The internet is still fun.
I was on bulletin board systems pre-internet as a kid and spent too much time on the web in the late 90s. I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better.
Though I don't like social media much anymore and worry about the effect of screens on kids, I still love the internet and value what it makes possible.
I don't buy into these arguments of things used to be better. It's the same argument that older generations used with younger generations for music, cars, or clothes. The list goes on.
It's subjective. Technology enables new possibilities. Everything grows or dies and life moves on.
It's not that the internet used to be fun. It's that the internet changed and people tend to stay the same and not want things to change around them.
TikTok is where I find fun on the current internet. It's hilarious (Taylor Swift private jet memes), weird (grimace shake), surprising, emotionally moving (hopecore), educational (how to adjust a door closer), and always exposing me to things I've never seen (starting process for a diesel locomotive). It contains ads, but they're pretty easy to identify and very easy to skip.
TikTok is like a Potemkin village propping up the idea that the Internet is still just regular people faffing around.
The reality is that TT, like all social media, puts people on a hamster wheel of 'content creation'. Post about this, not that. Post using code words if [geopolitical event] is advertiser-unfriendly. Post something every single day so that the algorithm deigns to distribute your post to randomly selected buckets of users across the globe.
I skip the ads on Tiktok too, but at this point, even regular videos desperate for engagement are effectively ads. Taylor Swift memes, or memes related to [popular IP] are ads, just delivered by unpaid civilians.
Knowing someone close to influencer marketing- even some are paid civilians...
A friend of mine was ranting about this as an influencer. The algorithm had determined that what people needed in their lives was videos of her putting decor on the top shelf of her kitchen. She tried to post varied content, but the only things that would get views was variations of her doing the exact same thing. Absolutely ridiculous.
I never liked how addictive short form content like TikTok/Shorts/Reels are, the way they hijack your attention into an endless stream of information (a lot of time useless, but of course you can cater to your tastes) that you just stare at and swipe-swipe-swipe feels dystopian to say the least.
I personally did an experiment on myself after I had issues watching long lectures being addicted to Youtube shorts, went on a complete detox; uninstalled Instagram, only used NewPipe and my attention span skyrocketed within 2-3 weeks.
I cannot recommend enough for people to take a break from short form content like this.
I successfully evaded TikTok for years only to get accidentally sucked in once Instagram added their copycat. It made me delete the app off my phone; the format is too potent and (like you) had a deleterious impact on my productivity and attention span.
I am allergic to video content. I don't use the tiktok app or website, and I only ever watch a facebook or instagram reel if someone sends it to me, I never click through the UI to get to them. There's something so infuriating about not knowing how long you're going to be held hostage for, whether it will be worth it, whether the volume will be on or off... I just hate it.
This is a tragic comment because 1) TikTok never holds you hostage, you can flip through all videos (including ads) instantly. 2) TikTok content is an order of magnitude better than what makes its way to reels. 3) TikTok's algorithm customizes itself to your interests based on what you watch so effortlessly and quickly.
Thanks for the laugh. Next up an cyanide pill that allows you loose weight.
> TikTok never holds you hostage, you can flip through all videos (including ads) instantly.
Dark UI is in play to keep you hostage. The instant gratification is designed to keep your mind hostage.
> TikTok content is an order of magnitude better than what makes its way to reels
It's specifically selected. There is a bar you have to meet if you wish to be on the main screen.
> TikTok's algorithm customizes itself to your interests based on what you watch so effortlessly and quickly.
In comparison this is like offering an alcoholic to try an NIPA when only promising to let them have an single IPA.
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But TikTok is not the internet, it's just a service. Even if TikTok is universally considered "fun", and it isn't, that still doesn't speak to the proposition that the internet as a whole has lost most of its fun.
consuuuume
Like it or not, its interaction model lends to readily democratized production more than anything — making memorable artifacts out of interactions that would be as low in effort as the above comment.
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This wasn't a sarcasm? Honestly, I am undecided.
