Every single discussion around UI is now laden with "this isn't 100% optimized for user interaction" like there's some rulebook dictating exactly what you have to do for your website to be useable.
There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.
I think the big change has been a shift to massive platforms for everything - so before you'd have hundreds of little vBulletin forums, IRC servers etc.
Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc.
It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.
Yeah sure, but it doesn't explain why. If I were to point out to anything, it would be monetization - starting from early ads ruining everything with pop-ups, through corporations gathering data, bad actors exploiting every little vulnerability to get some leverage, to users themselves aligning themselves with money; less and less people doing what they want just for fun, but rather adhering to corporate guidelines and ad strategies to get as much as they can out of this system. So much that other internet users who don't get anything out of it would also start behaving that way, maybe with hopes of getting a slice of the pie at some point. Maybe their next tweet will be a hit?
And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.
>And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.
It absolutely is, because everything is adversarial. Every piece of advice is a hidden ad, every friendly person an attempt to lure you into parasocial relations, every teacher a course seller.
We went from a community to normalizing psychopathy.
And a little while before that, the desktop computer was a mystical thing that could take you to wonderlands. I was truly an intriguing machine, instead of just another home appliance.
I too am waiting for the pendulum to swing from clean corporate cookie cutterism back to dumb fun and I believe it's up to us to make that change. It probably won't happen on its own.
“This has resulted in fractured attention, anxiety, and sadly, a diminished sense of place and belonging even with the connectivity the internet could offer.”
Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing?
Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…
I have no idea how she generated the text, but whether LLM or not, it isn't a recounting of direct experience. The author graduated high school in 2019 and never experienced the Internet of the 90s and doesn't remember pre-2006 because she was a toddler.
It doesn't have the usual giveaways of LLM text (except for the rather prominent dashes) but definitely has a similar verboseness and repetitiveness. Human writing can be like that too, if its author wanted to pad it out to a word quota.
You can't even do it ironically anymore because the average user doesn't pick up on it and whatever insane joke you pull will become internet norm in the future
Are they though? I realised a couple of weeks ago that meme culture seems to have died. Obviously not to zero, we still see them, but there seemed to be two meme times - the advice animals time of around 2014, and another time since, but they don't seem popular now
The kids are memeing heavily with AI. I don't understand it, but then again, my parents wouldn't have understood rage comics or other memes from back in the day.
Really not sure what GP is referring to - lots of humor still going around - but I can probably guess.
The internet is for everyone. That includes what you're not interested in.
It's pretty clear to me you all are just looking for closure. You do not want to live in the past. You can prove it to yourself by finding any old discussion archive and feeling the cringe. You do not want the values of the past either. You're chasing a feeling that is more related to your own aging than what various media like the internet "are".
Things would have changed anyway. You might just be upset that it wasn't on your terms. You can try to revive old ideas, but that veers into art. Art is very hard and requires a much deeper perspective than nostalgia. The perspective required to create what you want will also necessarily ruin what you expected to feel from it.
A relevant quote: "Everything was better back when everything was worse" - David Sipress, The New Yorker, Nov 24, 2003
> In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet was a deeply physical thing, a location. One “arrived” at the internet with purpose and intention. It was an embodied experience.
As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true.
For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites.
That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995.
Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).
Every single discussion around UI is now laden with "this isn't 100% optimized for user interaction" like there's some rulebook dictating exactly what you have to do for your website to be useable.
There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.
As an aside - anyone else really dislike the typeface used on this page? I find it difficult to read.
I think the big change has been a shift to massive platforms for everything - so before you'd have hundreds of little vBulletin forums, IRC servers etc.
Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc.
It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.
Yeah sure, but it doesn't explain why. If I were to point out to anything, it would be monetization - starting from early ads ruining everything with pop-ups, through corporations gathering data, bad actors exploiting every little vulnerability to get some leverage, to users themselves aligning themselves with money; less and less people doing what they want just for fun, but rather adhering to corporate guidelines and ad strategies to get as much as they can out of this system. So much that other internet users who don't get anything out of it would also start behaving that way, maybe with hopes of getting a slice of the pie at some point. Maybe their next tweet will be a hit?
