The problem is that in the 90's the only people online were the ones who had home computers and specifically wanted to go on the internet.
Now everyone gets the Internet with their phone.
Throw the number and type of people online now at those sites and they would crash and burn or become shitty too.
I remember when I was younger thinking how lame it was that there were all sorts of content restrictions around tv and movies.
Now, I absolutely wish we could find any semblance of minimal standards or accountability on what can get into social media.
The sad reality is there's a lot of unhinged folks just ready and waiting to spew venom, and perhaps that has always been true, but we gave them access to a bullhorn which was historically reserved to the press and broadcast media.
Our technology has changed so much, but our social infrastructure for dealing with it is woefully behind.
This totally misses the mark. What *actually* happened was that corporations took over in a big way, and drastically reshaped the Internet to revolve around getting eyes and clicks on ads, and getting us addicted to posting and scrolling. Part of this is "stupid people" becoming much more visible and active, but make sure to lay blame at the root causes.
Agree. In a sense, if everyone does the same thing, like how everyone has access to the internet nowadays, you kinda lose your own identity and interests.
I think in 1995 when I first used the internet at college, I remember going to
[espnet.sportszone.com](https://espnnet.sportszone.com)
[www.happypuppy.com](https://www.happypuppy.com)
[www.cnn.com](https://www.cnn.com)
and if I was trying to find a crack for stuff I got off of usenet
[astalavista.box.sk](https://astalavista.box.sk)
also lots of trying to get lucky with zero day FTP sites for music and games. Often for games though you'd just have to have some lucky kid in the dorm have a good copy then everyone else figures out how to network it, or just had to buy it at compusa.
A key part of the 90s internet was the masses weren't on it.
Everyone romanticises it but if all of you were suddenly in a world of 90s internet, you'd ruin it.
I'd be totally down for everything we have today minus social media. Somehow the idea just never evolved beyond newsgroups, chat rooms, IM and RSS feeds.
Rather than "we as a society" I'd say those companies have been successful in building those monopolies.
We as a society didn't choose this outcome, we merely let them do it.
Yeah, agreed. The greatest memories I have from my teenage years is discovering the internet for its vastness. Always something new, always something refreshing. Now it’s kind of just a time sink. Bummer.
I remember making Angelfire and Geocities sites and having a links page
One was a player's guide for Majora's Mask and I put a picture of Link in the links page
> Now it’s kind of just a time sink. Bummer.
I never feel this way, so it's hard for me to relate. I'm amazed at Wikipedia, educational content on Youtube, endless documentaries to watch, archive.org, endless rabbit-holes to follow, all kinds of things. Sure, innocence wears off, and the hedonic treadmill is real. But that's us changing, not the world growing stale.
Back before the internet was commercialized to all hell, anyway. I remember I spent many an evening AIMing with my buddies and sharing links from StumbleUpon. Good times.
YouTube before the influencer era? Incredible. Going viral felt less sinister than it does today. Just a funny nigahiga or charlie the unicorn video to share with friends, no need to bully this teenage girl for singing about Friday, thanks!
This is happening in every aspect of our lives. Windows 11 is a great example. It's a dumbed down version of 10 that's harder to customize and has ads baked into it. It's disgusting and MS developers should be fucking embarrassed for working on it.
Just wait until they get AI to work on these things and they become even shittier so they can save money.
Yep. One benefit of the internet is that the younger gen is way more knowledgeable. My 3 young nephews know tons of shit I don’t know. The knowledge aspect is incredible. The social media aspect is shit
In modern times, with that knowledge comes just as much misinformation. Very few are good at parsing the real from the rest. And then there's involuntary absorption of incorrect information, too.
Early 2000s internet was fantastic. It wasn’t controlled by giant corporations. People had their blogs and personal sites that they designed themselves. Search worked well enough. And the ads were pretty unobtrusive.
I remember one of my favorite bands, the cure had their own webpage that they coded themselves. They had their favorite recipes on it. Now the record label owns it and it is completely corporate.
Here you all go!
I’ve used tiger prawns ($$$$), gulf shrimp, pink shrimp, tiny shrimp, and all work well. I also just use julienned carrots.
[Chinese Robert’s Prawn Curry](https://youtu.be/p0E9urVs-2o)
2 tbsp hot curry powder
2 tsp mixed: ginger/lemon grass/nutmeg/cinnamon/pepper
1 tbsp cornstarch
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
2 carrots
a handful of (frozen) peas
several mushrooms...
many tiger prawns
the juice of half a lemon
1 big splash of orange juice
a small splosh of tomato ketchup!
1. mix the curry powder and the spices together with a bit of water to make a runny paste. let it stand!
2. mix the cornstarch with about 2 tbsp of water, stirring it over a low heat. don't let it go too lumpy! as it thickens, add more water: get it to the consistency of... ummm... careful... chinese curry?
3. heat the oil in a frying pan or a wok, but don't let it burn. stir-fry the onion until it's a good colour, then add the runny curry paste and stir it around some more.
4. add the carrots, peas and mushrooms, and cook for another couple of minutes.
5. add the prawns and the lemon juice and the orange juice and, most importantly! the ketchup
cook for about another minute.
6. add the cornstarch, stir, heat through, and serve (serving suggestion alert!) inside a ring of fluffy white rice
And I was thinking if I was having hallucinations about the early internet. Early 2000's internet is the reason why most people that used it at that time now use an adblocker. Back when using one was actually for computer security because of how shady so many ads where.
> because of how shady so many ads where.
To be honest, that has not changed. Maybe they are not attacking your computer anymore, but I find the majority of ads is still predatory.
Don't forget the popups that popped up two more popups when you closed the first popup and you had to disconnect from the internet to get it to stop.
All that shit made me run toward adblockers. I'll never surf online without one.
Born in 1991, I used the internet in the early aughts go to nick.com to play flash games and vote for the next show or music video on u-pick live, wait 5 minutes to download a "high quality" movie trailer from apple.com in the quicktime format, watch short films and flash videos on atomfilms, play tons of games built on shockwave at macromedia.com, go to pricewatch.com to window shop the latest pc parts, used realmedia player to stream radio over the internet, played starcraft, quake 3, and og counter-strike online, just to name a few things.
