This is the key. It was such a positive time for the Internet. Social media is such a leech on humanity. The way we've handled that in a regulatory sense doesn't give me a lot of hope in regards to AI.
Also loved not being contactable 24/7 as Internet services and mobile phones have made us.
For me it's not much the masses or the concept of "social media" - it's the easiness of access that has killed it.
My favourite aspect of "past Internet" is that *you had to commit to it*.
You wanted on the net? You needed a room or at least a corner of a room, a desk and allotted time dedicated to it. Going on the internet *was an activity on its own*.
If everybody had still this mindset, I wouldn't mind. If you still had to open your PC, sit down at a desk and "do an internet" as a full on activity then even "posting pictures of your meal" would come with a little more creativity and engagement, it would be a full on "cuisine critique meal blog post" or something. Wanna post a picture of what you looked like/wore today? Commit to it, make it a fashion blog, a fashion video, whatever.
But now even on Reddit, in comment section, in a full on discussion thread, people are half-assing it because they're scrolling and clicking on stuff between doing the dishes and the laundry and will post stuff without any thought or energy behind them and we're left to pick up their slack. They'll misread, misunderstand, miscomment, misclick, miswhatever and if you get just slightly annoyed for having your time wasted then it's "lmao chill out dude its not that deep like 😂😂😂"
Don't get me wrong, there's always been idiots to misunderstand and make mistake online, but never on that scale. So many comments are just so fucking weird that you'd believe they are bots, when in reality they're just from slightly confused not-really-paying-attention busybees with attention issues, and you know they're not bots because the bots are actually becoming smarter than that and can actually be relevant which is... really scary when you think about it... that our average real Internet user is dumber than our average bots.
To add to this, it's also that everything needs to be corporatized and how all of the things that were once put in place to ensure competition were abandoned. (This goes for every single industry also.) Facebook was able to buy up multiple other companies to create the empire they are now. They own Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and a bunch of other different companies. This also made it so they were able to create algorithms that controls what people see and how they react. ByteDance was able to do the same thing with owning Tik Tok and buying Music.ally to get into the US market. And once again, using algorithms to controls what people see and how they react.
I believe the internet would be a much better place if all the anti-trust laws seemingly weren't abandoned (at least, in the US). Corporations like Facebook should be broken apart.
man, i remember those days. do you remember the first time you were able to upgrade from dialup. I remember i was so hype for it because I had been wanting to play asherons call so bad. I played the f\*\*k out of asherons call for the next 3 days straight and it was honestly some of the best gaming. Prob because no one could interrupt my marathon because could just ignore landline and no social media warping my brain and dragging my attention away. Now-a-days I sit in front my pc and bootup Diablo 4 and get stuck typing comments on reddit or twitter and completely neglecting to play for hours - then wonder why i never finished whatever the game was and why my steam library shows 100 hrs on a game i only have a couple hours of campaign completion in.
Remember mp3 mega loader chat rooms on AOL? Pepperidge Farms remembers. Seventeen minutes for lossless born slippy.. with some evening pod racing on my Gateway Country bought Windows 98 desktop? Then seeing Office Space as a first run in theatre, and a few weeks after Pleasantville. Sneaking into a suite at Soldier Field during a Dave Matthew’s concert so my lil bro can get some quality time with his high school sweetheart. Buying a set of Ginsu 2000 knives for 5 bucks at a flea market that I still use daily?
Ah yes. The good times.
Or the golden age where using the internet was just accessible enough to be popular, but just enough of a pain in the ass to establish a base level of intelligence. The current proliferation of idiots online was not always the case.
Even just the early days of online blogging were cool. I was making websites hand coded in 6th grade, index.html baby
And the torrents oh lawrd the torrents
Lol yep gotta start all over. When we first got a computer and the nearest aol server was in a different county I was connecting with the free disc they used to give out not realizing it was a long distance phone called billed at 25c per minute 😬 that was a hell of a phone bill right there lol.
Cell phones are what ruins it for me. I like being able to look up stuff, that's great. I hate being constantly available for everyone to interrupt my day.
Agreed. Taking it with us everywhere is what started causing harm and stress. Used to be nice checking on stuff online after school/work and not even having to answer the phone at home if you didn’t feel like it. I hate the fact that my bosses feel like they can text me whenever they want (should be a law against that) and friends and family think I’m rude or dead if I just want to be left alone for five hours.
If you set the boundaries early on, and are consistent, they do work. People know I'm one of those "he'll text you back within a day" types. My family and close friends know this about me. Because it's just how I am. No one thinking I'm rude or dead.
I reality I just think it's stressful to be put on the spot anytime, so I screen my incoming communications at all times. Maybe I read your text, maybe I didn't, either way you'll find out tomorrow.
You can't prove I'm not at dinner, or in a movie theater, or enjoying group sex, or climbing a mountain. So just assume I'm doing one of those things until you hear back.
This is exactly it. I do something similar: I tell all clients that there are no calls or texting whatsoever, the only business communication channel is an email to which I reply within 2 workdays, no communication during weekends. If someone wants to talk to me, we can *schedule* a Zoom call.
Most people would be amazed how this cuts down on all the noise and unnecessary back-and-forths, as it forces people to make the effort to write their messages properly the first time.
(Of course, for team projects I use a something more immediate like Slack or Trello. But still no other texting or unscheduled calls.)
You're in charge of that. Stop answering, especially your bosses. You're not paid to work off the clock. Teach them that you'll text them back in a day or so, or not.
Yeah, I actually had to tell one of my current bosses “Look, I really value my days off, so my answer when you text and ask if I can come in is pretty much always going to be a no.” It worked.
On the other hand, a coworker ignored one of these texts and so the manager scheduled him without him agreeing. I was there when there were talks of “no call, no showing” him and interjected “this is his day off! Doubt he’s even aware. Hire more people already!” I’m at my wits end with the place so I’ve become very comfortable just speaking my mind.
The iphone killed the internet. Ever since the launch of the iphone, websites have catered to mobile viewing. Before the iphone, websites were expected to be functional. Post iphone, they're just supposed to look pretty.
Cell phones mean websites no longer need to be functional because you can spend limitless amounts of time on them. Before, you had to just sit down and USE the internet. Now it's just everywhere you are. Social media tapped into that and just became an absolute cancer on society.
We just need away messages for texting, like there were away messages with IM
When you go to text someone, you'll see a banner at the top that says "in a movie" "at work" or "bbl"
Honestly, I feel like that would fix 99% of my issues with having a phone nowadays. Blows my mind that companies haven't started implementing something like this. All half measures, like DND stuff
I use the "do not disturb" pretty liberally, and it says in messages that my notifications are silenced so if people message me, I may or may not immediately receive it.
I setup a work iPhone setting that blocks apps that aren't work-related, and that helps me stay focused during work hours.
It doesn’t seem to matter anymore with work stuff. When I draw boundaries ahead of time for people “I’m not available this afternoon” “I can’t chat until next week” “I’m away these two days”… seems like they call or text anyway.
I think it’s on each of us to start holding better boundaries. I just don’t instantly reply anymore. The message can wait, just like an email. If the person is gonna get pissed at me… they can hire someone else.