And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.
>And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.
It absolutely is, because everything is adversarial. Every piece of advice is a hidden ad, every friendly person an attempt to lure you into parasocial relations, every teacher a course seller.
We went from a community to normalizing psychopathy.
Hear hear.
It seems so innocent. “Just an ad” but the whole influencing industry is kind of a nice word for “manipulation”
When the cost of manipulation is so low, and the repercussions for lying and cheating are not there, everything gets skewed.
And a little while before that, the desktop computer was a mystical thing that could take you to wonderlands. I was truly an intriguing machine, instead of just another home appliance.
Exactly. Thats it what i most miss, the sense of wonderful misteries and possibilities that the computer had.
I too am waiting for the pendulum to swing from clean corporate cookie cutterism back to dumb fun and I believe it's up to us to make that change. It probably won't happen on its own.
i wrote a zine on how to set up your own server / website and left free copies of them around some friendly indie bookstores and libraries
hopefully we'll see something new soon
Some corners of the web are still real places: https://projectvv.de
“This has resulted in fractured attention, anxiety, and sadly, a diminished sense of place and belonging even with the connectivity the internet could offer.”
Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing?
Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…
The article seems to repeat its thesis almost verbatim three times.
And the title/concept seems mostly copied from this YouTube video from a mouth earlier: https://youtu.be/oYlcUbLAFmw?si=T1AIE4w49qF1u7ul
I think about that video quite often
I have no idea how she generated the text, but whether LLM or not, it isn't a recounting of direct experience. The author graduated high school in 2019 and never experienced the Internet of the 90s and doesn't remember pre-2006 because she was a toddler.
Thanks. Glad I'm not the only one who felt that. I think the author just learned the word panopticon.
It doesn't have the usual giveaways of LLM text (except for the rather prominent dashes) but definitely has a similar verboseness and repetitiveness. Human writing can be like that too, if its author wanted to pad it out to a word quota.
i love those days where we uses visit internet cafes to play games and enjoys the internet through searching in google.com
altavista.com
Webcrawler
The thing that kills me is how serious it's gotten. Can't joke around anymore, not unless you're doing it ironically.
You can't even do it ironically anymore because the average user doesn't pick up on it and whatever insane joke you pull will become internet norm in the future
Memes are still a thing.
Are they though? I realised a couple of weeks ago that meme culture seems to have died. Obviously not to zero, we still see them, but there seemed to be two meme times - the advice animals time of around 2014, and another time since, but they don't seem popular now
> Are they though? (...) meme culture seems to have died
This is how I know you're out of touch.
The kids and their memes are alive and well, you just don't know where they are and what that looks like.
The kids are memeing heavily with AI. I don't understand it, but then again, my parents wouldn't have understood rage comics or other memes from back in the day.
Really not sure what GP is referring to - lots of humor still going around - but I can probably guess.
The internet is for everyone. That includes what you're not interested in.
It's pretty clear to me you all are just looking for closure. You do not want to live in the past. You can prove it to yourself by finding any old discussion archive and feeling the cringe. You do not want the values of the past either. You're chasing a feeling that is more related to your own aging than what various media like the internet "are".
Things would have changed anyway. You might just be upset that it wasn't on your terms. You can try to revive old ideas, but that veers into art. Art is very hard and requires a much deeper perspective than nostalgia. The perspective required to create what you want will also necessarily ruin what you expected to feel from it.
A relevant quote: "Everything was better back when everything was worse" - David Sipress, The New Yorker, Nov 24, 2003
> In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet was a deeply physical thing, a location. One “arrived” at the internet with purpose and intention. It was an embodied experience.
As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true.
For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites.
I remember when Wikipedia was founded in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia
That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995.
Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).