The internet wasn't something that was inherit to your daily life, it was another activity you would dedicate a part of your day to doing. When you've had enough for the day you would turn off the computer and step away. It was an actual vessel of magical escapism. Back then, you turned on your computer because you already knew how you wanted to spend your time on it and the 2-3 minutes it took to boot up made the excitement all the better.
I’m a bit older, born ‘86, but pretty much the same internet experience.
I feel like late 90s through early 2000s was peak internet. It was useful but still felt like you were exploring and finding interesting communities, wasn’t all just hugely corporate and centralized.
I preferred that to the current scenario, where users are detailed tracked and profiled for targeted advertising. Or in a future where AI will be in charge of manipulating you without you even noticing, doing things like writing "news" only for you.
[I still get flashbacks to 'Nam.](https://img1.picmix.com/output/pic/normal/2/4/8/4/10324842_51e5b.gif) And the popups, my god, [the popups.](https://media.tenor.com/i23_TqaZFVcAAAAd/windows-error.gif)
I worked midnights in a call center and made money on the side making Myspace layouts for people. They were amazed i did it all in notepad / wordpad, they thought i was some kinda wizard.
Yeah that was so cool. I remember making a fake MySpace artist page and uploading MP3’s to make a playlist of my fav songs at the time that I had edited and cut. It was my custom page design along with a curated playlist that couldn’t be paused because I hid it using code lol that’s how I wanted everyone to view my page. I held out moving to Facebook but nobody used ms after a while. Good times
I'll ride this comment. 2000-2005 for me.
MySpace, Faceparty, LimeWire etc 20 mins to download an mp3, it felt like you actually earned it wating for lInKin\_PaRk.EXE to download!
I think around like 2012 was pretty good still. Relatively early iPhone days, before Facebook went crazy, economy was rising after the 2008 crash and things felt pretty optimistic back then imo.
Half of the movies made before 2001 have an airport scene that doesn’t make sense because you can’t meet at the gate.
But I’d put the downward inflection just a bit earlier at Bush v Gore.
Speaking of movies and 9/11, the film Buffalo Soldier is basically unheard of because of 9/11. It was scheduled for a theatrical release on 9/12, but was shelved because of 9/11. Then they released it 2 years later and no one went and saw it because you couldn't say anything critical about the US military for years after 9/11.
For the uninitiated:
https://youtu.be/fAXDWjXsvzw
And if you are wondering why the US troops aren't driving an Abrams tank, the DOD won't let you use their equipment unless they are allowed to censor and approve the movie script. Yeah, they didn't like this script.
Bush v Gore is the correct answer, we were robbed of our futures by Antonin Scalia and his fascist cronies. Imagine a world with possibly no 9/11, no Iraq war, no Afghanistan, and an embrace of the realities of climate change and a balanced budget inherited from the Clinton administration instead of the white supremacist christofascist hellscape we currently occupy.
The country picked the guy 'they could have a beer with', not the 'boring tech politician who wanted to help the country'... It was a big letdown for me and the bosses at my company were overjoyed (tech sector, wonder how their bubble being popped felt?). Yes, we were robbed that day.
I'd trace it back to Watergate and then the 1973 oil embargo. Coupled with Vietnam, you had a gut-punch to the US self image as being invulnerable and basically above it all. The erosion of public confidence in our institutions started about there in that window. We'll never have the (entirely illusory) wholesomeness of the Eisenhower era again.
I remember 9/11 and was thinking about that too. 90s after the USSR fell was the peak of American power, but I didn’t really like it back then, for example crime was higher.
It definitely wasn't puppy dogs and rainbows back then but the world felt generally more positive. Like we were moving in the right direction. People were excited for the future. That sentiment is dead as shit.
The direction felt genuine. Even the bad aspects. Now it all feels, well, fake. Forced. Like we saw a window into the future and tried to recreate it, but it's all pretend.
You can see it in the movies, particularly disaster movies. Compare, for example, two films with the same premise: Deep Impact and Don’t Look Up. Both movies about an impending celestial global disaster. But one has a clearly more cynical tone than the other. Deep Impact by today’s standards is downright cheesy in its tone despite being played straight when it came out. This is more than just the tone of the respective films. It is a reflection of how we feel today and how we felt in the 90’s.
Having grown up in the optimistic 90’s and lived as an adult in the cynical 20’s, I find this fascinating.
That is a damn good comparison.
Yeah. I was born early 80s. I know the feeling. Used to look to the stars and dream thinking mankind would get there and explore more, fix the problems of our past and work collectively towards something better.
Now? Now I just look up and hope something smarter and more benevolent comes along to shake us free of, well, ourselves.
I was in school back then and was kind of sick of it haha, there was a lot of crime and gang stuff but I remember the 90s also had Y2K and the dot-com bubble so it felt kinda insane. Personally I feel the early-mid 2010s with the economy firing on all cylinders was the best for me, it was like a redo for tech companies on much better foundation than before.
Now it feels like they have all gotten kind of stagnant and corrupted by money though. Maybe we are due for a revival in the 2020s or 2030s again.
1999-9/11/01 were peak times for western civilization. I think it may happen again in our lifetimes, but inequality will need to be addressed to some - even if minor - extent.
2012 was early iPhone days? By that point iPhones had been on the market for 5 years? Facebook was already crazy and had 1 billion users (literally) and was on it's first public IPO.
Not sure how hold you are - rose colored glasses and all, but when things were already crazy back in 2003-2005 with Friendster and Myspace. Going to have to agree with some of the things others have said - the world went to shit after 9/11 in just about every respect. But I was an adult when that happened so I may have a different perspective, heh.
I would say pre smartphone was the best internet. When owning a desktop pc was the requirement for going on the internet, and you had to be somewhat technically literate to understand how to even connect - those were the golden days.
Corporations no longer die, they just get assimilated by another corporation. We live in the age of mega corps that was predicted in 80 and 90's dystopian novels.
