I'm old enough to remember when we told to never, ever use our real names on the internet. I think that's a big part of why having a "second identity" was such a big thing on the early internet. It wasn't until myspace and facebook that using your real name online became the norm.
because the internet is just glorified ad space now, when people found out it could be profitable it took over so now it's just brands, corporations and people trying to become famous by churning out repetitive slop. and bots (also run for profit)
I don't think ads are much of an issue as it is the accessibility to it, boomers, their politics and their culture wars. I really think those are more pressing problems to the fun internet we used to enjoy as recent as 10 years ago.
@@who_bob2641 Exactly. A lot more people here. Saying that they're 50-70 years old. Sometimes they're even going to websites specifically meant for school-aged kids....
I miss the heck out of forums and chatrooms. Nobody will ever convince me that Discord is somehow a suitable replacement for either of those communities.
Ah, that comment right here, as a fellow chatroom guy, & now discord dweller.. You're absolutely right. Nothing will come close to these days. It's almost bittersweet.
That's because it's not. On a forum, you can start a topic, which will stay alive and on-topic so long as people are still posting to that thread. On Discord, if you try to start a new topic (i.e you're looking for tech support), it's immediately buried by the current conversation, and no one sees it.
Reddit isn't a suitable replacement for forums, either. The voting system causes people to post things that will be "liked', like lazy repetitive jokes, and avoid anything that might get the down arrows, even if it would be useful information.
Fight back. FOSS. Neocities. There are ways we can construct a better internet but we have to stop using these lame apps like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
The problem with capitalism is that it becomes too perfect, first it makes the product better and better, eventually it stops caring about the product and seeks to mold the customer, then all the competition converges into just enough to not be considered a monopoly… it’s products have become garbage but there is no other game in town, then it’s final form is a farce, all it does is use its power to directly syphon money into itself. The only reason you noticed is because the internet has been speed-running the capitalist trajectory.
I compare the old vs. new internet to seeing an elephant. The old internet is seeing an elephant in its natural habitat. You have to travel to see what you want, it's a little more work to get it but you discover more things along the way. You find things you didn't expect, find interesting things you never even thought about. The new internet is like seeing an elephant in the zoo. You walk into an enclosure, you walk straight to the elephant, grab some overly priced merchandise at the gift shop on your way out and it's over.
I want to add: The elephant wouldn't be in the zoo. Without the help from illegal wildlife traders. Not to mention the tourists. Who couldn't respect the fellow's space.
I remember when finding a new website with your friend/sibling was one of the most exciting thing you could do on the internet. Now, it’s just go in same 3/4 social media sites and scroll for hours.
@alanatalksalotyeah no. You can’t say that about everything. Especially when one can observe the obvious. Some things objectively change for the worse. (Ok no seeing some of your other comments you seem to be here to try to start sh** lmao. Calm down bro)
Because corporations realized it's true potential for PROFITS and squeezed every last drop of character and effort out of it for short term profits. If something good exists; capitalism WILL get ahold of it and WILL destroy it.
Same. I recognize AI has SOME good uses in certain contexts, but good god, I've had to start transitioning away from using google because it spends 10 times more energy generating some "convenient" ai search result filled to the brim with misinformation. Ecosia is so much better. It feels like old Google. Not to mention apps like Insta and Snapchat BEGGING me to create AI art using their databases that almost certainly include my own art in them just to create something far uglier and more sterile without any of the fun of drawing it.
@@LilChuunosukeLet's not forget that Google doesn't search what you explicitly type in, it uses AI and the algorithm to give you "potentially better" matches. I'm getting sick of typing something in verbatim and not getting it in the first page of results.
The internet is just like everything that has been invented ever. Starts out as a niche thing, gains support, comes good, reaches its zenith and then the corporate world finally notices. Then they shape it in their image and turn it into a vapid shell of its best days and then it dies a slow death. The online moniker I use on UA-cam was invented on June 19, 2007. At this time, the internet was coming really good and a barely 2-year old UA-cam was showing good signs of life.
Same here, I am still using my name from 2006 youtube and remember google trying to convince people to change their youtube handle to their actual name. That was a hard pass for me. I miss the old youtube where videos got rated by 1 to 5 stars, videos weren't produced by big corps, and youtube didnt try to shove short form content down my throat
@@NvmThemHereIAm Haha, I forgot all about that insanity! Yeah... I want all the people I yell at about politics and video games to know exactly who I am! That sounds like a great idea. The company that flushed $billions down the toilet on Stadia...
The name I use on UA-cam derives from the suicide of two 16-year old emo girls in Melbourne, Australia in April 2007. I still wonder to this very day what these two dead emo girls put on UA-cam from April 2005 to April 2007, if anything at all.
@@NvmThemHereIAmGoogle believes my name is How Boutno. I was raised on no real names on the internet, not to post self-identifying information on the internet... then everyone disregarded that advice and plastered their whole existence to it and are confused on how they get ads for something they thought about.
The suits got involved, simple as that. The money people. The people that have ruined every entertainment industry that gains popularity. It happened to music, TV, movies, video games, the internet, social media, and soon AI. Money, and business minded people, who only see the instrumental value in art, that is, as a means to get money, and not the intrinsic value in art, the value of art itself, the value art has by sheer virtue of existing in the first place. THOSE are the people who have ruined the internet.
