a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children.
-
Nowdays the kids are elsewhere! The very active mesh network user group in my city is run by a teenager
@NilaJones yeah, and their contributions will also unfortunately likely be ignored or unrecognized by future historians. there is this tendency to put folks from my generation who gained notoriety like Aaron Swartz on a pedestal of "amazing kid who was doing all this stuff online when no other kids were" but he was just one who was exceptionally talented and well placed from a pool of many many much less notable peers
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi
Lax supervision, or parents who were techgeeks themselves.I didn't worry that my children would encounter objectionable things on the WWW (it didn't get so murky until later). The stuff in the bookcase belonging to the father of my son's playmate, though, was quite horrifying.
Focusing on the interwebs, or any other medium, is missing the point. Age verification for the web is so far from useful for its *professed* purpose that I suspect the motives. -
@rose_alibi
Lax supervision, or parents who were techgeeks themselves.I didn't worry that my children would encounter objectionable things on the WWW (it didn't get so murky until later). The stuff in the bookcase belonging to the father of my son's playmate, though, was quite horrifying.
Focusing on the interwebs, or any other medium, is missing the point. Age verification for the web is so far from useful for its *professed* purpose that I suspect the motives.@sunflowerinrain what are you talking about
-
@rose_alibi even though I was an adult during that time I remember trying lots of things and never having to use a credit card or even prove who I was, and if a site was asking for CC verification I used think it was dodgy
As a young adult, I didn't have a credit card.
So would send cash in double envelopes to pay for things such as
Next level up from free, on the 14 line chat bbs, run on a old 386 under some 14 year olds bed. Got 2 hours before being kicked off and having to attack dial back in to get one of the lines. <Insert modem speaker busy tone>
First internet connection. Off the back of a different chat bbs, which was a bit more commercial. Was timed and Credits ran out fast. So would just post them $200 cash every so often.
Even my first proper isp, I remember sending them cash until they had direct debit.
And in this time, the internet was all new. Kids were having a great time building all sorts of stuff. They knew more than many adults.
Tried to get the kids interested a few times. but shown no interest. More interested in consuming stupid reels on Instagram.
-
even researchers my own age who were either not prolifically online or who had better supervised childhoods seem to not comprehend this part of the history. i rarely see mention of the ways children used the web that aren't about sites aimed at and made for children. we were not all using those sites...
@rose_alibi I'm sure I wasn't legally an adult when I made my Geocities site, although I'm not sure the exact age. When we invoke nostalgia for the smolweb sites of that era, a lot of the source material inspiring that nostalgia - a lot of what made the web Like That back then - was kids! Why does the web not look like that now? Partly, the lack of kids making small experimental websites.
It's no surprise we got that one single generation of children who looked like wizards to their elders, hence a lot of premature/optimistic predictions that successive generations would keep being more tech-literate than their forebears.
-
@spacehobo @rose_alibi stop describing me, it’s creeping me out. You didn’t get the area code right but everything else was spot on.
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi my friends and I made an Angelfire page about our little league baseball team with absolutely zero parental approval, assistance, or knowledge. It was glorious.
-
@spacehobo @rose_alibi stop describing me, it’s creeping me out. You didn’t get the area code right but everything else was spot on.
@linux_mclinuxface @spacehobo @rose_alibi you got the country code wrong, but that's me.
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi +9001%
With "Age Verification" we'd neither see Reddit nor Markdown, cuz Aaron Swartz started these in his teens!
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi true true…
I grew up in the Internet!
-
even researchers my own age who were either not prolifically online or who had better supervised childhoods seem to not comprehend this part of the history. i rarely see mention of the ways children used the web that aren't about sites aimed at and made for children. we were not all using those sites...
@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
-
@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
@rose_alibi in 2002, we went on the final School Trip before graduating ("Studienfahrt"), we had a custom website set up for that for photo sharing and it included a forum (as you do) and a shoutbox (as you do).
I graduated in 2003, and we had a website in place for that, too. I ran that for 20 more years until I discontinued the domain in 2023. It had a shoutbox, profiles, forums (of course), polls. It was handwritten PHP4, but all classes before and after ours had a website.
-
@rose_alibi in 2002, we went on the final School Trip before graduating ("Studienfahrt"), we had a custom website set up for that for photo sharing and it included a forum (as you do) and a shoutbox (as you do).
I graduated in 2003, and we had a website in place for that, too. I ran that for 20 more years until I discontinued the domain in 2023. It had a shoutbox, profiles, forums (of course), polls. It was handwritten PHP4, but all classes before and after ours had a website.
@rose_alibi in the study programme I took up, EVERY class had their own domain (usually a fun spin on the study program's name) and they were all running something like phpBB themselves.
This died, when facebook communities basically solved that need in a one-size-fits-all way. It never came back. It was later supplanted by Discord guilds/servers and then WhatsApp groupchats. I think for a while Skype was also in there somewhere.
-
Here's a website started by a teenager in the 90's that's still around, because no one has bothered to delete it. His parents didn't mind, though.
@Anne_Delong @rose_alibi this is amazing! Thanks for sharing
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi same
-
@rose_alibi lissaexplains.com. Where a lot of us went to learn how to code once we made it past the WYSIWYG editors.
@moxie @rose_alibi in germany, it's traditional to learn this with SelfHTML https://wiki.selfhtml.org/wiki/HTML - EVERYONE used to use it, and it's still a solid way to get started (if you speak german).
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi this is probably overlooked, yeah, though i do wonder about the scope of it. i uploaded my first website when i was 11 and was hosting a web forum for online friends when i was 15/16. but i was very much the outlier in having an online existence compared to my peers. i have often had the sense that the level of ambient online friendships and general *pervasiveness* of online social interactions for tweens and teens that is largely known today didn’t really take off until the mid-00s.
so i tend to think that running web forums and the like was the exception rather than the rule, at least into the early 00s. kids might put up static geocities and angelfire and tripod sites since they were easy. but it was much harder to get access to resources to let you run dynamic ones (though there were plenty of services that would host forums/guestbooks/etc. on your behalf!)
after all, domain names still cost $99 a year as late as 1999! -
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
-
@rose_alibi I had a Geocities and tripod page. Almost everyone in my class had this. Almost everyone tried customizing it. The bare minimum was finding cool glitter GIFs to put on there.
@claudius @rose_alibi I owe so much of my childhood love of the web to GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and the folks who ran the .tk domain registry.
-
a thing i have found younger researchers of the late 90s internet don't really appreciate is the number of ephemeral websites made by literal children. i was 12/13/14 making websites on freehosts for fun and i knew easily a dozen other people my age doing the same. the person who hosted the forum i was part of in high school started it at 15 on a server under his bed. there was no concept of age verification. if you had an internet connection and lax parental supervision you were good to go.
(this post is not about the utterly inane age verification laws nor is it about porn. it is about the very often ignored contributions of young people to culture.)
@rose_alibi @Pepijn has a number of insane stories on this topic.