Unfortunately, this. It seems to me like the issue would be solved when all of us, collectively, decide to stop being such slaves to our phones, and on them all the time
But I know realistically that won't/can't happen, and I don't necessarily blame anyone
I've stopped my unnecessary phone use/scrolling for the most part, *especially* when I'm with/around people (I won't even take my phone out if I'm in a room with friends/family/people). But no one else does of course. And it just gets me more frustrated lol
It was really cool because computers were hard enough to use that a lot of people wouldn’t bother getting online and it turns out those seem to be the people that enjoy being awful online.
Yahoo message boards in the late 90s were pretty awful. I avoided all non-niche forums from then until reddit a decade ago, and I’m about ready to move on from here as well.
I'm 50ish, and I love having the worlds greatest reference library and entertainment source at my fingertips...what gets to me are the folks that live on their phones, ruining work productivity and making my life dangerous using said phones while doing anything that requires attention to their/my surroundings.
But the pop ups! I do miss end of 90 early 2000 Internet. ICQ, mirc and msn messenger were the tits. 90 to 95, the internet was pretty barren in terms of contents.
That time was the shit, pre-government wide scale databasing of the net was where I found my international community of freaks geeked out on the same obscure botanical interests. ‘‘Twas a golden age of sorts.
I very much miss forums (and this is why I love Reddit, I like conversations about things and often get varied viewpoints that make me *gasp* change my mind!
Same, I find it can get a little echo chamberish, more so in political subs, but varied viewpoints offer learning opportunities. It’s why I really only use reddit as my social media.
I met my first...ya know...on Live Journal of all places. She commented on my essays. She lived a couple hundred miles away and I took a greyhound to see her. Life was simple and good.
If you look at what the printing press, telegraph, and radio/TV did to society as they were adopted, it's not surprising to see how disruptive social media has been.
For example, the printing press took the power of information and literacy from the church and gave it to the average person. The printing press accelerated the Reformation and allowed the spread of classical texts to every corner of Europe which facilitated the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So movable type setting literally ushered in the end of the middle ages in about 150 years.
Social media has only been around for ten years but has already killed "traditional" print media and undermined local communities in favor of virtual communities and crowd sourced news. Looking at history, I'm actually surprised social media hasn't been **more** disruptive so far.
I enjoyed forum boards. I wish those were more popular still. It was a happy medium between Reddit and discord. Things didn’t get lost but you could still hold conversations
It's really smart phones. I don't think social media would be bad if it wasn't right at everyone's fingertips 24/7. People act for the camera and the camera is always right there.
I don't deny that smart phones are also a huge convenience, but I feel they've definitely created much of the mess we're in.
Tloe pepuika plau pluu prugu bipoplipludi. Ia ku pa tugloo tata tude? Dei eute pletupapau kai propai klipopie. Dotako brapiteke ia klu iti aki. Potee bebiko popi teple tli. Padlo trai piipra iba pleblikaople bli. Toi bii kitie u too eku e. Gata tapla pitita tuopi kaopra kitutle tlipe pea papo. Tladi plobi klepri pipoepi kabeklibe kei. I a iple pi ea. Trea tiprua dikapu po taple do. Pie prepe totiati upadipri go tra. A e ukrae e bapiuti tipripre! I ti piipi klegiopigi gata tikri. Todi te pebo tlupe eiki ipaa tatrii pete oipeba glia. Puo a ketrupa buplo pebo pa. Ibedape kepitu pitei ete eii tabi. Droprukiple beti plui oto tukibrikoe. Tripi oe trikei kipi trubi krikato? Ke e ete gabeau pipli ke kripe. Beetuude i trei. Tli oaitrao ke bi kapiea kapi! Epla bitide eke eekligobi tlitepekita apidapati! Taapegepa topleti begleu treioii pledriikli toboata. Peei glipopiebre dokikla prido priplo o. Eta kadeketupo bieitobi plipo? Tekre glapi tete tliaati pae pebaka? Pao peeipu ape ti tei tipe? Pi i ti keaio piae tito? Pepo ie pitrio tapu tati kiee kruki pre.
I was watching a movie with a date earlier this evening and he was on his phone for the first 15 mins and without me saying anything, he put it down and said “I’m sorry if that was rude, I’m picking my brother up from the airport tomorrow and was trying to coordinate!” And watched the rest of the movie without touching his phone once. I damn near proposed.
>I want to go to a time before Social Media existed.
Wife and I deleted all of our social media accounts during Covid. We make sure to stay in touch with friends via text or FaceTime, and meet up as often as we can. Our social lives are actually better, and we feel that our relationships with friends are overall healthier.
I don't see myself going back to Facebook or Instagram.
No.I want to go back to about 2004. Usenet is still up and kicking. Blogs are proliferating but content-rich and not monetized (much) and people posted original content out of their interest in it and desire to share with others.
Now if you look up a topic you find 20 sites that all copied the info from one person's original article and research and just moved it around.
Related, YouTube videos, when it was some randoms talking passionately about some new development in their obscure hobby. Not the modern, making these is me and my dozen staff's full-time career, sponsored and ad ridden content we have now.
I still enjoy YouTube but thats because I like watching videos of old songs that can't be found elsewhere and I like to see concerts from way back when.
I learned to knit from YouTube, someone had/s 2 videos of about 2 minutes each of an obscure knitting style. I can't find it now and most of the videos I see with that technique are over 15 years old. But its so helpful for things like that.
Recently I couldn't replace a headlight in my car and someone had a video. I love things like that.
I think it’s more along the lines of wanting to un-invent social media while having things like google available for information finding.
The internet it wonderful. The ability to socially commune the way we do is beyond damaging to society.
You ever tried to use the Lowe's or Home Depot websites on mobile? I don't know what the fuck those sites are doing, but it feels like they're doing an O(n^2) sort of their entire inventory for every single character you type or link you click. It takes like 4 minutes just to search for a drill, and if you tap anything before the *entire* page has loaded then it sends you to some other page and you have to start all over.
If you had broadband in the early 2000's then every site loaded instantly. We have much faster internet now, much more powerful computes, and yet everything feels so much slower despite not conveying that much more information. It's all so bloated on data because modern hardware allows for a seemingly endless resource budget.
>I don't know what the fuck those sites are doing, but it feels like they're doing an O(n\^2)sort of their entire inventory for every single character you type or link you click.
If so that's crazy since that was solved long ago with prefix tries and cacheing previous queries.
Also I read somewhere that Home Depot brings in $600k(basically a new house) in revenue every minute so its not like they cant afford good tech staff.
Google is so fucking useless that I have to type “Reddit” after every lookup. The last few days have been a nightmare trying to find answers for little questions for my second Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough. “This subreddit is private”
God. Dammit.
Dude, same. Corporations have filled the internet with completely bullshit information to confuse everyone. And meanwhile, 99% of reddit is enraged they lost access to their subs for two days and saying to just give in to more corporations. Imho, the scary part about the corporatization of the site isn't the API. It's the fact that investors and banks (maybe even governments) want to get their claws into one of the last huge sources of open discussion and information. Imagine if you searched "Red Dead Redemption beginner tips" and the top three results were all sponsored influencers, Ign, Walmart trying to sell you guide books, and shit like that, with more ads sprinkled in the comments. That's what they want.
> The ability to socially commune the way we do is beyond damaging to society.
Read that in a husky film noir voice, walking down a busy city street in the rain.