Exactly right. So many things start out as a passion or interest from one or more people who just want to experience or create. And if it lives long enough and gains enough popularity, the leeches with their ideas of profit will come along and try to comodify it, killing the soul in the process. It's always been this way and always will The only thing you can do is disengage. It hurts to see something you love dying, but all things live and die in time. Just move on to the next thing that interests you and help it to grow and thrive, enjoying and experiencing while it's still honest and real
I’d say the mid 2000’s to early 2010’s was the best time to be on the internet before the optimism got chucked into a furnace and we seemingly got transported into an alternate timeline where humans will be less prevalent on the internet than A.I.
Earlier years had their charms too, from what I saw of it, but ... yes. Though I personally found mid-00s quite a different beast from early-10s (which was the peak for me). Kind of nice that you don't just randomly run into Goatse and pals now, though.
@@DMC-octuHonestly, running into Goatse, lemon party, meatspin, etc. was peak internet. No one understands the old mantra of "Don't feed the trolls" nor "Don't post self-identifying information online" and are confused as why the internet became a cesspit of corporate control, vapid and extremists takes, and constantly being targetted by ads for the THOUGHTS they think.
Yeah it's not like the technology really saw much of a jump. With the exception of AI we have largely been using the same tech, just more optimized and faster speeds. Not to mention the reason why millennials tend to be depressed is because we saw that hope and optimism taken away. Gen Z might remember parts of that internet for being on the tail end, but they were probably too young to actually remember much.
I completely understand. I just wanted to share some fun stuff in my life, and I get tossed aside by the popularity machine, because of course they want quantity, not quality. Oh and it also must be something that's a fad and trending.
@@JonathanHeydh-vy4yw On the other hand, if Google or something big had not bought them, UA-cam would have quickly been outcompeted by some other site bought by Google or Amazon that could host video content - very possibly Google Plus itself. UA-cam desperately needed more server space, and Google had it in spades. I think they made the right decision at the time, even if their corporate overlords cost the site its soul down the line.
but why it is just because google or window take it over youtube an than all things are changed than look to the old youtube an than the new when google or window take it over
@@danielclaeys4976 I hate to say this but the United States and it’s so called culture values philosophy norms beliefs etc are nothing but a laughing stock of the whole planet
When you’re at work and think about all the things you’re going to do after work. Clean, workout, rearrange your whole house, play video games. Then you go home and do nothing because you can do anything you want. That’s the Internet now…it’s right in your pocket. You used to have limited internet time so you had to make it fun or useful. Now we can access it in the car, on the toilet, in the woods. There’s no escape!
When you say "anything", does that mainly mean spending 3-5 hours scrolling through UA-cam/Twitter/etc? If so, I relate to this SO HARD. I've been trying to substitute my time on UA-cam with other hobbies/activities. Slow but steady!
Everything is controlled. Can’t even speak your mind. It’s not a communication playground anymore. Feels more like you’re trying to have a conversation in the middle of class and the teacher is getting mad.
It didn't even have to be chaotic. I mean look at 2Advanced. It wasn't really chaotic. It was "FUN". It was "WILD". It was "UNIQUE". It was "INTERACTIVE". It was "TACTILE".
For me, somewhere between 2012-2016 is when not just the internet; but society as a whole started getting pretty uninspiring. In addition to the tech corporations; smart devices and social media has warped everyone’s minds. 😢
It’s because the internet used to be a thing you had to sit down and make time for. Now it is everywhere around us and in all of our pockets at all times. It was a thing to explore. Now it’s just a way to escape.
I used to to explore and escape society and treated it like an oasis. Now society followed me in and are basically dictating things. There are only a few pockets left to run to now.
Not exactly. The real issue is what it has become. Back in the early 2010's you could have a cellphone (not a smartphone) with social media clients, and you could share your life on them. It wasn't about how many likes and popularity votes. It was about sharing a slice of your life. Now it's become, a "share my fake life to make me seem rich and populahhh" to make as many people love me.
The old forum system was so superior. I still use old forum posts all the time to help me fix my old cars. Thankfully the info/knowledge still is out there from back in the day. You can actually FIND for the information you want from an old post. No algorithm pushing you in the direction it wants. Trying to find the advice you actually want from instagram or similar now days is near impossible. Unless it’s in a new fresh post that’s “trending”… it’s not happening
old forum posts wont always be there, and a lot of it is gone by this point too wayback machine can only do so much IG is a picture app idk why youd look there. Reddit maybe, but the issue with that site is utterly incorrect advise can get upvoted enough to seem legitimate. That would have never occurred in an old forum. Discord is so fragmented and subdivided so good luck finding anything while sifting through a million irrelevant memes and gifs. the net has become less of a practical tool, and now mostly a marketing device
I kind of hope there will be a kind of revolution in the internet someday, breaking free from the limitations of your go-to-sites and going back to the wild internet without limits. It sounds unlikely but as every site gets more strict and controlling, I'm sure there is a chance of something like this happening one day
I'm an artist and have been posting my art online since the early 2010s when I had to take photos of my drawings on the back of my algebra homework with a cheap plastic camera, plug it into my computer, and email the photo to my friend who had less strict parental controls on their family computer. In the early deviantart days, I could easily garner dozens if not hundreds of likes and followers with my crappy colored pencil drawings covered in grease stains drawn after finishing my school lunch. Now, social media algorithms won't even show my art to my own followers because I'm not posting enough, not posting the "optimal" amount of tags, not creating short videos, etc. After around 12 years of posting, I stopped this summer when it became clear to me that sharing my work would do nothing but result in my art being scraped for genAI. I refuse to even post my art on my own neocities site until i am able to start using Glaze or Nightshade on my work.
