"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone.
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"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
@futurebird I found so many things I never expected to like, things outside of my usual. That's what made the old net so fun. I miss the rabbit holes so deep you pop out the other side totally bewildered. I was so into the John Titor thing it was ridiculous. Still kinda am lmao
Now it's just all the same. Everywhere. If it's not social media is promoting and selling something at every other post. The internet is a job now -
"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
I remember early Ebay;
your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 214 results all unique basically the us was an online garage sale before the Power Sellers ruined it. Everything I posted sold. Now I am lucky to get one sale a month.now your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 2,140M results out of which 95% are the same
I miss old ebay.
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@discobeez @Ambulocetus @futurebird
i have memory of web "rings" and one option was to get sent to a random site in the ring. it was fun. kind of like sitting down with a random volume of the encyclopedia, opening to a random page and just reading.
@paul_ipv6 @discobeez @futurebird
I remember Webrings and stumbleupon. Everything was new and exciting back then. -
All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird@sauropods.win Who is “they”?
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@futurebird@sauropods.win Who is “they”?
Facebook, Amazon, the people who promoted putting everything in the cloud.
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All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird
The unwashed masses aren't supposed to produce content! They're supposed to consume it, and only from the giant media companies, and watch advertisements and pay subscription fees for the privilege!
What are you, some kind of commie? -
@Rtzq0 @futurebird Does your site use cleanstream for verification?
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@futurebird I found so many things I never expected to like, things outside of my usual. That's what made the old net so fun. I miss the rabbit holes so deep you pop out the other side totally bewildered. I was so into the John Titor thing it was ridiculous. Still kinda am lmao
Now it's just all the same. Everywhere. If it's not social media is promoting and selling something at every other post. The internet is a job now@futurebird Edit to add I forgot he was also promoting his event. I'm sharing this for the bit before that https://youtu.be/koKDP6kPvvY
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All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird When ISPs started selling “consumer” plans with fast download and slow upload, a lot of old-school internet people were annoyed. Weren’t we all supposed to be equal online?
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@futurebird They're authoritarian down to their bones. If nobody in authority tells them something has value, they don't believe it does.
My partner's late mother, just a couple of years ago: "If there weren't advertisements, how would we know what to buy?"
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My partner's late mother, just a couple of years ago: "If there weren't advertisements, how would we know what to buy?"
@woozle @futurebird When we needed it, we'd go get it. That's how.
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I remember early Ebay;
your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 214 results all unique basically the us was an online garage sale before the Power Sellers ruined it. Everything I posted sold. Now I am lucky to get one sale a month.now your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 2,140M results out of which 95% are the same
I miss old ebay.
@Crystal_Fish_Caves @futurebird I was never a big eBay user, but I was still pretty shocked by how gross it looks these days.
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@woozle @futurebird When we needed it, we'd go get it. That's how.
When I see something advertised, that usually makes me suspicious of it -- because they're spending money promoting it rather than making it a better product.
I suspect if neurodivergent people were more the norm, "advertisements" as we know them simply would not exist.
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@futurebird "Stop talking to each other and start buying things"
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start@rehana @futurebird she's on Fedi @Catvalente
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@Crystal_Fish_Caves @futurebird I was never a big eBay user, but I was still pretty shocked by how gross it looks these days.
@Sadsquatch oh god is that how my store's home looks to pedestrians? I gotta move.
Ill try any of the site builders up to the 'give us your credit card' part I let one of the ai store builders take a crack at my aquarium decore niche store and it tripped up the ai at every turn like I am running a tropical fish door dash sushi mash up.
I took a poll a couple of days ago about ebay vs your own domain vs go to the mall ebay last brick and mortar almost beat online which I thought was crazy. -
All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird yeah it really is astonishing. A classic social media example of this is the difference between MySpace profiles (which had a lot going on to begin with could be further customized with CSS so were all over the place) and the very limited and sparse Facebook profile.
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"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
@futurebird I made the first website that Cal State L.A. ever had. I learned html and wrote it in Notepad. Of course it was entirely static. All it had was the location, phone number, and operating hours of the new Writing Center I was running. Probably no one ever saw it because no one was on the web. You had to have Netscape to see it and no one had it. The IT people were no help at all. They said, "If you had told us a year ago that people would want to put up webpages, we would have told you you were crazy." I said, "OK, but this is now, and I want to do this."
Ah, those were the days of promise and possibility. Then it all turned stupid.
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@futurebird some people really love order, hierarchy, and authority.
@dr2chase @futurebird not just that, but uniformity. I want my site to be orderly in my particular way, but even other people who want orderly things should be free to make them their own way
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@futurebird When ISPs started selling “consumer” plans with fast download and slow upload, a lot of old-school internet people were annoyed. Weren’t we all supposed to be equal online?
Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.
Until now, I figured the bandwidth asymmetry of DSL and cable was some kind of intentional “consume, don't produce” design decision, but…well, fiber ISPs would be throttling upstream if that were the case, so I guess bandwidth asymmetry was nothing more than a technical trade-off this whole time?
Happy to see it, at any rate. Uploading a software build now takes seconds instead of minutes.
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"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
@futurebird Yep... Feels about right.