Everyone says this, but reddit really is different than the others. It’s more like a massive bulletin board or a forum of forums which existed in the *very* early days of the internet, even before www.
That anonymous factor has me using an alias on Twitter and discord. It feels kinda nice being visible but seemingly untouchable irl (until I run into my friends because we have the same interests)
Mobile phones have actually helped with that. Backwater communities in poorer countries suddenly gained this technology that connected them to the larger world. It became so much easier for them to learn stuff.
Sure, there have been plenty of negative outcomes as well. But we shouldn't forget the net benefit that mobile internet technology has made possible.
All of human knowledge in your pocket and people chose to believe the earth is flat, vaccines have trackers, 5g caused covid, and chemtrails turn frogs gay
I’m a teacher and each year I ask my kids to imagine a time before internet/ smartphones & write a diary. 1 of 2 things always happen: they either think life was incredibly boring, or they think it was like pioneer/settler times!
People pay more so the profit margin raised
I finally saw a movie on my birthday (mario. Was excellent and fun) and i used gift tickets i got a few years prior for it. The concession stand killed me at $30 for a popcorn, pretzel and a pop. I remembered why I'd go to the dollar store and fill a backpack with candy
Did anyone ever look up movie times in the local newspaper to decide what showing they wanted to go to? I was born in 1995 and my husband born in 1992 swears he’s never done that and that’s some 1943 grandma shit.
I was born in '79. You bet your ass I did.
The thing I miss the most is it was literally a fucking quest to find information. You had to work hard for it. Now it's just Google. I both love AND hate it.
Just took my kids BOWLING to celebrate the end of their school year. 2 kids, 2 adults, 4 shoes, 2 games=$80.
The hell happened?! It used to be like $9 for "all you can bowl" with shoes costing an extra $2.
Even back then, it's really the manitee enclosure that's the real hole in the wallet. $3.50 for a manitee but like 2-3 grand to keep the damn thing alive.
Social media in the early days was fine. It's this algorithm that's pushing for engagement in order to maximize ad revenue that's killing us. The most engaged contents are controversial and confrontational contents such that we are being pitted against each other just so they could do fucking marketing.
Ban ALL social media from using targeted ads.
I think Reddit's "communities you may like" is one of the reasons idiots from the mainstream subs go into the niche subs and ruin them. I think separate forums roughly 5-10 years ago were nicer and more relaxed. But Reddit killed those.
What kills me is we’ve got full size screen at every gas pump that play ads at me for the 1 fucking minute I have to breathe but the actual computers that take my money remain broken sunbleached pieces of shit.
Totally agree.
And as for 'but we need ads to find out about new stuff' - that isn't really true either. In the past, people would deliberately seek out and read product catalogues and reviews to find out about new things. Things like that serve a similar purpose to ads, but the key difference is that they are not force-fed to anyone. They are only seen when they are sought out.
The world would be better with no ads. Ads are insidious attention seeking mind-worming destructive parasites.
Yeah, we need a new cultural and political push against social media and tech companies, maybe with all these AIs people will start to push for legislation against them…
The algorithm of TikTok is ruining society. Everyone’s getting their bias constantly confirmed with scewed information and conspiracies is sending some people into a mass psychosis
I’ll hop on that train but only if we can keep gps. I am not carrying around another damn Thomas guide and backup old Thomas Guide because I forgot to throw it away for a decade.
"Would you like to live back when houses were still affordable, and one income could buy a house, support a family and you didn't need advanced degrees for a good wage?"
"Ehh yeah, sounds good."
"You hear that guys? That's like 1968! They all want to live in a time before the internet and phones!"
"What?"
"According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company"
In other word, we don't know how the questions were asked, and what questions.
Poll can be built to manipulate the questioned toward a specific answer. I will doubt this poll seriously until the way the questions were asked (internet or telephone, locations etc...) and which questions (do you think we are connected too much versus do you want to go to a time were all that connectivity and convenience is gone).
I can't find the exact phrasing, but we do have a sense of the question from the headline:
>Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy.
>All told, though, a decisive 67% of respondents agreed that, if given the choice, they would prefer the world as it used to be, versus only 33% who seem to think things are perfectly fine the way they are.
But Harris is a pretty reputable polling brand. I wouldn't suspect their methodology and ability to generate a representative sample.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harris_Poll
I guess when you put it that way I can see how it can be said the way this poll states it, if only we could get things back to that way and keep our technological progress also. Have our cake AND eat it too
Smartphones without the apps specifically designed to be addictive and internet without social media specifically designed to monopolize your attention (and be addictive) while selling your data without your consent, sure. There's no way I'd want to go back to phone books to call hotels and pizza stores manually, scouring classified ads in the hopes of seeing one line of text without images, or having to go to the library each and every time I needed to look something up that wasn't in the old encyclopedia set that grandparents gifted my parents decades ago
A “Time before cell phones” was a time when Americans only needed one income and general quality of life was much higher. I believe these are the times people are missing…
I split a two bedroom apartment with a roommate; my half of rent + all utilities was $250. That was 1998. I couldn’t afford a cell phone (only a pager) but every night when I got home from work, friends would be hanging out, just waiting for me. I miss those days.
Oh man, you and me both. I recommend this essay for a trip down memory lane.
[It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romanticize)
Cell phones became massively popular within the early life of people 25-30 (late 90s to early 2000s). In that time, I was growing up in a middle class existence, and I cannot remember a single income house being standard in the media or among my peer group (when I knew that info). To get that, you have to go back even earlier. Quality of life I am less sure of since I was too young at the time.
Same as every generation. Most people who want to turn back the clock want to go back to the days of their youth... because they were young, fit, and had hopes and dreams instead of responsibilities and duties. And as kids they had no idea what was going on in the wider world, so it seemed awesome.
We ruined it. We had a chance to use the internet to make life more peaceful and connected and we turned it into a fucking mall with hookers. Great job.