@@LilChuunosukeplease don’t give up, I would love to see your art. Your art and my “art” will be better than any ai art no matter how many ai bros will try to tell you otherwise
@@LilChuunosuke yeah the internet has turned everything into a giant rat race to only be monetized in the most optimal way possible. Probably why everything feels samey now.
@@billnocolis9368 Well yeah... art made by a human is always gonna have character to it. It's a little piece of you, made with love. AI is never going to replicate that... but the AI bros don't care about the passion and the craft of it.
It's because corpos have no taste and don't wanna spend money for real artists, so they try to force their poor graphic designers to do something that's not in their skillset. I also kinda blame it on them trying to ape on indie brands who didn't HAVE a whole lot of money to make these big, flashy graphics, and these corpo shitheels thought that was why people were supporting these brands (and not, you know... trying to support a smaller company instead of these big-ass shitheel corpo juggernauts).
Popularity. The internet went from being a place outcasts, Tech Entheusiasts and geeks would enjoy. Everyone saw you as a super hero knowing how to navigate and communicate with a browser let alone code. Now that everyone is super, nobody is. Society now reflects our getaway from society. It's depressing like a kid finding out he was never special.
I'm still special. I get shunned by the popularity machine, but I carry on making stuff, even if NO ONE sees me. Sometimes, being special, is about being resilient and going through with it, for the sake of doing it.
@@GnarlyChop Good for you. Glad to see people enjoy their interests. I don't really care for the word "special". I see too many people suffer from bad ego death realizing the fish in the pond are just as big as them. A lot of people I know say thry can't push themselves to do anything cause they're "not as good as they want to be". Have to remind them that they don't really love what they do if all they can't even show the courage to fail and learn from it.
There's two things that contribute to this that I don't see anyone talking about: 1. Globalization - Americans might not know this, but the old internet was far more national than the current one. Each country had its own internet culture that was stronger and more prevalent than international online culture. 2. Puritanism - As the Internet grows, seemingly more and more people turn into stuck-up puritan hall monitors that want to censor away and remove everything they consider problematic. The lack of this mindset is what allowed the carefree, edgy, brave aesthetic of the internet in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s - people were shamelessly edgy just as much as they were shamelessly cringe and free.
Internet was cool as only as a small, highly technical group of nerds cared about it. When the general public took interest (at the latest with smartphones) it went the same way every public place becomes, ad riddled, sanitized slop.
@@Saltedroastedcaramel It is an insanely big factor, because part of what allowed the old internet spirit to exist in the first place was boldness and a "wild west" approach to content online.
I definitely prefer a less 'efficient' aesthetic. I mean, we kinda accept the blandness because it's the most 'optimal', but maybe we should stop and think for a bit, why we are so obsessed with this efficiency. Life is for living, and that includes visual enjoyment, not just being the most optimal worker drone.
Money. The numbers say minimal makes more money, so everything that isn't that is abandoned with the crackhead's disgust for his family. It isn't more money so it's chucked.
That wont happen because money. Even if you did manage to make something work, everyone would immediately start to copy it. Look at UA-cam thumbnail pictures for their videos.
In some ways, minimalism has gotten a little INNEFICIENT. These days, i sometimes can't figure out if something is a button or just a graphic... Back in the day buttons were 3D!
Yeah I managed to find a discord server kind of like that. It isn't quite the same, but it's the closest thing. Largely because it's a chat group and threads are not really a thing. I like how in the main chat people can be having multiple discussions over each other. Still once it is done, it is done. Threads could have kept it alive buy bumping it to the front page again.
Bring back 2 things: 1. Everything on the internet is a lie. Girl? Guy in real life. Child? Already FBI. 2. Government & Corpo Partnership, go away losers, we dont want you.
@@TheSaival the normies are already kicked out. That is why we are in a UA-cam comment section and not some fancy IRC channel with a dozen bots designed for simplicity.
Something I don’t see talked about often that I think really made the internet fun was that accessing it was done solely through a computer and “surfing” the internet was something you did in your free time. It wasn’t on your phone, it was something you did when you got home from work or school. The ability to customize your profile was lost through phone apps becoming the popular media outlet. The last time I felt happy or inspired on the internet was using Tumblr in the late 2010s. I would still use it on my iphone during the day, but coming home from school and using it on my laptop was a far better experience and totally separate from my day to day life. I’d spend hours coding my profile layout just like I had done with my Myspace a decade before. Everything becoming a mobile centric experience imo is a big part of why it’s not fun anymore.
Happens every time a technology becomes mainstream & commercialized. It seems most developments of the internet in recent years were mostly about maximizing ad revenue and data collection rather than actually improving the core technology / user experience.
Coming from a person of that era, a lot of the early internet was the same. It was just the lack of structure and plenty of competition (no social networks) that made it more fun though. But ad revenue maxing and unregulated data collection was always a thing. It’s just more known now.
@@KayzewolfYeah, the dependency on advertising has become more noticeable with growing public attention. This creates a need to make environments good for advertising, requiring more regulation and data collection. Really, most forms of media have the same issue with puritan regulation and advertising, just in different forms.
