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That’s the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be…Yes, I’m making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I’m very sorry!
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I imagine you weren’t old enough to remember the early days of the Internet and the hopes we had. Maybe I’m wrong.
I’m old enough. First had internet in 1994, made my first website in 1996. Back then everything was DiY, and most regular people didn’t really see the use in it until AOL convinced them by giving them email and easy-to-access yellow-pages like thing (which was AOL’s website bundled with a browser they could install without knowing anything technical). At the time, computers were sold in furniture stores along with entertainment centres.
I vividly remember explaining to multiple clients in the early aughts that AOL wasn’t the actual internet. They couldn’t find their new website because they had no idea anything outside aol.com existed, and they were entering their web address in AOL’s site search.
I remember the hopes very clearly. I remember before that when BASIC was fun and magical.
I gotta agree – this is the natural culmination of those hopes, if not actually better. ISPs are comparatively cheap, everyone can access most sites for free and with zero technical expertise, and anyone can say anything they like on one site or another. In the beginning, it really seemed that it would be very expensive and not very accessible. Those are massive hurdles that I don’t feel get enough credit in these conversations. I’m typing this on a small computer in my hand, ffs.
If you didn’t watch all that happen from the inside (I’ve been a software and firmware developer since the mid 90s and a user experience designer since 2002, and began fucking about with programming and hardware in the mid 80s), I can totally see how many people are more cynical about expectation/reality. From the relative outside, the internet seemed to pop into existence like magic in only a few years – and it really did seem like magic, with early-adoption consumers rightly believing it could change the world.
I think the bigger issue is that knowing what all humans are thinking is not as fun as we thought it would be.
I would really like to hear from people who are not web developers or creating software and firmware. I believe the experience for the large mass of humanity is so much less than the potential it had back in the day. Yes AOL existed but it truly was the low end of the scale. It’s not like there was people who did web development software and firmware and then everybody else was on AOL. However, it is a lot like that now. The people who are smart who are savvy who can find what they’re looking for in spite of the barriers put up to finding that still enjoy the freedom and the cheap plentiful access that they’re looking for. But you have to be able to get to it using command line level language and most ordinary users don’t have anything like geocities to allow them to produce a website about their model trains.
It’s indeed a utopia for the technically savvy. And that’s it.
Right, but I wasn’t talking so much about my own experience, rather my experience with other people during that time, because I was tech support for literally everyone I knew, so I knew what they all thought. Because they told me.
AOL was what most nontechnical people had during that time. There’s a reason for those AOL disc memes. It’s made fun of a lot, but that was how the internet became mainstream. They mailed them to everyone and their grandma, and their success was it was FREE** and the discs installed and configured everything for you: the browser, the ISP settings, and even their home page. You stuck the disc into your cup holder, and it gave you a friendly icon on your desktop to click to access The World Wide Web™ (or AOL’s private version of it – most people didn’t know better). Most people would never have discovered the internet otherwise.
eta: and yes, internet society was actually that divided in the early years. More so, if anything. AOL was so ubiquitous and marketed, they made a blockbuster movie out of it. You likely can hear the tone in your head, even if you never used AOL in your life. Few brands have attained that social status, or held it for long. Oscar Meyer, Disney, things like that. And it didn’t last a hundred years; merely a few. /e
It wasn’t just the discs – if you bought your computer from the furniture store it came set up that way. Non-tech people just clicked that icon and didn’t know any better. Keep in mind that accessing the real internet was difficult and required a lot of knowledge many people neither had nor wanted at the time. The computer was for spreadsheets and solitaire, and it was a very expensive luxury.
I doubt you’ll get the response you’re looking for, because the people you’re talking about are the same people you’re decrying today. I’m saying that idealised demographic didn’t really exist, and I’m not speculating about them. I was embedded deeply in a world of those people. I remember them very clearly. I made it my career to understand them.
I strongly believe you’re seeing them through a heavy fog of nostalgia.
eta: and back to the original point, I strongly believe that people who feel the internet has fallen short of our expectations don’t remember what our expectations really were.
Good answer, but I disagree.
However, I’m willing to admit my memory isn’t perfect and perhaps I’m wrong and things were exactly as you said they were.
I am, and as a former Unix admin, I’m also amazed at how easy self hosting is these days. Hopefully it continues to grow. It certainly seems to be.