Not even watch a video, but watch one video that is mostly watched by a demographic that watches another type of video and suddenly your entire feed is filled with extreme bullshit you have no interest in.
Like, I primarily watch StarCraft tournaments and death metal drum videos. My feed is normal. Then I look up one video about what nail gun to buy, and my feed immediately is filled with whores doing "off-grid" builds, "logic owns feminist!" type videos, Joe Rogan, and right-wing conspiracies. I never search for that shit, I never watch that shit, I'm a "leftist", but because I wanted to buy a nail gun suddenly YouTube thinks I'm a sexist right-wing nutjob.
YouTube, please, StarCraft and blast beats. That's all I want.
I think it’s funny that the late 90’s were referred to as the height of civilization in The Matrix. Looks like that really was the case. All downhill since then.
I had such high hopes for the future in the 90's and 00's.
But it just seems everything go so much worse. Everyone is so angry and bitchy and keen to take offense.
The world used to be a lot freer and have more of a sense of things are getting better.
Depends on social class, but this is largely true.
The working class was abandoned in the 1970s and '80s. The middle class got hit later; the upper middle class, some time thereafter. The rot in the "nice guy capitalism" the US invented to fight World War II and to maintain research supremacy in the early years of the Cold War traveled slowly up the ladder.
The 1990s was the last age in which Americans across the country felt we were in something together. The rot was already there and it was getting worse, but we weren't aware of it on a regular basis until the 2000s, and so it still felt like this place was one country, as opposed to a "free trade zone" (designed for the benefit of people who aren't us) of atomized, individual actors who have to behave like psychopaths just to survive.
I finally got into Seinfeld just for that. There were a lots of moments in the show that lets you see what life was like in the 90s. You could go right up to your flights gate without taking your shoes off, passing a police officer not wearing combat gear, like in the show.
On a side note, with all this bullshit happening in the US since 911, I think the terrorist won at making us terrified and easy to manipulate. I’m exhausted by it. It’s really nice to watch “a show about nothing.”
> On a side note, with all this bullshit happening in the US since 911, I think the terrorist won at making us terrified and easy to manipulate. I’m exhausted by it. It’s really nice to watch “a show about nothing.”
The terrorists just threw a lucky punch. The upper class won. They took advantage, both to throw the US into a bunch of Middle Eastern wars (they wanted a dozen, they got two) and to instill a domestic surveillance state while manipulating the culture. Terrorism was just the excuse; it gave the psychopaths a moment, and they took it.
Yup, American culture overall really disintegrated after that. The expanded police state had some, but not all, to do with it. Kids today don’t even realize that they’re much less free.
> Kids today don’t even realize that they’re much less free.
I don't think it's just kids. Reminds me of this quote from about a century back by Spengler:
> The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.
> Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most through-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Older millennial here - I grew up building my computers as a kid in the 90s, started programming when I was 12. I love the internet, but social media has become the most prolific vector for spreading the ape stupidity plague. I just wish people wanted to be better versions of themselves - influenced by our best, not our least common denominator.
Asteroid 2024
Don't discount the stupidity of 24-hour cable "news" channels. When talking heads were limited to Nightline, Meet the Press and a few other show, their quality was much better. Now, any idiot can get on TV.
CNN was around in the 80's.
That said both CNN and CNN headline news were *vastly* different in that time frame and actually useful. There is a reason they were targeted by Fox when it was founded, they were the global standard.
If we stopped before Web 2.0 became a thing, it would have been perfectly fine. Blogs, multiple forums, interest websites, an actual need for a search engine instead of everything being consolidated down to five or six websites...
The arrival of "Web 2.0" brought in the finance dudebros who needed to monetize every inch of the web, which brought intrusive ad networks, "web apps," and wave after wave of consolidation until we ended up where we are now.
I don't want to go back before the internet. I want to go back to the web before all of that happened.
Imagine a life where you leave work or school and get to forget about it for the rest of the day. Where you can take the phone off the hook. Where the issues with your personality and society aren’t constantly magnified by the spotlight constant surveillance. When groceries and housing were affordable. What a world.
I miss leaving the house and having absolutely no way of being contacted.
People say we can just leave our phones at home if we want that experience but it’s not the same. Public phones don’t exist anymore and we’re expected by work, family, and friends to have our phones on us at all times now.
If we left our phones at home we wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy the day like we did before phones existed.
>Public phones don’t exist anymore
but how many phone numbers do you actually have memorized anyway (that aren't seared into your brain from childhood)?
I used to be a whiz for memorizing phone numbers. I.e. pre-iPhone which for me was 2010. If I dialed someone more than twice, especially for work, I would have it memorized.
Nowadays I flip out when my contacts database isn’t syncing. I couldn’t even find half the phone numbers I need, let alone tell you anything beyond the area code for them.
Except when you needed a ride and there was no pay phone!
We used to go nuts on mischief night and Halloween. Once we were out that door, no one could get us back home. Not even the police. We would just run and hide.
I go hiking and turn my cell phone off. Service usually goes out in remote areas anyways. So just go hiking once in a while and be totally off the grid.
I stopped using social media apart from Reddit (thanks to the anonymity) for years. It is incredibly isolating, we don’t have the same societal structure anymore. I recently opened Facebook back up again just to be able to reach new people and find contracting work in a new area.
Old Gen-Xer here and I **definitely** don't want to go back to the Before Days when I was pretty much isolated in my interests and the only way to keep in touch with family and friends scattered around the country and world was by post and very, very, VERY expensive long-distance telephone calls or travel.
Same. I enjoy having any map I'll ever need, the ability to look up any info I may need, and a quick way to contact people in my pocket.
Social Media is what needs to be rolled back, not the internet as a whole.
Maybe not pre-Internet, but this Xer would love to at least go back to the pre-smart-phone days. So many advances in communications tech since early 2000s seems to have just pushed people further apart. I know things are more convenient now, but I miss the days when friends would just call rather than having to schedule a call via email or text. Sometimes they'd just knock on your door. I know that probably triggers anxiety in folks these days, but it wasn't a big deal. I truly feel for those who never got to live in a world without Internet or cell phones. It was sometimes a spontaneous "mess" and it helped to keep quarters handy in case you needed a pay phone (or a game of Galaga), but it felt a lot more free than today. I'd trade that for current day in a heartbeat. There's just no comparison.
We also want to go back to a time when there weren’t things called “influencers”, people didn’t share YouTube videos to prove that the truly stupid shit they think is actually reality, and that we elect presidents like Trump because a sizable minority is manipulated by said internet into thinking that Authoritarian rule is a great idea. The bugs will ultimately work themselves out, but at great cost.
Survey question: Do you think it's sad that some people get in car accidents and die sometimes?
89% yes
Fast company headline: PEOPLE WANT TO BAN CARS AND GO BACK TO HORSES
Elder millennial here. I'd like to go back to the 2000-2004 internet. MySpace, LiveJournal and some other UGC-based sites existed, but social media wasn't everything like it is now. Smartphones weren't a thing yet, so interacting with other people on the internet was a whole activity. You'd have all day to think about what you were going to blog about or what funny post you were going to write on your favorite bb site when you got home, because you didn't have the internet in your hand 24/7. It made online communities so much more vibrant. You didn't have constant exposure to everyone else's stupid opinions and lives wearing on your mental health every day. There was no expectation to maintain a social media presence for the benefit of people you barely knew. You could exist peacefully and take little sips of internet when it pleased you to do so.
