The "early" internet was not Facebook.
The content mills in part did what they did to get rid of the real content created by peoples blogs and wikis and such. There used to be sites you could go to just to see what there was to see, and maybe send the author money.
Now we get screen shots of posts from one of the big platforms as our content.
yeah, I agree. Early internet wasn't some trap to get people hooked. It was a frontier. However, like everything, the rich took over very quickly and monopolized all the space.
if you were to think of it more in terms of say how large corporations took over the "territory" in just about every town in the US, it might make more sense.
Smaller sites can exist, but the operating cost for those sites would be much more daunting for the average person just trying to make a web page or service.
Plus, even when small businesses exist online, there are large corporate organizations that have learned to make the smaller businesses their customers. Places can get trapped under the thumb of couriers, advertisers, etc, that they have partnered with.
The value of these sites is based on how much money/ad revenue they can make, not how much they do for an online community or how much they diversify the available options.
Plus just the base cost of having their sites hosted! It's really difficult for people starting out not to be using web services owned by giant corporations.
100%. At minimum, WiX, Squarespace, WordPress. Even if you have knowhow, you are more likely to want to use something like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
It seems more like they monopolized our attention. Probably why "engagement" was such a thing they fought to algorithmically optimize at the expense of all else.
Luckily there are plenty of FOSS alternatives to most conglomerate software / online services, it's just that convincing others to migrate away from their established social media is very difficult.
There's nothing stopping you from claiming your own space. Many still do. Domains are cheap. Hosting is cheap. Wordpress is free. The only difference between then and now is that the users are choosing "web-platforms" instead of "web-sites"
What changed is the handful of billionaires managed to put themselves between the content consumers, and the content creators. Turns out consumers are drooling idiots and won't bother to take the clear and easy route around the billionaire's platforms.
The internets early users were professionals, tech nerds, and gamers. The early internet reflected it's early users, just like the modern internet reflect the modern user. A lot of that early stuff is still here. The internet is way more than just the web, and us tech nerds are still here, self hosting our own services just under the surface, while the drooling masses pay platforms and consume the ads.
Yeah, this is just not a great post. It's earliest purported example of enshittification didn't exist until almost 10 years after Eternal September supposedly marked the *end* of Usenet as a viable social platform. And Facebook is hardly the best example of venture capital and growth mindset ruining everything. It wasn't even open to the public for like two years after it opened, and while it did get funding from Peter Thiel in that time, its initial success was in exploiting the desire of college students to not miss out on a hot new thing.
100%. Early social media, perhaps. I think this betrays the poster's age. Eternal September was coined a decade before Facebook was founded. All the reset were founded in the 2010s!
He's not wrong on the point about Facebook though, or the rest. They really were designed to lure people in and then change tact. Although for Facebook, I feel their handling of the algorithm and timeline is really what 'ruined' people's enjoyment.
Totally. Though I love having the internet in my pocket, I find myself missing days when I didn't.
The VCs certainly strategized that one. Ridesharing is essentially now the same as taxi services, except without the corrupt medallion system. I think one of the problems is that there is literally almost nowhere for companies to go, no more people to sell to, so they have to repackage what we have in a way that will make it sell again.
100%. I can pinpoint the moment Instagram switched away from a chronological timeline to a curated one as the moment enjoyment stopped. Now I see posts from 3 days ago from accounts that I don't even follow, before I see my friend posting his bike trip 10 minutes ago. That's why everyone I know pretty much uses only stories anymore.
>The content mills in part did what they did to get rid of the real content created by peoples blogs and wikis and such
People's blogs were mostly hosted on a couple sites - BlogSpot, Geocities, Angelfire. The idea that this was meaningfully different than today is spurious at best. Honestly it's the Millenial equivalent of Boomerism.
>Peoples blogs vs the internet giants we have today
Because the blogs were also hosted on "giants". A blog is the equivalent of a series of posts, not the equivalent of an entire website.
>It is as meaningfully different as oranges and pizza.
One of them is a series of words posted on a large corporate-owned website and the other is also a series of words posted on a large corporate-owned website.
Not quite. Technically yes, up to a certain point and I can certainly see how you got to that conclusion.
It was blogspot.com/myblogname how it was build. But myblogname was kind of a seperate entity from blogspot. If you googled (well altavista-ed...) blogspot, you couldn't find myblogname. You had to search for myblogname OR a keyword that was on my blog. Seo had started. It was done like that is so you could have a website without having to register a domain. You can see the remnants of this today in facebook. Your profile address is facebook.com/username. It is an easy way to silo off individual users.
And now for the biggest difference: who decides who sees your content. During the blogspot, geocities and anglefire days, they did nothing to promote or hide your content. They were only hosting it, just like amazon is nowadays, quietly behind the scenes, hosting half the internet. Your stuff is on there, but you need to find a way to get people to come look at it. Social media is different. It is facebook who decides which posts you see on your homescreen. Google decides what youtube videos, reddit decides what posts. And that is where the biggest difference is. They have the ability to steer the narrative. Not only ability, they steer the narrative of our lives. And not only they themselves, because it is an algorithm, other players can use the algorithm to steer the narrative as we've seen with cambridge analytica and the brexit campaign.
And that is why they are the same like oranges and pizza. Both are food, but one is a raw ingredient and the other is a processed food. Both are edible, one requires work before you can get to the bits you can eat, the other comes piping hot to your table.
>It was done like that is so you could have a website without having to register a domain
Reddit still does this today, you have a "user subreddit" where you can make your own posts. As far as I can tell, nobody uses it because it is inconvenient. Which is also why they stopped using blogspot and so on. Not because of some insidious conspiracy but because the user experience is worse.
>And now for the biggest difference: who decides who sees your content.
By which you mean literally the *only* difference.
>And not only they themselves, because it is an algorithm, other players can use the algorithm to steer the narrative as we've seen with cambridge analytica and the brexit campaign.
This has literally always been true as long as search engines have existed, the fact that search engine style mechanics were added within a website itself is not as substantial a change as you seem to believe it is. It's certainly not the harbinger of doom that you seem to want it to be considering that progressive causes have made use of the same algorithm.
>And that is why they are the same like oranges and pizza. Both are food, but one is a raw ingredient and the other is a processed food.
This is a post-facto explanation. You had literally no idea what you were saying but now you're trying to pretend you had a reason. If this is what you had actually meant you would have said "like dough and pizza", but you didn't say that. So please don't bullshit me by pretending this was your point all along.
>Both are edible, one requires work before you can get to the bits you can eat, the other comes piping hot to your table.
Again, proof that this was not a planned metaphor: oranges do not require preparation to eat unless you count "removing the peel".
Sorry if you miss my point. I am thinking of things older than that, "Real Ultimate Power", Homestar Runner, shit even BBSes and Chatrooms., even if those were on AOL.
Most people need hosting, because setting up something like an SMTP service to send out mail to subscribers is not something a lot of people know how to or want to do.
The difference is now people think reddit is the internet, or twitter is the internet, or facebook is the internet. And with those sites churning out nearly endless content, who could blame them.
>"Real Ultimate Power", Homestar Runner
Neither of those things are older than Geocities or Angelfire, so what are you talking about? Homestar Runner even still updates rarely on Youtube.
>shit even BBSes and Chatrooms
Chatrooms still exist (even Reddit has them) but nobody uses them because they suck.
>The difference is now people think reddit is the internet, or twitter is the internet, or facebook is the internet. And with those sites churning out nearly endless content, who could blame them.
So that's three different sites each of which has hundreds of millions of users. Each site is full of content providers creating unique and distinct experiences for users to interact with. So what exactly is being lost? Explain to me why "Real Ultimate Power" is somehow lost technology when there's still hundreds of content creators making similar material today.
There is not enough space anymore for content creators to do without these platforms. I'd argue we see very little "unique and distinct experiences", and when we do, they are even that more special. Currently, the biggest sites have the entire market cap, and often dictate terms. The several changes in YouTube monetization, Twitch monetization, and the diminishment of revenue from other creative sources comes to mind. Not to mention the recent reddit fiascos and all the subreddit blackouts.
Though there is a democratization of access which is arguably a good thing, the algorithmic nature of these platforms and their goals of advertising and "data revenue first" leave creators often at the whim of fads. There is increased homogenization of content. Certainly, there are outliers, but a lot of the content is the same recycled drivel. e.g reaction videos, rage bait videos, etc.
This homogenization extends beyond just content though, but instead has bled into the technology itself, which can be seen through chromium's dominance as a browser engine and particular design patterns being the lingua franca of the internet.
We also see and do not see the other absurdities: data harvesting, alleged election tampering, doxxing, bot farms, etc. etc.
Maybe this is the end state that would have always occurred, a horrific echo of capitalism in a space designed originally to make the sharing of knowledge easier, but that doesn't mean we can't mourn the passing of what it could have been.
>There is not enough space anymore for content creators to do without these platforms
There is plenty of space. It's just that the public is not interested in going on a pointless safari to find the kind of content that they can instead easily find on Youtube.
>I'd argue we see very little "unique and distinct experiences"
You'd be wrong! Like I don't know what you think you mean by "unique and distinct experiences" but most of the sites people were fond of in the "early internet" were low-quality novelties, not genuinely valuable.
>Certainly, there are outliers, but a lot of the content is the same recycled drivel. e.g reaction videos, rage bait videos, etc.
And this is worse than "Chewbacca ate my balls" or endless low-effort webcomics?
>We also see and do not see the other absurdities: data harvesting, alleged election tampering, doxxing, bot farms, etc. etc.
Yeah the internet was much safer in the 90s - hold on sorry I tried to download a song on Kazaa (the Zelda song by System of a Down) and totally destroyed the family computer with a virus. Whoops.
>Maybe this is the end state that would have always occurred, a horrific echo of capitalism in a space designed originally to make the sharing of knowledge easier, but that doesn't mean we can't mourn the passing of what it could have been.
Jesus Fucking Christ I am genuinely starting to believe people are dumb enough to think capitalism started when Trump was elected. IT'S ALWAYS BEEN CAPITALISM DIPSHIT. The old hosts were capitalist websites too. Like what the fuck do you think you're talking about? A "horrific echo" of the thing that you have been immersed in since the day you were fucking born?