(I don't like TikTok and everything it stands for)
Leave your bubble occasionally and you may find that many of the creatives who might have populated Geocities or Usenet — were they born 20 years earlier — are carving out niche audiences with 300 views on TikTok.
Do you have an accurate model of what TikTok is though? Does anyone?
Surveillance, profit and evil.
We are talking about an app made in one of the most surveillance states of the world, heavily moderated to that where if you don't look pretty your binned and making profit off the data you provide.
This is a description of one method of generating an estimate of what it is (a method which itself may be a consequence of western propaganda, but certainly of western culture)...more interesting in my opinion is estimates of methods for accurately determining what it is.
The internet isn't fun.
- If not all, most sites now force you to inhumanly deselect all cookies and "legit" consents that without would be making cash off your data.
- Most blogs have a ever so annoying scroll model of "Subscribe to my blog, enter your email" or prompts of: "Login with your gmail/apple mail". (medium)
The same goes for "Do you wish to visit this in said mobile $app?" restricting any UI interaction until you click a tiny "no" button. (Reddit)
- Web Pages now hijack the back button to the home page.
- Loading times are abysmal, over 2mb to load what?
From when, where you could hop over the small rainbow coloured fence and enter a whole new lush garden, full of organic nature and green with a forest leading you to the backtracks...
Your now encaged and faced with a dull grey corporatised agendaed wall. Locked in to an garden with over-beaten grass; divided and with less equality unless you're willing to sacrifice everything.
Where's the interoperability?
Discord isn't fun. Servers die quickly, subscription models, forced UI changes.
Nothing fun with Facebook, Twitter and what they push.
Removal of dedicated server's from online games takes away individually.
You rarely are able to play with others on other consoles. And then your at the mercy that $corp doesn't cripple the game; let alone plying without internet.
You had clients. ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! BBSes, forums... and now your kept to being a slave of what, two? WhatsApp, Discord?
Sure, outside, the niches of Telegram, matrix, slack et cetera all exist but the general populist don't follow those.
VR isn't it either. It has -it- but I can't wait 15 minutes for a VR room to load because I'm stuck on 2mb broadband.
Anything else interactive is gate kept and freedom is kept non-existent as that if you try, your thrown against an electric fence of Terms & Conditions threatening electrocution if you do.
Everything is fun in the beginning. Then it gets commercialized and regulated and it's no longer fun.
A while back I heard an interesting observation: coffee shop conversations in the Bay Area went from being about cool tech to being about money.
I can't help but feel that this is a deeper change beyond just me facing the usual disillusionment of growing up.
Tech started with a bunch of nerds. Those nerds made loads of money, which attracted the non-nerds. The non-nerds were better at marketing themselves and talking their way up the ladder. Now tech is mostly non-nerds.
Cool tech doesn't fill VC stockings at Christmas. Making B2B SaaS crap however....
Regulation is what keeps things fun after commercialization kicks in. You aren't currently being gouged for the price of your internet by the Bell monopoly thanks to antitrust regulation enforced in the eighties!
Not trying to detract from your point, but the internet is still surprisingly unregulated, although I think we're at the early stages of seeing that change.
The Internet is heavily regulated, just by web hosts and payment processors instead of government.
The internet is being ruined in the same way most Art Deco, and Arts and Crafts architecture is being ruined in the US. Turned into cookie cutter, boxes with windows with absolutely no personality at all.
Take a look at any shopping mall still alive today, and find pictures of it when it was first opened for example.
From beautiful waterfalls and fountains with foliage, to dime store prints and pastel color patterns. The internet is the same now.
Internet fun is proportional to the degree of its decentralisation.
Geocities and Angelfire beg to differ.
I question the aesthetic sensibilities of many content creators on those platforms, but the site content itself was sometimes whimsical and entertaining.
I think both sites required you to write actual HTML, with no WYSIWIG. I salute the efforts of the regular people who tried.
8-10 regular sites, then mindless scrolling. Hundreds of bookmarks I'll never re-visit. I do miss forums.