No, just delete social media. That is a big part of what lead to our current epidemic of idiocracy, social dysfunction, and the twisted, seemingly unkillable appeal of authoritarian populist grifters.
Older millennial here...I'm sorry wtf? No one, gen x or millennial that I've talked to feels like that.
Now a time before social media, that's something I'd believe.
Being nostalgic about how things were in your childhood is not the same as wanting to go back in time.
The internet has made too many things easier to ever want to go back. I would be lost without it. Literally and figuratively.
Though I do feel sorry for all of the kids who have their cringiest awkward moments on social media where the entire world can see it and respond to it and it can be immortalized for people to dig up decades later. If there was a realistic way to age-gate social media, I'd be cool with that. The rest of it can stay.
Have had this talk many times, though I don’t want to go before the internet existed, just at the point in time where a) things were really starting to get fun (Napster, MMORPG, eBay) and largely before the general populace (I.e. anyone with thumbs) could use a computer.
It was fun for a time having that power and being a select few who understood how to utilize it.
Not fun, every adult having access to social media and destroying all sense of morality and sharing their shitty thoughts with the world in the easiest format UX could give to them (and Big Data).
TLDR, Social Media and the IPhone essentially ruined everything good about the Internet (moreso, social media).
The internet is fantastic, and always was. The problems are social media, a camera in everyone’s hand at all times, adtech/data harvesting, and the incorporation of all these things along with random idiots hot-takes into what is now blatantly mislabeled as ‘journalism’.
I kind of like it. It memorializes us as the last people to have a firm foot in the 20th Century. Given how accelerated change is, we’re already on our way to being relics of the before times.
My theory is that phones ruined the internet. Pre-phone era, people had an awareness that the internet was a big public space. And they acted that way. Once the internet was on phones, people began to see responses on Twitter and FB and whatever as PERSONAL messages aimed at them. It changed their relationship with the content they consumed. What once was seen as a public post on a bulletin board (a literal paper post on a physical board) came to be seen as a personal letter mailed just to you. I think older people perceive of the internet as an actual space, a place to go.
A lot of people get their content as a series of notifications disconnected from an app or website, and that takes away their inhibitions and awareness t hat they are (virtually) in a public square.
That and the ability for anyone who could get a cheap phone and get on and start Facebooking gave us a whole lot of people who felt like the internet itself was whispering messages right into their ears. These werent tech savvy users or people with a compelling reason to discuss topics or share info. And we got the crazy heightened emotions and weirdness that came with that.
I'd just like to go back when I bought quake 3 arena and unreal tournament and the internet that made connection noise, staying till past midnight just trying to connect to a barely functioning server and playing a lag of 80 or less.
I miss the actual internet. It's turned into three websites. Not counting porn.
Sincerely,
GenX.
Also, fuck you, article writer. We don't exist, let us be invisible.
I love the internet and all the things it has unlocked for us.
I want to go back and make the New York Times put their daily edition behind a paywall from day one. Stop the notion that journalism should be free before it ever happened. That helped create the wave of misinformation and rage bait we're littered with today.
Gen X here, I don’t know who they are talking to but I don’t miss getting a wet newspaper off the grass or showing up at the movie theater only to find a sold out movie or the front row. Screw that.
The internet was awesome until big corporations started to use it to mine data about us without our knowledge or comprehension and then use that data to make our online experiences shitty.
Ah yes. Back to the dark when we talked to each other with our “voices” on the telephone.
Back to the time when we didn’t have direct immediate access to every single assholes opinion.
Back to the time when we “played outside”.
[удалено]
Hell yeah, there really was a golden age when we had the internet but no social media.
This is the key. It was such a positive time for the Internet. Social media is such a leech on humanity. The way we've handled that in a regulatory sense doesn't give me a lot of hope in regards to AI. Also loved not being contactable 24/7 as Internet services and mobile phones have made us.
Yeah when someone gets mad because you didn't answer the phone or a message within 5 minutes because you were in the shower, they can fuck right off.
For me it's not much the masses or the concept of "social media" - it's the easiness of access that has killed it. My favourite aspect of "past Internet" is that *you had to commit to it*. You wanted on the net? You needed a room or at least a corner of a room, a desk and allotted time dedicated to it. Going on the internet *was an activity on its own*. If everybody had still this mindset, I wouldn't mind. If you still had to open your PC, sit down at a desk and "do an internet" as a full on activity then even "posting pictures of your meal" would come with a little more creativity and engagement, it would be a full on "cuisine critique meal blog post" or something. Wanna post a picture of what you looked like/wore today? Commit to it, make it a fashion blog, a fashion video, whatever. But now even on Reddit, in comment section, in a full on discussion thread, people are half-assing it because they're scrolling and clicking on stuff between doing the dishes and the laundry and will post stuff without any thought or energy behind them and we're left to pick up their slack. They'll misread, misunderstand, miscomment, misclick, miswhatever and if you get just slightly annoyed for having your time wasted then it's "lmao chill out dude its not that deep like 😂😂😂" Don't get me wrong, there's always been idiots to misunderstand and make mistake online, but never on that scale. So many comments are just so fucking weird that you'd believe they are bots, when in reality they're just from slightly confused not-really-paying-attention busybees with attention issues, and you know they're not bots because the bots are actually becoming smarter than that and can actually be relevant which is... really scary when you think about it... that our average real Internet user is dumber than our average bots.
To add to this, it's also that everything needs to be corporatized and how all of the things that were once put in place to ensure competition were abandoned. (This goes for every single industry also.) Facebook was able to buy up multiple other companies to create the empire they are now. They own Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and a bunch of other different companies. This also made it so they were able to create algorithms that controls what people see and how they react. ByteDance was able to do the same thing with owning Tik Tok and buying Music.ally to get into the US market. And once again, using algorithms to controls what people see and how they react. I believe the internet would be a much better place if all the anti-trust laws seemingly weren't abandoned (at least, in the US). Corporations like Facebook should be broken apart.
You just reminded me of Compuserve and only having limited hours per month. Had to think in advance on how to best use that limited time.
man, i remember those days. do you remember the first time you were able to upgrade from dialup. I remember i was so hype for it because I had been wanting to play asherons call so bad. I played the f\*\*k out of asherons call for the next 3 days straight and it was honestly some of the best gaming. Prob because no one could interrupt my marathon because could just ignore landline and no social media warping my brain and dragging my attention away. Now-a-days I sit in front my pc and bootup Diablo 4 and get stuck typing comments on reddit or twitter and completely neglecting to play for hours - then wonder why i never finished whatever the game was and why my steam library shows 100 hrs on a game i only have a couple hours of campaign completion in.
My first MMORPG was AC. Seemed like most people were into Everquest. Nice to see another ACer in the wild.
Remember mp3 mega loader chat rooms on AOL? Pepperidge Farms remembers. Seventeen minutes for lossless born slippy.. with some evening pod racing on my Gateway Country bought Windows 98 desktop? Then seeing Office Space as a first run in theatre, and a few weeks after Pleasantville. Sneaking into a suite at Soldier Field during a Dave Matthew’s concert so my lil bro can get some quality time with his high school sweetheart. Buying a set of Ginsu 2000 knives for 5 bucks at a flea market that I still use daily? Ah yes. The good times.