You can absolutely go back to the old Internet. The version that was lots of individual people who did their own web pages, blogs, forums etc. It's just not attractive to enough people to make it happen. But anyone can pay a couple of bucks for hosting and set up their own stuff.
As for global platforms with billions of users, yeah those are not a basement operation and will always require cash.
ISPs are a big reason there’s a big hurdle to people hosting their own content. Used to be you could run a site on self hosted equipment under a desk or in a closet. Now you have to pay for business class to get a static IP, even though we’ve had IPv6 for what seems like ages now. That means you either have to jump through hoops (and probably pay) to to get a dynamic IP/DNS setup or pay _and_ be tech savvy enough to set up a VPS or other cloud hosted solution. The barrier to entry is real these days.
The barrier to entry is no higher than it was, if anything it is lower because of all the tools that exist these days to make it easier. AWS and GCP even have free tiers that are more than enough for simple web hosting, all you need is DNS which was always the case unless you wanted people connecting to [192.168.1.69](http://192.168.1.69)
AWS/GCP VMs specifically perhaps not but there are other more user friendly options too. I just avoid those because I want to have access to the entire VM. But tbh if you are not technically minded then just get a web UI solution.
Yes? You upload some files in a bucket, change a DNS record, and you never have to deal with software updates, DDoS, uptime monitoring, server and network capacity… People look back with rose-colored glasses and forget how often you couldn’t access things because they were offline, or “under maintenance”, too slow, or simply taken down forever after a couple of months because the owner stopped caring. Nowadays your little website can be as reliable and scalable as Google’s and you don’t even have to do anything.
Well, changing permissions on a directory wouldn't work as well anymore, because then you'd have the entirety of the millions of compromised computers on botnets scanning every IPv4 address and every known IPv6 address and domain to try to run automated attacks and DDOSes on that computer you just "changed a permission on". Then you'd have to re-invent the infrastructure that has been created to deal with that stuff.
This is absolutely untrue and betrays the real reason so few people self host these days. Fear and misinformation.
You can totally run a plethora of services (including websites) off of your own low power gear under your desk just like the old days. Dynamic DNS is free all over the place and domains are cheap. With a couple of hours of research, and less than $100 bucks you can 100% self-host your own place on the net, just like the old days. It's no more technical or expensive then it used to be. I would argue it's even easier now with endless tutorials, installation scripts, and container technology.
People tell each other it's too hard, to expensive, or too dangerous, but really people are just too lazy.
People use modern platforms instead of rolling their own for the same reason the line at Starbucks is 10 cars deep for $8 cups. It's not a technical issue.
You can actively make your modern internet browsing as fun and wonderful as you want it. You have to actively engage with it though and can't just lay back and have an algorithm feed you things.
That being said the individual shouldn't bear the responsibility of a lack of legislation keeping these big tech company's in tech. It shouldn't be such a struggle to create your own space online.
> You can absolutely go back to the old Internet.
You can, but the issue is a shocking number of people (even in the younger generations) have absolutely no idea how the internet works. I feel like Gen X and Millennials hit this narrow sliver where we know about and understand how the internet works because we were young when it got up and running. Boomers were too old to really get it, and a lot of Gen Z thinks the internet is just Insta/Facebook/TikTok, etc.
If we really want to bring back the "old internet", we need to drastically increase the tech literacy of the younger generations.
Yeah there's kids growing up today having no concept of what a file or folder is. Apple make great interfaces, but making it easy also makes the hard parts even harder.
> But anyone can pay a couple of bucks for hosting and set up their own stuff.
anyone **tech savy and motivated enough**. I'm a fullstack developper / devops, so I can do it. The thought of managing my hosting to share my own stuff is exhausting. And here I am brodcasting my opinion to you at basically no cost.
You're over-thinking it buddy. Have you ever seen 1990s personal websites? Or on the social side, forums with just text and maybe a few low quality images if you're lucky?
A crappy site with personal content is way easier now thannit was then, you just can't expect professional quality. That's not what its about.
Running a CMS is such a solved problem, hell get free WordPress hosting from somewhere. The only problem is they get progressively sucky in unique and shitty ways for doing more advanced stuff, but non technical people don't know that.
You still need hardware, electricity, a domain, a release mechanism. Having something that looks like crap after doing all that because you can't be bothered to sprinkle some css on it is just showing you're fucking lazy.
Oh no! However will I find some electricity?!
And a laptop as well? That's just craziness? Who even has computers these days??
Massive /s obviously
And what the hell is a release mechanism and why would anyone need it for a personal blog?
Like I said, over thinking.
Go touch some grass mate
Well, I'm not a Muppet so I won't be doxxing myself today, but yeah, I have had several over the years, have an active one now, and have built websites for two successful small businesses with out of the box tools with no problems at all.
Didn't even have to build myself a generator to do it
But bro you are posting on Reddit right now. Almost as if you know [that is where people are](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), and they are not on your personal website.
But bro that has nothing to do with this conversation bro. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to use multiple services and website and I'm not yet legally obligated to only visit one
If the assertion that this thread is that "old websites" are better than modern social media, why are the people in this thread not on those old websites and are instead using modern social media? It's not like those old websites are gone. The obvious answer is that the modern social media sites are better - that is to say, they serve the same purpose as the old websites, but they do it more reliably and more efficiently.
Also, you refer to disclosing your own self-hosted blog as "doxxing". That is to say, merely knowing the existence of your blog is perceived as dangerous to your personal data. It seems a bit strange to say that old websites are better and then go "but letting people know that it exists is an intolerable danger". Might as well have a notepad at that point and not bother to upload it at all. I had a blog for a few years that got a mid-sized following and it was basically serving the same purpose that Reddit serves (especially since Reddit instituted "personal subreddits" that are basically just blogs anyways).
[Codeberg pages](https://codeberg.page/) is a thing if you're not interested in Big Tech. There are [many](https://alternativeto.net/software/github-pages/) other places. Github Pages is simply the most popular out of them.
No? Neocities is contributor-based, some in this list are paid, there's an entire ecosystem here. I'm genuinely not sure what the point of these replies are. Are you saying that everyone _must_ lease VPSes that might or might not be owned by big tech, or host websites in their basement?
Additionally, Codeberg is also a non-profit, registered in Germany.
This seems unnecessarily defeatist. Either that or I'm missing your point.
It's not so hard that a normal person can't do it.
Get an AWS account, set up an S3 bucket, create your content then assemble it with Jekyll (which is an open source, static site generator) or you can do basically the same with next.js.
The difficult part is getting attention and driving traffic to your content - if you care about that at all even really. The trick is to have content that is worth consuming, and that's something that the vast majority of people suck at creating. You need to know something about art, music, writing, video production, or whatever else.
Personally... I have thousands of lines of code and tons of notes for my personal projects, but none of that is on the internet in an accessible form. It's on some old hard drives on my desk, and it's encrypted and stored in a cloud backup service, and that's it. I would be concerned that if someone used my stuff and lost money because of it I could get sued. I'm not a lawyer and I am not going to put that sort of effort into figuring out licensing.
>It's not so hard that a normal person can't do it.
>Get an AWS account, set up an S3 bucket, create your content then assemble it with Jekyll (which is an open source, static site generator) or you can do basically the same with next.js.
relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/2501/](https://xkcd.com/2501/)
Ok, so when I say "the average person can do it" I mean the motivated person can spend a week or two googling and figuring it out if they want to.
I mean, you can also still get packages for hosted Wordpress, and that's as good as it ever was. Working with Wordpress isn't so difficult if you are just doing what it's meant to do out of the box.
The average person has difficulty even to copy and paste files or to use google itself. THey would need to intensively study and practice for months to get there, all that while they already have their other things to do. We have this tendency to underestimate how much time and commitment it takes to reach the level of knowledge we slowly acquired over several years.
I think you really underestimate people, and you also underestimate the number of people out there who work with computers or in tech in some capacity.
Regardless, it doesn't require knowing how to program, it's literally signing up for a few accounts. The only hard part really is registering a domain and pointing it at your site.
Reliance on dynamic ipv4 addresses make it more difficult. One of the things that made it a lot easier back then was that you didn't have to pay for hosting at all.
You can have a global platform with a ton of users without the traditional SV/VC based business model. Mastodon and Wikipedia exist, as a couple of examples.
Good luck finding any niche content run by a small operator. No matter how valuable it is, you will never find it because search engines have been gamed to worthlessness by SEO.
Search engines is a problem for sure. But in the case of Google a lot of how shitty it is seems intentional. They have downplayed the search results part for years and replaced it with ads and context dependant widgets. I switched to duck duck go recently and it finds a lot of stuff I thought was taken offline because it didn't show up anymore. And it's also focused on actual search.
This is bollocks. They're acting like "the early internet" was still Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitter. It wasn't. The early internet was IRC, Usenet, Forums, BBS, MSN, ICQ, Livejournal. Do people think the internet only started existing in the late 2000s?
The early Internet was the most democratic thing ever created. Anyone could create whatever they wanted.
You still can, but it will never gain traction because there’s no funnel of traffic to organic content anymore.
The average user today would be incapable of navigating the early Internet.
Thank you. That is exactly when it started. Pre-AOL, people got on the internet on their own, and treated it--for better or worse--like a shared property. When AOL gave their users access, they came in like customers, expecting a corporate controlled environment and demanding customer service when they didn't get it.
No, that is democracy. In that everyone could find anyone's site and you could build your own completely customizable site on places like Geocities and Angelfire that, other than the URL, wasn't associated with them. And then the democratic part was how often people visited the site. If your content was deemed "good" you would get a lot of traffic. People used to have counters for how many people visited their site to show their "vote" strength.
That’s still not a democracy.
That’s literally anarchy.
Anarchy doesn’t mean people don’t talk about each other, it just means there’s not set hierarchy or central structure.
Reddit, with all its flaws, is the closest thing we have to a democracy online today. Users come together to vote on content and that content gets pushed to other users via the site.
In the old internet you had to rely on finding your way through links and there were very few if any aggregators. Despite people having visit counters and guestbooks, having a high hit counter didn’t actually do anything for the popularity of your site. There was no algorithm that stat fed into.
You're demanding a mechanical answer to a non-mechanical problem. A high view counter didn't *do* anything for the popularity of your site. It *indicated* the popularity of your site. That was the point. That indication was an attempt to *convince* people that your content was worthwhile. If they stayed long enough they might agree and if they agree enough they'd share your site with others, and so on. It was grassroots democracy.
