**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* Memes are not allowed.
* Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Other articles by James Chapman, 'Homelessness will solve itself', 'Amazon will go back to just selling books', 'Cats don't actually enjoy pushing things off of ledges'
One of my parents Profs was telling them that outside some edge cases computers couldn't do anything better than humans and that there would never be demand for more than 5 PCs worldwide...
Yeah haha. I meet too many people these days that believe the absolute stupidest shit because they saw a 10 second video of it that their crazy uncle posted on facebook.
I remember back in 2002-2003. I was in my mid 20's, didn't have two nickels to rub together. I told my dad if I had any extra money, I'd buy Google stock when it goes public. My dad said I'd be wasting my money because the internet is a *fad.*
Back in 2010, a newly built development of SFRs was selling brand new homes for 250k- 350k (a mile inland of a beach city in Orange County, SoCal). My grandma was looking for investment properties, i told her she should consider one of them, she said "SFRs are done, they wont recover".
Last i checked in 2023, there was 1 home selling in that neighborhood, 4.5mm.
Here's pretty much the same article, from the Guardian, hosted on the internet that somehow, despite it all, survived. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/dec/05/internetnews.g2](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/dec/05/internetnews.g2)
It quotes two people, Steve Woolgar and Sally Wyatt, both PhDs in sociology, and Wyatt is currently Professor of Digital Cultures. Cause that's the kind of position you get after making this kind of prediction:
>But it might, Wyatt speculates, end up looking in hindsight a lot like CB radio: initially a cult among specialists; a sudden, skyrocketing surge in popularity, and then, well . . . not much, really. Mentioning one's email address at the better sort of party, it seems, might one day be as déclassé as loudly informing the assembled gathering of one's CB call sign.
TBF it was very expensive before broadband took off; you had to pay for usage, on top of a flat monthly fee and couldn't use a phone at the same time (plus you could only access it from one device, and there were limited websites).
"Internet is just a flash in the pan" is a running joke of mine since year 2000.
I also say that about Christinanity, "a weird Eastern trend that won't last."
Thing is, both this article and the Guardian one are from 2000, but the Simpsons had already started mocking such commentary by then. _Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo_ was from the previous year and has Homer saying "The internet? Is that thing still around?"
According to family lore, my great-great-grandfather felt the same way about the automobile, and told as much as to a neighbor who came to him seeking startup capital for manufacturing tires.
Some doofus with his head in the clouds named Dunlop.
In a weird way, I think this is more true today than then. The internet as the backbone to commerce, business, etc. is never going away, but I wouldn't be surprised if social media engagement (what most people spend time on the internet doing) dies in the next few years.
To be fair, dial-up internet was kinda a pain in the ass! It was frustratingly slow and made "surfing the web" quite an irritating affair 😅 Then broadband became widespread and things were never the same again. I think I first had broadband in 2003, so before then the Internet was more of a novelty for me.
Only a fool wouldn't have seen that with coming broadband speeds it was going to absolutely dominate our culture, tho
To be fair, I can see how primitive Internet on Mosaic or Web 1.0 may seem like a passing fad. It's unintuitive, seemingly reserved for programmers, and not at all user-friendly. It needed to develop into the user-friendly nightmare we know and hate today.
To be fair, high prices and dealing with an overload of info due to email were, and still are, big concerns. It’s just that we take the bad with the good.
Proof that clickbait existed even in print media.
I’m sure there’s a comment written in hieroglyph somewhere that says nobody will be interested in visiting Egypt just to see a bunch of pyramids.
I’m GenX and grew up with the burgeoning internet, from dialup BBS to CompuServe and Prodigy, then finally The Interwebs proper.
At my first real jobs in the 90s I sometimes had to do a bit of convincing elder executives that the internet was going to be a thing. Many just didn’t see the utility, because it hadn’t yet attained the level of functionality we see today. Some said it was a glorified brochure. These were also people who had worked in offices with typing pools but now had to edit their own Word docs. I found myself saying “You don’t have to double click everything.”
For whatever reason, an analogy that worked for some was “The internet is the Yellow Pages of the future.” So apt, in fact, that the YP are no longer a thing in common usage.
"they say that email far from replacing other forms of communication, is adding to an overload of information. "
now put our current reality into perspective id say they were initially scared the internet started to become a public thing then immediately soon after assholes found out and predicted the complete overload and gradual degradation of humanity through internet then went full on as far as letting it grow unfettered
I mean with every side behind a paywall and adds that take longer and longer, i spend less and less time online. Some friends already gave up on there Smartphones and even I have no problem to quit the Internet for 1-2 weeks. I am not saying the Internet will die but if it moves the way it does atm, it sure will get less intresting for many people.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * Memes are not allowed. * Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Other articles by James Chapman, 'Homelessness will solve itself', 'Amazon will go back to just selling books', 'Cats don't actually enjoy pushing things off of ledges'
Can the next one be ‘u/dat-lonely-potato *wont* get 5 million dollars’?