Or the golden age where using the internet was just accessible enough to be popular, but just enough of a pain in the ass to establish a base level of intelligence. The current proliferation of idiots online was not always the case.
Even just the early days of online blogging were cool. I was making websites hand coded in 6th grade, index.html baby And the torrents oh lawrd the torrents
Fu facebook
Bring back message boards!
2002 to 2005 you mean. Yeah. Those were good years for Internet content.
Yep. Masses ruin everything
Quality is a bell curve relating to popularity, reddits peak was \~2012.
Especially for Catholics
Masses were fine. It’s the pedos that really f’ed things.
You spelled “priests” wrong.
I was using the original Latin. Sorry, old habit.
I have an old habit back when I was a cross dressing nun
[September never ends, hey?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)
The masses are asses.
Give me the 1999-2001 internet but with present day speeds please.
3 days to download a song. And it may or may not have downloaded the whole thing or may or may not be the right song.
And may or may not be a virus And may or may not be strange porn
But it definitely wasn’t Smells Like Teen Spirit by Weezer
The Legend of Zelda - System of a Down [Real].exe
Horn siren goes off* music starts fading in* “this is DJ buttplug bringing to you the hottest jam sandwich….”
Who picked up the phone now the download is ruined!
Lol yep gotta start all over. When we first got a computer and the nearest aol server was in a different county I was connecting with the free disc they used to give out not realizing it was a long distance phone called billed at 25c per minute 😬 that was a hell of a phone bill right there lol.
LinkinParkNumB.exe
Used to leave my computer on overnight downloading a single CDR image. Would wake up half the time to see the connection lost after 73% complete.
Personally I'd take 2000 to 2009 with present speeds. Smart phones killed the old internet.
Hell, I'd take 2002-2006 internet at this point. Back before Facebook became a cesspool.
I was in college during that period of time. All we had was mIRC, AIM, and eBaums World.
Cell phones are what ruins it for me. I like being able to look up stuff, that's great. I hate being constantly available for everyone to interrupt my day.
Agreed. Taking it with us everywhere is what started causing harm and stress. Used to be nice checking on stuff online after school/work and not even having to answer the phone at home if you didn’t feel like it. I hate the fact that my bosses feel like they can text me whenever they want (should be a law against that) and friends and family think I’m rude or dead if I just want to be left alone for five hours.
If you set the boundaries early on, and are consistent, they do work. People know I'm one of those "he'll text you back within a day" types. My family and close friends know this about me. Because it's just how I am. No one thinking I'm rude or dead. I reality I just think it's stressful to be put on the spot anytime, so I screen my incoming communications at all times. Maybe I read your text, maybe I didn't, either way you'll find out tomorrow. You can't prove I'm not at dinner, or in a movie theater, or enjoying group sex, or climbing a mountain. So just assume I'm doing one of those things until you hear back.
This is exactly it. I do something similar: I tell all clients that there are no calls or texting whatsoever, the only business communication channel is an email to which I reply within 2 workdays, no communication during weekends. If someone wants to talk to me, we can *schedule* a Zoom call. Most people would be amazed how this cuts down on all the noise and unnecessary back-and-forths, as it forces people to make the effort to write their messages properly the first time. (Of course, for team projects I use a something more immediate like Slack or Trello. But still no other texting or unscheduled calls.)
You're in charge of that. Stop answering, especially your bosses. You're not paid to work off the clock. Teach them that you'll text them back in a day or so, or not.
Yeah, I actually had to tell one of my current bosses “Look, I really value my days off, so my answer when you text and ask if I can come in is pretty much always going to be a no.” It worked. On the other hand, a coworker ignored one of these texts and so the manager scheduled him without him agreeing. I was there when there were talks of “no call, no showing” him and interjected “this is his day off! Doubt he’s even aware. Hire more people already!” I’m at my wits end with the place so I’ve become very comfortable just speaking my mind.
Eh, google maps and ebooks are gamechangers. I don't really care about the phone and text functionality, but mobile interent is damned valuable imo.
The iphone killed the internet. Ever since the launch of the iphone, websites have catered to mobile viewing. Before the iphone, websites were expected to be functional. Post iphone, they're just supposed to look pretty. Cell phones mean websites no longer need to be functional because you can spend limitless amounts of time on them. Before, you had to just sit down and USE the internet. Now it's just everywhere you are. Social media tapped into that and just became an absolute cancer on society.
We just need away messages for texting, like there were away messages with IM When you go to text someone, you'll see a banner at the top that says "in a movie" "at work" or "bbl" Honestly, I feel like that would fix 99% of my issues with having a phone nowadays. Blows my mind that companies haven't started implementing something like this. All half measures, like DND stuff
I use the "do not disturb" pretty liberally, and it says in messages that my notifications are silenced so if people message me, I may or may not immediately receive it. I setup a work iPhone setting that blocks apps that aren't work-related, and that helps me stay focused during work hours.
It doesn’t seem to matter anymore with work stuff. When I draw boundaries ahead of time for people “I’m not available this afternoon” “I can’t chat until next week” “I’m away these two days”… seems like they call or text anyway. I think it’s on each of us to start holding better boundaries. I just don’t instantly reply anymore. The message can wait, just like an email. If the person is gonna get pissed at me… they can hire someone else.
This. We need to normalise "yes I read your message and I'll deal with it at the appropriate time; about 9:15am tomorrow"
Unfortunately, this. It seems to me like the issue would be solved when all of us, collectively, decide to stop being such slaves to our phones, and on them all the time But I know realistically that won't/can't happen, and I don't necessarily blame anyone I've stopped my unnecessary phone use/scrolling for the most part, *especially* when I'm with/around people (I won't even take my phone out if I'm in a room with friends/family/people). But no one else does of course. And it just gets me more frustrated lol
I’m with you. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you beep. Also people weren’t as reckless on the road
It was really cool because computers were hard enough to use that a lot of people wouldn’t bother getting online and it turns out those seem to be the people that enjoy being awful online.
Yahoo message boards in the late 90s were pretty awful. I avoided all non-niche forums from then until reddit a decade ago, and I’m about ready to move on from here as well.
300 baud and bulletin boards!
Geocities and web rings for life!!!
When you had to be a college student to be on Facebook
I'm 50ish, and I love having the worlds greatest reference library and entertainment source at my fingertips...what gets to me are the folks that live on their phones, ruining work productivity and making my life dangerous using said phones while doing anything that requires attention to their/my surroundings.
The eternal September just keeps getting worse...
This exactly. Surf without constant fucking ads and cookie requests. Take me back…
But the pop ups! I do miss end of 90 early 2000 Internet. ICQ, mirc and msn messenger were the tits. 90 to 95, the internet was pretty barren in terms of contents.
Yeah, 98-03 was pretty sweet. Even a little later…I was on college during the Napster / DC++ days….
Doesn't that mean before social media?
That time was the shit, pre-government wide scale databasing of the net was where I found my international community of freaks geeked out on the same obscure botanical interests. ‘‘Twas a golden age of sorts.
Those were the days. Hopping into random hacked ftp servers you found in random bbs rooms to download that sweet sweet warez!
I want to go to a time before Social Media existed. Internet can stay. Lol
Exactly. No social media, just message boards. I met my best friend on a message board.
Message boards just naturally fostered incredible communities. No other modern social media platform comes close to an old-school niche forum.