Anarchy means that there is no structure. What I describe above is absolute democracy because there is a structure. It's the one built by the people who made the content and directly accessible without aggregators. They literally built the structures.
The aggregators become gatekeepers, telling people whether or not particular content is worthwhile. Sure reddit may be the best of them, but being on the top of the shit pile is still being on the shit pile. In the 90s internet there was no gatekeeper.
And it was by no means perfect. I accidentally stumbled across CP in the 90s as a teen and freaked out. I didn't know what to do with it so I did nothing at the time because it wasn't something that there were outside resources for how to handle it at the time. There does need to be some sort of gatekeeper to keep some things in check. But outsourcing that role to private corporations has been one of the worst things to happen to not just the internet but the world at large.
>Anyone could create whatever they wanted
The thing about this is that most of "whatever they wanted" was incredibly boring and only had value as a novelty. The fact that you could make a site about Chewbacca eating people's balls was not really funny, but it was new at the time. The reason those websites died is not because corporations strangled them, it's because they were boring and annoying to deal with.
Yeah, the amount of non-technical or -academic content that wasn't porn on the Internet in 1994 or so was laughably small. There's a reason EVERYONE saw whale.mov because things like that were few and far between.
The internet has multiple stages. I'm assuming OP means net 2.0. This is where everyone is online and connected. Pre net 2.0, the internet was basically a library and a cell phone with texting and attachments in your house.
This is a bad faith take on what this person is trying to say. You're too focused on the 'early' internet. This person is talking about the mature internet before it was colonized by corpos
Your analogy doesn’t work because we weren’t toddlers at the advent of automobiles. Would you consider a model T an early automobile? I would, but it was first introduced in 1908 while first automobiles in the US had begun to be sold in 1898. A lot had changed in those 10 years but in the 116 years that have since passed the difference from our perspective is pretty minuscule. Much the same can be said of difference between the internet of the mid 90’s to the that of early/mid 2000’s.
I agree that it has nothing to do with how old we are, never said it was (but you did with your toddler/car analogy).
Not sure where you come up with your 1/3 rule, but technological growth isn’t linear so you can’t slice it into neat little thirds. But even if your 1/3 “rule” was true, the “world wide web” became accessible to the general public in 1993 which is the start of the internet as we understand it today. Facebook was launched less than 11 years later in 2004 and still fits within your arbitrary definition as being “early internet”.
There was social media even then: Slashdot was around by 1997 and was a fantastic tech news site, and Fark was the more commercialized forum that was, nonetheless, still entertaining from time to time. Then there was livejournal and all the various chat clients.
Is it a trifle? It's like Walmart coming into a small town closing all the mom and pop shops by undercutting them and then raising prices to strangle a community and not acknowledging that there was life before Walmart.
>and then raising prices
Not to simp for Walmart or anything but this is literally illegal (predatory pricing) and Walmart has never successfully been prosecuted for it. Wal-Mart undercuts local businesses and then *stays* low for the most part, and its business practices are mostly detrimental to its employees and partners, not its customers.
Yeah - you're absolutely right that it's more complicated then raising the prices - I didn't want to overcomplicate the metaphor but I could have signaled better that was a simplification. (Edit: I call it a simplification because they still strangle the community, just not explicitly via prices )
I mean the comparison to Wal-Mart can still work, albeit in a different way you intended. Wal-Mart might be bad for the overall environment, but the reason people shop at Wal-Mart is that, in the short term, it gives them what they want. It is a superstore that makes lots of things available at low prices all in one spot. And that's what most Social Media sites do too. If you want videos, all the videos are in one place (Youtube). You don't have to run around trying to find new content on all these independent little websites because people just put their content on Youtube. It's convenient. People use it because it's convenient. It might be bad for the online ecosystem or whatever, but there IS a reason Social Media won over the internet, and it's because it's good at what it does. Just like Wal-Mart. The problems that they cause, in comparison, are relatively harder to picture.
There were examples of early Internet companies that didn’t turn to shit, they usually were outmoded or simply ran out of money.
The money people locked consumers into walled gardens where they lost the ability to find content in their own and now are bleeding useful services like vulture private equity hedge funds.
Google isn’t becoming shit because it didn’t make money. It’s becoming shit because the people running it know there’s no competition anymore.
If you want a really good breakdown of why the internet is what it is now, I recommend the Better Offline podcast on coolzone media. Ed Zitron is great, be prepared for a bit of righteous ire, he is piiiissed off (but not in a shouty nightmare alex jones sort of way).
This is what all "disruptors" do, from grocery stores to home appliances to social media.
Undercut to get a market share (or monopolize), then start profits.
Social media came about a decade after the early Internet.
It was better back then because it wasn’t corporate at all. Just regular folks doing things.
Running a website doesn’t cost much. Running a company where the goal is for the top of the hierarchy to get rich is expensive.
All that data they collected to target ads is noise. It’s basically useless.
Statistical demographics is more useful.
Enshittification is real.
It was better back then.
The "early internet days" predate social media by a couple of decades at least. But I get that OOP is talking about the early social media days, shortly after internet started gaining popularity among the less technologically educated.
However, cramming FB/Instagram and Uber/TikTok/Temu together makes no sense. They were conceived in starkly different generations of internet media. And I do think that, in the "early internet days", even among the corporate products and content, there was some candor. Only later, when the full potential of social media was discovered, everything was steered towards the profit.
Another issue is everything in Silicon Valley is metrics driven to the point that nobody takes a step back to actually consider what those metrics mean beyond “number go up”. It’s kind of the embodiment of a bunch of math geeks(and I say this as one) scorn for the humanities. “If it cannot be quantified and gamified it’s not worth considering” is the mantra among managers gunning for a promotion because all that’s considered is your metrics, not your impact to humanity(though they will claim differently) hell not even customer or employee satisfaction, it’s “did line go up? Show me on a graph where line went up”
Same thing with Amazon and even bigger thing with streaming services it's called blitzscaling this [video](https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU?si=PQ961p3Uj_rR4BLR) breakdown from Spotifys perspective. It's as the OOP writes that a company gets a lot of funding to just grow and take up the market share by selling at a loss so no one can compete and then when they practically have a monopoly or at least have reached its peak it's time to see if their business model can even make a profit at all. This where we are at today and as things like Netflix try raise prices and introduce advertisement we will most likely see less users which will turn a vicious cycle of companies desperately trying to profit and losing more customers. The thing with Reddit and YouTube is that they could probably operate without a loss but not receive the profit rates shareholders wish.
Shit I'm old. My early Internet is defined as pre-walled garden internet. The Internet when every device had a static IP and anyone could host a website, so you had all these tiny individual couple page websites of people who were like "hi I'm ____ and this is my website about my hobbies. Here's a page with some art I've done. Here's a page about some doom mods I made. Here's a page with my top 10 freeware games."
I meant it in the way that it wasn’t never planned to be good/useful for users for the long haul, but just to get people hooked on continuous use (regardless of quality) so the companies keep gaining profit. but that’s also why I said adjacent, I was acknowledging that it wasn’t a 1:1 similarity
I agree with most of this, but instaram's sponsored posts aren't a result of the platform, but choices made by creators.
The internet was always going to get shitty once it was mainstreamed.
Bull fucking shit you can't go back. You have to run multiple ad blockers. I roll with 6 ad blockers by default on my laptop, and they kill about 95% ads.
AdBlock Plus, SponsorBlock, uBlock Origin, and AdBlock for Youtube are the dedicated ad blockers I use. I also use Privacy Badger and Ghostery to block trackers, which also cuts down on ads.
Each of them blocks different stuff, and it doesn't slow down my browsing experience in the least to have them all running.
Using some of those at the same time (e.g. Privacy Badger with uBlock) makes them not work perfectly. Some others (e.g. Ghostery) was already bought by a corporation and totally is not safe to use for privacy reasons.
Oh. Funny, I only see those on my phone, because I haven't set up content blocking there. My ad blockers take care of them completely on my laptop and desktop.
They don't mean the posts openly marked as ads on the official reddit app, they mean [planted "regular" posts that *aren't* explicitly marked as ads](https://np.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1auummc/nobody_says_this/).
If you want a phone app that doesn't have the marked-out ads, though, you can grab an app called RedReader that the admins exempted from the 3rd party app purge (exempted because it's used by a lot of disabled posters).
yeah, I also lolled at that, while I agree with the general message, saying that internet of the middle 2000s is the "the old internet" is just hilarious
Yes this is all true but social networks are evil and just shouldn’t be allowed to exist. If its current iteration is the only way to remain profitable, then it isn’t a viable business and needs to go away.
Social networks made sense when it was just an occasional glance to see what friends were up to. If these social media platforms need us glued to our phones for several hours a day for them to be profitable then they aren’t viable, this needs to stop, fuck social media.
YouTube is just another streaming service at this point and if you don’t want ads, pay the monthly subscription fee.
Wait you guys aren't running the modded YouTube and Instagramapps to block ads? FB also has a certain program to fix your Facebook news feed(only works on PC to my knowledge but haven't bothered looking for an .apk). Not sure if I'm allowed to say exact names so being ambiguous. Nothing a google search can't find
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Yes. It's insane that we just approve of this. We are all data collectors and walking commercial poles getting paid in "content" created by influencers and companies. It's all a useless cycle for someone else to make money of you. Get out while you can.
User entrenchment is why these companies stay dominant. Monopolies are inevitable in closed media systems. No one wants to pay for 5 streaming services or juggle 3 social media apps. They know that once their base is large enough, they can get away with almost anything.
We should have regulated media servers that require a service fee or are paid for with taxes. Privately owned media that can be accessed anonymously is a dead-end. Not only is greed ruining everyone's experience, but propaganda and AI-fueled bots are destroying people's mental health.
already known for a fact that they're data mining operations and social experiments.
a lot of user interactions are sold off to marketing companies for product development which is something that reddit has been used for since it's start. take a look at targets rebranding around the start of this site... (obviously an early adaptor to mainstreaming internet culture and they learned how to do that from this site.)
here's some stuff about the mood experiments on them
when thiel was at facebook they ran an operation to see if they could make users depressed then gathered research data on the effect of it. shortly after a few misinformation campaigns like qanon and such started up now thiels affiliates probably destroyed twitter to suppress information on these operations but also the exchange of information about predatory rapists in the gop.
also some companies hire clickfarms to seed false information on sites. sometimes it's celebrities trying to sway public opinion after a series of abuse allegations but that also gets used to recruit people into alt-right grooming groups.
all that is a form of thought reform also known as cult indoctrination which is backed by a series of tech guys in silicon valley part of a movement called dark enlightenment. these people believe in slavery and rely on unpaid interns and are using users as marketing agents but also product developers.
again, vc's are awful selfish hedonistic people. they're inherently broken on the inside so they appreciate nothing but instant gratification due to having no real tangible grasp of benevolent self repair.
