old internet
old internet
106 comments
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I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.
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There's still rss.
There's still email.
There are still blogs.And there's gemini.
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In México very little News sources use RSS, at most they have Flipboard accounts or Twitter :(
This also applies to information about the government, where most of the politicians and other elements use Twitter :/
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True elsewhere – there's no profit in RSS I guess.
It is still around though and you can RSS-ify some sites.
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Blogs never begged for dopamine
The little counter I put on my page certainly did! Got so excited when it reached 100, even though it was mostly me.
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But you never made an onlyfans to channel more traffic and then eventually get caught up in a cartel and get owned and sold by a pimp even though on paper it looked as if you were making your own choices.
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The "old internet" still exists mostly. People have moved on to other things. You can still use IRC, Usenet, RSS, BBS, Forums... they all exist. They may not be as popular.. but a lot of the old web tech is still out there.
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If anyone really cares, gopher is still somewhat alive.
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"email never throttled you"
Someone forgot about the good ol' days of spam? Chainmails? Viruses? Here's an example of a classic virus,
YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS
This virus works on the honor system:
If you're running a variant of Unix or Linux, please forward thismessage to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random.
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They used to make you pay $100/yr for an email address.
Not custom. Just an email address
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I can assure you, your email is throttled. You just haven’t noticed.
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Absolutely miss that old internet.
It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.
I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.
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Actually, it was probably kind of a boon for us nerds, because cool people would come to us and ask us to make their webpages for them. Now Zuck etc. does it for them...
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There's more computing power than ever but seemingly fewer services than ever.
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And it's not like there was any shortage of dummies that actually did, either!
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No, there weren’t. But that wasn’t a problem because they could be avoided, or they were curiosities. Not like today, where social media keeps shoving them in front of you at every opportunity.
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We used to make our own WEB PAGES!
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Bring back Livejournal. It was free therapy and you could be your messy self.
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The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.
Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline.. cause people don't just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.
Its toxic as fuck.
Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just..exist.
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Have an... Errr... Upvote.
You're right, it also highly goes against a lot of small groups, neurodivergent with different understanding etc.
It's literally out of control with no corrective.
But yay internet points.
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Why no emojis? Personally, I've always felt like they were just a better way of expressing a person's emotion or meaning that's a bit more than plain text can easily describe.
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Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
... Is what i would like to say, but maybe that only works in smaller communities. I know a YouTuber who is currently getting baselessly harassed by popular assholes and she probably has an insane number of dislikes.
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Voting is great though. It helps sort wheat from chaff.
Except it doesnt.
It just reinforces blind group think, no thought or reason. Upvotes don't make people more right, downvotes don't make people more wrong. Its just thoughtless highschool cliquey shit, that was intentionally created to manipulate users into conflict to provoke more engagement.. Theres a reason this upvote/downvote shit started on ad driven social media... Only you get to do it all hidden behind the anonymity of a button.
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emojis are the problem? 🥺🥺🥺😭
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RSS still works pretty well.
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As does everything else in the list. It's just that almost no one uses it, because people don't mind the not owning in exchange of the content.
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We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.
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Join the uBlock+NoScript revolution! We don't even see the social media buttons.
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Web3 is more that everything is an app/platform now.
Keep your ad blockers though.
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What kind of pages get indexed?
Pages must be simple in design. Simple HTML, non-commerical sites are preferred. Pages should not use much scripts/css for cosmetic effect.
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rss2email is great also... simple concept- run the program as a scheduled task, it checks for any updated css feeds, then sends you an email with the new ones.
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I recently set up freshrss and have been digging it. It's not perfect, but definitely as good as Google reader was.
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The Internet was once called "the Wild West" when lack of scrutiny was enabling all kinds of things like rampant copyright infringement and thinly veiled pedophilia (see "lolita"). As in the actual wild west, pioneers were inventing new tools to survive and thrive. Brief periods like this are probably normal before entrenched players - whether they're railroads or media giants - roll in and lay down an organizational layer that makes it a lot easier for typical people to participate. In doing so they also tell the government how to regulate the new world to make sure their profit models still work. Then they take credit for the whole thing.
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...it's been the frontier of human condition for as long as we've wrought civilisation from the wild; always ephemeral; always pollinating, seeding anew, and burgeoning along the fresh meadowlands of social intercourse...
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It was just the first taste of a sweet poison.
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Fuck you, yes it was perfect.
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This might not be a question for you, but I'll ask it anyway.
What do we do to get it back? I have computers, I have an internet connection. What can I and we do to make our space?
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- Make a personal website.
- Link to it in some places.
- Put links to other places on it.
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I still use email and RSS.
If you want to read blogs and minor websites, maybe check out kagis "small web" index (this is free access I believe): https://kagi.com/smallweb
The real web is still there, and probably has as many users as it did 25 years ago, but the average person doesn't use it. Remember the average person didn't use the internet much at all 25 years ago.
One thing I want to do is try to create a space for family to hang out. Self-hosted. No concerns about data mining or trolls, just a personal space for us.
They don't have to use it but starting from the right group, I think they will, many of them perhaps only because it will become the only place to see photos of our kids. Just need the right platform.
