Sums up my experience growing up
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@ilovecomputers Iʼm old school. Our content is still content. Screw “SEO”, Big Tech, and the surveillance economy. I saw the peak and refused to downgrade. We even took off tracked ads.
@jackyan @ilovecomputers SEO was the beginning of the death of the usable web.
Proud to say that in all my web-based endeavors over the years I have never once used SEO. It's fucking evil.
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
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@mirabilos I could be wrong, but the 2010s is when the internet became so normalized in the US that you had to be in abject poverty to not have it. Like I had a friend who wasn’t online until he was in high school in the 2000s
@ilovecomputers I’m not in america
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers I'm 63 and yes to all of this
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@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
@triptych @ilovecomputers Yes. It's back to DIY and user created content, like at first.
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@jackyan @ilovecomputers SEO was the beginning of the death of the usable web.
Proud to say that in all my web-based endeavors over the years I have never once used SEO. It's fucking evil.
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/02/read-all-about-the-seo-algorithm-that-i-developed-for-google/
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@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/02/read-all-about-the-seo-algorithm-that-i-developed-for-google/
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I sometimes send this to the idiots who enquire about “SEO” with us, even though we say we donʼt do guest posts or “outreach” on our contact pages:
https://jackyan.com/blog/2025/02/we-do-not-do-paid-or-guest-posts-and-heres-why/
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@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
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@ilovecomputers I feel for you.
In my case it was CB radio. Elitist rebels at first then regulated and finally destroyed from within by wilful, selfish people.@original_peterm @ilovecomputers I remember that very well. I was briefly a CB user (Bristol, 1970s) and this perfectly summarises what happened. Before regulation it was possible to deal with the selfish people via "direct action" (ahem). After legalisation, the troublemakers had the law on their side and got free rein. It's not a bad analogy for what happened to the internet. The anarchy was at least self-regulating...
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers but but but Confetti! (Le Sigh)
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Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
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Sums up my experience growing up
This close to discovering that the real problem is, and always has been, capitalism (and, beyond it, greed).
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@ilovecomputers
Watching this vast, beautiful thing you could explore turn into like 4 websites has been really sad.The best glimpses of what it COULD become seemed so possible.
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@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
@hackillu There are fediverse versions of forum-like interfaces that look a little like reddit, or discord, or other things. They can interoperate with your mastodon accounts - you may have to set up new accounts to use them, but the interoperability is still there AFAIK. I haven't (yet) tried them out.
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Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
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@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
@mutkitta Re forums, I miss them too. Many groups that would have been on forums are now on Reddit, in Discord servers, or Facebook Groups.
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Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers
I remember a #search machine developped by an university in the early 1990s (?), before #Google came up. They found the best content, even for very complicated scientific searches, they found the smallest private website on any island in the Pacific, or in Asia, Africa. The world outside the USA was still connected.They were destroyed by Google and the users prefering the #convenience of the biggest, believing their hollow promises. The biggest got the money for development.
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@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
@triptych Yes, it's up there but more and more hidden by AI Slop.
And people don't dig the mud, they are tired.
For a normal, simple professional search, I nowadays need more than 3 times longer: to find "something", to fact-check, to find traces for more. I work with a bunch of internal databases/platforms but it's crazy to get results inside the fog. Often I don't get these results anymore. I'm not very optimistic.
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@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
@hackillu We have something like #groups https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/ but it feels more like RSS than a forum. It's just boosting everything for the group.
Unfortunately, the very vibrant gup.pe groups are destroyed and the new ones are only slowly taking traction.Everyone can set up such a group with @hello
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Sums up my experience growing up
I was actually talking to my cousins about this the other day, a lot of people in our generation (Millennials but also Gen X and older Gen Z) were using the Internet before all of the really bad dark patterns were added in so we got them at a trickle rate and could develop defenses for some of them as they got more refined
How can we replicate that slow creep for kids now so that they can also build up their defenses instead of getting hit hard while unprepared?