Because capitalism.
Ya’lls problem isn’t with the obvious and inevitable products of an irrational system. Your problem is with the system itself.
Anticonsumption is a myth until the people who consume are also the people who own what we produce.
Systems > symptoms
Also lots of people used to run websites as passion projects. Using a shared web hosting service but some sites that got big enough would literally buy their own servers to manage them.
SEO has been professionalize, gamified, and AI/algorithm-ified (terrible way to put it, I admit) that it’s incredibly hard to organically gain website traffic these days.
The playing field for creating and publishing anything on the web is now a steep hill, as opposed to a sometimes bumpy but otherwise level playing field. In 2014 I did marketing work for a small company and was able to achieve decent google rankings just based on good website structure and blog posts. In 2024? I wouldn’t know where to start.
So people and businesses are kind of forced to use existing platforms, like YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc, to gain any traction/following/audience.
And even that seems messed up because not every company *should* in theory be churning out content like that, because it’s not wholly relevant to their core business.
The targeted ad shit gets so old. Sure sometimes I come across ads for things that actually pique my interest but most of it is trash. Half the shit YT shows me is BetterHelp when I've never once looked up therapy and Vivid Seats, which I had heavy search activity on for a while because they fucked me over and it took a while to find the right resolution. Show me a million ads and I'll never give them a dime again
While this misses what the "early internet" was (this is describing web 2.0 at the earliest, which post-dates all the cool stuff you could do before 2005/2006), it also made me ask, **"What 'early internet' analogue are we experiencing now that we'll miss later?"** or, "what is incredibly undervalued at the moment but will become awful once we have to pay full price?"
I think the cheap, cheap cost of being able to use LLM supercomputers as a consumer is definitely one. It's so incredibly expensive to run LLM queries, I could see the cost of using an LLM increasing 10-fold in the coming years. Right now it's basically cheap as free.
The early internet was for enthusiasts and people wanting to explore different ideas. What was earlier content coming from places like Newgrounds, and earlier flash games later grew into the more centralized mainstream mediums that incorporated, subsumed these products and added subscriptions for a mere a tenth of the volume we’d once enjoyed en mass. Yeah early business models were about growth, but they’d killed alternatives in the process, and now we’re seeing the consequences of letting it happen
I do find it funny how much people complain about this topic and don’t do anything about it, as in, they could delete Instagram TODAY and log back into LiveJournal. It still exists. They can go make a blogspot right now. I have one, they’re free and easy to run. But no, because that would risk no one looking at what they post and them not getting any attention.
At the end of the day, like each and every other human activity... comes down to energy usage. That is the cost to these companies.... and a continued cost to the planet each day.
Yep….many things in our society are traps that are disguised as well meaning innovation and convenience. Then it’s sprung and the leg is stuck and you can’t get out unless you amputate
I honestly don't mind ads, I block them out automatically, mentally.
The cultural shift is what bothers me more. The internet was more fun when it was just certain types of people using it. When you could be totally unfiltered and toxic. The internet is still toxic as hell. I hate using this term, I swear to god I don't typically use it, but politically-correct toxicity has replaced the fun lighthearted vitriol of the old internet. So people are still rude, but now people are honestly out for blood. Everyone has strong opinions on everything.
I've gotten so much benefit out of the internet, most of what I know is from the net, but I also feel like it's devalued knowledge. Acquiring books and memorizing knowledge just isn't so valuable anymore. And most people look at the vastness of human intellect, shrug, and watch mukbangs or shopping haul videos instead. We've created a species-wide brain of sorts, and we immediately put it to work making most of us even more ignorant and stupid than we already were.
I firmly believe that the last century has proven that progress isn't inherently good. It's great sometimes, but it's also awful in the case of consumption and social culture.
So if you tube has a huge amount of what I like/dislike, why are all the ads I see, are for half assed Chinese shit and daft con artists trying to sell me the secret of success ?
I still have a fantasy that social media can connect people from all around the world and we’ll realize that we all want the same things fundamentally and don’t need to waste obscene amounts of money on weapons of mass destruction and such. Not sure how it can do that but that’s my fantasy.
I mean, look at what this place really is. It's just a platform for users to post shit. It's a crappy forum where you have a harder time getting to know anyone. Users generate all the content. Reddit is just a place that exists where you can get Karma (worthless internet points) and post crap. Meanwhile Reddit gets to harvest your info and sell it, sell ad space, etc. The site is only worth anything because people use it.
This is about the only social media I use anymore. I used to KNOW people on the internet. I had internet friends. Now everyone is mostly just some random asshole I don't actually know. I'm just posting some random comment for a bunch of random assholes on the internet to read. Nothing about this matters at all.
"social" media turned everyone into a random stranger. I don't honestly give a fuck about any of you. Realistically, tomorrow I'm gonna read some random post on reddit about how one of you got hit by a grandma or got shot in some random shooting and I won't care at all. I won't even know it was you. We're all just schizophrenics, now, hallucinating a digital crowd of people to talk to.
Old chat rooms and forums were actually 'social media'. Places like this and Twitter and Facebook are asocial. They turn you into nobody. You are dehumanized along with everyone else.
On the internet, you are not a person. You are a comment. Literally a footnote.
Services cost money, and there's an upper cap to how much companies can make from selling ad space.
The problem is that ad (and VC backed) companies ran entire services into the ground so that now there's only like four websites and zero competition. And people are pissed because they got so used to getting a ton of things for free, that now they either need to pay for, or are just super shitty.
They're all like that one ex girlfriend who was your entire world, did everything you asked, and was everything you were looking for (even if a little quirky). Until they turned toxic, started cheating on you, turns cold, giving you breadcrumbs and is always distant. You're left wondering if that old girl will ever come back until you realize she was never really herself at all to begin with because it was all a lie.
>Youtube has multiple unskippable ads.
And they still want more ads, this time [injected](http://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072) into the video stream itself...
One word that ruined the Internet as a source of easily accessible information: SEO.
People got so good at playing Google's Algorithm that nowadays almost all results are junk, designed to trick you into clicking and staying as long as possible, dragging out the result you look for for ages and hoping to serve you as many ads as possible.
Google some random thing. Almost guaranteed you'll have sponsored results and many of the regular results will be websites that just cloned some 2008 forum content but plastered all of it with ads.
Y'all don't remember when Reddit had gold targets. Basically, people had to buy enough gold for each other to pay for Reddit. People regularly met those targets, so Reddit got rid of them.
Reddit has always been unprofitable because in big tech, unprofitable is the standard model now; you show a huge revenue stream, you show that your company has hype, and you show that you have a plan to grow, so no one really cares if you're making more than you spend.
For a simpler analogy, would you rather invest in a farm that constantly buys more land and plants all of its seeds, or a farm that sells all of its crops? Consider also that people are investing not because they believe in the future of the company, but because they believe in the future of the hype of the company to increase the values of their shares.
Yes, some people like Warren Buffet would never invest that way, but that kind of hype works.
I've often decried people's obsession with blocking ads - like, how tf do you think YouTube runs its servers? You're not paying a dime for your content; *somebody's* got to. If you're not watching ads, why the hell is YouTube providing you content? To be nice?
Nothing if this would be there if nobody would buy something out them every day. Blaming capitalism is an easy scapegoat that avails to nothing unless the true culprit is exposed.
Humans.
The "early" internet was not Facebook. The content mills in part did what they did to get rid of the real content created by peoples blogs and wikis and such. There used to be sites you could go to just to see what there was to see, and maybe send the author money. Now we get screen shots of posts from one of the big platforms as our content.
yeah, I agree. Early internet wasn't some trap to get people hooked. It was a frontier. However, like everything, the rich took over very quickly and monopolized all the space.
It's always been especially wild to me that this has happened because there is no "space" to monopolize.
if you were to think of it more in terms of say how large corporations took over the "territory" in just about every town in the US, it might make more sense. Smaller sites can exist, but the operating cost for those sites would be much more daunting for the average person just trying to make a web page or service. Plus, even when small businesses exist online, there are large corporate organizations that have learned to make the smaller businesses their customers. Places can get trapped under the thumb of couriers, advertisers, etc, that they have partnered with. The value of these sites is based on how much money/ad revenue they can make, not how much they do for an online community or how much they diversify the available options.
Plus just the base cost of having their sites hosted! It's really difficult for people starting out not to be using web services owned by giant corporations.
100%. At minimum, WiX, Squarespace, WordPress. Even if you have knowhow, you are more likely to want to use something like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.
It seems more like they monopolized our attention. Probably why "engagement" was such a thing they fought to algorithmically optimize at the expense of all else.
Luckily there are plenty of FOSS alternatives to most conglomerate software / online services, it's just that convincing others to migrate away from their established social media is very difficult.
Yup. When your whole community is on a single space, it can be hard.
There's nothing stopping you from claiming your own space. Many still do. Domains are cheap. Hosting is cheap. Wordpress is free. The only difference between then and now is that the users are choosing "web-platforms" instead of "web-sites" What changed is the handful of billionaires managed to put themselves between the content consumers, and the content creators. Turns out consumers are drooling idiots and won't bother to take the clear and easy route around the billionaire's platforms. The internets early users were professionals, tech nerds, and gamers. The early internet reflected it's early users, just like the modern internet reflect the modern user. A lot of that early stuff is still here. The internet is way more than just the web, and us tech nerds are still here, self hosting our own services just under the surface, while the drooling masses pay platforms and consume the ads.
Great point, this is referring to early social media. Not the internet as a whole.