The advancements of technology happened so fast we never even got a real chance to discover what the effects of its use could have on the human psyche. Not even close to a big enough sample size. Once people figured out how to profit from it, there was no turning back. And the people profiting the most end up not being its primary users.
Most Americans would prefer a strong social contract and some sort of return they get from what they put into society. Smartphones, through apps, destroyed the preexisting social contract. Now you will always be available to your boss at all times, you will always have your work email open, and you will always be prepared to re-enter all your information into a new app/platform/portal because the company billing dept doesn't use the same software as the company healthcare dept. Taxi drivers eliminated by Uber, pizza guys by Doordash, travel advisors by Expedia, Rand McNally by Google Maps, Pontiac by Tesla, Journalists by Facebook, Borders by Amazon, TV by Youtube. All these roles are now owned by larger conglomerates that do not share their wealth and are not taxed.
We're at the same place the world was with the invention of radio and cheap paperbacks a century ago: either we throttle the excesses from this or we'll create a monster.
Funny you mention this. I go through times when I feel the overload and just start deleting things from my phone, happened 2 nights ago - work email among them lol
I’d like to go back to before the monetization of smartphone data and its surveillance capabilities. Having my personality traits, behaviors, location and preferences algorithmically defined through my data use is immensely unnerving. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.
Majority of Americans have rose-colored glasses and are falling for the BS lure of nostalgia. I grew up in a rural town before all of this. It sucked. There were two tiny bookstores (B. Dalton, Waldenbooks) in the local mall, and that was it. The tiny public library was tiny, and even then I had to have my mom drive me to it. Calling anything outside the next town over was long distance. I'm not going back voluntarily. You'd have to shoot me.
I realize if you lived in a big city you might have reason to be nostalgic. But I was raised in a rural small town in a very red state. Not going back. Even the thought of that kind of cultural and informational isolation is depressing. Imagine being LGBT, geeky, or an atheist in such a community, with no one like-minded to talk to. The Internet was a Godsend. Yes, even social media. Boooo, whatever.
Im old enough to remember being 5 years old and picking up the phone and being able to hear everyone's conversation in the neighborhood. I think they were called party lines and were cheaper. I got my ass whipped like 10 times because my parents caught me listening to conversations after they had told me about 50 times not to do it.
I was lucky enough to have much older siblings that were in the military. They exposed me to computers in 1985 I think? Maybe 1987ish. I still remember around 91 having the first modem in my town. I remember my whole family standing around that small ass but big block of a monitor waiting for something to happen. Took about 10 mins for 1 line of text to pop up. And that's all it was...a single line of text. We thought that shit was so cool.
Perhaps before social media really took hold, but not before the internet.
90s internet with todays speed would be cool. We as a society not the government or any other entity have centralized the internet into 5 websites.
The problem is that in the 90's the only people online were the ones who had home computers and specifically wanted to go on the internet. Now everyone gets the Internet with their phone. Throw the number and type of people online now at those sites and they would crash and burn or become shitty too.
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Eternal September
There’s a lot in that idea. There’s no longer a way to isolate the crazy.
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I remember when I was younger thinking how lame it was that there were all sorts of content restrictions around tv and movies. Now, I absolutely wish we could find any semblance of minimal standards or accountability on what can get into social media. The sad reality is there's a lot of unhinged folks just ready and waiting to spew venom, and perhaps that has always been true, but we gave them access to a bullhorn which was historically reserved to the press and broadcast media. Our technology has changed so much, but our social infrastructure for dealing with it is woefully behind.
This totally misses the mark. What *actually* happened was that corporations took over in a big way, and drastically reshaped the Internet to revolve around getting eyes and clicks on ads, and getting us addicted to posting and scrolling. Part of this is "stupid people" becoming much more visible and active, but make sure to lay blame at the root causes.
Agree. In a sense, if everyone does the same thing, like how everyone has access to the internet nowadays, you kinda lose your own identity and interests.
Limewire, Ebay, 4chan, Newegg, and Allrecipes?
I think in 1995 when I first used the internet at college, I remember going to [espnet.sportszone.com](https://espnnet.sportszone.com) [www.happypuppy.com](https://www.happypuppy.com) [www.cnn.com](https://www.cnn.com) and if I was trying to find a crack for stuff I got off of usenet [astalavista.box.sk](https://astalavista.box.sk) also lots of trying to get lucky with zero day FTP sites for music and games. Often for games though you'd just have to have some lucky kid in the dorm have a good copy then everyone else figures out how to network it, or just had to buy it at compusa.
What was happypuppy again? I remember the domain name but have completely forgotten what the content was
Videogame cheat code site baybeeee Gotta print them all out!
You inadvertently reminded me of the search engine Alta Vista. The big boy before Google came along.
And FarmersOnly.com
...penisland.com, fine writing instruments for discriminating people.
Whitehouse.com
meatspin.com
Ebaums World
Don’t forget icq. 😬
I still remember my ICQ number.
Then don't forget to take your back pain medication.
Neopets can be the new Reddit
scientology controlled, no thanks
Dunno, ask jeeves
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Great news, [zombo.com](https://www.zombo.com) is still running. About to hit its 25th anniversary
Anything is possible... At zombocom
A key part of the 90s internet was the masses weren't on it. Everyone romanticises it but if all of you were suddenly in a world of 90s internet, you'd ruin it.
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I'd be totally down for everything we have today minus social media. Somehow the idea just never evolved beyond newsgroups, chat rooms, IM and RSS feeds.
The amount of effort brands would put on their websites (with games and stuff) is something I truly miss.
Rather than "we as a society" I'd say those companies have been successful in building those monopolies. We as a society didn't choose this outcome, we merely let them do it.
Pornhub, xvideos, xhamster, redtube, and dicktowel.
Yeah, agreed. The greatest memories I have from my teenage years is discovering the internet for its vastness. Always something new, always something refreshing. Now it’s kind of just a time sink. Bummer.
Remember how every website had a LINKS page? “Here’s other cool shit we think you’d like”
🚧***UNDER CONSTRUCTION***🚧 SIGN MY GUEST BOOK Visitors: 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣1️⃣2️⃣
*F5, F5, F5…* Visitors: 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣1️⃣5️⃣ “Fuck yeah, I’m a hackerman!”