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Support federated content and sites. Self-host your own content using software that makes it compatible with federation. Continue to use democratized protocols (email, RSS, etc.)
We’ll never be able to go back to the way it was. But we can take the good parts and center around them going forward. Proprietary and silo’d content and platforms eat themselves alive by design. The open web just has to outlive it.
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This might be the depressing answer, but: nothing.
Most people want a fun (=addictive), nice looking, free (=no cost to them), easy to use web.
And the current internet will always outperform the old one. Ads generate revenue and allow companies to fund development costs, hosting costs and optimize their page for search engines better than individuals.
You, personally, can use platforms that mimick the old web, just like you're doing right now.
But if this is what most people wanted and cared about, Reddit and Twitter would long be dead and the Fediverse big and thriving. -
In addition to the other suggestions, I also recommend marginalia-search.com as an excellent searchengine for finding sites that get lost in the usual SEO soup. It has labels for sites containing javascript, tracking, ads, etc. and can find older sites quite well, though you might have to scroll past the stackexchange and substack posts, which it also picks up. The old version also has a funky diagram to show the relevance of your search, which doesn't have anything to do with anything but is kinda cool I think.
E: especially the explore page is a good way to just see some sites.
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Idk I might've been able to live without seeing the Mr. Hands video, back in the day.
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I still use my feed reader ever day.
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i donno man. i still use rss, and they solved tracking by not putting the article in the xml, just a link that ends in source rss.
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Or putting a weird (and illegal) consent dialogue the reader can't crawl. Golem.de does that, one of the biggest german tech newspapers.
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Isn't that a legitimate use-case for RSS (specifically Atom) though? My blog's feed just points to the plain-HTML pages with the post. It seems wasteful to put my entire site in a single, polled file.
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The new Internet is shitty. Like dirty meth.
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Also, you didn't need to have a mobile phone just to sign up on a site.
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Twice this week I've looked up some song lyrics origins/meanings, and it's obvious the old sites are just running LLM summaries of every song they have in their DB.
Wikipedia has notoriously been vague on this, only covering it with a couple sentences for some interview source etc. But those couple of sentences said so much more than the 20 paragraph essay of an LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
It used to be fans chimed in with their ideas and sources, establishing a solid lyrics origin or meaning. But apparently that's dead now for the big services and the blogs that exist buried under SEO.
Seriously, do it now and see what I'm talking about. It's absolute spew.
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LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.
They aren't even that capable. They simply try to predict the words that would meet a naïve observer's expectations.
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I also hate how ChatGPT infected the web nowadays is, though I usually look up song lyrics on genius. They sometimes have user generated comments with interesting tid bits. Akin to the old forums would be a lemmy community for interpreting song lyrics :)
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It's depressing because I'd rather read someone being completely wrong about a song than for some LLM to summarise the "correct" answer
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I looked up something recently, I think it was about some game, and the top result (and probably several after) were just total gibberish that didn't help at all. Just generative nonsense based on the words it was provided.
I really hope we get a solution to this. I know this is the most profitable to these people, but it's far from the most useful. It's just so cheap to make that anything else existing becomes near impossible. No matter what else is created, once the rules for optimizing it are figured out it'll be flooded with AI nonsense. It honestly feels like the death of information right now, and I don't see an ending.
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Pretty sure podcasts “tracked" you RSS usage since there's an entire analytics industry around podcasts driven through RSS but you agree with the sentiment.
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Email may not have throttled you but your 9600 baud modem sure did.
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"email" also might not throttle you, but every single (actual) mail server on earth will haha
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So glad RSS is still around. My beloved
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I miss vBulletin boards.
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Bring back local BBSes. With monthly GTs.
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Catch you at the inn with no guards, how bout that?
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past tense
I still use these things. People who post this shit are telling on themselves.
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Blogs never begged for dopamine
My livejournal certainly did.
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Forums. Good old days.
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I miss USENET. I mean, I know it's still there, but last I checked it was 99% pirated media and porn.
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Well I'm sold.
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Is see no problem there.
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Haven't posted anything in ages, but I still semi-frequently check up on SomethingAwful. I keep it as my browser home page. It is alive and well.
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I was there when the internet was bastardized.
It was like watching Rome fall.
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None of the things listed have disappeared. Rome didn't fall, it's still alive and well, we are just in city nearby with some people complaining that it's not like Rome.
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Guess I'm the only old-school ThrottleMail user who used to follow The Dopamine Fiend on Xanga.
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I still is if you avoid the dumbassery of social media.
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Where do you find cool blogs? I run a blog myself, and have come across a few cool ones, but is there a place where people promote their blogs and where I can find blogs I might like?
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Not exactly pure blogs, but random web 1.0 sites. There's some real gems in there.
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Back when the internet was just a small collection of weirdos sharing their passions and interests with eachother, without advertising, without SEO (Hell, Search engines didnt even exist during a lot of those early days..), Without bullshit.
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The first page that came up was somebody's photography blog, with the most recent posts being 2021. The second was called AJ's Ferret GIF Archive
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Still is.
106 comments