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The Internet of the early 2000s is gone. RIP.

P___X

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I think most of us here were there for the late 90s early 2010, for the internets. In fact, the forum stuff we used was just one of the best ways to interact in-depth with strangers in the 2000s. I learned about underground Hip-Hip, electronic music production, gear off forums. I was there and hooked on Reddit in the early 2010s when it was pretty mature, but not totally messed up. I remember facebook when the default mode was a chronologic listing of my *actual* friends' posts without any automated spam, ads, AI generated shit, political disinformation, etc. All gone now.

I took a big reddit sabbatical a few months ago and out of boredom I started logging back in and goodness. So 20-30% of videos on the frontpage are from Tik-Tok (instant skip, it's junk). Useless, often tasteless memes. 1000x reposted videos. But now I see that a lot (perhaps 20%) of interesting pictures are now AI-generated. And the text only posts?! Text-only posts do not seem to make it to the Front page anymore, and if they do, they are almost exclusively The Am I The Asshole variety. AITAH has been the most appalling sub on reddit for a while, where made up stories get judged by 15-year-olds who recommend divorce/breakup. But something really changed now. The stories used to have some realism to them, but not anymore:

"My mom was an amazing mother. She also had no support and was young [19 per the OP]. I have no idea how she pulled it off. She did however needlessly complicate parenting because her standards were so high. She believed if her kid showed any interest in anything, she had to support it full throttle. That meant the sister who rode horses owned three and competed every weekend. It meant going to everyone of my games and getting me private lessons. It meant my sister who liked art had to be taken to the Louvre and the Met."

I don't think I need to explain the incredibility here. It's just sad, that the internetz I knew turned into low effort self-generating, meaningless garbage, dumped on us using soulless algorithms.
 
I think most of us here were there for the late 90s early 2010, for the internets. In fact, the forum stuff we used was just one of the best ways to interact in-depth with strangers in the 2000s. I learned about underground Hip-Hip, electronic music production, gear off forums. I was there and hooked on Reddit in the early 2010s when it was pretty mature, but not totally messed up. I remember facebook when the default mode was a chronologic listing of my *actual* friends' posts without any automated spam, ads, AI generated shit, political disinformation, etc. All gone now.

I took a big reddit sabbatical a few months ago and out of boredom I started logging back in and goodness. So 20-30% of videos on the frontpage are from Tik-Tok (instant skip, it's junk). Useless, often tasteless memes. 1000x reposted videos. But now I see that a lot (perhaps 20%) of interesting pictures are now AI-generated. And the text only posts?! Text-only posts do not seem to make it to the Front page anymore, and if they do, they are almost exclusively The Am I The Asshole variety. AITAH has been the most appalling sub on reddit for a while, where made up stories get judged by 15-year-olds who recommend divorce/breakup. But something really changed now. The stories used to have some realism to them, but not anymore:

"My mom was an amazing mother. She also had no support and was young [19 per the OP]. I have no idea how she pulled it off. She did however needlessly complicate parenting because her standards were so high. She believed if her kid showed any interest in anything, she had to support it full throttle. That meant the sister who rode horses owned three and competed every weekend. It meant going to everyone of my games and getting me private lessons. It meant my sister who liked art had to be taken to the Louvre and the Met."

I don't think I need to explain the incredibility here. It's just sad, that the internetz I knew turned into low effort self-generating, meaningless garbage, dumped on us using soulless algorithms.
I enjoyed the “free-for-all” way we used the internet in the late years of last century and early years of this one.

I enjoyed finding blogs about every topic imaginable. Also, many blogs had fairly long posts, made regularly. One example that comes to mind: “As The Apple Turns” - an Apple rumor/news site. One might have come for the latest news, but the humor, wit, and staunch dedication to the blog made you a diehard fan. Imagine, a free blog on a niche topic (Apple Computer pre-iPod was not a popular topic), with 3 separate topics covered… every day! You can even enjoy reruns on a modernized archive of the site… http://appleturns.com/

I also used to be on a high-traffic forum dedicated to a single manga! Guess what, people migrated to corporate social media instead, the site died, and the subreddits on this manga/anime are junk, hardly even visited by anybody anymore.

My wife was on a forum nonchalantly added to a certain cooking show’s website (probably on a whim, totally basic forum settings, default theme, etc). But it got huge because people loved talking about their recipes (duh), and they built a nice community. Later, of course, everybody migrated to corporate social media, and the community faded away because FB algorithms aren’t designed to keep niche groups together. Nor do FB groups offer visibility to new members, since it’s all a walled garden.

I love this forum because it‘s a reminder of what can be done on the internet. But of course, we only have a few people, and I don’t think many of us are teenagers anymore. Do subreddits, FB groups, and TikTok really build online communities? I think not.

One thing that I currently like is the ”Fediverse” aka Mastodon. But it’s short-form. I wish for the days of people making blogs about their interests (niche or not) and putting them on the web, not even worrying about “monetization” either. Instead, the king of “blogs” right now is substack, a paywalled platform.