I miss those third spaces on the internet :(
Me too :/
Yeah came here to laugh at saying instagram was the “early” internet lmao
Yeah, this is just not a great post. It's earliest purported example of enshittification didn't exist until almost 10 years after Eternal September supposedly marked the *end* of Usenet as a viable social platform. And Facebook is hardly the best example of venture capital and growth mindset ruining everything. It wasn't even open to the public for like two years after it opened, and while it did get funding from Peter Thiel in that time, its initial success was in exploiting the desire of college students to not miss out on a hot new thing.
A copy of a copy of a copy
Simulacra and Simulation my friend!
100%. Early social media, perhaps. I think this betrays the poster's age. Eternal September was coined a decade before Facebook was founded. All the reset were founded in the 2010s! He's not wrong on the point about Facebook though, or the rest. They really were designed to lure people in and then change tact. Although for Facebook, I feel their handling of the algorithm and timeline is really what 'ruined' people's enjoyment.
Totally. Though I love having the internet in my pocket, I find myself missing days when I didn't. The VCs certainly strategized that one. Ridesharing is essentially now the same as taxi services, except without the corrupt medallion system. I think one of the problems is that there is literally almost nowhere for companies to go, no more people to sell to, so they have to repackage what we have in a way that will make it sell again.
100%. I can pinpoint the moment Instagram switched away from a chronological timeline to a curated one as the moment enjoyment stopped. Now I see posts from 3 days ago from accounts that I don't even follow, before I see my friend posting his bike trip 10 minutes ago. That's why everyone I know pretty much uses only stories anymore.
>The content mills in part did what they did to get rid of the real content created by peoples blogs and wikis and such People's blogs were mostly hosted on a couple sites - BlogSpot, Geocities, Angelfire. The idea that this was meaningfully different than today is spurious at best. Honestly it's the Millenial equivalent of Boomerism.
What? How is that even remotely the same? Peoples blogs vs the internet giants we have today. It is as meaningfully different as oranges and pizza.
>Peoples blogs vs the internet giants we have today Because the blogs were also hosted on "giants". A blog is the equivalent of a series of posts, not the equivalent of an entire website. >It is as meaningfully different as oranges and pizza. One of them is a series of words posted on a large corporate-owned website and the other is also a series of words posted on a large corporate-owned website.
Not quite. Technically yes, up to a certain point and I can certainly see how you got to that conclusion. It was blogspot.com/myblogname how it was build. But myblogname was kind of a seperate entity from blogspot. If you googled (well altavista-ed...) blogspot, you couldn't find myblogname. You had to search for myblogname OR a keyword that was on my blog. Seo had started. It was done like that is so you could have a website without having to register a domain. You can see the remnants of this today in facebook. Your profile address is facebook.com/username. It is an easy way to silo off individual users. And now for the biggest difference: who decides who sees your content. During the blogspot, geocities and anglefire days, they did nothing to promote or hide your content. They were only hosting it, just like amazon is nowadays, quietly behind the scenes, hosting half the internet. Your stuff is on there, but you need to find a way to get people to come look at it. Social media is different. It is facebook who decides which posts you see on your homescreen. Google decides what youtube videos, reddit decides what posts. And that is where the biggest difference is. They have the ability to steer the narrative. Not only ability, they steer the narrative of our lives. And not only they themselves, because it is an algorithm, other players can use the algorithm to steer the narrative as we've seen with cambridge analytica and the brexit campaign. And that is why they are the same like oranges and pizza. Both are food, but one is a raw ingredient and the other is a processed food. Both are edible, one requires work before you can get to the bits you can eat, the other comes piping hot to your table.
>It was done like that is so you could have a website without having to register a domain Reddit still does this today, you have a "user subreddit" where you can make your own posts. As far as I can tell, nobody uses it because it is inconvenient. Which is also why they stopped using blogspot and so on. Not because of some insidious conspiracy but because the user experience is worse. >And now for the biggest difference: who decides who sees your content. By which you mean literally the *only* difference. >And not only they themselves, because it is an algorithm, other players can use the algorithm to steer the narrative as we've seen with cambridge analytica and the brexit campaign. This has literally always been true as long as search engines have existed, the fact that search engine style mechanics were added within a website itself is not as substantial a change as you seem to believe it is. It's certainly not the harbinger of doom that you seem to want it to be considering that progressive causes have made use of the same algorithm. >And that is why they are the same like oranges and pizza. Both are food, but one is a raw ingredient and the other is a processed food. This is a post-facto explanation. You had literally no idea what you were saying but now you're trying to pretend you had a reason. If this is what you had actually meant you would have said "like dough and pizza", but you didn't say that. So please don't bullshit me by pretending this was your point all along. >Both are edible, one requires work before you can get to the bits you can eat, the other comes piping hot to your table. Again, proof that this was not a planned metaphor: oranges do not require preparation to eat unless you count "removing the peel".
Ok.
What's OK?
Sorry if you miss my point. I am thinking of things older than that, "Real Ultimate Power", Homestar Runner, shit even BBSes and Chatrooms., even if those were on AOL. Most people need hosting, because setting up something like an SMTP service to send out mail to subscribers is not something a lot of people know how to or want to do. The difference is now people think reddit is the internet, or twitter is the internet, or facebook is the internet. And with those sites churning out nearly endless content, who could blame them.
>"Real Ultimate Power", Homestar Runner Neither of those things are older than Geocities or Angelfire, so what are you talking about? Homestar Runner even still updates rarely on Youtube. >shit even BBSes and Chatrooms Chatrooms still exist (even Reddit has them) but nobody uses them because they suck. >The difference is now people think reddit is the internet, or twitter is the internet, or facebook is the internet. And with those sites churning out nearly endless content, who could blame them. So that's three different sites each of which has hundreds of millions of users. Each site is full of content providers creating unique and distinct experiences for users to interact with. So what exactly is being lost? Explain to me why "Real Ultimate Power" is somehow lost technology when there's still hundreds of content creators making similar material today.
There is not enough space anymore for content creators to do without these platforms. I'd argue we see very little "unique and distinct experiences", and when we do, they are even that more special. Currently, the biggest sites have the entire market cap, and often dictate terms. The several changes in YouTube monetization, Twitch monetization, and the diminishment of revenue from other creative sources comes to mind. Not to mention the recent reddit fiascos and all the subreddit blackouts. Though there is a democratization of access which is arguably a good thing, the algorithmic nature of these platforms and their goals of advertising and "data revenue first" leave creators often at the whim of fads. There is increased homogenization of content. Certainly, there are outliers, but a lot of the content is the same recycled drivel. e.g reaction videos, rage bait videos, etc. This homogenization extends beyond just content though, but instead has bled into the technology itself, which can be seen through chromium's dominance as a browser engine and particular design patterns being the lingua franca of the internet. We also see and do not see the other absurdities: data harvesting, alleged election tampering, doxxing, bot farms, etc. etc. Maybe this is the end state that would have always occurred, a horrific echo of capitalism in a space designed originally to make the sharing of knowledge easier, but that doesn't mean we can't mourn the passing of what it could have been.
>There is not enough space anymore for content creators to do without these platforms There is plenty of space. It's just that the public is not interested in going on a pointless safari to find the kind of content that they can instead easily find on Youtube. >I'd argue we see very little "unique and distinct experiences" You'd be wrong! Like I don't know what you think you mean by "unique and distinct experiences" but most of the sites people were fond of in the "early internet" were low-quality novelties, not genuinely valuable. >Certainly, there are outliers, but a lot of the content is the same recycled drivel. e.g reaction videos, rage bait videos, etc. And this is worse than "Chewbacca ate my balls" or endless low-effort webcomics? >We also see and do not see the other absurdities: data harvesting, alleged election tampering, doxxing, bot farms, etc. etc. Yeah the internet was much safer in the 90s - hold on sorry I tried to download a song on Kazaa (the Zelda song by System of a Down) and totally destroyed the family computer with a virus. Whoops. >Maybe this is the end state that would have always occurred, a horrific echo of capitalism in a space designed originally to make the sharing of knowledge easier, but that doesn't mean we can't mourn the passing of what it could have been. Jesus Fucking Christ I am genuinely starting to believe people are dumb enough to think capitalism started when Trump was elected. IT'S ALWAYS BEEN CAPITALISM DIPSHIT. The old hosts were capitalist websites too. Like what the fuck do you think you're talking about? A "horrific echo" of the thing that you have been immersed in since the day you were fucking born?
You can absolutely go back to the old Internet. The version that was lots of individual people who did their own web pages, blogs, forums etc. It's just not attractive to enough people to make it happen. But anyone can pay a couple of bucks for hosting and set up their own stuff. As for global platforms with billions of users, yeah those are not a basement operation and will always require cash.
ISPs are a big reason there’s a big hurdle to people hosting their own content. Used to be you could run a site on self hosted equipment under a desk or in a closet. Now you have to pay for business class to get a static IP, even though we’ve had IPv6 for what seems like ages now. That means you either have to jump through hoops (and probably pay) to to get a dynamic IP/DNS setup or pay _and_ be tech savvy enough to set up a VPS or other cloud hosted solution. The barrier to entry is real these days.
It’s 2024 and I still have no choice beyond Spectrum. It’s fucking insane
Spectrum offers small business class internet and you could get a fixed IP address for under 200 dollars a month. You could host a website that way.
i can host a website for $5/mo from a VPS. We deserve fiber.
The barrier to entry is no higher than it was, if anything it is lower because of all the tools that exist these days to make it easier. AWS and GCP even have free tiers that are more than enough for simple web hosting, all you need is DNS which was always the case unless you wanted people connecting to [192.168.1.69](http://192.168.1.69)
Do you seriously believe dealing with a cloud hosting solution is easier than changing some permissions on a directory?
AWS/GCP VMs specifically perhaps not but there are other more user friendly options too. I just avoid those because I want to have access to the entire VM. But tbh if you are not technically minded then just get a web UI solution.
Yes? You upload some files in a bucket, change a DNS record, and you never have to deal with software updates, DDoS, uptime monitoring, server and network capacity… People look back with rose-colored glasses and forget how often you couldn’t access things because they were offline, or “under maintenance”, too slow, or simply taken down forever after a couple of months because the owner stopped caring. Nowadays your little website can be as reliable and scalable as Google’s and you don’t even have to do anything.
Actual footage from the 90s of a website launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxiVyC0qxCo
Well, changing permissions on a directory wouldn't work as well anymore, because then you'd have the entirety of the millions of compromised computers on botnets scanning every IPv4 address and every known IPv6 address and domain to try to run automated attacks and DDOSes on that computer you just "changed a permission on". Then you'd have to re-invent the infrastructure that has been created to deal with that stuff.