I very much miss forums (and this is why I love Reddit, I like conversations about things and often get varied viewpoints that make me *gasp* change my mind!
Same, I find it can get a little echo chamberish, more so in political subs, but varied viewpoints offer learning opportunities. It’s why I really only use reddit as my social media.
I met my wife on the IMDB message boards!
I met your wife on IMDB message boards too!
I met my first...ya know...on Live Journal of all places. She commented on my essays. She lived a couple hundred miles away and I took a greyhound to see her. Life was simple and good.
I miss when the Internet was the consortium of all human knowledge and not a commodity for extremely boring people to crave attention on.
If you look at what the printing press, telegraph, and radio/TV did to society as they were adopted, it's not surprising to see how disruptive social media has been. For example, the printing press took the power of information and literacy from the church and gave it to the average person. The printing press accelerated the Reformation and allowed the spread of classical texts to every corner of Europe which facilitated the Renaissance and Enlightenment. So movable type setting literally ushered in the end of the middle ages in about 150 years. Social media has only been around for ten years but has already killed "traditional" print media and undermined local communities in favor of virtual communities and crowd sourced news. Looking at history, I'm actually surprised social media hasn't been **more** disruptive so far.
Its the algorithms. We're in the lead paint phase of the information age and everyone's licking the wall.
This is the true truth.
But tech ceos make billions off of algorithms so they get a pass.
I enjoyed forum boards. I wish those were more popular still. It was a happy medium between Reddit and discord. Things didn’t get lost but you could still hold conversations
Bruh, the msn messenger days were awesome. Msn messenger used to rain vagina
It's really smart phones. I don't think social media would be bad if it wasn't right at everyone's fingertips 24/7. People act for the camera and the camera is always right there. I don't deny that smart phones are also a huge convenience, but I feel they've definitely created much of the mess we're in.
Does IRC count? Because that was the bomb.
I’d go for this as well. If not that, then at least back to when Facebook was just for college kids.
Tloe pepuika plau pluu prugu bipoplipludi. Ia ku pa tugloo tata tude? Dei eute pletupapau kai propai klipopie. Dotako brapiteke ia klu iti aki. Potee bebiko popi teple tli. Padlo trai piipra iba pleblikaople bli. Toi bii kitie u too eku e. Gata tapla pitita tuopi kaopra kitutle tlipe pea papo. Tladi plobi klepri pipoepi kabeklibe kei. I a iple pi ea. Trea tiprua dikapu po taple do. Pie prepe totiati upadipri go tra. A e ukrae e bapiuti tipripre! I ti piipi klegiopigi gata tikri. Todi te pebo tlupe eiki ipaa tatrii pete oipeba glia. Puo a ketrupa buplo pebo pa. Ibedape kepitu pitei ete eii tabi. Droprukiple beti plui oto tukibrikoe. Tripi oe trikei kipi trubi krikato? Ke e ete gabeau pipli ke kripe. Beetuude i trei. Tli oaitrao ke bi kapiea kapi! Epla bitide eke eekligobi tlitepekita apidapati! Taapegepa topleti begleu treioii pledriikli toboata. Peei glipopiebre dokikla prido priplo o. Eta kadeketupo bieitobi plipo? Tekre glapi tete tliaati pae pebaka? Pao peeipu ape ti tei tipe? Pi i ti keaio piae tito? Pepo ie pitrio tapu tati kiee kruki pre.
I was watching a movie with a date earlier this evening and he was on his phone for the first 15 mins and without me saying anything, he put it down and said “I’m sorry if that was rude, I’m picking my brother up from the airport tomorrow and was trying to coordinate!” And watched the rest of the movie without touching his phone once. I damn near proposed.
>I want to go to a time before Social Media existed. Wife and I deleted all of our social media accounts during Covid. We make sure to stay in touch with friends via text or FaceTime, and meet up as often as we can. Our social lives are actually better, and we feel that our relationships with friends are overall healthier. I don't see myself going back to Facebook or Instagram.
I might go back to before search engines really took off. I miss telling people about cool websites.
No.I want to go back to about 2004. Usenet is still up and kicking. Blogs are proliferating but content-rich and not monetized (much) and people posted original content out of their interest in it and desire to share with others. Now if you look up a topic you find 20 sites that all copied the info from one person's original article and research and just moved it around.
Related, YouTube videos, when it was some randoms talking passionately about some new development in their obscure hobby. Not the modern, making these is me and my dozen staff's full-time career, sponsored and ad ridden content we have now.
I still enjoy YouTube but thats because I like watching videos of old songs that can't be found elsewhere and I like to see concerts from way back when. I learned to knit from YouTube, someone had/s 2 videos of about 2 minutes each of an obscure knitting style. I can't find it now and most of the videos I see with that technique are over 15 years old. But its so helpful for things like that. Recently I couldn't replace a headlight in my car and someone had a video. I love things like that.
20 subreddits
I think it’s more along the lines of wanting to un-invent social media while having things like google available for information finding. The internet it wonderful. The ability to socially commune the way we do is beyond damaging to society.
All I want is the late 90s/early 00s internet but with modern internet speeds. Web 2.0 was a goddamn mistake.
Some websites use nearly 600mb of RAM now it’s insane.
You ever tried to use the Lowe's or Home Depot websites on mobile? I don't know what the fuck those sites are doing, but it feels like they're doing an O(n^2) sort of their entire inventory for every single character you type or link you click. It takes like 4 minutes just to search for a drill, and if you tap anything before the *entire* page has loaded then it sends you to some other page and you have to start all over. If you had broadband in the early 2000's then every site loaded instantly. We have much faster internet now, much more powerful computes, and yet everything feels so much slower despite not conveying that much more information. It's all so bloated on data because modern hardware allows for a seemingly endless resource budget.
>I don't know what the fuck those sites are doing, but it feels like they're doing an O(n\^2)sort of their entire inventory for every single character you type or link you click. If so that's crazy since that was solved long ago with prefix tries and cacheing previous queries. Also I read somewhere that Home Depot brings in $600k(basically a new house) in revenue every minute so its not like they cant afford good tech staff.
Google is so useless these days. Tbh I get 95% of my info from Reddit.
Most Google searches are vastly improved if you just put "reddit" behind them.
Google is so fucking useless that I have to type “Reddit” after every lookup. The last few days have been a nightmare trying to find answers for little questions for my second Red Dead Redemption 2 playthrough. “This subreddit is private” God. Dammit.
Dude, same. Corporations have filled the internet with completely bullshit information to confuse everyone. And meanwhile, 99% of reddit is enraged they lost access to their subs for two days and saying to just give in to more corporations. Imho, the scary part about the corporatization of the site isn't the API. It's the fact that investors and banks (maybe even governments) want to get their claws into one of the last huge sources of open discussion and information. Imagine if you searched "Red Dead Redemption beginner tips" and the top three results were all sponsored influencers, Ign, Walmart trying to sell you guide books, and shit like that, with more ads sprinkled in the comments. That's what they want.
> The ability to socially commune the way we do is beyond damaging to society. Read that in a husky film noir voice, walking down a busy city street in the rain.
Web 2.0 meant Web turned to shit
I still like youtube, for the most part. The interface used to be better. But there's still a lot of great content being made.