>> Hundreds of bookmarks I'll never re-visit.
It is like the books on our shelves and the proverbial pictures in our parents shoeboxes. I recall when I was very very young, my parents would break out the shoeboxes at holiday gatherings (usually Christmas and Thanksgiving) and rummage through the pictures with family members. Other than those times, they were just boxes in the back of a closet.
Perhaps we should do that with our bookmarks... break them out once a year and see if there are any ones left keeping, and ones that just need to go to the back of the closet.
Old internet for me was pre AOL. Pre web browsers with graphics. Lynx browser. FTP, Archie, Veronica... Great Newsgroups.
Commercial enterprises were hounded if they dared try to sell a product. Remember when the law firm's fax machine was crippled ( fax DDS attack?) in retaliation?
If you wanted to see the Olympics up close, you posted what sports you were interested in and folks would take pics for you and upload them onto an FTP server. You only used the server during off hours out of politeness.
Simtel is where you found your dos programs.
You downloaded Linux one disk at a time.
When AOL opened it up to its users, they destroyed many of the cozier aspects. But the porn definitely exploded.
Life is change.
I have only one anecdote to compare the Internet of yesteryear with today.
In 1998 when I was 14, on my ISP portal there was a link called "CHAT", with a list of channel and topics. In a channel targeted to teenagers, it was full of teenagers.
No bots, no FBI, no creepy adults. Kids my age from all over the country talking and having fun, in a public space. I know because over the years I have met and even had my first real-life relationship with people met in there.
I do not believe for a single second anyone that says today's Internet is more fun, safe, approachable, original than today.
That's because it used to be young
So did we.
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
While rose-tinted glasses are a common bias, it is likewise a simplistic fallacy to assume that things only improve with time.
The Internet WAS more fun.
The internet can still be fun but I see what the author means.
At most I just use a few modern social media sites, some with frontends (Nitter, YT2009) and visit a few obscure sites.
I can't help but observe that the majority of these sites linked are very ordinary looking sites. I don't see an abundance of "fun".
In my opinion, if you don't think people are still out there having fun on the internet, you're looking in the wrong places.
> ordinary looking sites
That's an aesthetic judgement. A site doesn't have to "look" fun to be fun. It just has to present the content that the author, or audience, find engaging.
An all-singing all-dancing website may well not be any kind of fun at all; a brutalist HTML 3.2 page might actually have something interesting written on it.
> That's an aesthetic judgement. A site doesn't have to "look" fun to be fun. It just has to present the content that the author, or audience, find engaging.
This right here. This here is why I visit this site, a bunch of other old sites, and use frontends for some modern social media sites.
The recent trend of redesigning almost everything is insane. "Modern redesigns" that uses widescreen screens less efficiently than the old design used a 1024x768 display.
No I don't care if it "looks old", if it functions good for me then I'll use it.
> you're looking in the wrong places.
Could very well be, but I find it very difficult to locate the right places, then.
You used to be young
I miss when my bookmarks folder had a hundred entries in it instead of not needing bookmarks because there are only five websites.
One out of a dozen people is capable of producing something interesting on a consistent basis, yet we've become convinced that each of us is somehow deficient if we aren't capable of convincing a mass of strangers to engage with our thoughts and opinions. The dung beetle internet is just a bunch of people pushing bullshit around a table as if them touching the bullshit makes it more interesting for the next person who touches the bullshit.
Our bookmarks are now the list of open tabs in our browsers. I have over 100 tabs open on my phone. They are saved in storage somewhere, so even if I reboot my phone, the tabs will be there when I pull up the app again.
They're actually better than bookmarks IMO because they save a snapshot of the page, which helps jog the memory better than the Favicon that browser bookmarks usually save.
I like looking at any site with a background that is not plain white.
ah, another delightful throwback to the old, fun internet - a page that is nothing more than a collection of facts or links on a hyperspecific topic :)
It still is. But it used to be, too.
The Internet is still fun! It's actually way more fun than I remember it being as a kid now.
