Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt “the real Internet” was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I’ve come to realize that it’s always been shitty. That’s my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn’t understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet.
Nah, I’m a Gen X’er. I agree that the internet in the 90’s was cool, but by the late 90’s, early 00’s it was a lot more polished and bandwidth was plentiful enough to actually get a lot of stuff done online without ridiculous wait times. After MySpace fell and Facebook took over, it was still pretty cool. It’s when Facebook established dominance over the web, sharing their shitty like buttons everywhere, Google started buying out cool companies and making their search engine worse, and blogs & forums started dying that I think the internet lost its soul.
@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: “Windows '95 is Amiga '87.”
Yahoo and ISPs like AOL tried that. And were partly successful. Yahoo was the ‘literally’ the home page for 90% of Internet users. In India, ISPs were decentralized but it’s only JIO or Airtel now, if you 24x7 service and connectivity.