@@JonathanHeydh-vy4yw fancy words but I think you mean corporatism. America is becoming like robocop. OCP a big tech company owns the cops the hospital the city the government. They practically are the military.
In less than 2 years ads are now A.I generated where 30 - 50% of comments are A.I generated for conversation bait. That is another reason things are based on funnels and making you go deeper for some type of end action. Usually purchases and information gathering to sell
To me, two things killed the old internet: Social networks. They killed two things that made the old internet worth it: 1) anonymity 2) webforums Mobile access. Before mobile access, going online from desktop was a ritual. You dedicated time to it. You knew the time online was limited, so you made the best use of it.
The issue with the late 2000s and early 2010s is the amount of ads and pop-ups, combined with the insane spread of adware, malware, and bloatware. I was working as a computer tech on the side, and I would visit 6 houses a week removing adware and bloatware that was slowing down PCs. It was normally something checked by default to install, while installing something else. And apps claiming to clean your pc, or increase your speed was commonplace, but they too were usually fronts for more malware. I can remember thinking to myself "why am I even paying for the internet?" because half your time was spent clicking through ad pop-ups, while the other half was spent waiting on the hourglass cursor to turn back into an arrow.
lol the computer tech guys my mom would get to fix the messes i would cause as a child from just . really liking toolbars and kazaa. ended up family friends the way they were constantly coming over hahah
tbh, i find navigating modern websites actually harder, and even finding things in general. google has gotten objectively worse over the last 5-10 years. im on the internet since 2008 and being honest the 2010s were quite something. if i could go back in time and relive my youth i would totally do. especially with hindsight on how to easily have an financially worry free life.
The Internet was for nerds and programmers... the normies laughed at us for using our computers constantly. Now they sit like Zombies in front of their Devices and scroll endless content.
Normies ruined it. People love to blame corporations, which is true in the direct sense, but corporations can't thrive without normies. Corporations are mosquitos, normies moving in turned it in to a swamp for the mosquitos to thrive in. The iphone also helped open the floodgates too.
I do genuinely think 2003-2013 was the best era of the internet. There were still active forums, a number of active virtual worlds and flash was actually supported.
Absolutely, broadband connection while practically no restrictions/regulations/commercialisation. The absolutely beautiful wild west era of the internet
Why 2013? If we're talking about censorship, then I'd say 2017 was when it went down hill for the big tech platforms, but there's still alt tech, forums and chatrooms.
As a child of the 90s I miss the unsanitized wild west internet of the late 90s/00s. At 12 years old I had already seen my first video from Chechnya. Kids today would have a breakdown.
I think there was a huge chunk of internet history that fell through the cracks of the script for this video - user monetization. People used to make content and publish content (of any type) just for the heck of it. There wasn't a hint of cash on the horizon so everyone was like chill. Once we were able to monetize things such as IG profiles, FB groups, YT videos that turned the entire content machine on and it began the competition towards "the best [placeholder]", clickbait and a bunch of other stuff that wasn't even remotely important in the '90s or '00s. So yes, internet looks worse today (I personally don't think so), but 15 years ago only corps could make money via online mediums. Even FB and YT were created with the idea of "let's give people a place to hang out" rather than today's mindset of "let's make money online". Even this very video was created to generate income. Not saying it in a bad way - I also work and earn online, but that's the jist of it. If it weren't for that overarching goal of making money ExtraMint would've probably just record Peter Griffin impersonations, log off and not toss and turn in his bed if this video will hit the goals or not.
THIS. This is it right here. The internet used to be just another hobby. No money COULD be made, as it had not been "invented" ( for lack of a better term) yet. This is why the older internet feels nicer. People were creating simply for the joy of creating. It happens all the time, the minute money gets involved, it all goes out the window.
I would also add on that social media made everyone more comfortable about providing their own personal information. Then people like Zuckerborg had the bright idea to package that information and sell it to the advertisers. Then cellphones come into the mix by adding more people to contribute to it. Now everything is designed to essentially track you. Which is ironic since the common knowledge back then was to never post personal information online. Now everyone does the opposite. People might not have known it back then, but that knowledge helped gatekeep the online space.
I was just thinking about this a lot last week. Lately I feel so much less inspired than I have over the last 10 years, and I think the internet changing into what is now is a huge component of that. Like I miss old tumbler, and youtube, other artists and ideas coming together, actually getting hooked by interesting content rather than drowning in algorithmically chosen time wasters, the absolute freedom we used to have... I miss that. Also, if you live in a place where there's not much to do besides go on the internet, it was a great escape. The internet wasn't just a time waster but a way to interact with the world and be exposed to new ideas and stuff. Now it feels like it can either only be a time waster, or used for buisness, and that's it. The days of the internet being a fun creative playground are gone. I hope it comes back.. it probably won't, but I can dream, right?
@@lasciviouspaine i feel like the utilitarianism is just one of the symptoms of the plague that is capitalism, which i variously refer to as neo feudalism or corpofascism 💀
Yeah it’s crazy to think I’m about to turn 28 and I was playing Roblox when I was 9 years old. I still remember my old account name, just can’t get the password. Which sucks cause according to my little cousin I have tons of “rare” hats and could sell the account lmao
19:47 Yes because when I look back on something I use when I come home from work, the words I want to have available to me to describe it are that it's "functional", and "productive". Ah yes, this food I eat functionally filled me up. This movie I watched definitely passed some time. This book I read certainly was full of words on paper I could skim through. This desktop environment I'm using sure does get me to things quickly. I'm sure glad this user can demonstrate their personality through only a profile image and a banner, wouldn't want to see more color and personality on a person's page. This is the kind of stuff purpose built for an NPC from a video game, not for a diverse human experience. No wonder it is so full of AI posters, the modern internet is basically made for _them,_ not human beings.