Serious and honest question: what do you find fun about it?
Nice! Would be nice if you could add a RSS feed
It gets a ton of shit here, but Discord reminds me of “the good ol’ days” when I was a teen on IRC and AIM.
I think a lot of the problem today is there’s no continuity in community or conversations by design, so a lot of sites feel extremely transactional. For example: you might read a YouTube comment that makes you laugh, but you’ll likely never read anything else from that person as long as you live.
On forums you had people putting absurd effort into their “posting persona” and these people would be around for years and decades. They weren’t motivated by likes or retweets. They weren’t trying to get you to listen to their podcast or subscribe to their Patreon. They were just humans having a conversation.
Is it the Internet that has become unfunny, or just you that has become older?
Think about it twice :)
add this to zapwebring.com
I also spent a ton of time on BBSes, pre Internet. A few of these developed into early dialup ISPs. One thing I really miss is the "community" aspect. Local message boards, etc. That is all gone now. The closest thing you can find is maybe a subreddit or Discord, but it's not the same. The community and locality aspect is gone. You can't even meet a weirdo on Craigslist anymore.
For many people, the Internet of today is basically interactive TV.
Local message boards are gone because they end up becoming dominated by weirdos and the people who don't have anything else to do, so end up posting constantly. Think of the comments section of a local newspaper website.
It also says something that most of local newspaper websites already disabled their comments section few years back because of this exact reason. That's what at least happened to the few I was visiting. It was really bad though. Made you wonder that those are just regular folks walking the same sidewalks as myself and in their past time they just go on and express fantasies of violence under some "grassroots" politics column.
I don't think this is entirely correct. The same weirdos are now posting on reddit.
I can't really disagree and also miss the local aspect. But local city subreddits have more much more info and discussion on local news, history and politics than BBSs did. Less DIY and decentralized and more corporate and centralized. Not great but it's still there.
Mixed bag I guess.
EDIT: this was largely just to strengthen one of your points.
Every single time something becomes big, the hardcore early fans of that thing will complain about the change.
This used to happen with bands. Early die hard fans enjoyed having their own tribe or clique built around the band, and then when the band became too successful they'd say that the band "sold out" and that the newfound fans aren't really fans and so on.
This happened with Linux where many people say Linux isn't fun anymore, or they lament that everything changed. I was an early Linux user, but I find that Linux is better than ever and I'm thankful I don't need to configure X anymore.
People of the early internet were in their own little clique, and then the entire world jumped in and they lost "their place." They will always lament this change, and they will always say it used to be better.
Humans are tribal and they forms tribes around anything and everything. Anytime their tribe is displaced they will become resentful even if that displacement makes the thing their tribe formed around better in every possible way. For me, I never had a solid sense of "tribal belonging" and therefore never really cared about these things, but I do understand the impulse as I get very vivid and strong experiences of it at sporting events, concerts, and so on. I suppose the strongest sense of tribalism I feel consistently is that of being a contrarian by impulse, and I feel some kind of kindred spirit with other contrarians... so maybe take everything I've said here with a grain or pound of salt.
Humans may be tribal, but the universe is also entropic. Things decay in quality over time, and the only answer to this is cyclical rebirth.
The analogy of music here is telling because in fact the vast majority of bands are only truly good for an album or two in a small band of time, maybe even for just a song. People would be objectively right to say punk isn't what it was in the 80s in certain places like the UK.
Things really do sometimes get worse, or at least not stay the same style and quality forever. The repugnant conclusion alone pretty much guarantees niche things that are "good" to the niche that then get super popular and commercialized trend towards a worse for everyone steady state over time.
I agree, tribalism of this nature has a huge effect.
With the internet, though, I think there's another factor that reduces its "fun level" -- the internet has also shifted to being a heavily commercialized environment, and commercialization has a very strong anti-fun effect.