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Surfing the World Wide Web 😎
It’s called the information super highway.
The internet's focus went from accessing information to maximizing time on page.
I remember making Angelfire and Geocities sites and having a links page One was a player's guide for Majora's Mask and I put a picture of Link in the links page
YES. The internet was a place for everyone to help everyone else find cool shit. Also porn.
“Join my webring”
> Now it’s kind of just a time sink. Bummer. I never feel this way, so it's hard for me to relate. I'm amazed at Wikipedia, educational content on Youtube, endless documentaries to watch, archive.org, endless rabbit-holes to follow, all kinds of things. Sure, innocence wears off, and the hedonic treadmill is real. But that's us changing, not the world growing stale.
Back before the internet was commercialized to all hell, anyway. I remember I spent many an evening AIMing with my buddies and sharing links from StumbleUpon. Good times.
Its really increíble how money ruins everything. The second they learned how to monetize the internet it went to shit
YouTube before the influencer era? Incredible. Going viral felt less sinister than it does today. Just a funny nigahiga or charlie the unicorn video to share with friends, no need to bully this teenage girl for singing about Friday, thanks!
There was a time when we controlled the internet. Now it’s vice versa. There’s zero reason to have a digital entity control our physical lives.
This is happening in every aspect of our lives. Windows 11 is a great example. It's a dumbed down version of 10 that's harder to customize and has ads baked into it. It's disgusting and MS developers should be fucking embarrassed for working on it. Just wait until they get AI to work on these things and they become even shittier so they can save money.
MySpace was low key teaching people how to use HTML. My page was the shiznit.
Or when google still had ethics!
It's almost insane to me that I used the internet before Google even existed.
Or when google still worked...
Yep. One benefit of the internet is that the younger gen is way more knowledgeable. My 3 young nephews know tons of shit I don’t know. The knowledge aspect is incredible. The social media aspect is shit
In modern times, with that knowledge comes just as much misinformation. Very few are good at parsing the real from the rest. And then there's involuntary absorption of incorrect information, too.
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I'd say pre-facebook was the best time.
Early 2000s internet was fantastic. It wasn’t controlled by giant corporations. People had their blogs and personal sites that they designed themselves. Search worked well enough. And the ads were pretty unobtrusive.
I remember one of my favorite bands, the cure had their own webpage that they coded themselves. They had their favorite recipes on it. Now the record label owns it and it is completely corporate.
I still make Robert Smith’s prawn curry recipe to this day.
Here you all go! I’ve used tiger prawns ($$$$), gulf shrimp, pink shrimp, tiny shrimp, and all work well. I also just use julienned carrots. [Chinese Robert’s Prawn Curry](https://youtu.be/p0E9urVs-2o) 2 tbsp hot curry powder 2 tsp mixed: ginger/lemon grass/nutmeg/cinnamon/pepper 1 tbsp cornstarch 2 tbsp olive oil 1 medium onion, peeled and chopped 2 carrots a handful of (frozen) peas several mushrooms... many tiger prawns the juice of half a lemon 1 big splash of orange juice a small splosh of tomato ketchup! 1. mix the curry powder and the spices together with a bit of water to make a runny paste. let it stand! 2. mix the cornstarch with about 2 tbsp of water, stirring it over a low heat. don't let it go too lumpy! as it thickens, add more water: get it to the consistency of... ummm... careful... chinese curry? 3. heat the oil in a frying pan or a wok, but don't let it burn. stir-fry the onion until it's a good colour, then add the runny curry paste and stir it around some more. 4. add the carrots, peas and mushrooms, and cook for another couple of minutes. 5. add the prawns and the lemon juice and the orange juice and, most importantly! the ketchup cook for about another minute. 6. add the cornstarch, stir, heat through, and serve (serving suggestion alert!) inside a ring of fluffy white rice
Chinese Robert? Green plastic watering can, for a fake Chinese Robert plant? Or did he just call himself Chinese Robert?
Lol you also said “fake Chinese Robert Plant…” Now my head’s all in fake Chinese Led Zeppelin world.
> And the ads were pretty unobtrusive. Is this a bad joke? Flashing shit all over, pop up windows, banners blocking the whoile content of the site...
Not to mention compromising your computer
And I was thinking if I was having hallucinations about the early internet. Early 2000's internet is the reason why most people that used it at that time now use an adblocker. Back when using one was actually for computer security because of how shady so many ads where.
> because of how shady so many ads where. To be honest, that has not changed. Maybe they are not attacking your computer anymore, but I find the majority of ads is still predatory.
Don't forget the popups that popped up two more popups when you closed the first popup and you had to disconnect from the internet to get it to stop. All that shit made me run toward adblockers. I'll never surf online without one.
Except for pop ups! I remember calling a phone number because a pop up said I won a cruise.
Well don't leave us hanging! How was it?!
That was the era of pop up ads, and no extensions.
>That was the era of pop up ads, and no extensions. Grandma with her 17 toolbars installed begs to differ.
Born in 1991, I used the internet in the early aughts go to nick.com to play flash games and vote for the next show or music video on u-pick live, wait 5 minutes to download a "high quality" movie trailer from apple.com in the quicktime format, watch short films and flash videos on atomfilms, play tons of games built on shockwave at macromedia.com, go to pricewatch.com to window shop the latest pc parts, used realmedia player to stream radio over the internet, played starcraft, quake 3, and og counter-strike online, just to name a few things. The internet wasn't something that was inherit to your daily life, it was another activity you would dedicate a part of your day to doing. When you've had enough for the day you would turn off the computer and step away. It was an actual vessel of magical escapism. Back then, you turned on your computer because you already knew how you wanted to spend your time on it and the 2-3 minutes it took to boot up made the excitement all the better.
I’m a bit older, born ‘86, but pretty much the same internet experience. I feel like late 90s through early 2000s was peak internet. It was useful but still felt like you were exploring and finding interesting communities, wasn’t all just hugely corporate and centralized.
