i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
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The creativity and willingness to share.
Anyone could make a crappy site.
Anyone could fire up some phpBB.
People created a lot of stuff that mainstream commercial developers weren’t willing to invest time in. Think windows power toys, mp3 players or converters, game mods, all the little things that filled the gaps in mainstream OS and other software. Add the free stuff that people made like Blender or other specialized software that did what commercial software did but for free.
Flash games.
Linux distros.
Hobbies and how-tos.
There was so much stuff. Now it’s all mostly locked down under DRM or whatever.
I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren’t wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there’s less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.
A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.
I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.
And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are “um,so”, and all we’re looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it… and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.
You also can’t ctrl-f a video. It’s by far the worst format for information.
And in terms of actual information per kilobyte, it’s often absolutely laughable compared to text.
Everyone’s using video for everything these days because that’s where the ad money is. Hooray, the tyranny of capitalism.
Or stock videos
It’s very easy to process an actual article and evaluate whether it actually does what I’m looking for enough to read it properly.
Video doesn’t provide that. It’s a bad format unless what you’re doing is actually visual in nature. Reviewing a video game? Sure, provided you’re spending meaningful examples of the actual mechanics. Reviewing a video camera? Absolutely.
If your video is just you talking at a camera, it almost definitely shouldn’t be a video.
Exactly this! My hearing problems don’t help the matter at all. Also they’re painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.
whats up guys in todays video I’ll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe
So today we’re going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I’m doing a video on tying shoes.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it’s something that you need to know. So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you’re in the right place! We’re talking about tying shoes.
So without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes … [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]
This is so accurate. I end up hitting the 1-9 numbers keys to see at what chunk of the video they get to the real meat.
Cue, 30 seconds of annoying intro music
I guess the catch is that I’d prefer to watch a video for information because the experience is better than the absolutely ad riddled text news sites.
thats not “the catch” its your preference
Googling so many “how do I do X?” type of questions have top-results of 10-minute videos where someone has their cluttered Desktop in full 1920x1080 and then they open the tiny command prompt in a small window (it’s clear they have no idea how to record a video), where they clumsily type commands they clearly don’t understand, and fumble through the entire process.
I just needed a single command. It should have been a 1-second result at the top of search, not shitty videos or SEO dynamically-generated shit site that are trying to sell me something.
The creativity people were willing to share. Forums, DIY guides, blogs, neat yet crappy animations on Youtube. It’s all kind of still there, but it’s hard to find with how the internet is today.
It was full of passionate people who made things because they enjoyed it. Now, it’s either how-to sites written by bots/keyboard monkeys, or you’re fast-tracked to the #1 video. You have to really go looking for the human now.
I just miss when you could search for things on search engines and find what you were looking for. I miss when putting operators, quotes, and parentheses actually changed the search results.
I miss when AI wasn’t shoved into EVERYTHING. I miss when the internet was usable to be honest.
There’s a certain scrappyness that has been lost. I think back to SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, that sort of stuff where people just made things, didn’t matter if they couldn’t draw, some of the best things were stick figure animations. Even on Youtube now people are doing ad reads to camera like a 1950’s talk show host.
I also miss the sort of folk mythologies that emerged from what I like to call the Contextless Era. The Napster/Limewire explosion pre-iTunes led to a lot of things being shared with no context except for chronically incorrect file names. Which is why at least one person who reads this sentence still thinks System Of A Down wrote a song about the Legend of Zelda.
I kinda miss the PC first internet. Just in general. I miss instant messenger clients. MSN, AIM and Yahoo! Facebook fucked it up. As Tom Scott once said, those style of messengers had the benefit of requiring users to log in, which meant being online was a signal you weren’t busy.
Wait was that not system of a down???
Called it!
No; the song - simply titled “Zelda” is from the album Rabbit Joint, by the band Rabbit Joint. Singer Joe Pleiman wrote the lyrics to the tune of the Hyrule Overture by Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.
Back in the day, little known bands would attempt an early form of SEO, they’d put the names of more famous bands or artists in the file names of mp3s they would upload. Say you were an obscure (and for my purposes, fictional) metal band named Scorn Town, you might upload your newest track as “Blood of the Night - Scorn Town (metallica).mp3” to kind of trick Metallica fans into downloading and listening to your song.
