I feel like there’s some amount of nostalgia filter here.
People thought the old memes were good?
People liked deep fried memes?
Whaaat?
As a nearly full time internet user since dialup, the web has changed a lot. Dynamic updates to websites is one of the nice things that’s changed. You no longer need to mash F5 to keep up to date on anything. Wifi is way better, though for a while there it wasn’t really a “thing”.
The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate. Most people online had similar hobbies and interests, so most people online were similar, and their interests varied only a little on specific things.
Ads were basically a joke. Everyone had a website, usually on Geocities or something. You’d spend hours painstakingly putting together your website, then when you went to other people’s websites, you’d skim over it and never look at it again.
No bots existed, if someone was talking to you, then you probably knew them somehow, or you were on a public forum/IRC. No YouTube, no Netflix, but mp3 file sharing was happening even before Napster.
There wasn’t a lot to do at first, but after you found a few websites you liked, whether Slashdot or fark, 4chan or something else, you were hooked. People were brutally mean, especially for sites like hotornot. No social media or social networks, no corporations, just people mostly. Most sites selling stuff were scams. Early eBay was a trip.
This all morphed into a more congealed mass when social media became a thing and “high-speed internet” was more readily available. WiFi g ERA, back when it was always referred to by the standard, 802.11g. only laptops for a while then the iPhone dropped and it’s been a steady downhill after that.
Now the internet is huge, everyone and their fridge is on social media. Ads are everywhere and worse than ever. Almost everything is trying to funnel you into one of a handful of categories that you don’t fit into to sell you something. A few gems still exist, like the Foss community and stuff like Lemmy.
IDK, the old web sucked in some ways, but was awesome in other ways. Now there’s just too much to keep up on, and unless you spend every waking moment consuming content, it’s basically impossible to do. Some people have staked their entire career on basically aggregating memes and popular stuff, to give an overview to those who don’t have the time to do it themselves.
Media streaming is pretty good, though, media companies keep trying to make it into the next cable TV bundle package, and keep raising the prices and enforcing rules that were not possible 20 years ago, and that sucks.
I’m don’t think that this is better. It’s certainly different, but not better. The way things are going well cause the internet to become a wasteland of AI bots and advertisements all run my corpos because everyone else will be unemployed and unable to find work because their job has been replaced by some AI or other technology that doesn’t cost the corp as much as humans do. I’m sure minimum wage and salaries will be corrected to match inflation right after the majority of the workforce is laid off to be replaced with whatever technology does their job for them, which will create an elite class of super rich (moreso than they already are) who own the company either through shares or by being in an upper management kind of position, and a “middle” class of the people hired to maintain and fix the technology… There will be no lower class, just a massive pool of unemployed people, unable to work because all the jobs have gone to, what is essentially, bots.
My prediction is that when that happens, it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet, or we’ll have to move to something that’s not capitalism to survive. I’m rooting for a star trek like economy, where your status is determined by reputation, and money no longer exists. Unlikely, but I still want it.
No idea when things will start to shift, but IMO, Amazon (the company) will make the first major move, since they burnout their workers so quickly (specifically in the warehouse and item delivery segment) that they’re already seeing the effects of running out of people willing to work in their warehouses in some areas, and as a consequence of them being unwilling to pay appropriately for the work, and/or afford the workers enough latitude to handle the work without burning out, by either hiring more people to reduce the workload, or give people… IDK, breaks to use the bathroom… They will very likely turn to robots to do the work instead. Once they get to that point, it’s all downhill as other companies will follow suit.
The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate
I agree, you had a lot of tech folks. But I think this undersells how many tech-proficient artists you had. Lots of people who knew just enough to get a website off the ground (or just knew who to ask for the answers) and then spent the balance of their time doing music or webcomics or long form prose.
I think the thing that’s strangling the web now more than every isn’t even “AI” or “bots” or “evil foreigners” so much as “sales and marketing people”. They’re fucking everywhere. Filling up my inbox. Spamming my invites list in every form of social media. Blowing up my phone. Grabbing every spare inch of screen space on every commercialized website.
If AI really was just a tool for artists and developers, I am convinced it would be an enjoyable addition to the Internet ecosystem. If the only bots were written by Slashdot and Stack Exchange forum flunkies, we’d have a plethora of useful little scripts and automated tools.