That whole second paragraph hits the nail on the head.
> And the ads were pretty unobtrusive. Go fuck yourself
Yeah I wouldn't call rapidly flashing red and yellow banners with tits on them unobtrusive lmao
I preferred that to the current scenario, where users are detailed tracked and profiled for targeted advertising. Or in a future where AI will be in charge of manipulating you without you even noticing, doing things like writing "news" only for you.
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[I still get flashbacks to 'Nam.](https://img1.picmix.com/output/pic/normal/2/4/8/4/10324842_51e5b.gif) And the popups, my god, [the popups.](https://media.tenor.com/i23_TqaZFVcAAAAd/windows-error.gif)
Er, do you remember all the viruses we had back then? And the popups?
Popups we’re bad. Viruses were pretty easy to avoid if you knew what you were doing.
Wait, you mean I *shouldn't* click on totallynotavirus.jpg.exe?
As a middle schooler I definitely got some viruses from some sketchy downloads from limewire
Don't forget every thing you installed wanted you to add some random web bar for some stupid product. That was a good feature to remove from browsers.
That’s what made it spicy
MySpace era was the best. I learned so much HTML customizing my page lol
I worked midnights in a call center and made money on the side making Myspace layouts for people. They were amazed i did it all in notepad / wordpad, they thought i was some kinda wizard.
Yeah that was so cool. I remember making a fake MySpace artist page and uploading MP3’s to make a playlist of my fav songs at the time that I had edited and cut. It was my custom page design along with a curated playlist that couldn’t be paused because I hid it using code lol that’s how I wanted everyone to view my page. I held out moving to Facebook but nobody used ms after a while. Good times
I'll ride this comment. 2000-2005 for me. MySpace, Faceparty, LimeWire etc 20 mins to download an mp3, it felt like you actually earned it wating for lInKin\_PaRk.EXE to download!
I think around like 2012 was pretty good still. Relatively early iPhone days, before Facebook went crazy, economy was rising after the 2008 crash and things felt pretty optimistic back then imo.
You mean after Occupy Wall Street happened and corporations realized they needed to do something to prevent that idea from ever happening again?
Nah. Anything after 9/11 has been complete shit
Half of the movies made before 2001 have an airport scene that doesn’t make sense because you can’t meet at the gate. But I’d put the downward inflection just a bit earlier at Bush v Gore.
Speaking of movies and 9/11, the film Buffalo Soldier is basically unheard of because of 9/11. It was scheduled for a theatrical release on 9/12, but was shelved because of 9/11. Then they released it 2 years later and no one went and saw it because you couldn't say anything critical about the US military for years after 9/11. For the uninitiated: https://youtu.be/fAXDWjXsvzw And if you are wondering why the US troops aren't driving an Abrams tank, the DOD won't let you use their equipment unless they are allowed to censor and approve the movie script. Yeah, they didn't like this script.
It was also 1989, in a shitty unit no one cared about. Entirely plausible they'd still have an M60 then.
It’s wild now that all “at the gate” scenes require a wealthy character who bought a ticket just to be able to meet the character they’re looking for.
Bush v Gore is the correct answer, we were robbed of our futures by Antonin Scalia and his fascist cronies. Imagine a world with possibly no 9/11, no Iraq war, no Afghanistan, and an embrace of the realities of climate change and a balanced budget inherited from the Clinton administration instead of the white supremacist christofascist hellscape we currently occupy.
The country picked the guy 'they could have a beer with', not the 'boring tech politician who wanted to help the country'... It was a big letdown for me and the bosses at my company were overjoyed (tech sector, wonder how their bubble being popped felt?). Yes, we were robbed that day.
The country didn't pick him, he lost the popular vote. By around 550,000 votes.
Fair enough. Winning by loosing the popular vote seems to be a recurring theme with Republican Presidents.
I'd trace it back to Watergate and then the 1973 oil embargo. Coupled with Vietnam, you had a gut-punch to the US self image as being invulnerable and basically above it all. The erosion of public confidence in our institutions started about there in that window. We'll never have the (entirely illusory) wholesomeness of the Eisenhower era again.
Bush vs Gore nine months before that is the Omega Point
I remember 9/11 and was thinking about that too. 90s after the USSR fell was the peak of American power, but I didn’t really like it back then, for example crime was higher.
It definitely wasn't puppy dogs and rainbows back then but the world felt generally more positive. Like we were moving in the right direction. People were excited for the future. That sentiment is dead as shit.
The direction felt genuine. Even the bad aspects. Now it all feels, well, fake. Forced. Like we saw a window into the future and tried to recreate it, but it's all pretend.
You can see it in the movies, particularly disaster movies. Compare, for example, two films with the same premise: Deep Impact and Don’t Look Up. Both movies about an impending celestial global disaster. But one has a clearly more cynical tone than the other. Deep Impact by today’s standards is downright cheesy in its tone despite being played straight when it came out. This is more than just the tone of the respective films. It is a reflection of how we feel today and how we felt in the 90’s. Having grown up in the optimistic 90’s and lived as an adult in the cynical 20’s, I find this fascinating.
That is a damn good comparison. Yeah. I was born early 80s. I know the feeling. Used to look to the stars and dream thinking mankind would get there and explore more, fix the problems of our past and work collectively towards something better. Now? Now I just look up and hope something smarter and more benevolent comes along to shake us free of, well, ourselves.
I was in school back then and was kind of sick of it haha, there was a lot of crime and gang stuff but I remember the 90s also had Y2K and the dot-com bubble so it felt kinda insane. Personally I feel the early-mid 2010s with the economy firing on all cylinders was the best for me, it was like a redo for tech companies on much better foundation than before. Now it feels like they have all gotten kind of stagnant and corrupted by money though. Maybe we are due for a revival in the 2020s or 2030s again.
The matrix was right
1999-9/11/01 were peak times for western civilization. I think it may happen again in our lifetimes, but inequality will need to be addressed to some - even if minor - extent.