A lot of the time simply being boring or ugly is enough to make a plain interface counter-productively designed on top of that, too. Sometimes being flat, monochrome, and "efficient" makes what you're looking for hard to find in an interface. Often buttons and features are "hidden" until you do something unexpectable, too. I believe this got much worse when smartphones and tablets started to dominate. Or a web page/program is so ugly or annoying that you can hardly stick around long enough to figure out how to do what you planned on doing. Modern Steam really does that for me. When it opens I feel the urge to run away from it. Fun aesthetics matter, and a comfortable balance can be struck. Most tech companies just don't care as much as they should.
@@Hobson64 The funny thing is I actually don't think steam is customizable enough, this is why I use CSSLoader-Desktop on it. I wish they had custom background images on store pages like itch does. I do agree that some of the best features like the Curator system and Interactive Recommender/Discovery Queue are VERY tucked away in a heap of total clutter though. But that's... kind of a problem with the steam store, not the steam application itself. This would be a problem on a regular web browser. I don't really have many complaints with the _actual program's_ UI other than it using a chromium backend thus being really janky and memory inefficient in a way only a chromium based application can be. I simply can't do without features like Steam Input anymore honestly, due to how MUCH functionality that has, I'm certain I've done things with that nobody else on this planet has done, like macroing entire words to a button which is something valve CLEARLY did not account for due to how much making that happen crashed the interface, but they let me do it anyway. Steam isn't really the first example I'd use as something that has gone too far.
Little note for people watching this; the Y2K thing was known about for quite a few years before 1999 even started its year, and while older computers like Commodore Pets and Apple ][s weren't really designed to understand this, the banks and governments had spent a few years by 1999 fixing the "bug" here there and the other to make sure systems knew what was going on and to account for it. At least one I remember reading (I can't find the sauce anymore, this might just be my concious hallucination) said something to the effect "I just told the computer Anything before 50 is in the 2000s. That's their problem in fifty years."
the internet was supposed to be this great and wonderful place, full of individuality and character. the 1990s dreamed of that future, and the 2000s began to bring it into realization. but that all changed when -the fire nation attacked- the algorithm and ad corporations took over. they took this beautiful world-a world that could have been the closest thing to a "utopia" capable of being made by humans-and they crushed it under their greedy corporate fists. they turned our beautiful world into a profit-driven hellscape. where there was once beauty, there is now gray. where there was once individuality, there is now conformity to the almighty algorithm. they didn't just pave paradise and put up a parking lot; they paved the world we created together and turned it into yet another drab, lifeless, corporate office building. and those of us who chose to stay have slowly lost our ability to fight back. now all we do is stand around the water cooler and reminisce about that beautiful landscape we used to roam as free people.
When i got on the Internet in the 90s i was filled with wonder and hope for the future. 30 years later there is no wonder and life is much more miserable. Better or worse is a matter of metrics, but most people i know are more miserable and more miserable than the older generation was at this age. Nothing like 30 years of proof to ruin the hope and fun of an incredible invention.
It's not just the internet, it's everything. Logos became minimalist, wrappers (on chocolate bars, etc) lost their colour and fun - while the actual products lost their flavour (and half of their mass, for five times the price). Restaurant chains such as McDonald's, everything loses the fun, and becomes one monotone colour with a simple logo in a basic font. Somewhere after the year 2005, everything became lifeless, soulless, boring, plain, and ALLLLLL about money. Fun stuff was replaced with large corporations, and all decisions started to be made by people in suits who know nothing about what we want, because they only see us as sales figures.
As a kid i went to the internet for the internet. For the novelty of it all. Now I go to the internet for the content. Internet is now just a background thing that serves you from the shadows.
Worlds online being shutdown really, really upsets me. It's still my favorite cyber realm i ever experienced. the loss of maximalism, customization, and freedom on the internet just gives my spirit the blue screen.
America's puritan values have had a massive effect on what is marketable and valuable, even globally. The internet was niche thing for a while, it wasn't really a place that businesses went to advertise unless they were big enough to use it as a side option. Things didn't need to be squeaky clean, and most of the people using it were enthusiasts or had some deep interest in something online. So culture developed on the internet, washed over other people who were already online, and stayed there. Now, with everyone using the internet every day, "real life" culture bleeds in a hell of a lot more, and everything has to have monetary value. If we can ever make a sequel and keep monopolistic corporate interest out, we can have the original internet back.
You might have some truth with America's puritan values. I would largely blame it on California's values purity spiraling out of control. Most of the big tech companies came from Silicon valley after all. As far as I have known the west coast has always been a bit of a meme with how insane they are. Thanks to the rocky mountains the entire west coast could be considered as being an island with how isolated they are compared to the rest of the country. Now more people have adopted the California values because of how influential big tech is.