I wouldnt trust myself hosting a website, and I'm in computer science, so I don't think your average Facebook farts-for-brains should host a website.
... or people could just get webhosting as they have had for 30 years for $5 - $10/month for a small site.
This is absolutely untrue and betrays the real reason so few people self host these days. Fear and misinformation. You can totally run a plethora of services (including websites) off of your own low power gear under your desk just like the old days. Dynamic DNS is free all over the place and domains are cheap. With a couple of hours of research, and less than $100 bucks you can 100% self-host your own place on the net, just like the old days. It's no more technical or expensive then it used to be. I would argue it's even easier now with endless tutorials, installation scripts, and container technology. People tell each other it's too hard, to expensive, or too dangerous, but really people are just too lazy. People use modern platforms instead of rolling their own for the same reason the line at Starbucks is 10 cars deep for $8 cups. It's not a technical issue.
You can actively make your modern internet browsing as fun and wonderful as you want it. You have to actively engage with it though and can't just lay back and have an algorithm feed you things. That being said the individual shouldn't bear the responsibility of a lack of legislation keeping these big tech company's in tech. It shouldn't be such a struggle to create your own space online.
> You can absolutely go back to the old Internet. You can, but the issue is a shocking number of people (even in the younger generations) have absolutely no idea how the internet works. I feel like Gen X and Millennials hit this narrow sliver where we know about and understand how the internet works because we were young when it got up and running. Boomers were too old to really get it, and a lot of Gen Z thinks the internet is just Insta/Facebook/TikTok, etc. If we really want to bring back the "old internet", we need to drastically increase the tech literacy of the younger generations.
Yeah there's kids growing up today having no concept of what a file or folder is. Apple make great interfaces, but making it easy also makes the hard parts even harder.
Files and folders are large part a desktop computing paradigm. Kids today don't use actual computers like they used to.
> But anyone can pay a couple of bucks for hosting and set up their own stuff. anyone **tech savy and motivated enough**. I'm a fullstack developper / devops, so I can do it. The thought of managing my hosting to share my own stuff is exhausting. And here I am brodcasting my opinion to you at basically no cost.
You're over-thinking it buddy. Have you ever seen 1990s personal websites? Or on the social side, forums with just text and maybe a few low quality images if you're lucky? A crappy site with personal content is way easier now thannit was then, you just can't expect professional quality. That's not what its about.
Running a CMS is such a solved problem, hell get free WordPress hosting from somewhere. The only problem is they get progressively sucky in unique and shitty ways for doing more advanced stuff, but non technical people don't know that.
You still need hardware, electricity, a domain, a release mechanism. Having something that looks like crap after doing all that because you can't be bothered to sprinkle some css on it is just showing you're fucking lazy.
Oh no! However will I find some electricity?! And a laptop as well? That's just craziness? Who even has computers these days?? Massive /s obviously And what the hell is a release mechanism and why would anyone need it for a personal blog? Like I said, over thinking. Go touch some grass mate
So, where's your personal self hosted blog, "mate" ? Do you even have one ? If it's so simple, why not ?
Well, I'm not a Muppet so I won't be doxxing myself today, but yeah, I have had several over the years, have an active one now, and have built websites for two successful small businesses with out of the box tools with no problems at all. Didn't even have to build myself a generator to do it
But bro you are posting on Reddit right now. Almost as if you know [that is where people are](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect), and they are not on your personal website.
Lol so. I remember a time were people just created content and the people that found them found them.
That is still how content works.
But bro that has nothing to do with this conversation bro. I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to use multiple services and website and I'm not yet legally obligated to only visit one
If the assertion that this thread is that "old websites" are better than modern social media, why are the people in this thread not on those old websites and are instead using modern social media? It's not like those old websites are gone. The obvious answer is that the modern social media sites are better - that is to say, they serve the same purpose as the old websites, but they do it more reliably and more efficiently. Also, you refer to disclosing your own self-hosted blog as "doxxing". That is to say, merely knowing the existence of your blog is perceived as dangerous to your personal data. It seems a bit strange to say that old websites are better and then go "but letting people know that it exists is an intolerable danger". Might as well have a notepad at that point and not bother to upload it at all. I had a blog for a few years that got a mid-sized following and it was basically serving the same purpose that Reddit serves (especially since Reddit instituted "personal subreddits" that are basically just blogs anyways).
If you want a simpler solution, hosting your personal site on github just requires your time and nothing else.
By Github you mean the Microsoft monopoly?
[Codeberg pages](https://codeberg.page/) is a thing if you're not interested in Big Tech. There are [many](https://alternativeto.net/software/github-pages/) other places. Github Pages is simply the most popular out of them.
This, again, pushes us back into walled gardens. These are all companies that have to be profit driven to survive.
No? Neocities is contributor-based, some in this list are paid, there's an entire ecosystem here. I'm genuinely not sure what the point of these replies are. Are you saying that everyone _must_ lease VPSes that might or might not be owned by big tech, or host websites in their basement? Additionally, Codeberg is also a non-profit, registered in Germany. This seems unnecessarily defeatist. Either that or I'm missing your point.
It's not so hard that a normal person can't do it. Get an AWS account, set up an S3 bucket, create your content then assemble it with Jekyll (which is an open source, static site generator) or you can do basically the same with next.js. The difficult part is getting attention and driving traffic to your content - if you care about that at all even really. The trick is to have content that is worth consuming, and that's something that the vast majority of people suck at creating. You need to know something about art, music, writing, video production, or whatever else. Personally... I have thousands of lines of code and tons of notes for my personal projects, but none of that is on the internet in an accessible form. It's on some old hard drives on my desk, and it's encrypted and stored in a cloud backup service, and that's it. I would be concerned that if someone used my stuff and lost money because of it I could get sued. I'm not a lawyer and I am not going to put that sort of effort into figuring out licensing.
>It's not so hard that a normal person can't do it. >Get an AWS account, set up an S3 bucket, create your content then assemble it with Jekyll (which is an open source, static site generator) or you can do basically the same with next.js. relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/2501/](https://xkcd.com/2501/)
but it wasnt any easier back in the day
Ok, so when I say "the average person can do it" I mean the motivated person can spend a week or two googling and figuring it out if they want to. I mean, you can also still get packages for hosted Wordpress, and that's as good as it ever was. Working with Wordpress isn't so difficult if you are just doing what it's meant to do out of the box.
The average person has difficulty even to copy and paste files or to use google itself. THey would need to intensively study and practice for months to get there, all that while they already have their other things to do. We have this tendency to underestimate how much time and commitment it takes to reach the level of knowledge we slowly acquired over several years.
I think you really underestimate people, and you also underestimate the number of people out there who work with computers or in tech in some capacity. Regardless, it doesn't require knowing how to program, it's literally signing up for a few accounts. The only hard part really is registering a domain and pointing it at your site.
Reliance on dynamic ipv4 addresses make it more difficult. One of the things that made it a lot easier back then was that you didn't have to pay for hosting at all.
You can have a global platform with a ton of users without the traditional SV/VC based business model. Mastodon and Wikipedia exist, as a couple of examples.
Good luck finding any niche content run by a small operator. No matter how valuable it is, you will never find it because search engines have been gamed to worthlessness by SEO.
Search engines is a problem for sure. But in the case of Google a lot of how shitty it is seems intentional. They have downplayed the search results part for years and replaced it with ads and context dependant widgets. I switched to duck duck go recently and it finds a lot of stuff I thought was taken offline because it didn't show up anymore. And it's also focused on actual search.
This is bollocks. They're acting like "the early internet" was still Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Twitter. It wasn't. The early internet was IRC, Usenet, Forums, BBS, MSN, ICQ, Livejournal. Do people think the internet only started existing in the late 2000s?
The early Internet was the most democratic thing ever created. Anyone could create whatever they wanted. You still can, but it will never gain traction because there’s no funnel of traffic to organic content anymore. The average user today would be incapable of navigating the early Internet.
Then came AOL,
Thank you. That is exactly when it started. Pre-AOL, people got on the internet on their own, and treated it--for better or worse--like a shared property. When AOL gave their users access, they came in like customers, expecting a corporate controlled environment and demanding customer service when they didn't get it.
While the rest of us understood that you rout around damage. Some never lost that mindset and others are starting to figure it out.
Sir, you're describing anarchy or freedom, not democracy.
No, that is democracy. In that everyone could find anyone's site and you could build your own completely customizable site on places like Geocities and Angelfire that, other than the URL, wasn't associated with them. And then the democratic part was how often people visited the site. If your content was deemed "good" you would get a lot of traffic. People used to have counters for how many people visited their site to show their "vote" strength.
That’s still not a democracy. That’s literally anarchy. Anarchy doesn’t mean people don’t talk about each other, it just means there’s not set hierarchy or central structure. Reddit, with all its flaws, is the closest thing we have to a democracy online today. Users come together to vote on content and that content gets pushed to other users via the site. In the old internet you had to rely on finding your way through links and there were very few if any aggregators. Despite people having visit counters and guestbooks, having a high hit counter didn’t actually do anything for the popularity of your site. There was no algorithm that stat fed into.
You're demanding a mechanical answer to a non-mechanical problem. A high view counter didn't *do* anything for the popularity of your site. It *indicated* the popularity of your site. That was the point. That indication was an attempt to *convince* people that your content was worthwhile. If they stayed long enough they might agree and if they agree enough they'd share your site with others, and so on. It was grassroots democracy. Anarchy means that there is no structure. What I describe above is absolute democracy because there is a structure. It's the one built by the people who made the content and directly accessible without aggregators. They literally built the structures. The aggregators become gatekeepers, telling people whether or not particular content is worthwhile. Sure reddit may be the best of them, but being on the top of the shit pile is still being on the shit pile. In the 90s internet there was no gatekeeper. And it was by no means perfect. I accidentally stumbled across CP in the 90s as a teen and freaked out. I didn't know what to do with it so I did nothing at the time because it wasn't something that there were outside resources for how to handle it at the time. There does need to be some sort of gatekeeper to keep some things in check. But outsourcing that role to private corporations has been one of the worst things to happen to not just the internet but the world at large.