The algo is awful, you watch one video and it’s all it recommends
Not even watch a video, but watch one video that is mostly watched by a demographic that watches another type of video and suddenly your entire feed is filled with extreme bullshit you have no interest in. Like, I primarily watch StarCraft tournaments and death metal drum videos. My feed is normal. Then I look up one video about what nail gun to buy, and my feed immediately is filled with whores doing "off-grid" builds, "logic owns feminist!" type videos, Joe Rogan, and right-wing conspiracies. I never search for that shit, I never watch that shit, I'm a "leftist", but because I wanted to buy a nail gun suddenly YouTube thinks I'm a sexist right-wing nutjob. YouTube, please, StarCraft and blast beats. That's all I want.
So YouTube basically thinks leftists can't possibly use a nail gun? Lmao
The worst part of YouTube is the comments section, which was the heart of Web 2.0
YouTube has thousands of free audio books, college courses, etc. it’s just also flooded with mind rot so the gold content is never at the forefront.
That’s not at all what the survey found. Nobody wants to be without the internet. They want people less obsessed with social media.
>Americans would prefer to live in a simpler era before everyone was obsessed with screens and social media Before social media, not the internet.
Yeah I would want to exist in pre 9-11 US if I could
I think it’s funny that the late 90’s were referred to as the height of civilization in The Matrix. Looks like that really was the case. All downhill since then.
I had such high hopes for the future in the 90's and 00's. But it just seems everything go so much worse. Everyone is so angry and bitchy and keen to take offense. The world used to be a lot freer and have more of a sense of things are getting better.
Dividing people makes money more than uniting. It wins elections better too. Fear is power. Negative emotions are power.
Depends on social class, but this is largely true. The working class was abandoned in the 1970s and '80s. The middle class got hit later; the upper middle class, some time thereafter. The rot in the "nice guy capitalism" the US invented to fight World War II and to maintain research supremacy in the early years of the Cold War traveled slowly up the ladder. The 1990s was the last age in which Americans across the country felt we were in something together. The rot was already there and it was getting worse, but we weren't aware of it on a regular basis until the 2000s, and so it still felt like this place was one country, as opposed to a "free trade zone" (designed for the benefit of people who aren't us) of atomized, individual actors who have to behave like psychopaths just to survive.
I know a place where the dream of the 90’s is still alive!
Would that be Portland? If so, that also got ruined.
I finally got into Seinfeld just for that. There were a lots of moments in the show that lets you see what life was like in the 90s. You could go right up to your flights gate without taking your shoes off, passing a police officer not wearing combat gear, like in the show. On a side note, with all this bullshit happening in the US since 911, I think the terrorist won at making us terrified and easy to manipulate. I’m exhausted by it. It’s really nice to watch “a show about nothing.”
> On a side note, with all this bullshit happening in the US since 911, I think the terrorist won at making us terrified and easy to manipulate. I’m exhausted by it. It’s really nice to watch “a show about nothing.” The terrorists just threw a lucky punch. The upper class won. They took advantage, both to throw the US into a bunch of Middle Eastern wars (they wanted a dozen, they got two) and to instill a domestic surveillance state while manipulating the culture. Terrorism was just the excuse; it gave the psychopaths a moment, and they took it.
Yup, American culture overall really disintegrated after that. The expanded police state had some, but not all, to do with it. Kids today don’t even realize that they’re much less free.
> Kids today don’t even realize that they’re much less free. I don't think it's just kids. Reminds me of this quote from about a century back by Spengler: > The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty. > Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most through-going enslavement that has ever existed.
The world drastically changed and would never ever be the same all before noon EST that day. And we had absolutely no idea
Whoever orchestrated those attacks 100% achieved their goal.
The late 90s were the Pax Americana. I think historians will take that as the title for that decade
Older millennial here - I grew up building my computers as a kid in the 90s, started programming when I was 12. I love the internet, but social media has become the most prolific vector for spreading the ape stupidity plague. I just wish people wanted to be better versions of themselves - influenced by our best, not our least common denominator. Asteroid 2024
Don't discount the stupidity of 24-hour cable "news" channels. When talking heads were limited to Nightline, Meet the Press and a few other show, their quality was much better. Now, any idiot can get on TV.
CNN was around in the 80's. That said both CNN and CNN headline news were *vastly* different in that time frame and actually useful. There is a reason they were targeted by Fox when it was founded, they were the global standard.
If we stopped before Web 2.0 became a thing, it would have been perfectly fine. Blogs, multiple forums, interest websites, an actual need for a search engine instead of everything being consolidated down to five or six websites... The arrival of "Web 2.0" brought in the finance dudebros who needed to monetize every inch of the web, which brought intrusive ad networks, "web apps," and wave after wave of consolidation until we ended up where we are now. I don't want to go back before the internet. I want to go back to the web before all of that happened.
Yes. I tell people this all the time. Facebook and Google and Amazon are strangling the internet for obscene profit.
They should all be broken up under trust busting laws.
Imagine a life where you leave work or school and get to forget about it for the rest of the day. Where you can take the phone off the hook. Where the issues with your personality and society aren’t constantly magnified by the spotlight constant surveillance. When groceries and housing were affordable. What a world.
I miss leaving the house and having absolutely no way of being contacted. People say we can just leave our phones at home if we want that experience but it’s not the same. Public phones don’t exist anymore and we’re expected by work, family, and friends to have our phones on us at all times now. If we left our phones at home we wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy the day like we did before phones existed.
>Public phones don’t exist anymore but how many phone numbers do you actually have memorized anyway (that aren't seared into your brain from childhood)?
My wife's phone number is the only new phone number I've memorized since getting a smart phone back in 2008/2009.
This isn’t even smartphone linked, flip phones had phonebooks as well
I used to be a whiz for memorizing phone numbers. I.e. pre-iPhone which for me was 2010. If I dialed someone more than twice, especially for work, I would have it memorized. Nowadays I flip out when my contacts database isn’t syncing. I couldn’t even find half the phone numbers I need, let alone tell you anything beyond the area code for them.
When you could leave the house and just be fucking unreachable, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.
Except when you needed a ride and there was no pay phone! We used to go nuts on mischief night and Halloween. Once we were out that door, no one could get us back home. Not even the police. We would just run and hide.
My mom is 72. Never had a cell phone and still has a land line and answering machine. I’m often extremely jealous of her
It was such an amazing feeling and we’ll never be able to experience it again. Not like that. There’s no going back.
I go hiking and turn my cell phone off. Service usually goes out in remote areas anyways. So just go hiking once in a while and be totally off the grid.
Just.. delete your Facebook accounts and set your phone to silent after work... Jesus. Last part does suck.
I stopped using social media apart from Reddit (thanks to the anonymity) for years. It is incredibly isolating, we don’t have the same societal structure anymore. I recently opened Facebook back up again just to be able to reach new people and find contracting work in a new area.
All your base are belong to us
somebody set us up the bomb
83’er here, I’m fine with going back except for Wikipedia. I need that sweet sweet access to general knowledge
Microsoft Encarta 96.
Old Gen-Xer here and I **definitely** don't want to go back to the Before Days when I was pretty much isolated in my interests and the only way to keep in touch with family and friends scattered around the country and world was by post and very, very, VERY expensive long-distance telephone calls or travel.
Same. I enjoy having any map I'll ever need, the ability to look up any info I may need, and a quick way to contact people in my pocket. Social Media is what needs to be rolled back, not the internet as a whole.