But because everything has to be marketing, and the shit that’s being marketed has to be as high margin as possible in order to capitalize on economies of scale, we are in an endless blizzard of shit I would never want and certainly never asked for.
Just a maelstrom of trash bombarding everyone who isn’t in a cubby hole like Lemmy.
it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet,
That last bit feels more likely than not, given the degree to which we’re churning up every acre of undeveloped real estate. We’re arguably already past the point of collapse.
But the idea that this will cause unemployment really hinges on the theory that AI can be cheaper and more ubiquitous than human labor. I’ve seen no evidence to support this.
On the contrary, AI is phenomenally expensive and inefficient. It’s a luxury (of sorts) that we’re subsidizing with longer working hours and a lower standard of living.
Modern AI is just another form of massive waste creation. When the bottom falls out of the market, it’s going to have to be one of the first things on the chopping block precisely because it is so resource intensive despite yielding so little
I suspect we’ll create a bunch of revisionist fantasies about how great 21st century AI was, a century from now when we’ve forgotten what it looks like. But in the meantime it’s not going to render us unemployed. It is going to bloat the economy with busy work jobs. Both on the front end fixing all the fuck ups that unmanaged automation creates and on the back end, as we scramble to clean up the mess it leaves behind.
the iPhone dropped and it’s been a steady downhill after that.
Mobile, always on Internet was a game changer.
We are still in a phase of evolution where being networked is not essential, but I expect that to disappear in a generation or two.
To be fair, All Your Base Are Belong To Us is still a banger that I may want to hear on my death bed.
Edit: what this does to me is that there is now programming language called “zig”, so you now can move zig.
I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the “social media” of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn’t get too involved.
It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).
Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there’s a lot not to like about the modern internet.
Stop, you’re making me cry.
I set up one of the first Echomail and Fidonet nodes in my country and was pretty active in the days the internet started. It was such a community effort, and seeing people start to grab hold and use it was a complete rush. To see what it turned into is utterly heartbreaking, but I guess it was predictable.
I see everyone talk about how we need to drive Linux adoption, and I get scared as fuck about what that would mean to Linux in 20 years. I don’t want to see that community vaporize the same way.
I think there’ll always be weird nerds getting excited about niche things. It’s exhausting to have to keep finding new spaces, but to some extent, I think that’s our lot in life: we’re like lyme-grass growing in sand dunes — pioneer species that grow where other things can’t (or won’t), putting down roots so other things can grow.
Unfortunately, the pioneer grasses can’t survive indefinitely in the communities they build; their existence acts as a windbreak and encourages more sand to settle, causing the sand dune to form quicker than they can grow, eventually being smothered by the dunes they helped established. They have to find somewhere else to grow, somewhere new — the sand dune of tomorrow. That’s why, when there’s a series of sand dunes at a beach, you see a sort of progression, moving from more established sand dunes to younger ones as you get closer to the shore.
Maybe in 20 years, Linux will be unrecognisable to us, and maybe that space will no longer be home to nerds like us. But we’ll always find something new to be excited about; the community won’t be vaporised, it’ll just be rejigged a bunch, as we discover new areas to put down roots. That is sad, but I think the alternative would be sadder, in a way. I don’t mean if Linux doesn’t become widely adopted, but if people stop trying to push for that — at the core of this movement/community is a bunch of people saying “hey, look at this really cool thing I care about”.
It’s easy to blame the Marram grasses for crowding out the early pioneers, but we do this to ourselves, by building tools for others to use, and working on outreach. In a way, that’s how we survive, because our community relies on people who are excited about building something new in an unexplored problem space; more gatekeepy communities may maintain their “ideological purity” for longer, but they inevitably die out.
It sucks to feel crowded out by the masses, but there’ll always be new spaces for people like us, because we’re good at building and tinkering. After all, look at where we are right now. Lemmy isn’t especially radical or new, but the atmosphere here is incredibly different to Reddit. I’m way more likely to find thought provoking discussions like this thread, for example, and to care enough to write comments like this.
I loved the old BBS community. I used to run an Amiga based BBS (also on Fidonet, I would say my node number, but it can still be looked up today, and we used real names so…). One day I had a drive failure and lost pretty much everything. No problem, said another Amiga BBS operator in my city. Bring your new HDD over and we’ll copy over my downloads folder.