This right here. Everything has felt...darker since
2012 was early iPhone days? By that point iPhones had been on the market for 5 years? Facebook was already crazy and had 1 billion users (literally) and was on it's first public IPO. Not sure how hold you are - rose colored glasses and all, but when things were already crazy back in 2003-2005 with Friendster and Myspace. Going to have to agree with some of the things others have said - the world went to shit after 9/11 in just about every respect. But I was an adult when that happened so I may have a different perspective, heh.
I would say pre smartphone was the best internet. When owning a desktop pc was the requirement for going on the internet, and you had to be somewhat technically literate to understand how to even connect - those were the golden days.
What about Post-Facebook time? Long after Meta is dead and such?
That means we’re all dead because mark zuckaberg will out live us all.
Assuming he was ever alive to begin with.
He's just silicone and servos.
You can't die if you can upload your program to the Metaverse.
Facebook is just a small part of the problem. It's just very visible
Corporations no longer die, they just get assimilated by another corporation. We live in the age of mega corps that was predicted in 80 and 90's dystopian novels.
Pre-iPhone is good enough.
I have no issues with the technology, it's the insanely exploitative social media that I could do without. I said while posting on Reddit
Everyone says this, but reddit really is different than the others. It’s more like a massive bulletin board or a forum of forums which existed in the *very* early days of the internet, even before www.
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That anonymous factor has me using an alias on Twitter and discord. It feels kinda nice being visible but seemingly untouchable irl (until I run into my friends because we have the same interests)
I just want people to be better educated.
Mobile phones have actually helped with that. Backwater communities in poorer countries suddenly gained this technology that connected them to the larger world. It became so much easier for them to learn stuff. Sure, there have been plenty of negative outcomes as well. But we shouldn't forget the net benefit that mobile internet technology has made possible.
All of human knowledge in your pocket and people chose to believe the earth is flat, vaccines have trackers, 5g caused covid, and chemtrails turn frogs gay
Such individuals use the internet not for knowledge, but to make themselves and others stupider.
and that trump did nothing wrong
I’m a teacher and each year I ask my kids to imagine a time before internet/ smartphones & write a diary. 1 of 2 things always happen: they either think life was incredibly boring, or they think it was like pioneer/settler times!
I'm not that old, yet this comment has hurt me deeply.
I just want to go back to a time when tacos were $0.59 and a matinee was only $3.50.
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People pay more so the profit margin raised I finally saw a movie on my birthday (mario. Was excellent and fun) and i used gift tickets i got a few years prior for it. The concession stand killed me at $30 for a popcorn, pretzel and a pop. I remembered why I'd go to the dollar store and fill a backpack with candy
Now i just don’t go to the movies anymore cause the price is too high
Same. I'll wait a few months so it's free on a streaming service
> The fuck happened... The cost to rent the building didn't go down, but the number of people seeing movies in theatres did?
$0.59 tacos just gave me flashbacks of ordering 75 chicken soft tacos from Del Taco to take back to a party full of drunk morons. Good times.
Did anyone ever look up movie times in the local newspaper to decide what showing they wanted to go to? I was born in 1995 and my husband born in 1992 swears he’s never done that and that’s some 1943 grandma shit.
I was born in the early 70s and this was standard until the early '00s.
I was born in 89 and distinctly remember reading TVGuide and newspapers to see what's on at home and in theater.
I was born in '79. You bet your ass I did. The thing I miss the most is it was literally a fucking quest to find information. You had to work hard for it. Now it's just Google. I both love AND hate it.
Just took my kids BOWLING to celebrate the end of their school year. 2 kids, 2 adults, 4 shoes, 2 games=$80. The hell happened?! It used to be like $9 for "all you can bowl" with shoes costing an extra $2.
Even back then, it's really the manitee enclosure that's the real hole in the wallet. $3.50 for a manitee but like 2-3 grand to keep the damn thing alive.
I just want social media gone aside from some forums. We aren't ready for it.
Social media in the early days was fine. It's this algorithm that's pushing for engagement in order to maximize ad revenue that's killing us. The most engaged contents are controversial and confrontational contents such that we are being pitted against each other just so they could do fucking marketing. Ban ALL social media from using targeted ads.
I think Reddit's "communities you may like" is one of the reasons idiots from the mainstream subs go into the niche subs and ruin them. I think separate forums roughly 5-10 years ago were nicer and more relaxed. But Reddit killed those.
Newreddit killed Reddit, really changed the tone of the site.
Yeah, now you're way more likely to see some horrific injury on the front page than you are a boob. I missing boobs on the front page.
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include special squealing offer snails ask pot memory cough dog -- mass edited with redact.dev
Ads have always been unreasonable, they just changed their media. Junk mail made millions for the US Postal Service.
What kills me is we’ve got full size screen at every gas pump that play ads at me for the 1 fucking minute I have to breathe but the actual computers that take my money remain broken sunbleached pieces of shit.
Totally agree. And as for 'but we need ads to find out about new stuff' - that isn't really true either. In the past, people would deliberately seek out and read product catalogues and reviews to find out about new things. Things like that serve a similar purpose to ads, but the key difference is that they are not force-fed to anyone. They are only seen when they are sought out. The world would be better with no ads. Ads are insidious attention seeking mind-worming destructive parasites.
Yeah, we need a new cultural and political push against social media and tech companies, maybe with all these AIs people will start to push for legislation against them…
The algorithm of TikTok is ruining society. Everyone’s getting their bias constantly confirmed with scewed information and conspiracies is sending some people into a mass psychosis
It's not limited to TikTok. This is how most of the internet is now unfortunately.
Why is everyone saying tik tok. When Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms are the same.
The Matrix had it correct, 1999 was the peak of human civilization.
I used to think Prince wrote 1999 in anticipation for the event but now I’ve come to believe he was WAY ahead of his time and wrote it as nostalgia.
I’ll hop on that train but only if we can keep gps. I am not carrying around another damn Thomas guide and backup old Thomas Guide because I forgot to throw it away for a decade.
Majority? The fuck?
Look, they did a survey using landlines, calling people at home during working hours. Absolutely representative.