Also the size of the platforms have an effect. If you are on Twitter, even if you mostly interact with people within a select niche, everything is essentially public and anyone can see it or come in and spoil the party so to speak. Twitter / Facebook / itself has a far wider reach than the niche forums or IRC channels of the past, so it is very easy for things to go off the rails with commenters outside of that niche coming in angry about something or changing the conversation etc.. this is largely true on Reddit now as well. The userbase is too broad so it loses that shared sense of community, this leads to misunderstandings, different values, and more arguments. Thus necessitating stricter rules / bans etc.. which can also put a damper on fun.
> I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better.
With the advances in technology I wish it had. However, we now have Material Design, oversized UIs, autoplaying videos when you are immediately on the site, anti-adblockers, "Please Subscribe" crap, the desktop being an afterthought (hamburger menus), etc.
I don't like those things either.
But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.
> But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.
Yeah, true. What I mean is that I miss when the web sites were still lighter pretty much and the desktop was still one of the main platforms (heck, one of the reasons of increased PC sales from the late 90s-early 00s was internet access). An example for me is that I had a better time viewing YouTube on a old computer and old OSes on VMs than YouTube today since back then, the site was still light enough and easy to use. Heck, back then you could even run it on Windows 98 and 2000.
Apologies I had to reply again. Been a while I actually used this so I forgot that there was an edit button.
That's not really a counterargument. Having to do those things sucks in and of themselves. They just mitigate some of the other suckage.
This pretty much, not to mention that some sites break just by disabling JavaScript even though frontends for popular social media sites like Twitter (Nitter) and YouTube (YT2009, Invidious) prove that you don't need JavaScript or at least make the entire site rely on it just to view content.
Ublock Origin has no effect on email modals or cookie popups. Those have to be manually zapped.
Consent-o-matic handles cookie popups. Some sites do have login-walls, enforced or no. Someone ought make another extension!
https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
UBlock Origin includes (but doesn't enable by default) several "Annoyances" filter lists that zap many cookie banners.
> flash to something better
Please enlighten me on something better. Nothing has enabled me to create in the same way of creativity and fun than Flash did; for me at least.
It was so practical that my mother made her first website in Flash.
Flash was a nice tool for creators and it enabled some interesting ways to present information. Flash gaming was a very interesting niche.
But on the whole I think it made the web worse. Lots of sites had microscopic text that you couldn't enlarge, no bookmarking pages or maintaining state, no right click, never ending security holes, invisible to search, inaccessible to those with vision or hearing assistants. The list goes on and on.
Plenty of websites have similar usability issues today. Most sites will refuse to load content without Javascript. I stopped keeping bookmarks because most pages I had went to 404 Not Found.
For all these disadvantages, Flash had something modern webdev can only dream of: permanence. A Flash file from 2004 will work almost perfectly in Ruffle, 20 years later; video, audio, images, animation. A dynamic webpage or dataviz (the only interactive things made today) won't load on anything that doesn't have a full NodeJS server on a Virtualbox VM and untold number of npm dependencies.
Flash was not the problem, it was how people used it. Same as today.
It doesn’t matter how bad some tool was if the replacement is non-existant or even worse, even less used, etc…
I'm not saying Flash was the key to website design or the web as a whole but it was definitely a key to animation, visual creativity and the likes.
As FruitLoops Studio is for Audio.
If you want to do the same you have to now know JavaScript, some library and some UI frontend.
Flash enabled you to add interactive to other than just a straight up black text on a white page.
You can't even copy text now on some SPA sites nor head back in browser history without being hijacked to their home page.
What we got isn't it either.
Yeah, Flash had its problems but it at least you "build a thing" without a ton of overhead. The complexity of today's "modern" tooling is a bit crazy. SPAs are often used inappropriately, where a simple, server-side generated site would be more efficient, easier to develop, deploy, maintain.
Doesn't Flash, the tool, export to JS now?
It was having Flash player, the browser plugin, that was an ongoing security and privacy problem for browsers.
Flash isn't even available anymore. It was discontinued in Dec 2020.
Adobe Animate, the descendant of Macromedia Flash authoring tool, still exists. It is Flash Player that went away.