Bill pay. Maps. Wikipedia. Every Song Ever. Every Movie Ever. Every re-run ever. Almost all the games. Communication about weird hobbies with people across the globe. Email your favorite author or artist directly. Free e-books from 5000BC to 1935 AD. Online tickets for travel. Online shopping. Podcasting. Online music collaboration.
Postal mail still a thing.
There is a lot to like about the contemporary internet. Perhaps people are less grateful now.
Well. I think it might be worth checking again what I wrote. I was quite clear in that I said there’s a not lot to like, not that there’s nothing to like. If I didn’t get anything from the modern internet, I’d not be here posting these comments.
I’d like to pull you up on the point about free e-books. Project Gutenburg was in its second decade by the time most home users got online. So that’s hardly a contemporary internet exclusive, it’s almost as old as the internet itself. Also, communication about weird hobbies is certainly not unique to the contemporary internet. We just did it on open services not controlled by corporate entities. Corporates that only run the service in order to sell your data.
As for a few of the things I don’t like? Well. Ads everywhere (including those containing malware), constant hacking attempts for anyone running a server (ssh/sip/www very commonly hit with some protocols getting 100+ hits per second), AI crawlers scooping up the whole internet without any care about how they impact transit fees or user experience, licensed purchases (streaming services, games, etc that can be taken away at a moments notice with zero recourse for the user), terrible user agreements for EVERYTHING especially regarding privacy with no way to reject since ALL companies offering similar services have the same damned agreements, subscriptions on everything everywhere and increasingly so, having to click to reject cookies everywhere and knowing they’re still building a profile about me whether I like it or not just in order to throw more adverts my way.
“every re-run ever” - except when streaming platforms decide to delete stuff forever arbitrarily, because they give zero shits about preservation.
Just download it then! I just got Infinity Train!
That’s what piracy is for
Bassboost and deepfrying are already outdated and old memes by now
Most of my old playlists are missing a ton of videos that have been taken down over the years. Worst of all you can’t even look up what those videos were called to search them somewhere else.
you dont miss old roblox, you miss having fun , a Roblox YouTuber
Exactly like this.
Veteran internet people sometimes go on about everything was smaller, different, blah blah blah, but I do always smell some sort of a nostalgia bias in their coments. Sure, there was some things that are better compared to now, but this is normal! Every decade has its ups and downs, and while not everything is perfect, you can’t forget the improvements that happened since then.
Controversial opinion: the Internet didn’t die, you just got left behind.
Gotta keep up. The edge of culture is always moving and trying to stay put is a guarantee that you’ll miss out.
The community of memes is more varied and nuanced than leekspin ever was. There’s more lowbrow comedy sure but there’s more of all types of content.
If you only see shit you hate online it’s your fault. Go find places you enjoy (for me that’s lemmy, as an example) and teach your algorithm to stop showing you rage bait by not falling for it.
Tiktok has plenty of problems but if you teach the algorithm that the only reason you’re there is absurdism and the bizarre: you’ll end up with an absurd and bizarre feed.
A phrase I read a while back that has pretty dystopian vibes but is pretty useful as a concept is “algorithm domestication”. It’s more or less what you describe in your comment.
I also agree, sometimes you forget that just like in the past, you still have to dig to find something good. Maybe the algorithm stuff confused people or something idk
“Rosy retrospection” is the phenomenon.
Humans are flawed. We forget how much things suck and remember what was nice about them. That can be good in getting along better with other people - but it sure causes a lot of problems in a modern context.
No - the internet pre-eternal September was not perfect. Objectively speaking it was less useful and less helpful than the modern web. A bunch of old heads got mad that they couldn’t keep using the same crusty Monty Python jokes ad nauseam when they had to routinely interact with the general public.
For real. Dude is claiming old memes used to be creative while using leek spin as the example.
Yeah but you can only get controlled absurdist bizarre stuff. It’s not people recommending things to you, it’s an algorithm that’s controlled by people with dubious intentions.
Sure you’ll see memes and funny stuff, but only the ones that have been approved by an unseen algorithm. So it’s the appearance of randomness, but not actually random.
The quality of a meme recommended by a tuned algorithm well exceeds the quality of leekspin on its own, much less in the quantity served.
