Do you miss the internet of the 90s and the 2000s?
I do, modern Internet is crap. Nowadays there is no much difference between the Internet and the real world. They want to turn it into the new TV, preaching their "politically correct" hypocrisy.
I agree the internet used to be a place of fun and escapism from reality for the most part. Nowadays however the internet and real life are no different and the internet actually influences our modern society with websites like Twitter back in the 90s and 2000s the internet was just that the internet the world wide web and not this big corporate centralized social media that influenced our society and websites like this one are one of the last few good sites on the net these days.
Late 00s up until ~2012 internet was my favorite. More content than the 'early' internet while not as infested with retards like the modern internet.
The mid/late 000s was a great era but by the early 2010s the internet was already dead in my opinion.
People like to conflate the World Wide Web and The Internet to be the same thing; this is a big mistake to conflate the two ideas. You can have the Internet without the World Wide Web.
Very true the internet has existed since the late 60s.
I miss the 2006-2009 era when smartphones were way too expensive at the time so most people didn't have them. Back then most people still had regular dumb phones and still had to socially engage with others irl and have real conversations and because the internet was so shitty on flip phones most people still had to use their PCs to mainly access the internet back then it truly was a simpler time.
I regret that with today's network speeds and computational power, we could have everything load instantly, on any device and connection and any country in the world, if websites were made with the same constraints as 20 years ago (small files, low quality images /videos). Other than that, no. Society has changed whether we like it or not, old tech is still around cf. News, IRC, they just lost their users. Even this website exists. It's not a technology problem.
Yes it is a technology problem and society has been absolute shit since 2012.
JavaShit should have been killed with fire when it was born
>>11
Javascript is never a problem for me since I started using the LibreJS add-on for GNU Icecat. It lets me know about websites that are designed to be defective. When I know a website is defective by design, I am happy to avoid that website for being defective.
I miss the net.art scene but as long as there's sites that allow me to do whatever I want without any consequences (even the actions that do have consequences mean nothing if you have a VPN), then I'm happy with the internet.
>>1
Yeah I think that's pretty much what the topic of this site is
>>15
considering this site is a relic of the old internet, characterizing it as an "old internet nostalgia site" doesn't seem fair, if that is what you are implying.
while this site is definitely old, I think it's fair to call it "nostalgia" because it was already retro at the time it was created in... 2004-05?
discussion forums were a '80s and '90s thing, by the early '00s most English-speaking internet users had moved onto multimedia-centric and ego-stroking social networking sites like myspace and livejournal. 2channel was one of the very last pure discussion forums to arise (somewhat) organically, and that happened mainly because the Japanese internet as a whole resists innovation
if you call 4-ch "a relic of the old internet" you might also have to call, like, reddit "a relic of the old internet". unless the distinguishing factor is literally never getting any significant software updates
Not really there were still plenty of people on discussion forums in the 2000s and they were still pretty popular especially to discuss media at the time. 4ch is a relic of the old internet" because textboard culture both in Japan and the west is dying people prefer imageboards over BBS textboards and fuck off Reddit is not nor is in anyway "a relic of the old internet" Sites like Reddit Twitter Tumblr and so on may have came out in the 2000s but they didn't take off and get big until the early 2010s and by that time the old internet was already dead everything started to go downhill around 2008/2009 and at first it wasn't so bad but after early 2010 things got really shitty and by 2012 we completely lost everything.
Rest in peace the old internet 1969-2012
Do you think the old internet can be brought back? What would need to happen?
>>20
An apocalypse sufficient to destroy current corporate entities with a vested interest in web bloat/advertising but not so severe as to knock our tech level back below computer tech. A wide-scale return to dial-up type speeds and/or methods would probably help though.
still find it weird that people born the same year this site was set up are already doing porn and politics
That too it is kinda both Gen Z sucks at memes and i hate how they are obsessed with sex and think 4chan culture is the entire internet i hate the fact that 4chan culture spilled out into the rest of the internet.
>>27
Can we really give fault to them though? I mean, the first kind of internet they were exposed to was the commercial/capitalist one. I'm not sure about the part about being obsessed with sex since I think that may apply to most generations since the invention of tv(?), because ever since everything got sexualized and for a lot of people sexualizing everything has become normal because of that.
The 4chan thing is new to me, I think it depends on the places you frequent.
>>27
I also want to add that what a generation ends up consuming and using is mostly fault of the previous generations' inability to control and prevent low-quality/damaging content being fed to children. After all most of the content which is consumed by kids today and therefore the content they learn from is made by people older than them, so I think that older people(previous generations) have a big responsability in how tomorrow children and new generations will end up behaving and thinking.
On a side note I would like to point out that the modern internet doesn't really look different from the old internet, the only thing that changed are the big companies governing it. Can't really prevent the web from becoming a capitalistic tool, low contents and bad media orbit around things that make most money out of people's behavior and attention.
>On a side note I would like to point out that the modern >internet doesn't really look different from the old internet,
Not really websites like YouTube used to be more simple and basic with their layout/design but now it is a cluster fuck to look at with nothing but video playlist and ads all over the place.
> I mean, the first kind of internet they were exposed to was the commercial/capitalist one.
I think you meant corporatist because the internet has been commercial and capitalist since the beginning.
>>20
I doubt it. Also the "old internet" was not that much better where pseudonymous text posting is concerned; Usenet groups and BBS were flooded with autistic trolls who had nothing else to do than obsessively post there and cultivating their online "personas" as happens everywhere where anon posting is not encouraged. Not that different from reddit.
It is true that there was very weak connection between online and offline world, tha facebooks and instagrams and associated lifestyles are completely new. Horse is out of the barn tho, I can't imagine so many people would discard their entire "life"styles now.
I was born in 2000
I can't remember any internet before 2012 except outside what I was told about it.
I mostly use fediverse and *chan / *ch boards.
The main reason I use fediverse is because IRC is dead.
IRC isn't that dead. There are still plenty of active channels around. That being said, they are mostly full of old schizophrenics.
Probably not too different from fediverse in that regard, really.
>>33
that "weak connection" between irl and the net is key. That's what defined the old internet of the 90s and 2000s for me. What i experienced online during that time had very little consequence in the real world. And that era is never coming back. In fact its moving at hyper velocity the other way. We will soon be in a world where your real identity is tied to your online identity EVERYWHERE you go
That is too young to remember the old internet the late 90s zoomers were the last generation to see the old internet if you were born after 1999 you're too young to remember it.
Internet ages as they ended.
Ancient internet (1993) -----> Old internet (2001)*? -----> Mid internet (2007) -----> New Internet (2014) -----> Hell
The 2005-2008 era was the last good era of the internet and the last era where there was actually a disconnect between the internet and real life and you could actually log off the internet completely. When smartphones started becoming more common and affordable around 2009/2010 that was when everything started going downhill and people who didn't know how to use a computer now had access to the internet and by 2012 the old internet was dead.
>>35
That is strange. I'm only five years older but my memories extend way beyond 2007 (the analogous time window for me). My earliest memories of the internet are from 1999. I think Old Internet stopped being Old Internet for me around 2004 when I noticed that websites were completely different.
I do miss the older protocols. That shit was just about dead by the time I was old enough to use a computer, but they were still alive in recent memory at the time for me to experience them. I remember seeing Gopher links in 2001 and so on. I barely understood the purpose of FTP but I did go to FTP sites because I liked to look at folders and files online.