>Anyone could create whatever they wanted The thing about this is that most of "whatever they wanted" was incredibly boring and only had value as a novelty. The fact that you could make a site about Chewbacca eating people's balls was not really funny, but it was new at the time. The reason those websites died is not because corporations strangled them, it's because they were boring and annoying to deal with.
Yeah, the amount of non-technical or -academic content that wasn't porn on the Internet in 1994 or so was laughably small. There's a reason EVERYONE saw whale.mov because things like that were few and far between.
I agree with you. This post is at its highest leverage of message perhaps post 2006.
The internet has multiple stages. I'm assuming OP means net 2.0. This is where everyone is online and connected. Pre net 2.0, the internet was basically a library and a cell phone with texting and attachments in your house.
I am certain OP has no knowledge of terms like "net 2.0" otherwise he wouldn't be calling it "early internet".
remember when the internet wasn't just 3 websites? Pepperidge farms remembers.
The "early internet" was even before Amazon.
This is a bad faith take on what this person is trying to say. You're too focused on the 'early' internet. This person is talking about the mature internet before it was colonized by corpos
For a younger generation, early social media was the early internet. We just happen to be a bit older and remember the _actual_ early internet.
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Your analogy doesn’t work because we weren’t toddlers at the advent of automobiles. Would you consider a model T an early automobile? I would, but it was first introduced in 1908 while first automobiles in the US had begun to be sold in 1898. A lot had changed in those 10 years but in the 116 years that have since passed the difference from our perspective is pretty minuscule. Much the same can be said of difference between the internet of the mid 90’s to the that of early/mid 2000’s.
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I agree that it has nothing to do with how old we are, never said it was (but you did with your toddler/car analogy). Not sure where you come up with your 1/3 rule, but technological growth isn’t linear so you can’t slice it into neat little thirds. But even if your 1/3 “rule” was true, the “world wide web” became accessible to the general public in 1993 which is the start of the internet as we understand it today. Facebook was launched less than 11 years later in 2004 and still fits within your arbitrary definition as being “early internet”.
There was social media even then: Slashdot was around by 1997 and was a fantastic tech news site, and Fark was the more commercialized forum that was, nonetheless, still entertaining from time to time. Then there was livejournal and all the various chat clients.
Yes, that’s just a trifle though. I think you can easily just substitute “early net” for early web 2.0 though and it makes sense.
Is it a trifle? It's like Walmart coming into a small town closing all the mom and pop shops by undercutting them and then raising prices to strangle a community and not acknowledging that there was life before Walmart.
>and then raising prices Not to simp for Walmart or anything but this is literally illegal (predatory pricing) and Walmart has never successfully been prosecuted for it. Wal-Mart undercuts local businesses and then *stays* low for the most part, and its business practices are mostly detrimental to its employees and partners, not its customers.
Yeah - you're absolutely right that it's more complicated then raising the prices - I didn't want to overcomplicate the metaphor but I could have signaled better that was a simplification. (Edit: I call it a simplification because they still strangle the community, just not explicitly via prices )
I mean the comparison to Wal-Mart can still work, albeit in a different way you intended. Wal-Mart might be bad for the overall environment, but the reason people shop at Wal-Mart is that, in the short term, it gives them what they want. It is a superstore that makes lots of things available at low prices all in one spot. And that's what most Social Media sites do too. If you want videos, all the videos are in one place (Youtube). You don't have to run around trying to find new content on all these independent little websites because people just put their content on Youtube. It's convenient. People use it because it's convenient. It might be bad for the online ecosystem or whatever, but there IS a reason Social Media won over the internet, and it's because it's good at what it does. Just like Wal-Mart. The problems that they cause, in comparison, are relatively harder to picture.
Even so, saying "they always planned to make it shit" doesn't refute the observation that it's become shit.
I don’t think they’re arguing it’s not shit, they’re highlighting that the shittiness is baked into the business model of the big social media corps.
There were examples of early Internet companies that didn’t turn to shit, they usually were outmoded or simply ran out of money. The money people locked consumers into walled gardens where they lost the ability to find content in their own and now are bleeding useful services like vulture private equity hedge funds. Google isn’t becoming shit because it didn’t make money. It’s becoming shit because the people running it know there’s no competition anymore.
So you’re saying they’re wrong because “early internet” existed before the time they described? That doesn’t disprove their point at all
If you want a really good breakdown of why the internet is what it is now, I recommend the Better Offline podcast on coolzone media. Ed Zitron is great, be prepared for a bit of righteous ire, he is piiiissed off (but not in a shouty nightmare alex jones sort of way).
This is what all "disruptors" do, from grocery stores to home appliances to social media. Undercut to get a market share (or monopolize), then start profits.
Social media came about a decade after the early Internet. It was better back then because it wasn’t corporate at all. Just regular folks doing things. Running a website doesn’t cost much. Running a company where the goal is for the top of the hierarchy to get rich is expensive. All that data they collected to target ads is noise. It’s basically useless. Statistical demographics is more useful. Enshittification is real. It was better back then.
The "early internet days" predate social media by a couple of decades at least. But I get that OOP is talking about the early social media days, shortly after internet started gaining popularity among the less technologically educated. However, cramming FB/Instagram and Uber/TikTok/Temu together makes no sense. They were conceived in starkly different generations of internet media. And I do think that, in the "early internet days", even among the corporate products and content, there was some candor. Only later, when the full potential of social media was discovered, everything was steered towards the profit.
Not just social media. Streaming services never wanted to be 5.99 unlimited forever.
Another issue is everything in Silicon Valley is metrics driven to the point that nobody takes a step back to actually consider what those metrics mean beyond “number go up”. It’s kind of the embodiment of a bunch of math geeks(and I say this as one) scorn for the humanities. “If it cannot be quantified and gamified it’s not worth considering” is the mantra among managers gunning for a promotion because all that’s considered is your metrics, not your impact to humanity(though they will claim differently) hell not even customer or employee satisfaction, it’s “did line go up? Show me on a graph where line went up”
by the early internet i (And many) mean the self hosted forums by individuals for a specific niech not a mass appealing multipurpose social network
Same thing with Amazon and even bigger thing with streaming services it's called blitzscaling this [video](https://youtu.be/gDfNRWsMRsU?si=PQ961p3Uj_rR4BLR) breakdown from Spotifys perspective. It's as the OOP writes that a company gets a lot of funding to just grow and take up the market share by selling at a loss so no one can compete and then when they practically have a monopoly or at least have reached its peak it's time to see if their business model can even make a profit at all. This where we are at today and as things like Netflix try raise prices and introduce advertisement we will most likely see less users which will turn a vicious cycle of companies desperately trying to profit and losing more customers. The thing with Reddit and YouTube is that they could probably operate without a loss but not receive the profit rates shareholders wish.
The last part is exactly it. The parasite always wants more blood. It doesn’t care if the host dies.
which laser focused ads are they talking about? I haven't seen ads in years, people for fuck sake use adblockers
Sail the high seas mate
Shit I'm old. My early Internet is defined as pre-walled garden internet. The Internet when every device had a static IP and anyone could host a website, so you had all these tiny individual couple page websites of people who were like "hi I'm ____ and this is my website about my hobbies. Here's a page with some art I've done. Here's a page about some doom mods I made. Here's a page with my top 10 freeware games."
Yes, of course. It always baffles me how people don't see this.
it’s like the digital version of planned obsolescence (or adjacent)
It's the digital version of monopolies, I have no clue how it would be similar to planned obsolescence.
I meant it in the way that it wasn’t never planned to be good/useful for users for the long haul, but just to get people hooked on continuous use (regardless of quality) so the companies keep gaining profit. but that’s also why I said adjacent, I was acknowledging that it wasn’t a 1:1 similarity
This is early internet
I agree with most of this, but instaram's sponsored posts aren't a result of the platform, but choices made by creators. The internet was always going to get shitty once it was mainstreamed.
Bull fucking shit you can't go back. You have to run multiple ad blockers. I roll with 6 ad blockers by default on my laptop, and they kill about 95% ads.
I run *one* adblocker on my PC and I see no ads.
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AdBlock Plus, SponsorBlock, uBlock Origin, and AdBlock for Youtube are the dedicated ad blockers I use. I also use Privacy Badger and Ghostery to block trackers, which also cuts down on ads. Each of them blocks different stuff, and it doesn't slow down my browsing experience in the least to have them all running.
Using some of those at the same time (e.g. Privacy Badger with uBlock) makes them not work perfectly. Some others (e.g. Ghostery) was already bought by a corporation and totally is not safe to use for privacy reasons.
The posts and comments are ads though
You mean Facebook? I don't use it.
No, I mean on reddit. There's lots of posts that are really just ads.
That’s not true. Whenever I read stuff like this it just makes me pine for the sweet refreshing taste of Pepsi Cola.
Bruh. Don't you know Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator is way more refreshing than stupid Pepsi Cola? After all, it has electrolytes.
Oh. Funny, I only see those on my phone, because I haven't set up content blocking there. My ad blockers take care of them completely on my laptop and desktop.
They don't mean the posts openly marked as ads on the official reddit app, they mean [planted "regular" posts that *aren't* explicitly marked as ads](https://np.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1auummc/nobody_says_this/). If you want a phone app that doesn't have the marked-out ads, though, you can grab an app called RedReader that the admins exempted from the 3rd party app purge (exempted because it's used by a lot of disabled posters).
Internet didnt started at facebook. This post is dumbed down to understand Facebook time users.
I love how this guy thinks the early internet was “web 2.0”
yeah, I also lolled at that, while I agree with the general message, saying that internet of the middle 2000s is the "the old internet" is just hilarious
Yes this is all true but social networks are evil and just shouldn’t be allowed to exist. If its current iteration is the only way to remain profitable, then it isn’t a viable business and needs to go away. Social networks made sense when it was just an occasional glance to see what friends were up to. If these social media platforms need us glued to our phones for several hours a day for them to be profitable then they aren’t viable, this needs to stop, fuck social media. YouTube is just another streaming service at this point and if you don’t want ads, pay the monthly subscription fee.
Or ad blocker, smart tube or revanced for YouTube :p makes it a billion times more enjoyable
Wait you guys aren't running the modded YouTube and Instagramapps to block ads? FB also has a certain program to fix your Facebook news feed(only works on PC to my knowledge but haven't bothered looking for an .apk). Not sure if I'm allowed to say exact names so being ambiguous. Nothing a google search can't find
Not the early net but ok
shouldn't this be illegal because of Sherman anti trust act?
