

      Now though?

      Its no longer a place of nerd passions and interest. Now its an essential service. Now you have to be online, have to be always connected, to make sure you catch the important email, the fraud alert, etc etc.

      You go where the Search Engine points you to, based on the years of tracking you.

      Its wonders paved over with corporate interests and buried under an avalance of ads and tracking. With almost everything you do being monetized by someone, somehow, and almost always to your own personal detriment.

      and no longer can you really have those all night conversations in a small chat room with vastly different people, because opinions and interactions have been pushed into parody-like extremes due to obsession and addiction to the chemical release of upvotes and likes and whatever else.

      The internet went from a great wonder… to a public bathroom in the bad part of town.

  • TheInsane42@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    For me the old internet was an escape from real life. I hate crowds, so I preferred the internet in '94. It was fun, new and all other nerds were just like me, so I understood them (ok, most of them). Now ‘normals’ have taken over as well as companies.

    Yea olde internet was for sharing useful information, learning and communicating with like minded, now internet is primarily for earning cash (companies) and having opinions sent out/manipulated. To much noice, not enough information.

  • protist@mander.xyz
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    10 months ago

    Welcome to aging. It’s been like this for everyone forever.

    Edit: It’s ok, go ahead and downvote. When you find smells are a little less intense, colors are a little less vivid, or experiences are a little less pleasurable, go ahead and blame others for that, right? Surely it doesn’t have anything to do with your own inexorable march toward death? Knowing that things were better before now is a new phenomenon, never experienced before by any prior generation, right?

    Edit: You’ll see. YOU’LL ALL SEE

  • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 months ago

    There used to be intent to the act of using a computer or going online

    Nowadays we have access to the Internet and a computer at all times on our person

    There was novelty and satisfaction with just being able to use it.

    And as for the graph, well as it relates to the topic at hand:

    And with the rise of social media and people always showing their best online you have people comparing themselves to those people who always show the good but never the bad parts of their lives. So people think they’re doing terrible when infact their just doing normal.

    And with the spread of negative emotion enforcing information online (which spreads via algorithms looking for what gets the most reaction and pushing it further (this is a whole topic unto itself)) you end up with a lot of people only seeing the bad in the world.

    Not to mention the constant drip feed of dopamine from our little windows into the infinite. (Screaming righteous anger into a comment section, seeing funny memes, watching your favorite influencers do great in life)

    You end up with a perfect storm of shit leading to a terrible feedback loop and people being unable to cope (and likely not learning healthy coping skills). Though it’s not the only reason for it (as we can never truly know the mind of another or why they would do such a thing (I’ve torn myself up on that topic of for years about people I’ve cared about)) it sure as shit ain’t helping.

    • sbv@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      There used to be intent to the act of using a computer or going online

      That’s a really good point. Now we’re constantly pulling out devices at every spare moment.

      • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 months ago

        And in those spare moments when we’re trying to avoid boredom we are cutting ourselves off from the moments of creativity

        In those moments of boredom is when our minds can be the most creative

  • El_Supreme_O@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I was a new Airline Pilot for a major u.s. operation as the internet and Apple Computers were simultaneously [pardon the pun] taking off.

    AOL and other chat/message boards provided recently divorced me of that day, a plethora of social opportunities, far exceeding that which my former childhood church social habit, could begin to provide. I had to replace that habit as I had grown weary of the duplicitous sky daddy followers and their gatherings where they planned how best to shear the congregational sheep again, all the while crossing their fingers behind their backs.

    All of these factors coupled with the company benefit of free travel which was as easy as grabbing my ubiquitous packed bag, and a quick drive to the airport, made all of the world I cared to visit easily accessible.

    As a [still] budding writer wannabe, I recorded each of the encounters, using some likeness of the people, places and events to fuel a stack of Journals which contain enough fodder to keep Poe’s descendants busy for a considerable length. [3m+ words]

    I am grateful that I happened to be in what was for me, the right place, right time, and enjoyed the growth years of the internet. Gone is the smorgasbord internet of my youth, replaced with that which is a more tenuous venue, one bereft of once prevalent h*man kindness and consideration.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    It was new and exciting, with people constantly trying new things.

    Now we’re collectively running out of new ideas while rehashing old memories constantly trying to get back that old feeling.

  • LightDelaBlue@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    The massive variety of website made by tons of diferent people’s . Not uniform garbage we got today .