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.
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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...
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.
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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 like to refer to these folk as "Generation Lissa".
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@rose_alibi I like to refer to these folk as "Generation Lissa".
@moxie lissa?
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@moxie lissa?
@rose_alibi lissaexplains.com. Where a lot of us went to learn how to code once we made it past the WYSIWYG editors.
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@rose_alibi lissaexplains.com. Where a lot of us went to learn how to code once we made it past the WYSIWYG editors.
@moxie oh i learned just by looking at source code
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@moxie oh i learned just by looking at source code
@rose_alibi I did that too, but I always remember Lissa being credited all over the websites I visited so she feels representative of that era for me.
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@moxie oh i learned just by looking at source code
@moxie oh i see. looking at wiki, lissaexplains was made a year after i started building sites. i didn't see a wysiwyg til much later
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@moxie oh i see. looking at wiki, lissaexplains was made a year after i started building sites. i didn't see a wysiwyg til much later
@rose_alibi That's actually a way better place to start. I started in '97, and relied WAY too much on WYSIWYG for the first year or so. I wish I found coding first!
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@rose_alibi That's actually a way better place to start. I started in '97, and relied WAY too much on WYSIWYG for the first year or so. I wish I found coding first!
@moxie it's funny what just a 1 or 2 year difference can make in terms of exposure. i remember my first experience of the wysiwyg being very frustrating because it felt so limiting
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@moxie it's funny what just a 1 or 2 year difference can make in terms of exposure. i remember my first experience of the wysiwyg being very frustrating because it felt so limiting
@rose_alibi same! proliferation of wysiwyg web editors actively turned me off webdev. it's why there's a big gap in my website building experience between the geocities/angelfire/spree/lycos era and the neocities/nekoweb era. if I don't have a way to drop into raw html it's just a blogging platform to me (à la wordpress)
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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 yes i made my first website in grade 5 or 6, i had a whole bunch of weird ones
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@szymon ok
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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.)
Nowdays the kids are elsewhere! The very active mesh network user group in my city is run by a teenager
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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 absolutely! as a bored isolated kid, i spent so much time online. i made a simple html website at one point, but couldn’t figure out how to host it- so then, at 11, i made a blog on blogger which i updated for years.
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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 im a bit younger but even in the 2010s as a kid me and my online community were making weebly/wix/etc sites to store info and art of our OCs, worldbuilding lore, rp stuff, etc-- not quite the same maybe since they were very wysiwyg-heavy but still!
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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
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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
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@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.
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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.