Don’t use this shit for your news or to inform your world view but use it to fuck around and enjoy yourself. That’s the point. It’s an endless feed of human creativity and the bizarre. Using it for the serious is the worst way to interact with it.
Who cares if it’s a human recommending it to me - it’s a human making it and I’m here for the creators not the middlemen.
You’re saying there’s no potential for anyone to put a spin on the memes you’re consuming? You believe it’s not having any kind of influence on you in any way?
Everything always has a spin. It’s important to be critical.
That’s different than being paranoid that the CCP is controlling my mind by showing me a dog waking up it’s owner at 3am with a bowl in its mouth followed by a truck saying “Fresh milk inside” and then a stereotypical Los Angeles Latino gangster wearing an It mask and huffing from a red balloon in a storm sewer followed up with a woman in purple talking about Victorian street slang.
You’re being influenced by commenters on lemmy you should probably log off you can never be too careful. I’m actually a CIA psyop here to convince you that TikTok is bad by using reverse psychology.
It’s what you don’t see that’s significant too. Someone from Taiwan making a funny meme that might make you feel like Taiwan is a cool place that you wouldn’t want something bad to happen there? Probably not going to see that. Someone in Hong Kong being nostalgic about when their vote actually made a difference? Not going to see it. A Uighur just talking about their day to day life. Not going to see it.
Everyone knows people have a limited amount of time to consume information. If they fill up that time with anything and everything other than the things they don’t want you to be thinking about, they can erase these things from public consciousness.
China is full of fun and happy people! Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Uighur people? Never heard of them!
When it’s a person discussing things with you rather than a very small set of algorithms controlled by a very small group of people, you’ll hear about things you might not hear about from an algorithm. Sure it’s determined by what the person you’re talking to knows about and what they care about, so it’s very random. But at there’s at least there’s a probability you’ll hear about things that are inconvenient to the powerful people for you to know about.
I have family in Taiwan, (and get Taiwanese content constantly) that’s not a convincing argument. Thanks.
Umm annon that was not the wild web. The wild web was in the 90’s and early 00’s. That was truly the wild web.
Nah I think they’re more or less right. I’d maybe pull it back 3 or 4 years, but not as far as 2004.
What killed off the old wild web was the popularity of centralised platforms. Facebook (open since 2006, really started taking off more around 2008/9), YouTube (first video 2005, really takes off from 2007/8), and Reddit (self posts first allowed in 2008), and other things like that which were admittedly great for allowing more people to share their creations with the world, but we’re disastrous for the open web, because they killed off independent blogs, forums, and other smaller websites.
So it sounds like the Internet died in 2008.
Right about with the uprise of the smartphone i guess
I would say it contracted a terminal illness at some point around 2006±1 and went into palliative care in 2008±1, but didn’t fully die for another 5ish years. The death of Google Reader seems a good landmark to use, since RSS was a really helpful tool that became less necessary as sites became more centralised.
MySpace was huge before Facebook, and it killed off a lot of blogs. Late 90s and early 2000s were truly the wild web IMO. I had a geocities page with its own forum before MySpace made me abandon it due to inactivity.
I remember watching saddam hussein hanging video when i was 12, good times
Ah the good old “korn_music_vide.wmv” that immediately cuts to someone in an orange jump suit on their knees.
Korn really getting intense with the new music videos
Ya, I remember the first time I went on rotten and my young mind was not prepared for it. Honestly I miss the good old days when the most shocking thing was lemonparty and tubgirl.
deleted by creator
Don’t forget about the goatse man
Googling CD Keys, Torrents and Cracks was easy back then. DC++ was the way to go and Limewire was not yet Infested with CP and Viruses. There was a sweet spot but only for 2 years. After that, the golden age of Piracy with the File-Hosters came and Reddit wasn’t shit.
If I have to pinpoint the timeframe: When 4Chan got really unironic racist (and the Stromfront forum leaked to the rest)… oh and Facebook…
Oh man, we had DC++ semi-officially endorsed by the inter-college IT department at my university in 2013/14. It was fantastic, especially since in my first year we only got 5 GB of data per month (with a large number of unmetered sites, including anything from Google), so without the unmetered file intranet it’d have been really hard to manage. Unfortunately as they increased the data caps it killed the popularity of DC++, which ended up getting killed off not long after I left.