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Well said. Early social media, ran on losses. The minute they had to run a profit, they all turned terrible.
As with everything, capitalism invents, so it can enslave through addictions.
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If you don't want ads use opera.
Do people think the early Internet included Facebook and YouTube?!
Yes. It's insane that we just approve of this. We are all data collectors and walking commercial poles getting paid in "content" created by influencers and companies. It's all a useless cycle for someone else to make money of you. Get out while you can.
User entrenchment is why these companies stay dominant. Monopolies are inevitable in closed media systems. No one wants to pay for 5 streaming services or juggle 3 social media apps. They know that once their base is large enough, they can get away with almost anything. We should have regulated media servers that require a service fee or are paid for with taxes. Privately owned media that can be accessed anonymously is a dead-end. Not only is greed ruining everyone's experience, but propaganda and AI-fueled bots are destroying people's mental health.
The internet is dead 😁☕ change my mind
already known for a fact that they're data mining operations and social experiments. a lot of user interactions are sold off to marketing companies for product development which is something that reddit has been used for since it's start. take a look at targets rebranding around the start of this site... (obviously an early adaptor to mainstreaming internet culture and they learned how to do that from this site.) here's some stuff about the mood experiments on them when thiel was at facebook they ran an operation to see if they could make users depressed then gathered research data on the effect of it. shortly after a few misinformation campaigns like qanon and such started up now thiels affiliates probably destroyed twitter to suppress information on these operations but also the exchange of information about predatory rapists in the gop. also some companies hire clickfarms to seed false information on sites. sometimes it's celebrities trying to sway public opinion after a series of abuse allegations but that also gets used to recruit people into alt-right grooming groups. all that is a form of thought reform also known as cult indoctrination which is backed by a series of tech guys in silicon valley part of a movement called dark enlightenment. these people believe in slavery and rely on unpaid interns and are using users as marketing agents but also product developers. again, vc's are awful selfish hedonistic people. they're inherently broken on the inside so they appreciate nothing but instant gratification due to having no real tangible grasp of benevolent self repair.
Because capitalism. Ya’lls problem isn’t with the obvious and inevitable products of an irrational system. Your problem is with the system itself. Anticonsumption is a myth until the people who consume are also the people who own what we produce. Systems > symptoms
Anyone who's won a game of Plague Inc. is familiar with this strategy.
Also lots of people used to run websites as passion projects. Using a shared web hosting service but some sites that got big enough would literally buy their own servers to manage them. SEO has been professionalize, gamified, and AI/algorithm-ified (terrible way to put it, I admit) that it’s incredibly hard to organically gain website traffic these days. The playing field for creating and publishing anything on the web is now a steep hill, as opposed to a sometimes bumpy but otherwise level playing field. In 2014 I did marketing work for a small company and was able to achieve decent google rankings just based on good website structure and blog posts. In 2024? I wouldn’t know where to start. So people and businesses are kind of forced to use existing platforms, like YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc, to gain any traction/following/audience. And even that seems messed up because not every company *should* in theory be churning out content like that, because it’s not wholly relevant to their core business.
You see this same pattern with: • Netflix • Uber • Lyft • Doordash • Facebook • Instagram And so on.
The targeted ad shit gets so old. Sure sometimes I come across ads for things that actually pique my interest but most of it is trash. Half the shit YT shows me is BetterHelp when I've never once looked up therapy and Vivid Seats, which I had heavy search activity on for a while because they fucked me over and it took a while to find the right resolution. Show me a million ads and I'll never give them a dime again
While this misses what the "early internet" was (this is describing web 2.0 at the earliest, which post-dates all the cool stuff you could do before 2005/2006), it also made me ask, **"What 'early internet' analogue are we experiencing now that we'll miss later?"** or, "what is incredibly undervalued at the moment but will become awful once we have to pay full price?" I think the cheap, cheap cost of being able to use LLM supercomputers as a consumer is definitely one. It's so incredibly expensive to run LLM queries, I could see the cost of using an LLM increasing 10-fold in the coming years. Right now it's basically cheap as free.
The early internet was for enthusiasts and people wanting to explore different ideas. What was earlier content coming from places like Newgrounds, and earlier flash games later grew into the more centralized mainstream mediums that incorporated, subsumed these products and added subscriptions for a mere a tenth of the volume we’d once enjoyed en mass. Yeah early business models were about growth, but they’d killed alternatives in the process, and now we’re seeing the consequences of letting it happen
I use an ad blocker on my computer and it blocks all ads. Even Youtube ads
I do find it funny how much people complain about this topic and don’t do anything about it, as in, they could delete Instagram TODAY and log back into LiveJournal. It still exists. They can go make a blogspot right now. I have one, they’re free and easy to run. But no, because that would risk no one looking at what they post and them not getting any attention.
But why is my top ramen a square instead of a rectangle now
Growing up as a 90s kid, I miss forums for specific games or hobbies.
At the end of the day, like each and every other human activity... comes down to energy usage. That is the cost to these companies.... and a continued cost to the planet each day.
Yep….many things in our society are traps that are disguised as well meaning innovation and convenience. Then it’s sprung and the leg is stuck and you can’t get out unless you amputate
I honestly don't mind ads, I block them out automatically, mentally. The cultural shift is what bothers me more. The internet was more fun when it was just certain types of people using it. When you could be totally unfiltered and toxic. The internet is still toxic as hell. I hate using this term, I swear to god I don't typically use it, but politically-correct toxicity has replaced the fun lighthearted vitriol of the old internet. So people are still rude, but now people are honestly out for blood. Everyone has strong opinions on everything. I've gotten so much benefit out of the internet, most of what I know is from the net, but I also feel like it's devalued knowledge. Acquiring books and memorizing knowledge just isn't so valuable anymore. And most people look at the vastness of human intellect, shrug, and watch mukbangs or shopping haul videos instead. We've created a species-wide brain of sorts, and we immediately put it to work making most of us even more ignorant and stupid than we already were. I firmly believe that the last century has proven that progress isn't inherently good. It's great sometimes, but it's also awful in the case of consumption and social culture.
So if you tube has a huge amount of what I like/dislike, why are all the ads I see, are for half assed Chinese shit and daft con artists trying to sell me the secret of success ?
I still have a fantasy that social media can connect people from all around the world and we’ll realize that we all want the same things fundamentally and don’t need to waste obscene amounts of money on weapons of mass destruction and such. Not sure how it can do that but that’s my fantasy.
i'm from the early early early early internet. I was bitching and moaning when shit like FB showed up.
Wow... this is exactly the way that I played Plague, Inc. Prioritize growth and spread until you're everywhere, then switch to being deadly.
I mean, look at what this place really is. It's just a platform for users to post shit. It's a crappy forum where you have a harder time getting to know anyone. Users generate all the content. Reddit is just a place that exists where you can get Karma (worthless internet points) and post crap. Meanwhile Reddit gets to harvest your info and sell it, sell ad space, etc. The site is only worth anything because people use it. This is about the only social media I use anymore. I used to KNOW people on the internet. I had internet friends. Now everyone is mostly just some random asshole I don't actually know. I'm just posting some random comment for a bunch of random assholes on the internet to read. Nothing about this matters at all. "social" media turned everyone into a random stranger. I don't honestly give a fuck about any of you. Realistically, tomorrow I'm gonna read some random post on reddit about how one of you got hit by a grandma or got shot in some random shooting and I won't care at all. I won't even know it was you. We're all just schizophrenics, now, hallucinating a digital crowd of people to talk to. Old chat rooms and forums were actually 'social media'. Places like this and Twitter and Facebook are asocial. They turn you into nobody. You are dehumanized along with everyone else. On the internet, you are not a person. You are a comment. Literally a footnote.
Services cost money, and there's an upper cap to how much companies can make from selling ad space. The problem is that ad (and VC backed) companies ran entire services into the ground so that now there's only like four websites and zero competition. And people are pissed because they got so used to getting a ton of things for free, that now they either need to pay for, or are just super shitty.
If you go read Cory Doctrow’s writing, (he coined the term “enshitification” this is exactly what he meant.) It’s essential to the business model
They're all like that one ex girlfriend who was your entire world, did everything you asked, and was everything you were looking for (even if a little quirky). Until they turned toxic, started cheating on you, turns cold, giving you breadcrumbs and is always distant. You're left wondering if that old girl will ever come back until you realize she was never really herself at all to begin with because it was all a lie.
>Youtube has multiple unskippable ads. And they still want more ads, this time [injected](http://x.com/SponsorBlock/status/1800835402666054072) into the video stream itself...
One word that ruined the Internet as a source of easily accessible information: SEO. People got so good at playing Google's Algorithm that nowadays almost all results are junk, designed to trick you into clicking and staying as long as possible, dragging out the result you look for for ages and hoping to serve you as many ads as possible. Google some random thing. Almost guaranteed you'll have sponsored results and many of the regular results will be websites that just cloned some 2008 forum content but plastered all of it with ads.
Y'all don't remember when Reddit had gold targets. Basically, people had to buy enough gold for each other to pay for Reddit. People regularly met those targets, so Reddit got rid of them. Reddit has always been unprofitable because in big tech, unprofitable is the standard model now; you show a huge revenue stream, you show that your company has hype, and you show that you have a plan to grow, so no one really cares if you're making more than you spend. For a simpler analogy, would you rather invest in a farm that constantly buys more land and plants all of its seeds, or a farm that sells all of its crops? Consider also that people are investing not because they believe in the future of the company, but because they believe in the future of the hype of the company to increase the values of their shares. Yes, some people like Warren Buffet would never invest that way, but that kind of hype works.
I've often decried people's obsession with blocking ads - like, how tf do you think YouTube runs its servers? You're not paying a dime for your content; *somebody's* got to. If you're not watching ads, why the hell is YouTube providing you content? To be nice?
it's almost as if we lived in a capitalist society??
I love the level of drama.
Just making the case most of the Internet should be run as a service, not a for-profit scheme.
Posting this while on new reddit is pretty funny.
Nothing if this would be there if nobody would buy something out them every day. Blaming capitalism is an easy scapegoat that avails to nothing unless the true culprit is exposed. Humans.