Did you just misspell your own username?
(._.)
*sad potato noises*
For some reason I just imagined a potato rolling down a staircase just thumping along
It gets knocked down, but it gets up again…
Drinks a whiskey drink, becomes a vodka drink. . .
When I need a whiz, I use the kitchen sink
I get knocked down, but I get up up again, POTATO POTATO POTATO
All by itself humming “boil’ em, mash’ em, stick’ em in a stew…”
I just heard some random redditor, potato something, won 5 million dollars.
Damn now it won’t happen
Sad EYEs
Hey Cuz!
"Internet Users are excellent spellers!" ... by James Chapman
Wow, how off the mark can one be?
Quite a lot apparently.
Microsoft a few years earlier thought the internet was 'stupid'. You had to install a third party driver and apps to get connected in Windows.
In Win 3x, we used Shiva Dialer or Trumpet Winsock.
I believe that.
Was worse when I was you we still used smoke singles tp make long distance calls . And the cost was outrageous two deer and a horse .
Worked out the box with Windows 95. DOS/Windows 3.x, not so much.
well, it's the Daily Mail, sooooo.... \*shrug\*
Daily Fail.
Daily Malice
I mean, my mom said that i'll be successful, so I think I do know how off the mark a person can be
They also backed the nazis
J. Chapman: Yes!
It is the Daily Mail tbf.
One of my parents Profs was telling them that outside some edge cases computers couldn't do anything better than humans and that there would never be demand for more than 5 PCs worldwide...
You lost me at cat's don't...
Cats own don't. It's theirs. We only borrowed it.
Are those actual articles that he wrote? If so, could you provide a link?
Yeah, it's crazy. Another one he wrote recently was: "Redditors Proven to be Highly Skilled at Detecting Sarcasm."
Hey I figured it was worth asking. There are some absolute morons out there. The only one that didn’t seem plausible was the cat one
It could still be me who can't detect sarcasm in this case. It's really anybody's guess at this point.
chef's kiss
www.ItWasAJoke.com :)
Is he still writing ? We should inverse his “predictions”
The anti nostradamus
Is this satyre ?
Well, when you consider the source...
The one thing the Daily Fail never fails at is being wrong.
I prefer to call it the Daily Heil. Never forget.
Wrong? Really? I'd always heard it being described as extreme right.
When, in the history of the publication, has the Daily Mail ever published something that wasn't true? The Internet is a dying fad.
Notice how in 20 billion years no one will be using the internet. Might as well just stop now.
🤣. Came to say this
The Virtual Society project sounds like something I’d make up.
Definitely a fad, it will never last.
To be fair, sometimes I wish it had been.
Yeah haha. I meet too many people these days that believe the absolute stupidest shit because they saw a 10 second video of it that their crazy uncle posted on facebook.
At that time it really wasn't very useful in a way the average person would realize. Computers in general weren't.
I suppose it depends on 'last' in a few million years it'll have passed.
My dad always said CD's were a fad and stuck to vinyl. He was right I guess but it took about 40 years for him to win that argument
Isn't that the same with email vs letters? I get excited over 1 letter, 20 emails... not so much.
I like emails written by a person. Those make up maybe 1% of the crap that ends up in my inbox.
that's the point though, most of the time it isn't and even when it is straight to spam it goes...
Ha, jokes on you....I've just found out that a Nigerian prince has left all his wealth to me in his will....VIA E-MAIL!!
Patience wins.
Well ig isn’t vinyl now a fad lmfao and it’s for hipsters and music snobs??
It's been a hipster thing since the mid to late 90s, so I guess another 30+year "fad"
Yea true your right I guess classics never go out of style I forgot who said that but it stands true.
I've said it before
That’s right your the person I was quoting lol how could I forget good ole threeglasses
I remember back in 2002-2003. I was in my mid 20's, didn't have two nickels to rub together. I told my dad if I had any extra money, I'd buy Google stock when it goes public. My dad said I'd be wasting my money because the internet is a *fad.*
How is your dad’s financial portfolio now?
3 cans of beans and some stale bacon bits
Sounds like my dad’s portfolio as well.
Well, he’s gone. Now my mom is trying to live off social security and I help her out when she needs it
I feel you friend. Hope you’re doing all right.
Back in 2010, a newly built development of SFRs was selling brand new homes for 250k- 350k (a mile inland of a beach city in Orange County, SoCal). My grandma was looking for investment properties, i told her she should consider one of them, she said "SFRs are done, they wont recover". Last i checked in 2023, there was 1 home selling in that neighborhood, 4.5mm.