I imagine you’re probably talking more about content, but you’ve uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.
The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.
Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.
well, at its heart, the ‘www’ was supposed to be a bunch of documents linked to each other contextually… in a similar vein Wikipedia handles things
you ever try and use the web without images? genX remembers.
Marketing ruins everything.
I think that’s too generalized. Marketing finances the Internet just as it has always financed print media (including the good, even inversitgative journalism).
I think that’s too generalized. Print and written media existed for literally thousands of years before marketing finance.
Touch some grass.
I’m talking about modern print media of course, cmon. Also Printing does not date back thousands of years - it was invented (in the west) by gutenberg in the 15th century. What are you saying?
Printing existed a long time before the printing press. But woodblock printing lacked responsive design so we’re definitely being too generalized.
I am aware of that. Either way, in this context, it is not useful to go over the long history of writing or print technology. I just wanted to say that even the now largely dysfunctional business models of the print media - I mean, of course, the opinion-forming press, such as newspapers or magazines - are historically linked to advertising sales. There were even advertisements in books. This is how journalism has always been financed (in fact, subscriptions still only account for a small proportion of revenues). And it’s the same on the Internet: News sites are essentially funded by ads - the same way all major social media platforms and most of major websites work. In my opinion, it is unrealistic to claim that marketing revenues can be dispensed with, because creating content is very time-consuming and therefore costly.
I’m saying you’re responding incoherently to people making fun of you because you can’t tell they’re giving you shit for your bad take.
I’m saying you’re pick and choosing your battles so you can feel bad about the modern world while ignoring the fact that you’re a part of the growing movement against the corporate web.
The corporate hatred you have isn’t new. Infinite growth isn’t sustainable and the awareness of that is growing.
Newspapers, books, music, TV, aren’t dead, they’ve continuing to evolve and independent creators are producing more worthwhile works than I’ll ever make it through. And all of those were “dead” before the internet. “Video killed the radio star” after all. But, we’ve seen several newsrooms destroyed as not-profitable enough, only to get restarted as employee owned newsrooms. There’s never been a better time to be a patron of the arts or a music fan.
Even so, the world doesn’t exist online. Talk to people in your community. You’ll feel better and the work and art they’re creating is more impactful than “content”.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I honestly didn’t realize anyone was making fun of me (the joke is on me I guess, I just don’t get it). I don’t have a problem with the current times tho. But I know the content business. I don’t call it that because I have no appreciation for art, writing or other creative arts, but because that’s the term used in business. And from this environment I also know that profits are unfortunately placed above good content, which is why creative people, aka content creators, are not paid appropriately imo. I have also recognized this spirit, which I do not approve of at all, in many Lemmy posts. Only in disguise, so to speak: namely with people who think that intellectual property only helps large corporations like Disney. In my experience, that’s not the case at all. People make a living from their creative work and patreon donations are simply not enough - at least not for a regular and secure income. What I was getting at with my comment is that it doesn’t make sense imo to complain about a content creator signing marketing contracts - that has always been part of this business, even in the days of print media.
And I guess my main point is that focus on defeatism.
You also couldn’t make money as an artist at basically any other point in history either. But now you have more opportunity to try and make a go of it either in the corporate space (although we’ll see if AI kills those positions) or as an indie. If you care, don’t give up and watch whatever the algorithm is feeding you. Consume indie art from the people who want to make a go at it. They exist in your local community and there are several coops have sprung up in the last couple years focused on music and handmade crafts with the enshittification of the existing platforms.
What does touch some grass mean?
Also, what kind of print and media existed for thousands of years? I thought it was just religious scrolls and cave paintings
Just saying they’re a bit terminally online.
The oldest consumer complaint is from approximately 3800 years ago and is a clay tablet complaining about the copper they received from Ea-Nasir. (A meme you might have seen around, even if you didn’t know that context)
Ancient Egyptians were around long enough they were doing archeology on Ancient Egyptians. There’s plenty of science and engineering in China and Africa that predates Pythagoras’ weird cult. (Srsly, if you’re not familiar with the cult of Pythagoras, highly recommend)
Yes, I’m mainly concerned with the content. HTML certainly gives you all the possibilities, but it has ultimately led to boring but easy-to-use and correspondingly restictive UIs. I think anyone who wants to reach a lot of people today will do so via social media (original Myspace unfortunately didn’t work out, tho).
actually made my own site https://sandwich.sh/ you can do quite a lot with just html, I just don’t know what. the archive section is html generated with a bash script. sending it here because I think it’s cool
i dont understand this at all.
theres nothing stopping me from building stuff for the web. dude, i run a social media server named moist
if your complaint is that ‘users are hard to wrangle away from corporations’, well, that has less to do with the internet and more to do with lazy/ignorant people.
i think the fact they use every psychology trick hook and deceive them has some significant impact in this.