My best memories are from 2000 to maybe at best somewhere around 2013. It all went rapidly downhill from there and here we are now... I also miss how easy it was to meet people and make friends. Random chatboxes, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! groups and so forth. Everyone was willing to have a chat. Now we have "SOCIAL" media and I've been with social media from the start but I've yet to make ONE friend through social media. Now I'm more determined than ever to maintain my personal website. It's far superior to running a social media account. And it seems like it's easier to get in touch with people who have their own websites, too. Just gonna stay in my nostalgic corner of the interwebs.
Anyone else here remember Ebaum’s Worl? Hands down the greatest website of that era and foundation of my relationship with the internet. Easily made up 98% of my entire browser history for the first 6 or 7 years, and my favorite memory with all its hilarity, horror & humorous oddities. It was literally a handbook of human nature captured in Java & Flash. And OP is right about having to search for these hidden gems, but it was fun & I miss it! It was also a badge of honor if you were the kid in school who always found the funniest shit cus fyp didn’t exist! RIP Ebaum & the interwebs.
14:36 This is literally makes me mad and several times depressed on daily basics since you can't escape it anywhere. People and corporations who pushes minimalism to absolute insane bland levels deserve "white room" punishment to taste their own medicine. (...I don't understand why my previous comment was shadow banned, so I made new one. UA-cam hate when users dislike modern minimalism?)
Why do I feel like the reason some websites are having that minimal design is because of mobile devices being a thing, since some people will use the browser and go to sites that PC users also went to.
thats exactly the reason, and as time goes on it gets worse because they optimize sites for smartphones more and more while ignoring/neglecting the desktop experience
This plays a big part. Back in the day I had to maintain my own site, as two sites, one for pc (html) and one for mobile (wap/wml, xhtml). Now it's css/html to maintain both, but for it to work well it's best to keep designs simple for responsive design to display good. I have kept my original mobile site online. It hasn't aged well. I no longer update neither version, or any of my sites for that matter. Footfall fell off around 2012 due to a certain social site embedding websites within their garden - which is probably no longer supported (wouldn't know, I deleted that socials account a decade ago).
You're not wrong... I remember when 'View Mobile version' used to be a thing. You'd go on a website and all the writing would be tiny; you'd have to press something to make the format more viewable. But now, even going on a website on a PC is basically looking at a blown-up version of a Mobile web page.
@ridethelapras Not to mention that "desktop mode" is a thing in a browser app like chrome mobile when it comes to visiting sites on a phone, so that's something.
I'll go farther, government, payment processors and copyright is probably biggest killer of internet, people like blame social media, but social media is only way it is, is because payment processors, they literally can deny people payment processing because of things like political opinions, and there literally nothing you can do, because it consider a trade secret.
The internet was the last bastion of free thinking till the mid/late 10s. From then on everyone just flooded the social media. Prior to that it was considered somewhat nerdy, hence ppl below a certain IQ level were just not there. Which made it more fun and exclusive. I was honestly wondering in those years how long was the internet going to be free and unregulated - well, not for that long. Now it is like the waiting room of a city hall while waiting for your drivers license renewed. Pure corporate hell.
I think anonymity was a big part of things. I remember feeling more free to speak my mind and act differently in online games than I would in real life. I was able to showcase interests and pursue things with online friends that I'd never want to admit to around friends or family. It was a way to be free of societal norms and breathe. But as things became more personalized to the individual and the almighty algorithm took hold of things I noticed I was holding back. Every time I'd sign up with a new social media platform I'd get suggested friends that were all people I'd have to see in person at some point. So I was less vocal, less imaginative, and less myself than I was prior. Now that I'm an adult, even the internet feels stifling, just like everything else.
2000s internet: Flash games, 'Broadcast Yourself' UA-cam slogan, top videos being made for free with pure passion, no ads or sponsors, no spying 2020s internet: SEO, bots, brainrot, farms, monetisation, AI, sponsors, spyware and ads that waste half the water on the planet, default pfp gen alphas in comment sections Hm, maybe we are just blinded by nostalgia? 😂😂
what do you mean no ads?? remember those toolbars/spyware that you could never get rid of? Endless pop ups because ad blockers didn't exist yet. Shitty early dynamic html, pre-modern javascript...
@sebp400 Windows XP didn't come bundled with spyware and bloat unlike Windows 11. Also modern websites are on average 10x more bloated than they need to be with trackers, analytics ads and pop ups everywhere. All this bs is considered normal in 2024 Go back to 2005 OS or web browser and see how many servers it connects to ootb
Even in the 2010's. It wasn't so bad. Things seemed to change when Politics ("brigading") and Big Business came in. There seemed to be more disagreement and less wholesome content at that point.
By the year 2001 many Net Artists, as it was called, were already working in retro tech ‘90s aesthetics and elite folks all over the net couldn’t get enough of it. We just had different names for the style as none of these more contemporary terms had been coined. But the movement was fairly widespread and pervasive for being true underground at the time.. artists/groups like Paperrad, Cory Arcangel, Jodi, Dragan Espenschied, Johnny Rogers, just to name a few. Things didn’t percolate up to mainstream until a decade+ later with Vaporwave and the many micro iterations that have since fallowed.. Long after the OG originators had moved on for the most part. There’s a lot of overlap between the dawn of 8bit chiptune music, glitch art, and these early pioneers
The difference is jank doesn't exist anymore. Sure things can still feel janky if they run like crap, but jank itself is all but dead. That jank site feel where it was pieced together by someone either who didn't care or didn't know how to quite properly make a good website is gone.
it feels dangerous and exhausting. it's either bots hiding everywhere trying to steal your account's data or ridiculously long video content that's 90% rage bait
I remember when people used to make fun of the internet for letting people showcase their personalities with customizable features. Now we miss those days. We shouldn't have been so hard on each other about that, because now it's gone and the world is a little worse because of that.