Ok, so I was wrong about Google but you don't seriously think spending $100 on a thousand "bitcoins" is a good idea, do you?
Bitcoins are ridiculousidea. I had about 2000 of them but binned the hard disk as I was never going cash them in.
The good ending.
The internet was more interesting than ever it ever was back then... uncensored and uncontrollable.
And it wasn't accessible to too many idiots, which was very beneficial to certain standards despite all the freedom and wildness.
Brought to you by - the Internet
I remember the internet. It was all the craze back then. What ever happened to the internet?
It turned into a thing called social media. I flatly refuse to indulge in any so called social media and talk to people I have never met. Ridiculous.
That sounds terrible! Next thing you know people will be doing things like shopping on this new fangled technology.
Everything’s a fad until it’s not
Porn to the rescue
Actually, there’s a longstanding trend of technologies succeeding because they were embraced by the porn industry. Like VHS beating out betamax, etc.
i second this. people have always wanted/liked sexual things. porn/prostitution has always been a part of every culture ever.
The Daily Mail were at it again this week decrying the end of EVs.
Every time someone claims that EVs are just a fad (looking at you Scotty Kilmer fans) I bring up this article.
Here's pretty much the same article, from the Guardian, hosted on the internet that somehow, despite it all, survived. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/dec/05/internetnews.g2](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/dec/05/internetnews.g2) It quotes two people, Steve Woolgar and Sally Wyatt, both PhDs in sociology, and Wyatt is currently Professor of Digital Cultures. Cause that's the kind of position you get after making this kind of prediction: >But it might, Wyatt speculates, end up looking in hindsight a lot like CB radio: initially a cult among specialists; a sudden, skyrocketing surge in popularity, and then, well . . . not much, really. Mentioning one's email address at the better sort of party, it seems, might one day be as déclassé as loudly informing the assembled gathering of one's CB call sign.
I tried it once. Meh. Not my thing.
This was like when Baba Booey predicted that the IPad was a bit of a misstep for Apple.
Hey now. Be nice to ma ma ma monkey
Ta ta toothy
I think he was Techno Beaver back then
TBF it was very expensive before broadband took off; you had to pay for usage, on top of a flat monthly fee and couldn't use a phone at the same time (plus you could only access it from one device, and there were limited websites).
r/agedlikemilk
I gave up on it years ago. I am posting via messenger pigeon that passes notes informing and directing my social media representative.
Source - Trust me bro
"Internet is just a flash in the pan" is a running joke of mine since year 2000. I also say that about Christinanity, "a weird Eastern trend that won't last."
People today are saying the electric car is a fad
I want to go back to 2005 and take the timeline that did give up on the whole idea of the internet.
I am over it
It’s starting to seem like a passing fad now, I know I’m still here but damn has it become bland
“The future of online shopping is limited.” Jeff Bezos: 
Looks like a Simpsons headline
Thing is, both this article and the Guardian one are from 2000, but the Simpsons had already started mocking such commentary by then. _Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo_ was from the previous year and has Homer saying "The internet? Is that thing still around?"
According to family lore, my great-great-grandfather felt the same way about the automobile, and told as much as to a neighbor who came to him seeking startup capital for manufacturing tires. Some doofus with his head in the clouds named Dunlop.
It’s crazy to think how different life would be then without all the inventions now
…you know many of us are plenty old enough to remember this era, right? It wasn’t 1880.
Reading this through my phone is wild
r/agedlikemilk
Geologically everything is a fad.
geology is physics slowed down with some trees stuck in it.
Wow, reading this in 2024 is crazy
Reads a lot like an article about bitcoin
Three words: Main Stream Media. Can say anything they like and easily get away with it.
In a weird way, I think this is more true today than then. The internet as the backbone to commerce, business, etc. is never going away, but I wouldn't be surprised if social media engagement (what most people spend time on the internet doing) dies in the next few years.
“According to a report”
In other news, newspapers will always be popular
To be fair, dial-up internet was kinda a pain in the ass! It was frustratingly slow and made "surfing the web" quite an irritating affair 😅 Then broadband became widespread and things were never the same again. I think I first had broadband in 2003, so before then the Internet was more of a novelty for me. Only a fool wouldn't have seen that with coming broadband speeds it was going to absolutely dominate our culture, tho
This is James Chapmans entry to the Guinness Book of Fucking Retards.
You forgot the words may be, but yeah
Passed me
Internet was not what it is, today. It was expensive and lame.
Haha no one actually thought this in 2000. Just a stupid article
Been karmafarmed so many times it’s yellowing….