But you did a stupid: It’s one of those songs whose title isn’t in the lyrics, but you wrote the band’s name into the chorus because you’re trying to get people to know who you are. So people think the file name is of the pattern “Flagpole Sitta - I’m Not Sick But I’m Not Well (Harvey Danger).mp3”. Actual title - what you think the actual title is (band name).extension. So a lot of small time acts accidentally attributed their own songs to more famous groups by incorrect titles. Or their fans did it for them; any prank phone call skits were attributed to the Jerky Boys, and any white man performing stand-up comedy who was even slightly southern (especially Bill Engval) was credited as Jeff Foxworthy.
And because this was the contextless era, no one even thinks to question this and if they do they don’t find anything because Scorn Town doesn’t and never will have a website and even if they did Alta Vista can’t find it. So it gets written into digital folk history at face value.
Pleiman’s vocals did bear quite a resemblance to that of System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, and Chop Suey was HUGE at the time. And some unknown individual uploaded Zelda by Rabbit Joint to Napster with a file name similar to “SOAD - Legend Of Zelda.mp3.”
Similarly, “The end of the world” aka “H’okay, so. Here’s the Earth, s’chillin…” was NOT made by Group X.
Link, he come to town!
He come to save!
The princess Zelda!
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn’t.
- Don’t feed the trolls
- Don’t talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there’s a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you’re one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you’re a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn’t really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said “The internet is leaking, this won’t end well.”
Didn’t realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it’s cool. It’s so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being “cancelled”. Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around “you just can’t understand my experiences” rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from “we’re all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can” to “we’re all wannabe celebrities that don’t have time to explain anything to the losers who aren’t good enough to understand our experiences” it all went to shit.
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now
which is honestly and deeply confusing. because on the internet no one knows you’re a dog! (oh. you got back to that two sentences later)
i just don’t go in for identity. at all. no one knows i’m a dog, and i like it that way.
Don’t get me wrong, identity is important. Even on the internet it can make sense in certain contexts like if you have a community for people of that group. There’s a time and a place for that.
But in most contexts it’s really unimportant in internet conversations.
But with the rise in social media it’s become the most important thing on the internet to the point where people can’t express ideas or accept an idea without it being connected to a person’s identity. Back in the day when everyone was pseudo-anonymous there was a death of the author kind of thing on everything so it was 100% about ideas and 0% about identity.
- less centralization
- obscure flash games
- random people’s crappy colorful html sites
- being able to find random people’s crappy html sites on search engines, despite not meeting the modern strict ranking criteria or being bloated with SEO
- being able to read fun, and sometimes unique and interesting ideas on said crappy html sites
- less DRM everywhere
- less commercialization and people trying to sell you crap (not saying less ads specifically because pop-up ads were everywhere)
- more people just sharing things for the sake of sharing even if it sucks
- anonymity
- just generally the more raw and people oriented feel and less of the corpo ridden EEE/data-sucking/cloud-for-everything/enshittification bullshit we have to deal with on a constant basis these years
The Flash games are what I actually miss the most, but all good points. My coworkers and I would pick a game from addictinggames.com every week and compete. No micro transactions, no intrusive ads, just mindless fun.
Motherlode was such a fun game. Thats what got me into game dev.
The broadness of the internet… Now its like 12 main websites and they are all time stealing scams with tedious or generic content
Not having to click some accept data mining cookie banner before I can see the site.
The lack of monetisation and the irrelevant ads that did exist were sat on the website itself…
Active forums. everything seems to be a subreddit now
There was no google. I used dogpile…
Stumbleupon and curated bookmark lists… The fact I had hundreds of sites bookmarked and categorised.
Dodgy assed chatrooms… Asl… Creepy question In hindsight.
I dont miss under construction banners, color clashing sites and low resolutions
I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.
Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here’s a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn’t worked for 5 years and isn’t actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you’ve viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here’s the next article on error -22.
Also, downloads were “here’s the link to it on our FTP server”, none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.
Unless you’re talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet
Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn’t all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there’s not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You’d look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.
There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn’t a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you’re looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.
The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.
Yeah in the late 90s/early 2000s it wasn’t that predatory in my recollection.
Search engines with actual results, now every search is about trying to sell you something. Searching for a product used to pull up its manufacturer and specs, now its just where to buy it or something like it.
Have you ever tried Kagi? It’s pretty interesting and I’m giving it a shot.
I am using it, it is good for me. Don’t miss google at all.
I’d like to have enough money to pay for Kagi :( their trial made me think it could easily replace Google for me
Lack of big corpos infecting everything.
The Fediverse is the closest thing to early internet rn, I fear for it because of the whole Threads thing
What’s up with Threads?