Too many beheadings in the wild web. But yeah, those years were really the wild web.
We live in an internet.
“I’m old” vs “I MOLD”
I like the latter more, said like Dr. Weird.
I knew it was “I’m old” just because I remsmber the old Fucki Mold joke…
I didn’t realize it was supposed to be “I’m old” until your comment
Actually it’s iMold, and electronic jello mold with a touchscreen developed by apple
It only displays the oldest memes while serving some disgusting salad inside the jello
Same here - and i like “i mold” a lot.
i thought it was L mold, as in the way memes what have gone through a lot of “right click save” cycles have the jpeg artifacts described as mold, and that it was somehow lame
Anyone has one of those lists? Can we move these memes to peertube or something?
The ancient legendary YT meme that Anon has as his profile pic is Leek Spin by Xyliex, created 18 years ago! I think it also popularized the Levan Polka as a meme song staple long before it’s revival with Bilal the street drummer/cat vibing video.
And luckily it’s already on archive.org so we’ve got one down!
4chan doesn’t have profile pictures. That’s the image anon posted
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
But they were all of them deceived, for another meme was made. In the land of YTMND, to the music of Three Six Mafia, the Edge Lord forged, in secret, a meatspin meme to troll all others.
And into this meme he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One meme to rule them all.
It’s the Ievan Polkka, “Ieva’s polka” where Ieva is a Finnish/Baltic variation of the name Eva.
Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja RÕÕM!!
Profile pic, good one.
I can hear that!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano
AYBABTU is Lord!
Kinda sad that it’s almost never mentioned that this is just a scene with Inoue Orihime from Bleach.
Influncer didn’t exist yet? I think young mind OP just didn’t understand that he was market to lol
I mean, I can’t speak to OP in particular, but there were definitely lots of years where people made shit for free, sold nothing, and didn’t consider it a job.
Like, there was no real mechanism for stick figure martial arts animations to make any money at all. Newgrounds or Ebaum’s World must have made some money from ads, but I don’t think any of that was profit-shared with the creators back in those days. Some of the creators were straight up anonymous because they didn’t even think to put their names on their stuff.
Obviously celebrities and ads and stuff still existed on the earth at the time, but it didn’t spread to the internet in a big way until later.
At least that’s how I remember it…
Newgrounds or Ebaum’s World must have made some money from ads, but I don’t think any of that was profit-shared with the creators back in those days.
Ebaums actually decompiled flash animations to remove watermarks added by the creators just so they could keep all the ad revenue for themselves.
Fuck ebaums. Newgrounds was legit, though.
There’s plenty of new good stuff on youtube still. Just a lot more junk as well
We can make it anew! I feel like Activitypub and federation has given us the tools to revive the old internet, made by our own hands.
The internet is now just a bunch of segregated echo chambers.
It always was in a way. In the early days only people with interest in the technology went online. Then, in the forum era, people found their communities and stuck with it. Only because of the rise of social media were suddenly all people on the same few platforms, which is now naturally splitting apart again into groups, subs, feds, etc
I’m working on a decentralised sharing protocol, so that anyone can have their own website, I just have to find some people interested in testing it out 😊
That sounds super interesting! Can you link me/tell me how that works networking wise at a high level? I’ve been poking at a number of distributed compute and decentralized software lately just because every single one has its own unique solutions to the various chicken/egg problems that decrentalization pose
Okay, so in the most simple way, the protocol is based on “I share yours, and you share mine”.
That means you run a little node connected to the internet, sharing other peoples “things” (it’s all encrypted so you don’t know whatever it is) and their nodes share your website. Add oversharing (you share say 10 different data from 10 different nodes, and they all share yours) and you have a robust presence too.
You can then share your website with a simple link.
I say website but you can share whatever you want, daily information, backup things, your holiday photos, anything really.
You can check it out on https://tenfingers.org (some more technical information can be found in the whitepaper available there too). There is a fully functioning implementation BTW.
Would you mind sharing what those chicken and egg problems are? To see if I navigated them well :-)
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to do my best to answer them ofc.
Awesome name! And even more awesome concept! Will test it out first chance!
Thank you!
I set up a sub at lemmy.mindoki.com/c/tenfingers if you want to share how it went… Or if you have questions and whatnot ofc :-)
Similar concept?