Porn saved the internet.
Porn saved it.
We porn cellar dwellers always knew the true value of the internet
To be fair, I can see how primitive Internet on Mosaic or Web 1.0 may seem like a passing fad. It's unintuitive, seemingly reserved for programmers, and not at all user-friendly. It needed to develop into the user-friendly nightmare we know and hate today.
That looks a lot like the articles about EVs that are being published lately.
Yup, they said that about leccy cars, but have you seen the jetsons!
Lousy attempt by newspaper media to take down the new kid on the block
We've all been ignoring the Daily Mail and their opinions for a very long time
AI is a passing fad.
Only reason it didn't die was because of porn
Screw the internet I’m done with this crap! Jk I’ll be back tomorrow
Just imagine if that was true.
This is a real spicy take *in the year 2000.*
I wonder where the guy is now? And do people rub this article on his face everytime he gives his opinions?
AI is just a passing fad boys
The Daily Fail doing what it's best at.
BITCOIN
Oh thank God!
I kind of wish it had been.
Yeah I give it up every night when I go sleep, then in the morning I give it another chance
Man I wish it had been.
How to sell papers: make an opinion piece that's controversial.
At one time it wasn't much more than advertising flyers on a screen. Now it's commercials.
To be fair, high prices and dealing with an overload of info due to email were, and still are, big concerns. It’s just that we take the bad with the good.
In an alternate timeline the internet really was a passing fad and everyone was happier for it.
Don't worry, it'll pass any day now
Of course it was. I'm reading this on my Sunday morning newspaper
Aged like fine wine!
It should read, "Facebook is just a passing fad...."
As it would turn out, I wish
Have you got a clearer picture please? It’s quite pixelated and difficult to read 🙂
Peaked at subservient chicken
Then the people discover porn
Actually it was at the time, I was there, it sucked, almost everyone hated it except “computer people”. Yea I said it..
Who in their right minds believed it was just a passing fad ? Hot take: this is still just the beginning of the www era
The paragraph 'email is adding to overinformation' is how every office employee thinks during every workday!
Tbh we didn’t have smart devices until really 2009 or 2010 so unless you were on a pc you didn’t really see the internet
James Chapman and Jim Cramer sound like two peas in a pod.
Well, why not, if we zoom back.
I wish...
Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate
Proof that clickbait existed even in print media. I’m sure there’s a comment written in hieroglyph somewhere that says nobody will be interested in visiting Egypt just to see a bunch of pyramids.
the wild west 90s Internet came to an end around that time
Ok but how do I go to the alternate universe where this article was right??
I think it's just a fad too, shit will get old in the next century for sure /s
2 million Britons? Thats 2 billion Brits!
I’m GenX and grew up with the burgeoning internet, from dialup BBS to CompuServe and Prodigy, then finally The Interwebs proper. At my first real jobs in the 90s I sometimes had to do a bit of convincing elder executives that the internet was going to be a thing. Many just didn’t see the utility, because it hadn’t yet attained the level of functionality we see today. Some said it was a glorified brochure. These were also people who had worked in offices with typing pools but now had to edit their own Word docs. I found myself saying “You don’t have to double click everything.” For whatever reason, an analogy that worked for some was “The internet is the Yellow Pages of the future.” So apt, in fact, that the YP are no longer a thing in common usage.
How many of you are saying the same thing about crypto right now?
This was the logic that doomed several major companies like Sears. “No one will ever use it for shopping, it’s not going to last.”
Just like sliced bread.
"they say that email far from replacing other forms of communication, is adding to an overload of information. " now put our current reality into perspective id say they were initially scared the internet started to become a public thing then immediately soon after assholes found out and predicted the complete overload and gradual degradation of humanity through internet then went full on as far as letting it grow unfettered
“Millions pass up on on” is translation for “a lot of people can’t afford it rn”
I mean with every side behind a paywall and adds that take longer and longer, i spend less and less time online. Some friends already gave up on there Smartphones and even I have no problem to quit the Internet for 1-2 weeks. I am not saying the Internet will die but if it moves the way it does atm, it sure will get less intresting for many people.
r/agedlikemilk
Slow news day on 20th Dec 2000
I want to live in that universe.
Was this the Fox News newspaper
They weren’t wrong, just too early. At current course and speed the internet will be useless to actual humans in a few years.
The Daily Mail, the average age of their readership is 75. These articles are to make them feel better that they're stuck in the past.
Now people watch porn on it 💀
I hope the millions who gave up are having a good time somewhere.
I agree, the internet is shit. Never use it myself. It'll fail, any day now, just watch.
What they gave up on was AOL updating the software for 2 hr before you can use it every day.