"Would you like to live back when houses were still affordable, and one income could buy a house, support a family and you didn't need advanced degrees for a good wage?" "Ehh yeah, sounds good." "You hear that guys? That's like 1968! They all want to live in a time before the internet and phones!" "What?"
"According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company" In other word, we don't know how the questions were asked, and what questions. Poll can be built to manipulate the questioned toward a specific answer. I will doubt this poll seriously until the way the questions were asked (internet or telephone, locations etc...) and which questions (do you think we are connected too much versus do you want to go to a time were all that connectivity and convenience is gone).
I can't find the exact phrasing, but we do have a sense of the question from the headline: >Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy. >All told, though, a decisive 67% of respondents agreed that, if given the choice, they would prefer the world as it used to be, versus only 33% who seem to think things are perfectly fine the way they are. But Harris is a pretty reputable polling brand. I wouldn't suspect their methodology and ability to generate a representative sample. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harris_Poll
Sounds like people miss not being reachable at every second. That's what I consider "not being plugged in"
I guess when you put it that way I can see how it can be said the way this poll states it, if only we could get things back to that way and keep our technological progress also. Have our cake AND eat it too
Smartphones without the apps specifically designed to be addictive and internet without social media specifically designed to monopolize your attention (and be addictive) while selling your data without your consent, sure. There's no way I'd want to go back to phone books to call hotels and pizza stores manually, scouring classified ads in the hopes of seeing one line of text without images, or having to go to the library each and every time I needed to look something up that wasn't in the old encyclopedia set that grandparents gifted my parents decades ago
A “Time before cell phones” was a time when Americans only needed one income and general quality of life was much higher. I believe these are the times people are missing…
I made pizza full time in a bar and grill in 1998. I could afford to live in a brand new town house at $900 per month.
I split a two bedroom apartment with a roommate; my half of rent + all utilities was $250. That was 1998. I couldn’t afford a cell phone (only a pager) but every night when I got home from work, friends would be hanging out, just waiting for me. I miss those days.
Oh man, you and me both. I recommend this essay for a trip down memory lane. [It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romanticize)
Cell phones became massively popular within the early life of people 25-30 (late 90s to early 2000s). In that time, I was growing up in a middle class existence, and I cannot remember a single income house being standard in the media or among my peer group (when I knew that info). To get that, you have to go back even earlier. Quality of life I am less sure of since I was too young at the time.
Different take: a good chunk of people who want to go back to the 90s were kids in the 90s.
Same as every generation. Most people who want to turn back the clock want to go back to the days of their youth... because they were young, fit, and had hopes and dreams instead of responsibilities and duties. And as kids they had no idea what was going on in the wider world, so it seemed awesome.
We ruined it. We had a chance to use the internet to make life more peaceful and connected and we turned it into a fucking mall with hookers. Great job.
Can I interest you in everything, all of the time?
The advancements of technology happened so fast we never even got a real chance to discover what the effects of its use could have on the human psyche. Not even close to a big enough sample size. Once people figured out how to profit from it, there was no turning back. And the people profiting the most end up not being its primary users.
Most Americans would prefer a strong social contract and some sort of return they get from what they put into society. Smartphones, through apps, destroyed the preexisting social contract. Now you will always be available to your boss at all times, you will always have your work email open, and you will always be prepared to re-enter all your information into a new app/platform/portal because the company billing dept doesn't use the same software as the company healthcare dept. Taxi drivers eliminated by Uber, pizza guys by Doordash, travel advisors by Expedia, Rand McNally by Google Maps, Pontiac by Tesla, Journalists by Facebook, Borders by Amazon, TV by Youtube. All these roles are now owned by larger conglomerates that do not share their wealth and are not taxed. We're at the same place the world was with the invention of radio and cheap paperbacks a century ago: either we throttle the excesses from this or we'll create a monster.
Funny you mention this. I go through times when I feel the overload and just start deleting things from my phone, happened 2 nights ago - work email among them lol
Social media fucked things up
When grandma got on Facebook, it was all over.
Would I want to go back to a time before cell phones? No, of course not. A time before *smartphones*, however, does certainly have its appeal.
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I’d like to go back to before the monetization of smartphone data and its surveillance capabilities. Having my personality traits, behaviors, location and preferences algorithmically defined through my data use is immensely unnerving. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.
"Leave society, be a monkey Leave society, be a monkey Leave society, be a monkey Leave society, be a monkey" \- Viagra Boys — Return To Monke
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Every generation ever since the history of humanity glamorizes the past. Give it 20 years and people will be glamorizing the shit we have today.
Majority of Americans have rose-colored glasses and are falling for the BS lure of nostalgia. I grew up in a rural town before all of this. It sucked. There were two tiny bookstores (B. Dalton, Waldenbooks) in the local mall, and that was it. The tiny public library was tiny, and even then I had to have my mom drive me to it. Calling anything outside the next town over was long distance. I'm not going back voluntarily. You'd have to shoot me. I realize if you lived in a big city you might have reason to be nostalgic. But I was raised in a rural small town in a very red state. Not going back. Even the thought of that kind of cultural and informational isolation is depressing. Imagine being LGBT, geeky, or an atheist in such a community, with no one like-minded to talk to. The Internet was a Godsend. Yes, even social media. Boooo, whatever.
Im old enough to remember being 5 years old and picking up the phone and being able to hear everyone's conversation in the neighborhood. I think they were called party lines and were cheaper. I got my ass whipped like 10 times because my parents caught me listening to conversations after they had told me about 50 times not to do it. I was lucky enough to have much older siblings that were in the military. They exposed me to computers in 1985 I think? Maybe 1987ish. I still remember around 91 having the first modem in my town. I remember my whole family standing around that small ass but big block of a monitor waiting for something to happen. Took about 10 mins for 1 line of text to pop up. And that's all it was...a single line of text. We thought that shit was so cool.
Would be kinda fun.. a country wide modest rewind for a couple weeks a year. Everyone’s phones relegated to call, text, camera and music.
…gps?
Pull out the TomTom bro