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.
No, 1990s internet just hadn’t actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don’t realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple’s website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn’t use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
People’s identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000’s. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
If the web today didn’t consist of “5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4”, that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
That’s a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.
That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.
Maybe that’s how it should have been still.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
That’s a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That’s one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.
That time period was after everything was monetized and full of ads though.
You don’t remember NetZero, do you? A free dial up ISP that gave free Internet connections under the condition that you give up like 25% of your screen to animated banner ads while you’re online.
Or BonziBuddy? Literal spyware.
What about all the MSIE toolbars, some of which had spyware, and many of which had ads?
Or just plain old email spam in the days before more sophisticated filters came out?
C’mon, you’re looking at the 1990s through rose tinted glasses. I’d argue that the typical web user saw more ads in 1998 than in 2008.
I remember that if you feared everything and only used programs and visited websites your friends recommended, you’d be much better than now. If you were careless, you had a bunch of banners and a porn blocker at the end of the day.
There’s something refreshing in this TBH.
I used NetZero dialup and played shooters online. I’d get killed a LOT with the lag. Also I uninstalled that damned ape buddy from dozens of peoples machines.
A map in your browser with full scrolling and zooming may have been impressive back then, it’s true. But you know what’s impressive today?
$ telnet mapscii.meA map in your terminal with full scrolling and zooming. 😎
YouTube wasn’t around for half of the mid-2000s.
It was launched in 2005… literally mid 2000 when delineated by decade
And it beat television, because funny videos could swear freely, or use any song as a gag, without it being a big deal.
God dammit.
Right, so it existed in the latter half of the decade, not in a span of time covering the whole middle.
If the “mid-2000s” were to cover, say, the four years 2003-2006, YouTube would have existed for half of that - not 2003 or 2004, but 2005 and 2006.
The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the “Wild West”. AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based “punters” and program crashing email “bombs”.
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
Capitalism ruins everything, just look at America
Britain ruined North America (ask the many natives of colonial times) before America could ruin the rest of the continent, then itself
I’m not sure I’d pin the ruining of north America on the Brits. They got that ball rolling.
While the big three empirical powers that colonized the Americas are all at fault, they are late comers compared to the Spanish. By the time the British started their first colony Desoto had ripped through appalachia, on a quest for gold, and had murdered, raped, and enslaved many natives. More importantly though, he introduced most of the tribes to old world diseases, which was apocalyptic to them.
True, that ball was already rolling when the Brits kicked it, but my point is that it didn’t stop being kicked afterwards either.
Oh yeah, the Native American genocide is still happening. These days it is mostly ignoring treaties to take their land for things like oil pipelines, but still going on.
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself … and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.
So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.
How much?
Stop blaming capitalism - people are the problem, not the systems they create.
The average person is a fucking retard and that’s not changing - when they reach a space, it goes to shit.
I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism
when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition
Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)
This self-loathing bullshit is way too common.
People aren’t the problem, the average person is average, the system is what drives down the average mental and emotional intelligence instead of up, and humanity is filled with plenty of people like Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross, and Harriet Tubman.
“People” are okay. They’re just suffering under the boots of a small group of people who are not.
Lmao speak for yourself with the “self loathing” label - I hate the rest of y’all because you’re dumb as fuck.
Ah yes, people are the problem, but you’re not people. You’re better than that.
As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.
they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
They would sell you a subscription for the rope nowadays.
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse
Normies ruined the internet
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It’s not a big deal, we’ve made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can’t rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
Both are rights, but the normies definitely destroyed the internet culture. They invaded forums without any regard for the rules set before (remember “RTFM”?), and when capitalism arrived, they all moved to commercial sites.
It’s not a big deal
It’s absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of “making niches for ourselves” will save us from that.
True
Plus the corporate web constantly kills off our niche spaces in the effort to make them palatable for advertisers by sanitizing minorities out of their own spaces.
I used to be super active in r/traaaa before the 3rd party plugin exodus and subsequent shutdown of the forum. Now? Those people either made a new Reddit or scattered to the 4 winds, and a similar space has struggled to take off here on Lemmy. And that’s just one of many instances of this sort of thing happening.
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Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
If we can collectively collectively decide who, how, and what fucked it up that will be beneficial for the future
corporations im pretty sure
The internet, collectively agreeing on something? It sounds like you’ve never been on it before lol
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.
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.
When I was a teen, way before the internet, if the outside didn’t hold much appeal (usually because it was raining) staying in my room and reading sci-fi and listening to music and stand-up comedy on cassette was a viable option. I’m ok with going back to that. My ebooks directory runneth over.
I don’t think so. We’ve all been happily having discussions with bots online for a long time now. People just don’t notice that the person they are writing to isn’t a human.
We went from talking in person to talking via computer and no talking with a computer. It’s not getting better.