Please don’t get me wrong: I have the greatest respect for all those who try against all odds. I just think that the idea of the Internet utopians was that the Internet would promote enlightenment, understanding and education. I simply have the impression that the opposite has generally happened.
It’s not perfect, by any means, but it’s definitely having a net positive effect. Traditionally, the right has sustained themselves by getting the next generation “on their side” through various tactics such as messing with education and such. It worked pre-internet because small towns were somewhat isolated and the flow of information easier to control.
Gen Z, the first generation to grow up entirely online, has proven they aren’t buying their shit this time around and I’d argue it’s because of the Internet and all the information they can access regardless of if they’re in some podunk town in bumfuck nowhere with like 300 people or a major city with millions
At the time, the Internet was also a hope to break the power of the extremely powerful print media (not originally Tim Berners-Lee’s intention, but that was the idea of most early Internet utopians). In theory this still works today, but in practice I think it has gotten even worse: Opinions can probably even be spread more cheaply today by well-funded think tanks via a few, all the more powerful players - a prominent example is Facebook/Meta’s collaboration with Cambridge Analytica. That’s probably the reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I know I thought that…but I was wrong.
There are these tiny villages in Africa, where people take laptops or tablets and a huge stash of DVDs, and often there isn’t even a roof just like 4 sticks poking up from the ground, maybe a tarp above it or possibly not even that. People come from hundreds of miles away, even walking, and they can watch videos from literal Harvard/Yale/etc. professors on whatever subject - engineering, lessions on how to speak English, biology, physics, etc. The barriers for people who truly WANT knowledge are pretty much entirely gone now, world-wide.
Which lasted it seems for about a minute, while instead now, misinformation flows even more freely. Those setups that I mentioned above took DECADES to create, leveraging the technology available at each timepoint, and more than a little prep work to discuss with the recipient culture to let them know it is an option. And even then, situations such as Boco Haram continue to threaten their continuation, bc girls (& women) learning things is considered bad in that case.
Thus, I learned that ignorance is extremely easy to cure (barely an inconvenience, if you know that famous YouTuber’s catchphrase;-). Entire courses are available freely online, such as the Crash Course series…of series (US History, World History, literature, biology, chemistry, physics, check it out!), and nowadays the most dumbed-down explanations of extremely complex topics as you could ever want, see e.g. this video.
The barriers nowadays to knowing things are “different”. See e.g. the movie WALL-E, where the humans all just gave up and sat down… but then were never able to get back up again.
The same was said about books, but have you ever read a dollar-store romance novel? Or newspapers, but there’s also The Sun.
Everything that can be used for good, will also be used for evil. It’s all there, but you have to wash out the shit yourself. That’s what seperates the chaff from the wheat, so to speak.
Content-wise, I think we aren’t in a bad spot. There’s a tonne of information available online that wasn’t accessible before. Wikipedia is a pretty great example, but the millions of howtos scattered across Instructables, YouTube, and other sites are also pretty amazing. Yeah, there’s monetization and SEO crap, but I think (hope?) it’s a net positive.
Application-wise, I think we’re also in an okay spot. Almost anyone can publish videos, text, and opinions on corporate publishing tools. If you want, you can spin up a private server with just a credit card, and do whatever you want with incoming traffic. Web browsers aren’t quite Neuromancer/Shadowrun decks, but they do allow anytime to run untrusted code safely on a local machine.
Did all this free information bring us together? No. Not yet, at least. But I think that’s what the early tech utopians got wrong. We aren’t insufferable jerks because we don’t know any better, we’re insufferable jerks because we know better and choose to do it anyway.
