The internet used to be fun
projects.kwon.nyc
projects.kwon.nyc
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.
For many people, the Internet of today is basically interactive TV.
Mixed bag I guess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 did have a certain (imo over hyped) DX that people had a fondness for & that the web wasn't catering to. This was good for users in that they got a lot of experiences they might not have otherwise had. But the experiences were 99% things the web could do, and the web experience as a user was better.
I'm not unsympathetic to the passing of the flash age (even given the treasonous un-webful proprietary closed app-like rot that it was). But I mostly wish we'd had more people writing competitive authoring tools for the web; we could have made a Flash timeline like editor, with svg and smil/svg Dom/css animations/css transitions. The DX was largely recreateable. I think it's somewhat over hyped, but I definitely see & am sorry that there haven't been successful popular web-targetting ways of doing similar.
I don't think the web is as impermanent as you project. Many sites will run fine from an archive. Sure, datavis sites not being able to get data you didn't fetch the first time is an issue, but flash dataviz's are just as liable to fetch data on the fly rather than bake it all in. Flash doesn't have an inherent advantage, more a happenstance one, and web archiving will take one far further than one might believe. Alas "save page as..." doesn't work; the promise of tech like http bundled seems high, but then the archival community groups went & did their own thing instead of joining up, and http bundles became another bland anti-Google rallying flag. Alas.
There haven't been a complete absence of Flash-like things, but on the web. There just wasn't much uptake. For all the people who swore Flash was the greatest, there weren't a lot of people willing to spend money or create a community around new attempts.
Flash was fun to dabble in, but it's unclear what value proposition similar tech has im todays world, besides being fun to mess around with (which I love but does not a market make).
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.
It was having Flash player, the browser plugin, that was an ongoing security and privacy problem for browsers.
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.
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.
> 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.
(I don't like TikTok and everything it stands for)
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.
- 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.
I can't help but feel that this is a deeper change beyond just me facing the usual disillusionment of growing up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Internet WAS more fun.
At most I just use a few modern social media sites, some with frontends (Nitter, YT2009) and visit a few obscure sites.
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.
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.
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.
Could very well be, but I find it very difficult to locate the right places, then.
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.
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 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.
Think about it twice :)