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We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse::High-profile lawsuits against Google and Amazon have revealed Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives.
it’s so sad. this is going to sound pathetic, but – i remember in high school browsing reddit and twitter and 4chan and almost getting a buzz off of it, the interactions felt so cutting-edge, funny and fresh and perfectly transient, it felt like i had a voice for the first time, able to post and have people like what i posted.
and now we’re kinda just…going thru the motions and everything is worse and companies are just blindly nuking things we used to hold sacred
I hear you. When I was a teen, Internet was: A handful of focused websites or your buddies geocities / angelfire site.
Chatting in crazy chat rooms on IRC, and having your close friends on ICQ.
Using a dial up modem to play doom, Warcraft 2, red alert, duke nukem, quake, StarCraft, total annihilation… etc.
Those were fun times. Felt like the bleeding edge of tech… hiding out and having fun in places people haven’t even heard of.
Once upon a time, I had a 6-digit ICQ number.
That’s some OG shit there! I still remember my number. It was an 8 digit haha
Yeah, I’d give anything to remember the number. I’d make all my friends get accounts, just to flex.
Have a 7-digit one and just found out it still works.
I had one contact left on it called “brokenprincess” and it says she was last seen “a long time ago”.
Creepy shit. Just in time for Halloween.
I discovered IRC in the 2020s already (I am Gen Z so wasn’t even online before mid-2010s), and from what I’ve seen in the descriptions of the “old internet”, looks like some servers I am in preserved the spirit) Some people in the rooms also have their own cozy websites, including me)
Right on, I rejoined IRC during the COVID shutdowns. It’s just nice to be chatting somewhere where a company isn’t flooding me with advertisements and/or harvesting my data (that I can tell at least).
CompuServe email addresses
I know there is truth in that the internet I worse.
But I do wonder how much of our feeling that is worse is more based on the glamor of youth and nostalgia.
I think there’s some of this, but I do honestly believe the internet has fundamentally changed and the makeup of it is a lot different. This isn’t all bad, but there’s a lot of things that we’ve lost now that the internet has become more centralized and corporate in general. At least proportionally I think there’s far fewer passion project websites and a lot of people gather on big websites instead, and there’s fewer communities that are strictly about a niche topic. In some sense this is good because things are generally more accessible to the average person, but I feel like the niche weirdos have been drowned out a bit in the eternal September, and there’s something a little sad about that too!
I think there are certain aspects of the modern internet that make it a worse place, even for all of the massive benefit and improvement from the early days. I’m mostly going to stick with social media, because initially it was a really interesting thing that quickly turned toxic and tbh I think when historians look back at this period, they’ll probably be able to point to a significant amount of societal damaged caused by it.
Like in the early days of myspace and even Facebook, it was a legit helpful way to connect with friends and catch up with people. Where I think it goes off of the rails is when you get to algorithmic timelines. Facebook in particular I think is very nearly directly responsible for a lot of the political divide we see today because of this. If you poll just about any issue, you’ll find that the US is trends about 70% left/progressive. Most people want universal healthcare, reasonable gun legislation, etc. But on Facebook, which probably has more of a representative sample of Americans than anyone else, you would frequently find that 7-10 out of the top posts were conservative wack jobs. One of the things that drove me to stop using the site entirely around 15-16 was that my friend group of mostly lefties somehow led to half or more of my TL being the small fraction of family or work acquaintances with right wing fringe nonsense takes.
You can kind of see this happening with reddit in real time right now. In 2010, you stared with the subs you wanted to see, things were democratically upvoted, and there was no algo outside of the users to speak of. Reddit has slowly been moving away from that, often surfacing things that you have no interest in because “engagement.” I have a pretty strong suspicion this was one of the driving factors in killing third party clients - they still mostly presented content the old way without shoving a bunch of crap in your face. Twitter went through the same. People used to complain about twitter being a cesspool, and I never had that because I always used a third party client and just followed people who’s stuff I wanted to see. And if they ventured too far into the sort of lunatic fringe, pruning them was easy and I could continue seeing the type of content I wanted. Now with no third party clients, there is just no way to not see this kind of nonsense on twitter, hence I haven’t for many months now.
Now, this is just not the way most people are going to engage with things on the internet. Like, just look at most people’s phones for fuck’s sake. A zillion notifications and badges for things that no one should care about. It doesn’t occur to most people that you can even avoid this kind of thing.
Anyway, lots of cool things about the modern internet, the type of social media most are using ain’t it though.
Thanks. You did nail why I think it’s different and even worse. I wonder what like… cluster of 10 years would you say was your peak internet experience?
Part of that might be you though. Things that gave us thrills in our youth become bland when you get older. I could say the same thing about ICQ and AIM vs reddit, twitter, etc.
MSN Messenger man, what a great software. Also Winamp.