The internet was way more social before "social media" came along.
I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over. I don't have as many personal connections with people now as I did then. AIM, ICQ, and later Gtalk were all amazing.
On desktop chat you would know that people would only be online if they made the conscious decision that they are up to chatting.
Whether its from school or work, everyone has an email address that they must check regularly. Anything longer than a three sentence text I'll just email.
Heck if work hadn't moved to slack I probably wouldn't answer most emails there either.
>> I loved the IM era and it's a huge shame it's over.
> I find that Discord is bringing it back.
As though you could log into discord and start a conversation with someone who was only using facebook messenger, or snapchat, or twitter, or whatsapp or instagram or any other service where messaging was possible.
Discord in reality represents a different way of doing things. You can chat with other discord users. That's it.
It's a decent system when the userbase is big and the company is benevolent, but it's a different thing than everyone who does "messaging" agreeing to let messages from any service go to any other service.
But this never existed, nor is the author claiming that. AIM, ICQ, etc required you to create an account on their own service. XMPP might be used, but I don't think any major service besides Google Talk supported federation. What the author had was a single client that happened to connect to multiple services, but you can do the same nowadays (e.g. using Pidgin and its plugins).
(As an aside, it's refreshing to see how BS-free the announcement that GTalk supported federation was: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html)
For me, this is a real shame and a bit of motivation. In 2015 my friends and I were using teamspeak very heavily and essentially became power users. Everything setting or personality feature you could mess with we did and it was a ton of fun. We started a list of features we really wanted to add or tweak, mainly around text chat and email messaging within the program. There was also a ton of UI changes I wanted to make, don't get me wrong I love the program but it's hard on the eyes sometimes. Anyway, around this time I was really wanting to dig my teeth into a big project. I thought it would be super useful to remake teamspeak as an opensource webapp. I even went as far as creating some UI mocks but then Discord blew up and I gave up that idea.
I don't know, maybe I'll set aside some time to try this project again. I really wanted to create an open and free program that allowed anyone to hack on it or setup private services without needing to pay hefty licensing fees or go through untrusted networks. The Web 3.0 version of vent/ts with some Stallman ideals.
I worry about how hard it would be to do these days, though-- in addition to the Windows/Mac/Linux clients that you've always needed, your app has to work on iPhone and Android (including their many variations), and don't forget the web app! Plus audio/video chat.
Image/file uploading is pretty tricky, too. If you dragged an image into an IRC channel, nothing would happen and that was normal. But now people except it to be automatically uploaded to cloud storage, resized, stripped of metadata, and shown in the chat view for all to see. Features like this are deceptively hard, and there are many of them.
All of that is just to be feature-competitive with the stuff people are already using, before you get to the absurd difficulty of getting people to switch away from Discord.
Email and IM are great, but I want them to work for me, not against.
I tell people that I've 'seen how the sausage gets made' ;)
People are surprised that a techie nerd like me, with a PhD in ML, immersed in the IT world for the past 30 years, has an aversion to tech gadgets. Have I heard of the latest fad X? Do I like the last AI-powered Y?
But the first thing I did when buying an apartment was rip out the silly "smart home" system, installing back mechanical controls everywhere. Much happier.
My take on it is, with experience comes appreciation for simplicity. And respect for "doing things right", which seems a losing battle in a marketing-first world.
I am afraid the day may come when I can't get audio equipment with a mechanical volume control (without a layer of software in between). Even today, some laptops rely on software to mute their speakers when the headphone jack is connected.
I dread the scenario of being in a public place, like a library or about to give a talk, resuming my laptop from suspend, and loud music (or worse!) blaring out of the speakers, with all audio controls unresponsive as the system churns (or crashes!) under the load of resuming.
It's very much this why I fully prep my laptop before I need to give a talk or go into a meeting where I might need my laptop (as much as I despise laptop-filled meetings). All applications closed except for whatever I need in that setting.
I dread the day this growth-at-any-cost marketing machine takes over politically, and these half-assed over-hyped systems (self driving cars come to mind) become mandatory, with no alternative.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/nobody-hates-software-more-tha...
My GFs Instagram account is literally professional photos of her... I mean she's a model but it's basically her portfolio.
Now EVERYONE does it though... girls go out specifically to build up their instagram...we're not ourselves anymore.
If I don't know if someone is up for chatting, I'm not going to start a conversation with them, in case I bother them.
One benefit of the old days is you knew all other participants were sitting in front of a desktop, with a full keyboard. You knew they weren't say: driving, or boarding onto a flight, or paying a restaurant bill.
A problem with features like "Apple allows you to SMS from Desktop" is you still must use lowest-common denominator conversational approach.
All these modern apps have greatly increased the frequency of our conversations, but overall lowered their quality.
I used ICQ and whatever else at the time. These days I chat with a few people via Hangouts and enjoy it, though the discussions have changed because I'm ~20 years older.
Now stuff has to be locked down, because otherwise bad shit happens.
Some modern social networks have similar features, but I can’t imagine doing this in this age. And in the last 5 years I’ve never been contacted randomly by anyone either.
Nowadays I would just have dismissed and blocked her as yet another spambot.
Nowadays, each of those is seen and felt as a terrible violation of your privacy, your intimacy, your property even... and people often rather play possum than take the 'risk' of picking up the phone or opening the door when the phone or the door bell rings.
When you call someone who hasn't got your number already, you are initially met with hostility (in the lucky case the person even picks up the phone) and have to justify "how the hell did you get my number?"
You're right though, but these connections are rarely long-lasting.
"Social Spaces and Payload Races" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hj1haLcdI0
"Secret Little Haven" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzHFRfOVOuQ
AIM/MSN days were so stupidly simple. Forced integration with real life made everything into pain and didn't improve relationships.
First half is definitely true :)
So a) one didn't have to be hugely privileged to be online before social media took over, and b) I don't think the level of privilege of participants has much to do with the change that this article is talking about.
2. Most of these countries came online only in the mobile era
3. Many of these countries have Facebook and broadly, Internet usage that eclipses US and Europe.