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.
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!
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.
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
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.
It’s real, it’s just not exclusive to the internet. Anything capitalism touches becomes in enshittified eventually.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“I’m old” vs “I MOLD”
I like the latter more, said like Dr. Weird.
We live in an internet.
you dont miss old roblox, you miss having fun , a Roblox YouTuber
Now I dont feel too well.
I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the “social media” of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn’t get too involved.
It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).
Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there’s a lot not to like about the modern internet.
Bill pay. Maps. Wikipedia. Every Song Ever. Every Movie Ever. Every re-run ever. Almost all the games. Communication about weird hobbies with people across the globe. Email your favorite author or artist directly. Free e-books from 5000BC to 1935 AD. Online tickets for travel. Online shopping. Podcasting. Online music collaboration.
Postal mail still a thing.
There is a lot to like about the contemporary internet. Perhaps people are less grateful now.
“every re-run ever” - except when streaming platforms decide to delete stuff forever arbitrarily, because they give zero shits about preservation.
That’s what piracy is for
Stop, you’re making me cry.
I set up one of the first Echomail and Fidonet nodes in my country and was pretty active in the days the internet started. It was such a community effort, and seeing people start to grab hold and use it was a complete rush. To see what it turned into is utterly heartbreaking, but I guess it was predictable.
I see everyone talk about how we need to drive Linux adoption, and I get scared as fuck about what that would mean to Linux in 20 years. I don’t want to see that community vaporize the same way.
I think there’ll always be weird nerds getting excited about niche things. It’s exhausting to have to keep finding new spaces, but to some extent, I think that’s our lot in life: we’re like lyme-grass growing in sand dunes — pioneer species that grow where other things can’t (or won’t), putting down roots so other things can grow.
Unfortunately, the pioneer grasses can’t survive indefinitely in the communities they build; their existence acts as a windbreak and encourages more sand to settle, causing the sand dune to form quicker than they can grow, eventually being smothered by the dunes they helped established. They have to find somewhere else to grow, somewhere new — the sand dune of tomorrow. That’s why, when there’s a series of sand dunes at a beach, you see a sort of progression, moving from more established sand dunes to younger ones as you get closer to the shore.
Maybe in 20 years, Linux will be unrecognisable to us, and maybe that space will no longer be home to nerds like us. But we’ll always find something new to be excited about; the community won’t be vaporised, it’ll just be rejigged a bunch, as we discover new areas to put down roots. That is sad, but I think the alternative would be sadder, in a way. I don’t mean if Linux doesn’t become widely adopted, but if people stop trying to push for that — at the core of this movement/community is a bunch of people saying “hey, look at this really cool thing I care about”.
It’s easy to blame the Marram grasses for crowding out the early pioneers, but we do this to ourselves, by building tools for others to use, and working on outreach. In a way, that’s how we survive, because our community relies on people who are excited about building something new in an unexplored problem space; more gatekeepy communities may maintain their “ideological purity” for longer, but they inevitably die out.
It sucks to feel crowded out by the masses, but there’ll always be new spaces for people like us, because we’re good at building and tinkering. After all, look at where we are right now. Lemmy isn’t especially radical or new, but the atmosphere here is incredibly different to Reddit. I’m way more likely to find thought provoking discussions like this thread, for example, and to care enough to write comments like this.
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!
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
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.
I feel like there’s some amount of nostalgia filter here.
People thought the old memes were good?
People liked deep fried memes?
Whaaat?
Jesus Christ how young are you that deep fried memes are “old”??
I can’t believe thanks to the internet undergoing enshittification I’m actually nostalgic for a time when it was casually racist, because that’s somehow better then this “Watching the words that we say, big brother corponet is listening.” bullshit
The Internet didn’t so much get less racist as it simply got sanitized because they realized that they weren’t extracting maximum dollar from non-white users. The hate simply got pushed further down into the dank miserable depths to fester while the rest of us get to pretend that racism isn’t still a massive problem because black people are a marketing demographic now…
I’ve always said the best type of media on the internet is almost no moderation because that means anyone can post anything.
People who post stupid or nonsensical things would just get ignored anyway, there’s no need for a mod tram to dictate what can and cannot be posted online. They should only exist to remove spam or brigading.
The wild west internet was great at this, we got some of the coolest communities and memes from all over the world.
Right around MySpace falling off, Facebook started agregiously taking over the majority of social media. Lots of forum sites are now dead or empty.
Somehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.
Back then the bigotry were mostly jokes than actual serious unironic targeting which you see festering nowadays.
A lot of it was ironic “It’s funny because we know it’s fucked up and wrong, if we legitimately agreed we wouldn’t think it was funny.”
Yeah, like a lot of racist humour in old british comedy shows is generally at the expense of the racist themselves, rather than who they’re mocking
Back in the YTMND days I was among the “Moon Crew”, people who made fads (what we called memes back then) about Moon Man. (The overtly racist version of the Mac Tonight character)
If I had known Moon Man would go on to be a symbol of the Alt Right, I’d have never had anything to do with the character.
Back then the joke was “Lol, Moon Man is completely insane and wacky.”, but in more recent Moon Man material the joke changed to “Moon Man is based cause he hates women and minorities.” and no one originally involved with how the character was back when he was a staple of YTMND has anything to do with it anymore.
No one actually had any support for the KKK, the chant just sounded funny on the old version of AT&T’s text to speech
And when Moon Man was involved in storylines the villains were usually folks like Charles Moonington (An undercover terrorists pretending to be a member of high society) or Goofy Clown Face (an unapologetic pedophile) who were demonstratably worse than Moon Man.
Now when I see the character he’s unironically supporting Trump, and actively battling against Sun Man (who in the original canon we made for the character was a self-hating black man who the “Three K Mafia” had to have around due to anti-discrimination laws requiring at least one black guy in the klan)
Moon Man was also shown as being clueless and out of touch with reality, because again, a major part of the character was that he was insane and not meant to be imitated.
It just pisses me off that he became a recruitment tool for Bigoted Movements, when again, he was largely satirical and meant to mock such backwards views. I mean shit, Moon Man’s “songs” were largely specifically parodies of and homages to famous rap musicians, that should have been a big clue right there that no one involved with the character’s inception actually hated black people. (That’s actually how I discovered Tupac, look this was like 15 years ago, I was an edgy teenager back then)
It makes me fully understand the pain Anthony Starr feels when he gets those fan letters about “What a good American Homelander is”, or how that guy who wrote that one comic felt when he had to kill off Pepe…
I was more thinking of the time people said the n word ironically, rappin for jesus and that guy who made that song about black people liking watermelon and kfc, as well as similar songs about white people, asians and arabs. My theory is that Etika’s death killed ironic usage of the n word along with PewDiePie’s bridge incident
I mean I kinda was too, no one was actually racist, it was just a gag… Instead of being a Alt-Right Nazi pretending it’s just a joke.
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.
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
Great now I have leekspin/levan polka stuck in my head. Thanks OP
