Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
There were also “no girls on the Internet”. Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop’s petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.
It wasn’t uniformly better.
We can’t, and shouldn’t go back. Ever forward.
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube’s reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I’m not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn’t profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).
I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.
The fediverse is similar enough for me :)
Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.
Goatse is what killed friendster imo
You’re the man now, dog!
We all lost our innocence back then. We stared into the void, unable to look away. You remember how we all were.
And napster was for taking naps! Until metallicock ruin it.
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…
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”.
I’m so old I remember webrings.
On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I’d made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun…
That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.
The Internet was even better before 2001. Around 2002 is when paywalls started becoming a thing along with the increased enforcement of the DMCA.
Yeah, I remember when I first got access to the internet in the 90s and it was mostly forums and whatnot run by hobbyists. Finding stuff was a bit tricky, but Yahoo was largely usable to find stuff. Wikipedia didn’t exist, but encyclopedia brittanica or whatever was a thing and worked somewhat okay online. Pictures bigger than a thumbnail loaded like a slideshow on dialup, but text was responsive, and text-based online games were becoming more and more common.
Yahoo search? Alta Vista ftw
Feels like we’re all old men whose country was conquered
That’s a surprisingly good way to put it!
Women used to post sexy photos of themselves just for the joy of getting a few people’s attention.
They still do, you just need to know where to look. A lot of them want to funnel you to their paid platform, but some just want some attention.
Capitalism