My feeling is that genAI and capitalism are destroying themselves. Now, all web content that is scraped to feed genAI is poisoned by other genAI. So the quality will get worse, and then people will find other ways to use teh tubes of noise. And then the funding for shit genAI websites will dry up, and some of the remaining web content will still be there, because the rest of us aren’t capitalists.
The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.
I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.
The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who’d give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.
And now there’s the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can’t even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.
For a while you could trust reviews, but that time is long gone, but still everyone just happily shops and consumes away, because online shopping is cheaper, there’s a bigger selection and it’s more convenient.
The same process is happening all the time everywhere. Stuff just gets gradually shittier, but we just accept it, because we get used to it.
What is there for them to do n outside?
Have a conversation? Go for a walk? Play one of many different types of non-sport or sport games? Generally hang out. The possibility are endless.
Sounds expensive.
Outside costs me $100+ every time.
Haha, how do you manage to do this?
Being outside should be free?
That’s called “loitering”.
I feel extremely sorry for you of there’s actually zero green space around you other than shopping. Heck, even if you’re in NYC you’re not that far from a park.
Maybe once they get to college. They sure aren’t doing that in suburban hell
I dunno, I live in suburbia and our kids manage to spend a lot of time outside with neighborhood kids. It’s a nice change of pace over the same neighborhood 10 years ago. The neighborhood is starting to turn over generationally and there are a lot more people outside now.
Parks and libraries in the US today are more badass than when I was a kid. My kids love them.
Bocce Ball. That game is fucking awesome.
Dodge traffic, get assaulted by constant advertising, get sunburned, encounter the great unwashed masses of humanity. Or get coffee. I dunno.
Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.What are your favorite capsules? My favorite is Ploum.
Whenever i dip my nose it’s a rabbit hole and it’s 1h to get up to go to work, so… no fav yet…
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.
I hate autoplay videos, and I think this feeling of unease when a video autoplays comes from the earlier days of the internet.
I recently started collecting feeds for my RSS reader, and it is so refreshing. I haven’t added any Lemmy feeds to it yet, since I’m on here a lot anyway, but it’s nice for blogs and websites that I’m not going to remember to check regularly otherwise.
collecting feeds
I’ve been moving back to RSS and have found https://scour.ing/about to be helpful. No affiliation.
blogs and websites that I’m not going to remember to check regularly otherwise
Yep, exactly.
What reader do you use?
RSS Guard. I tried a few, then decided that what I really wanted was just a simple app that would run locally, doesn’t run in browser, doesn’t rely on me creating an account to sync with some external server, and doesn’t have limits to the number of feeds I can add.
It was pretty painless to set up. The only downside is that if I ever want to transfer my feed list to a reader on my phone or another PC, I would have to export the list and then import it, but that’s not hard.
Is there a place that gives directions on how to set it up? It looks interesting, but I’m not great with installing non-normie software.
Rest assured, I’m very much a normie with tech stuff too. It wasn’t bad to set up. It’s been a few months, but I’m sure I just downloaded it from the link on their site and followed the installation prompts.
The hardest part is finding websites that support RSS. But for an example, say you wanted to receive reports about outbreaks from the FDA, here’s their RSS feed: https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/contact-fda/stay-informed/rss-feeds/fda-outbreaks/rss.xml
You would just go to “add feed” in the RSS reader, and paste the URL, and you’re done! You can customize how often you want it to check your feeds for new updates (I have mine check every couple of hours), and when they show up, you can view them within your reader similar to email.
Thanks, that sounds about my speed for installations.
Yo what extensions? I had a really good one that made thumbnails less interesting, and cut out a lot of the CTAs, but I seem to have lost it.
Obviously Ublock origin, the graal of extensions. Otherwise, the only way I can use youtube these days is with the following extensions: “Hide shorts for youtube”, “Youtube search fixer”, “Replace youtube’s home with subscription”. Also “return youtube dislike” and “blocktube” (to block stupid channels youtube keeps recommanding" are cool.
One more general level: I still dont care about cookies, darkreader, bitwarden (password manager), detrumpify (replace trump with a random insult), google sign-in pop-up blocker, flagfox, and many more lol.
Nice, ty for this list
I’m not worried. We’ll make a new one.
It ain’t years it’s months ago…
I remember Google search being in beta
Altavista was the real deal
Wasn’t Ask Jeeves the best search engine?
I was there, even a couple years before that… and in reality not so much has changed.
What we now call “The Internet” is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait… all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!
The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.
I remember when the internet was only for nerds… before it was ruined by the high school cool kids and the jocks
Yeah I miss those days, I remember as a teen I had internet at home and when I told people I just stayed home all holidays on the internet they all made fun of me, those same people live their entire lives out on Facebook now, I was just out there shitposting like you’re supposed to.