It’s full of insecurity magnets and dopamine hits now. Everything either pump and suck self confidence, gives or takes hope, it’s all just an emotional rollercoaster instead of just chillin
14:42 I just stumbled upon a home designer UA-camr and she said the same thing about minimalism! It blew my mind as to how that aesthetic slowly creeped into our collective awareness. And now you’re talking about the old internet days and makes me realize why I had so much fun as a kid, and why I (if I have to watch ads) prefer kid toy ads than some guy making money scheme haha 😂 love your video thank you for bringing me some memories! 😊
One thing I despise that has also ruined the internet... is damn copyright. Either now, you can't be as creative anymore due to videos being removed over it, or (back then muted for copyright) but now, you have bots who delete videos deemed copyrighted based on your own viewing history. Half the time they get removed more, if you save them in playlists. Especially old, nostalgic youtube videos and dank meme originals. So if you wanted to watch old meme videos, you might not find them unless archived off youtube.
If you're a young kid and you're intrigued about the early web, I want to tell you this video only scratches the surface. This is not a slight to the video, but the internet was one of the main creative outlets of the entire world for a very long time. It very slowly ground to a halt and became corporatized and paved over.
Social media changing from real time to algorithmic posts ruined them. Nothing like finding out about an event 11 days after it happened, but you see pictures from the event first.
I enjoyed the xanga days. I remember downloading songs through limewire on dial up and one song taking a full afternoon. All that for Real Slim Shady.. and it felt … awesome!
I miss the soul of the internet and getting lost in rabbitholes with unique content! It's not super well known, but the video game Hypnospace Outlaw is a great 90s internet simulator that brought me back. Highly recommend to anyone wanting to browse around and solve some mysteries on a fictional geocities like internet!
There is another thing. Back in the days people in the internet were content creators in much larger percentage than nowadays. Now we are mostly consumers. It just so happens, there is no sinister reason behind it. We could tell everyone to spin up their own websites or blogs and surely that creativity would reborn, but people won't do it or won't update it. Hell, people are not content creators even on platforms like facebook et al. Also, back then people were into internet because of hobbies and similar thing. Now the internet is a hobby (or rather activity) by itself.
Hid my best Peter Griffin impression somewhere in this video...
@@ExtraMintyy AMABUTUKUM
you didnt even hide it, you made it "came out"
17:23
Frutiger Aero
How old are you? I think age should come into this quite a bit.
I'm old enough to remember when we told to never, ever use our real names on the internet. I think that's a big part of why having a "second identity" was such a big thing on the early internet. It wasn't until myspace and facebook that using your real name online became the norm.
I totally remember the constant warnings about online safety & parents’ permission thing.
An advice that normies would frowned upon you.
Also to never share photos or personal information, now people share the most they can on Insta.
That’s still relevant today outside of LinkedIn.
Now you get treated like a freak if you DON'T use your full name and address everywhere. I really hate this timeline.
because the internet is just glorified ad space now, when people found out it could be profitable it took over so now it's just brands, corporations and people trying to become famous by churning out repetitive slop. and bots (also run for profit)
I think the NPC trend was a nail in the coffin of this idea.
@@sophiacristinaAs well as functioning as the ultimate proof of it, not to mention the greatest evidence of how brainrotten people are becoming.
''yo,I heard you like ads so I put an ad in your ad'' 🤦♀
I don't think ads are much of an issue as it is the accessibility to it, boomers, their politics and their culture wars. I really think those are more pressing problems to the fun internet we used to enjoy as recent as 10 years ago.
@@who_bob2641 Exactly. A lot more people here. Saying that they're 50-70 years old.
Sometimes they're even going to websites specifically meant for school-aged kids....
I miss the heck out of forums and chatrooms. Nobody will ever convince me that Discord is somehow a suitable replacement for either of those communities.
Ah, that comment right here, as a fellow chatroom guy, & now discord dweller.. You're absolutely right.
Nothing will come close to these days.
It's almost bittersweet.
That's because it's not. On a forum, you can start a topic, which will stay alive and on-topic so long as people are still posting to that thread. On Discord, if you try to start a new topic (i.e you're looking for tech support), it's immediately buried by the current conversation, and no one sees it.
Just keep using forums, or make your own. Why give up?
Reddit destroyed forums
Reddit isn't a suitable replacement for forums, either. The voting system causes people to post things that will be "liked', like lazy repetitive jokes, and avoid anything that might get the down arrows, even if it would be useful information.
Everything is so corporate and soulless now
Except for the Indie companies that is
Sadly so. It ain’t just nostalgia, aesthetics have literally changed for the worse
Fight back. FOSS. Neocities. There are ways we can construct a better internet but we have to stop using these lame apps like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Exactly the same thing happened to mcdonalds too, so bland and no character.
The problem with capitalism is that it becomes too perfect, first it makes the product better and better, eventually it stops caring about the product and seeks to mold the customer, then all the competition converges into just enough to not be considered a monopoly… it’s products have become garbage but there is no other game in town, then it’s final form is a farce, all it does is use its power to directly syphon money into itself.
