The internet is still fun.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's subjective. Technology enables new possibilities. Everything grows or dies and life moves on.<p>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.
The internet isn't fun.<p>- 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.<p>- 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)<p>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)<p>- Web Pages now hijack the back button to the home page.<p>- Loading times are abysmal, over 2mb to load what?<p>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...<p>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.<p>Where's the interoperability?<p>Discord isn't fun. Servers die quickly, subscription models, forced UI changes.<p>Nothing fun with Facebook, Twitter and what they push.<p>Removal of dedicated server's from online games takes away individually.<p>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.<p>You had clients. ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! BBSes, forums... and now your kept to being a slave of what, two? WhatsApp, Discord?<p>Sure, outside, the niches of Telegram, matrix, slack et cetera all exist but the general populist don't follow those.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Take a look at any shopping mall still alive today, and find pictures of it when it was first opened for example.<p>From beautiful waterfalls and fountains with foliage, to dime store prints and pastel color patterns. The internet is the same now.
Old internet for me was pre AOL. Pre web browsers with graphics. Lynx browser. FTP, Archie, Veronica... Great Newsgroups.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Simtel is where you found your dos programs.<p>You downloaded Linux one disk at a time.<p>When AOL opened it up to its users, they destroyed many of the cozier aspects. But the porn definitely exploded.<p>Life is change.
I have only one anecdote to compare the Internet of yesteryear with today.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I do not believe for a single second anyone that says today's Internet is more fun, safe, approachable, original than today.
The internet can still be fun but I see what the author means.<p>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".<p>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.
I miss when my bookmarks folder had a hundred entries in it instead of not needing bookmarks because there are only five websites.<p>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.
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 gets a ton of shit here, but Discord reminds me of “the good ol’ days” when I was a teen on IRC and AIM.<p>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.<p>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.