That’s true, of course. I didn’t mean to say that the internet doesn’t also have very positive effects. It’s a blessing that knowledge is now much more accessible. But on the whole, it seems to me that people don’t really make use of it - quite the opposite. It seems to me that many more people are now confusing their uninformed opinions with scientific knowledge. There is no other way I can explain this strange hostility towards science that a not inconsiderable number of people are displaying - this is a phenomenon of the recent (internet) past, or is my impression wrong?
but I think (hope?) it’s a net positive.
Definitely a net positive. My friend and I were discussing something similar the other day. He rides motos and I ride downhill and we both learned via youtube. What used to be restricted to people who could afford private lessons or coaching are now available to people even in third world countries. It’s opened up a lot of new horizons for people.
I feel like it’s still mostly fine for individuals who are savvy and know where to look. In summation, though, I think the abundance of mis/disinformation spammed on social media combined with a lack of media literacy is socially corrosive.
Social media is a huge part of the problem…
Stop using social media and 90% of the internets issues stop affecting you.
Search is still fucked tho
Hopefully we can use AI to filter out AI articles at some point in the future lol. Or at least find better sources using Search.
The US is using 40% renewables, China a bit more, many smaller countries are testing 100% renewable days, ozone was mostly fixed iirc. Progress may be slow, but to say it’s not happening is factually very false.
All true, but all the technological progress has done little to change the fact that we continue to destroy the world we live in with our eyes open. This is my point: technology is generally not used for the good of humanity, but for monetary gain. If we wanted to, the world could be a better place, but we don’t use our resources that way - they are not managed by the general public, but by people who don’t have the good of humanity in mind. I think the Internet is a good example of this: Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the www protocol, didn’t earn a cent from a patent or something like that - he was just interested in scientific exchange at the time. In my opinion, that’s a true hero, not Steve Jobs (he was a great businessman tho).
The prisoners’ dilemma explains why people prefer personal profit over benefitting mankind.
It’s almost as if something gets infinitely worse once the masses adopt it
Normies ruined the internet
Watch me.
It’s exactly the way David Bowie described how it would be back in the 90’s, though.
Is this a joke I don’t get or is there any source of what did David Bowie said ? (o･ω･o)
Here you go. Interview he did in 1999. I can’t find it right now, but this isn’t the full interview; he goes into a bit more detail after this and mentions the bad things it would bring that we are starting to become more well known and widespread.
One of the early utopias was that people would no longer debate about things because the internet would bring people together and provide them with information about anything and everything… well then algorithms and social media happened, and now we’re stuck with echo chambers of anti-vaxxers and flat earthers.
Other than that, it’s been nice in many ways nobody could have anticipated back then.
I think the Internet really did make people more knowledgeable overall, but my personal theory is that, as a collective, we are in the area of knowing that dunning-Kruger effect takes place. With our current collective intelligence machines really crystallizing that to me, where if ask an LLM something it doesn’t know, it will act like the average person on the internet and make shit up and assume it close enough.
The information age really speaks to the idea that information is not knowledge, but knowledge can be formed from information. I think the next major revolution and why social media algorithms, AI, data science, etc are so hot is because they are attempts to enter the knowledge age. To take all of this access to information and truly learn something from it, at the same scale.
i remember growing up I’d literally get a buzz off a good thread or from reeling off a good post. it felt so incredible being able to communicate with people across the world and be taken seriously, evaluated on the merits of my words rather than dismissed due to age or race or anything. and most of all, it felt like this special secret between you and other dorks. now everyone has phones in their pocket. going on twitter is like going to mcdonals.
The worst comment section of all belongs to Instagram. Absolute cesspool full of the most moronic people i’ve ever witnessed. Smart phones killed the internet. We need something that isn’t THE internet, and is only accessible if you have the patience and knowledge to connect to it.
We need something that isn’t THE internet, and is only accessible if you have the patience and knowledge to connect to it.
That kinda does exist it’s just that you and I lack either the knowledge or patience to connect to it.
No, we need something that is just accessible enough that I am still included, but all those other normies aren’t! \s
If that’s what you want, it does exist. It is called Usenet and it predates the world wide web. There are still active discussion communities, though most of its bandwidth is used for file-sharing nowadays.
I dismiss this comment because your age and race are ambiguous and everything else! /S
Seriously though I kind of feel like Lemmy has at least some of that nostalgic feeling. Surfing through instances, finding that one semi-active obscure interest community you fit right in with. It’s definitely not the same but nothing stays the same.
