Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
❤️
How accessable was the old internet for visually impaired people?
While I appreciate the heavy handed strawman argument, it was entirely possible to make the old internet more accessible to those with disabilities WITHOUT making the technology worse in every single other way.
Mixed and depending on the year. Hardware was available, (braile and speech syth) but it was expensive as hell. There was a bit of a crisis when we went from dos to windows. None of the early GUI supported any of the hardware. In 95 you could use JAWS screen reader. Navigator 4 and IE5 were shit for a while until they started supporting it. Graphic images were still a problem, even after ALT tags became available, trying to get content makers to use them was a fight.
To say nothing of Flash. Sighted navigation was nontrivial.
oh god yes, flash and shockwave were awful. When my company used flash they also put text-only versions of the site up behind the scenes, but we were in the minority
So many mid-century googie disasters with bitcrushed sound effects whenever you so much as looked at a button. Homestar Runner isn’t a parody, it’s just how the web was. Toons! Toons! Chawacte–! Stooore!
The most personally nostalgic version of this still accessible is surely some PC Gamer demo disc launcher. Coconut Monkey era navigation by bouncing around a starship to run the Final Fantasy VII installer. That presumably still works, too, since the most stable Linux API is Win32.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
My mom then: don’t put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I’m most like!
Still is
The thing about AIM, was “OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!” A lot of people didn’t have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
We’ve effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff
Check out flashpoint archive.
The balloon popping game or as a standalone, bloody pingu smash.
I have probably hundreds of hours on Yahtzee on pogo loool
Remember:
Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there’s no “big box” overhead.
And shipping will be FREE!
Everything you did on the Internet didn’t exist just to sell you something; you weren’t a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels…!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new…
P.S. Maybe it’s because I’m autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we’re going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.
And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.
If I was not banned from Facebook I would add this to groups and then argue with people about ☠️
lol any straight man who relies on online dating is planning to die alone lol.
Didnt tinder and other dating apps release data that actually proves that the ratio of men to women is like 5 to 1 on average for all of them? And we dont know how many straight men to straight women are in that ratio. COuld be 10 to 1 or 7 to 1 …
Like 15 years ago when online dating first became mainstream and began to overtake other forms of meeting people I noticed that the dates that I was getting went absolutely horribly. Most of the ones I met in the real world went great, to the point that I swore of online dating and eventually met my partner that way. I find it so bizarre that people think that every single thing must be done through an app, including socializing. Sharing memes and typing emojis back and forth is not socializing.
/end of old man rant
Sharing memes and typing emojis back and forth is not socializing.
I would actually say youre correct about this . I forgot where I read this but a researcher basically said this as an argument in one of his articles . They said that online conversation does a terrible job of emulating real life conversations because in online discussion you cant read facial expressions, expressions and social cues, you dont get interupted(and sometimes you being able to read how , when and how frequently a person interrupts you can tell you A LOOOOT about what that person is thinking about you or what they think of you. Like if someone interrupts you EVERY time you two or you in a group woth them talks maybe they dont respect you as much as you think. If someone interrupts you with sexual innuendo maybe theyre trying to tell you something ‘a little more’) or interupt others for dramatic effect (there are some jokes out there that dont make any sense unless you interrupt the person listening to it), or if a person deliberately changes their voice for a reason that you dont know of (maybe theyre afraid of their real voice? Maybe theres something more to it…), and other things too that I cant get into since I have little experience with IRL conversating. Alnd also obviously you dont get the physical aspect of conversation when you dont do IRL conversatioms. Sometimes you just need a hug and a shoulder to cry on and them too. Humans clearly can suffer from touxh starvation.
I think they said that surprisingly it is actually negotiation-based conversation or persuasions that has taken the biggest hit for those who choose to give up IRL conversating. I cant remember exactly why though
Obviously online chatting and sharing memes has its times and its places. But I think in the modern world most people rely on these things too commonly when theyre looking to converse with or make friends.
One can appreciate that Tinder somewhat allows women to have control over who they date
Of course, the inverse is stalkers and dick pics daily.
Idk. Humanity just can’t win.
Why cant we just create women friendly public spaces that allow women and men and people of whatever gender to safely pick, accept , or deny to date someone? If someone acts up we call authorities or we ‘take care of them’ ourselves.
Its very hard to send a dick pick in public right? Also I feel itll be very hard to be a stalker if the community that you and the person that you arer toxicly obsessing over both frequent have proof that youve stalked them (or even others) in the past and it is widely known there thst you frequently stalk them, right?
Bullshit. Getright and bitchx said so.
What is this talk, like you cannot be offline anymore? You can still put the phone down. You can turn off the message sounds, and check them in the evening, or tomorrow. Is someone forcing you on gunpoint, to constantly browse instagram, youtube, lemmy or something? But but- no. Life requires making choices, and being online constantly is a thing, you have accepted to do, if you are unhappy with it, stop doing it. If you have an addiction, you can fight against that, you do not need to just accept it.
If you have an employer who doesn’t respect down time then yeah, you have the metaphorical gun of poverty pointed at your head. Boss called you at 10:30 PM to fix the slides on the Henderson presentation but you didn’t answer because you were sleeping, your phone was in sleep mode and didn’t ring. George did answer and started working on it all night. George will be in the room when the presentation happens, you won’t be.
I hate that this is true, I wish I could disconnect from the office like my parents did but if I’m not available whenever my Boss wants me, it’s the unemployment line. It sucks, I hate it. It should be different, it should be illegal but this is reality and the reality is my Boss holds most of the power in our professional relationship.
If you are on call, that does not require you to do anything else on the phone, though. You could even have just a dummy phone, so they can still call and text you - most people do not have to work 24/7 on their smart phone (or computer for that matter). Not being constantly online does not have to mean you have to return to pre-modern times.
It’s not that you can’t, but the social norms that filled that time have been replaced by short-form media.
If you want to put down your phone, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re just going to be sitting there with your thumb up your butt because everyone around you is going to have their nose in their phone.
That is part of the choice, too, yeah. But it is the question: are you happier constantly online and available, or would being more offline make you feel better? I think everyone should at least try for a while. If you (you in a general sense here) cannot spend a day, without checking your inbox (I guess I have to add, unrelated to work), or scrolling instagram, or the news, or youtube… you have a serious addiction. Is it worth it, to constantly take part in the addiction, just because others have it too?
Personally I am mostly available only via phone calls, if I am not sitting on computer. If it is urgent, they have to call me, otherwise it can wait until I remember to check the messages. That might take a while, but people get used to it.
Im unfortunately not your target audience, Intro verted in person to a fault, i’m relatively happy with the state of affairs. But you are absolutely right with many if not most people
I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it’s just promoted content. Second–related to the post–is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people’s behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don’t know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I’ve ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, “install our app!”, etc. We didn’t have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
Very nicely put
You’re not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What’s before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you’ll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
The Internet in 1995 was an amazing place. You could find so many scholarly articles and weird funny sites, but every place to chat was full of creepy old men trying to meet kids. Which we thought was hilarious until we got a bit older and realized some of our friends were trying to meet them back. You’d accidentally find all manner of horrific shit, but there was information available. It wasn’t all true but it was almost all honest.
Which is wildly different from today where it feels like almost none of it’s honest. Even the stuff that’s true is only selectively true and trying to manipulate us into a worse place.
In the nineties fox news was strong and we were already experiencing a lot of it’s style of selective truth coupled with outright lies from other places, too. On the Internet at the time it was a lot easier to avoid that stuff.
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y’all. Sorry gen Z.