Oh well, I’m glad for this forum, as I said before. Who knows, maybe these types of online spaces will make a comeback!
 
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On the topic of TikTok, sounds like they have MacRumors mods working there.. or at least are using the same logic to solve problems:


As I recall, the MR solution to racist trolls was to block (or hide in “political news”) any post that even mentioned the existence of any minority.
 
Oh I just remembered another thing that was pretty great: mailing lists (aka listservs)! Well, it did help if you had a mail filter to put the messages in their own folder.

Here’s what reminded me of that…

 
So...since the debate I went back on Reddit to keep my hand on the pulse of the internetz.... Boy, it got totally shitified since the IPO. 20% of the posts are cats (oookay), 20% is s subreddit of some obscure anime lore, about 10% are "spoiler" posts about The Boys or House of Dragon, 10% are explicit advertisements, then is now about 10-20% guerrilla marketing/astroturfed posts, most recently about a fake twitter post about a guy complaining about only "woke" applicants passing an "IQ" test he scored below average on. I actually have to dive into the comments to find 3-4 posts about calling it out as a scam to get people on this website that gets you to pay for the results of your IQ test and then offer "brain training games" to improve your deflated scores. And there is the organic post about McDonalds calling Happy Meal "The Meal" during mental health awareness month. Another 20% is Karma farming posts about AMITHEASSHOLE for evicting my step children because they got my chihuahua hooked on fentanyl? With unanimous responses reassuring OP that they are NTA, and recommending divorce. And then the political shit, left wing tries to spin the debate in all the wrong ways and suggest trump is panicking about Project 2025.

But then you get a Life Pro Tip telling you to try putting a hint of salt in your coffee to eliminate its bitterness and it works like magic. Overall, I still think I got net dumber after this week of reddit experiment. Such a waste of potential.
 
So...since the debate I went back on Reddit to keep my hand on the pulse of the internetz.... Boy, it got totally shitified since the IPO. 20% of the posts are cats (oookay), 20% is s subreddit of some obscure anime lore, about 10% are "spoiler" posts about The Boys or House of Dragon, 10% are explicit advertisements, then is now about 10-20% guerrilla marketing/astroturfed posts, most recently about a fake twitter post about a guy complaining about only "woke" applicants passing an "IQ" test he scored below average on. I actually have to dive into the comments to find 3-4 posts about calling it out as a scam to get people on this website that gets you to pay for the results of your IQ test and then offer "brain training games" to improve your deflated scores. And there is the organic post about McDonalds calling Happy Meal "The Meal" during mental health awareness month. Another 20% is Karma farming posts about AMITHEASSHOLE for evicting my step children because they got my chihuahua hooked on fentanyl? With unanimous responses reassuring OP that they are NTA, and recommending divorce. And then the political shit, left wing tries to spin the debate in all the wrong ways and suggest trump is panicking about Project 2025.

But then you get a Life Pro Tip telling you to try putting a hint of salt in your coffee to eliminate its bitterness and it works like magic. Overall, I still think I got net dumber after this week of reddit experiment. Such a waste of potential.
Badly designed Geocities pages might have made your eyes bleed. But the cesspools of Reddit, FB, X, and Instagram will make your brain bleed.
 
Instagram I still enjoy. it's part of my night time in bed surf. But I mostly follow dogs, wild life, Nat Geo, Sheldrick Trust , saving wild mustangs and the like.

As for Reddit.....I am so damn sick of the Gen Z'ers over use of "HATE"or calling someone a "hater" just because their opinion differs.
 
Instagram I still enjoy. it's part of my night time in bed surf. But I mostly follow dogs, wild life, Nat Geo, Sheldrick Trust , saving wild mustangs and the like.

As for Reddit.....I am so damn sick of the Gen Z'ers over use of "HATE"or calling someone a "hater" just because their opinion differs.
I don't have IG, and it offers nothing exciting to me, but they are quite smart, low-key chipping into the space what Xitter and Tiktok used to own. I set my adblocker to kill all Xitter links. IG only showing a tiny logo on the videos is very smart because I developed an aversion to Tiktok videos and thanks to their exuberant use of labeling, it's quite effortless to not click on shit reposted from Tiktok.
 
Instagram I still enjoy. it's part of my night time in bed surf. But I mostly follow dogs, wild life, Nat Geo, Sheldrick Trust , saving wild mustangs and the like.

As for Reddit.....I am so damn sick of the Gen Z'ers over use of "HATE"or calling someone a "hater" just because their opinion differs.
IG started out great. FB executives weren’t smart enough to come up with it on their own. But they figured out that it would eat their lunch within a couple years, so they bought it… and the US government allowed that.

FB did gunk it up a bit, but really it has “good bones” as they say. The biggest problem with it? FB is plundering everybody’s personal data to sell to advertisers, and feed its LLMs.
 
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