Threads is owned by Facebook (aka Meta), and recently integrated into Fediverse. Many instances defederated from it, some voted on this action. Basically the worry is the whole “embrace, extend, extinguish” threat. More on the phrase here, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I miss when normies and politicians were scared and confused by it so they left it alone. When computers in general required some skill and knowledge to use so there was a natural barrier to entry.
Old internet lacked the following, which made it better:
- Scrolling shenanigans (fixed scrolling points, pointless animation and content position that changes with scrolling)
- Navigating pages that doesn’t create a history for you to easily back-forward them
- Everything can be easily monetized
- Using javascript for page layout that could be done with plain html
- The worst kind of intrusive ads, notifications and cookies
- Everything looks samey and “professional”
- Centralization
- Surgically precise SEO
Content wise, I think points 3, 6 and 7 are the main reasons why we “don’t have as much interesting content”. Too much focus on looking professional, on being marketable, on being profitable. 7, centralization, is how facebook, reddit and others pretty much killed several smaller forums
I love that neocities.org exists, you can make your own website and have a domain there for free, much like the old days of geocities. The problem is that your content won’t be found unless you advertise it elsewhere.
In a way, I suspect the centralized corporate internet is much like the difference between humans living in several, sparsely populated villages, where things and people feel more “connected”, vs living in large urban sprawls, where you’re surrounded by people and stuff, but hardly interact or care about most of it.
Too much focus on looking professional, on being marketable, on being profitable.
So you don’t like SEO…
your content won’t be found unless you advertise it elsewhere.
So you actually don’t care about SEO, but want better content?
I don’t hear anything about you creating content. The issue is, content creators make more money with SEO and monetization. That’s why they do it. If you don’t pay, they don’t care what you want.
Don’t you remember that most Geocities sites sucked and were hard to navigate? Every other page said “under construction”. You are currently on a network that has much better content and interaction than those sites.
Post more if you want more content.
I don’t hear anything about you creating content.
Oh look, it’s the “you can’t complain about X if you don’t do X” fallacy! It’s a cheap ad hominem, if I’m not mistaken. I have created and freely shared a number of 3D files for printing under a different handle, which you may argue isn’t “content”, I have also answered several questions on AskGodot, again on a different handle, before the site overhaul. I could go on, but that’s beside the point, because your phrase is just an attempt in bad faith to derail the discussion and shut down my voice because I “don’t count”, because I “don’t create content”.
content creators make more money with SEO and monetization
Which, allow me to point again to one of my complaints about the current internet: Everything can be easily monetized. The easier it is to get money creating “content”, the more it becomes a flood race for the money.
You are currently on a network that has much better content and interaction than those sites.
True to a certain extent. The interaction on some of the current sites feel like a checklist of dark patterns. I also have to wade through a continually growing swamp of auto-generated shit, whether AI or not, to find good stuff. Such prevalence of low quality content decreases the likelihood of me even wanting to get out of my “comfort bubble” of known places and creators.
Post more if you want more content.
This makes no sense.
Articles written for people not for search engines. I’m very familiar with SEO and you can see very clearly when article is created for ranking rather than movie readership. Unfortunately when 90% of traffic for many sources is Google you have no choice but to write articles this way.
God yes.
I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. We’re also occasionally asked to put up SEO commercial text for our advertising partners. And good god, they look like they were written by a lobotomised monkey on a malfunctioning typewriter.
Are you not called journalists anymore? Or are you just lying?
One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.
In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.
From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.
Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.
I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…
Ah yes! The elusive columnist! None of those ever attended J school or are held to journalism standards. They can definitely print whatever the fuck they want without any sort of fact finding or double checking.
What are you even talking about?
Having a bad day?
"We’ve all been there. You want to make a large batch of cookies for friends or family, but your KitchenAid stand mixer stopped working. When your KitchenAid stand mixer stops working, it inevitably leads to frustration. This is a common problem. Fortunately, there is a solution. I’ll show you a quick and easy way to fix your KitchenAid stand mixer when it stops working.
Believe it or not, the first KitchenAid stand mixer was made way back in 1918…"
This is one of the few cases where I think having an LLM bot straight up plagiarize an article is valid. They’re going out of their way to waste my time, so I’ll gladly have a bot lift the two sentences of the 20 paragraph article that actually answer the question.
If they want ad revenue they can make articles for humans, or they can eat my entire ass.
It’s often not up to publications but up to Google though. Finally Google is collapsing and taking all that spam with them.
One of the main arguments against LLMs is that content creation on the web will dry up but 90% of content of the web is already inaccurate SEO garbage. Maybe accelerationists were right this time.