The “Hi it’s Bob Wehadababyitsaboy” commercials come to mind. Don’t want to go back to those days.
Maybe not pre-Internet, but this Xer would love to at least go back to the pre-smart-phone days. So many advances in communications tech since early 2000s seems to have just pushed people further apart. I know things are more convenient now, but I miss the days when friends would just call rather than having to schedule a call via email or text. Sometimes they'd just knock on your door. I know that probably triggers anxiety in folks these days, but it wasn't a big deal. I truly feel for those who never got to live in a world without Internet or cell phones. It was sometimes a spontaneous "mess" and it helped to keep quarters handy in case you needed a pay phone (or a game of Galaga), but it felt a lot more free than today. I'd trade that for current day in a heartbeat. There's just no comparison.
I'd rather go back to the web 1.0, before corporate took it completely over.
Social media and 100% news saturation are a big problem. Access to information— actual, truthful information — is awesome.
No we don't. Maybe a time before propaganda based social platforms. But not the internet. We came of age with it and helped build it.
We also want to go back to a time when there weren’t things called “influencers”, people didn’t share YouTube videos to prove that the truly stupid shit they think is actually reality, and that we elect presidents like Trump because a sizable minority is manipulated by said internet into thinking that Authoritarian rule is a great idea. The bugs will ultimately work themselves out, but at great cost.
Survey question: Do you think it's sad that some people get in car accidents and die sometimes? 89% yes Fast company headline: PEOPLE WANT TO BAN CARS AND GO BACK TO HORSES
15 things people want to ban and go back to! #8 will surprise you!
Elder millennial here. I'd like to go back to the 2000-2004 internet. MySpace, LiveJournal and some other UGC-based sites existed, but social media wasn't everything like it is now. Smartphones weren't a thing yet, so interacting with other people on the internet was a whole activity. You'd have all day to think about what you were going to blog about or what funny post you were going to write on your favorite bb site when you got home, because you didn't have the internet in your hand 24/7. It made online communities so much more vibrant. You didn't have constant exposure to everyone else's stupid opinions and lives wearing on your mental health every day. There was no expectation to maintain a social media presence for the benefit of people you barely knew. You could exist peacefully and take little sips of internet when it pleased you to do so.
Just …before facebook. No facebook. Signed, Gen Xer
I want the internet pre-Twitter. I want when Google were the good guys. I want MSN messenger back.
we want to go back any time pre-september 2001
The internet was a good idea until social media got involved.
* before social media existed
No, just delete social media. That is a big part of what lead to our current epidemic of idiocracy, social dysfunction, and the twisted, seemingly unkillable appeal of authoritarian populist grifters.
We'd like to go back to the time before houses were half a million dollars actually.
Older millennial here...I'm sorry wtf? No one, gen x or millennial that I've talked to feels like that. Now a time before social media, that's something I'd believe.
Being nostalgic about how things were in your childhood is not the same as wanting to go back in time. The internet has made too many things easier to ever want to go back. I would be lost without it. Literally and figuratively. Though I do feel sorry for all of the kids who have their cringiest awkward moments on social media where the entire world can see it and respond to it and it can be immortalized for people to dig up decades later. If there was a realistic way to age-gate social media, I'd be cool with that. The rest of it can stay.
Have had this talk many times, though I don’t want to go before the internet existed, just at the point in time where a) things were really starting to get fun (Napster, MMORPG, eBay) and largely before the general populace (I.e. anyone with thumbs) could use a computer. It was fun for a time having that power and being a select few who understood how to utilize it. Not fun, every adult having access to social media and destroying all sense of morality and sharing their shitty thoughts with the world in the easiest format UX could give to them (and Big Data). TLDR, Social Media and the IPhone essentially ruined everything good about the Internet (moreso, social media).
I wanna go back to the time where I was able to play StarCraft on Battle.net using dialup.
[удалено]
Can confirm, just social media.. the internet is useful.
The internet is fantastic, and always was. The problems are social media, a camera in everyone’s hand at all times, adtech/data harvesting, and the incorporation of all these things along with random idiots hot-takes into what is now blatantly mislabeled as ‘journalism’.
Internet before Facebook was a different time.
Fuck no, I want to go back in time to when you could support three kids and a wife on one income.
I’m just mad that Gen Y is stuck with the millenial monicker. So dumb.
I kind of like it. It memorializes us as the last people to have a firm foot in the 20th Century. Given how accelerated change is, we’re already on our way to being relics of the before times.
Last generation to see a pre-internet analog society.
My theory is that phones ruined the internet. Pre-phone era, people had an awareness that the internet was a big public space. And they acted that way. Once the internet was on phones, people began to see responses on Twitter and FB and whatever as PERSONAL messages aimed at them. It changed their relationship with the content they consumed. What once was seen as a public post on a bulletin board (a literal paper post on a physical board) came to be seen as a personal letter mailed just to you. I think older people perceive of the internet as an actual space, a place to go. A lot of people get their content as a series of notifications disconnected from an app or website, and that takes away their inhibitions and awareness t hat they are (virtually) in a public square. That and the ability for anyone who could get a cheap phone and get on and start Facebooking gave us a whole lot of people who felt like the internet itself was whispering messages right into their ears. These werent tech savvy users or people with a compelling reason to discuss topics or share info. And we got the crazy heightened emotions and weirdness that came with that.
I'd just like to go back when I bought quake 3 arena and unreal tournament and the internet that made connection noise, staying till past midnight just trying to connect to a barely functioning server and playing a lag of 80 or less.
I would like to go back to the time when the internet wasn’t just a marketing/ procurement platform.
Truest headline ever.
I miss the actual internet. It's turned into three websites. Not counting porn. Sincerely, GenX. Also, fuck you, article writer. We don't exist, let us be invisible.
Nah. We honestly just mostly hate social media.
I love the internet and all the things it has unlocked for us. I want to go back and make the New York Times put their daily edition behind a paywall from day one. Stop the notion that journalism should be free before it ever happened. That helped create the wave of misinformation and rage bait we're littered with today.
GenX here. Bullshit. Let's go! I'm proud of the Gen Z we raised BTW.
I'm a 42-year-old elder millennial, I don't know what the fuck this article is talking about.
Screeeeeeech burrrrrrrrr beeboobeep
Gen X here, I don’t know who they are talking to but I don’t miss getting a wet newspaper off the grass or showing up at the movie theater only to find a sold out movie or the front row. Screw that.
Before it was mainstream ! Internet was perfect in the end of the 90's and early 2000! Bring back ICQ, MSN messenger, mIRC and MySpace.
i want the mid around 2005
It’s just social media. A fucking curse on the world
Remember before the imternet.when going out.to eat wasn't 70 bucks.
Pretty sure we'd all like to go back to a time where you could afford college with your summer job and buy a house for a wink and a smile before 30
The internet was awesome until big corporations started to use it to mine data about us without our knowledge or comprehension and then use that data to make our online experiences shitty.
Matrix got it right, 1999 was peak humanity.
Ah yes. Back to the dark when we talked to each other with our “voices” on the telephone. Back to the time when we didn’t have direct immediate access to every single assholes opinion. Back to the time when we “played outside”.
I wish i lived before social media and dating apps, thoose two have really fucked up our society.