The only reason you noticed is because the internet has been speed-running the capitalist trajectory.
I compare the old vs. new internet to seeing an elephant. The old internet is seeing an elephant in its natural habitat. You have to travel to see what you want, it's a little more work to get it but you discover more things along the way. You find things you didn't expect, find interesting things you never even thought about. The new internet is like seeing an elephant in the zoo. You walk into an enclosure, you walk straight to the elephant, grab some overly priced merchandise at the gift shop on your way out and it's over.
@@ionizingshadows and now we just gotta make our own Internet that’s just like the old Internet
I want to add: The elephant wouldn't be in the zoo. Without the help from illegal wildlife traders.
Not to mention the tourists. Who couldn't respect the fellow's space.
And I consider the old web or internet as a Intangible Cultural Heritage
Wow! This was wonderfully put.
Animals don't belong in zoos.
I remember when finding a new website with your friend/sibling was one of the most exciting thing you could do on the internet. Now, it’s just go in same 3/4 social media sites and scroll for hours.
Rose tinted glasses
@alanatalksalotyeah no. You can’t say that about everything. Especially when one can observe the obvious.
Some things objectively change for the worse.
(Ok no seeing some of your other comments you seem to be here to try to start sh** lmao. Calm down bro)
@@Riu-bw4bl no I'm not trying to start anything there's just a lot of comments that have MAJOR flaws
Which websites did you find?
@alanatalksalot Ok. I'm calling YOU out as one of those fake AI NPC bots the video mentions. You ain't real!
How was the content so much better when the internet wasn't everywhere? As a kid I thought the internet would only get better as it grew.
Then it turned to this and now we just gotta make our own Internet that’s just like what you said.
Same here i had high hopes
Because corporations realized it's true potential for PROFITS and squeezed every last drop of character and effort out of it for short term profits.
If something good exists; capitalism WILL get ahold of it and WILL destroy it.
The quality today is way better
The focus shifted from making content bc you enjoyed doing so to making it bc you wanted money.
The inclusion of AI into every phone and feature does really scare me. I miss when the internet felt like a human 3rd space
Same here. People always talked about how the internet was an escape from the real world.
And then people from the real world barged in.
I know ai has been around since the 50s
Same. I recognize AI has SOME good uses in certain contexts, but good god, I've had to start transitioning away from using google because it spends 10 times more energy generating some "convenient" ai search result filled to the brim with misinformation. Ecosia is so much better. It feels like old Google.
Not to mention apps like Insta and Snapchat BEGGING me to create AI art using their databases that almost certainly include my own art in them just to create something far uglier and more sterile without any of the fun of drawing it.
@@LilChuunosukeI always see ai photos when I search ANYTHING and it makes me want to take out my eyes and scream
@@LilChuunosukeLet's not forget that Google doesn't search what you explicitly type in, it uses AI and the algorithm to give you "potentially better" matches. I'm getting sick of typing something in verbatim and not getting it in the first page of results.
The internet is just like everything that has been invented ever. Starts out as a niche thing, gains support, comes good, reaches its zenith and then the corporate world finally notices. Then they shape it in their image and turn it into a vapid shell of its best days and then it dies a slow death. The online moniker I use on UA-cam was invented on June 19, 2007. At this time, the internet was coming really good and a barely 2-year old UA-cam was showing good signs of life.
Same here, I am still using my name from 2006 youtube and remember google trying to convince people to change their youtube handle to their actual name. That was a hard pass for me. I miss the old youtube where videos got rated by 1 to 5 stars, videos weren't produced by big corps, and youtube didnt try to shove short form content down my throat
@@NvmThemHereIAm Haha, I forgot all about that insanity!
Yeah... I want all the people I yell at about politics and video games to know exactly who I am! That sounds like a great idea.
The company that flushed $billions down the toilet on Stadia...
The name I use on UA-cam derives from the suicide of two 16-year old emo girls in Melbourne, Australia in April 2007. I still wonder to this very day what these two dead emo girls put on UA-cam from April 2005 to April 2007, if anything at all.
I've had my name for 10+ years. But it is close to my old name.
@@NvmThemHereIAmGoogle believes my name is How Boutno. I was raised on no real names on the internet, not to post self-identifying information on the internet... then everyone disregarded that advice and plastered their whole existence to it and are confused on how they get ads for something they thought about.
Probably my favourite part of the internet back then are the flash games
I used to think those wallpapers with a cat with round sunglasses were sick
@@23-oszkupto be honest I still feel they’re sick but that’s probably my nostalgia talking 😅
WHY YOU USE THE SEPI'S PROFILE PICTURE?????????
@MemphisOFICIAL777 he copied ME buddy
@ikhoonyejelem2967 What
The suits got involved, simple as that. The money people. The people that have ruined every entertainment industry that gains popularity. It happened to music, TV, movies, video games, the internet, social media, and soon AI. Money, and business minded people, who only see the instrumental value in art, that is, as a means to get money, and not the intrinsic value in art, the value of art itself, the value art has by sheer virtue of existing in the first place. THOSE are the people who have ruined the internet.
Exactly right. So many things start out as a passion or interest from one or more people who just want to experience or create. And if it lives long enough and gains enough popularity, the leeches with their ideas of profit will come along and try to comodify it, killing the soul in the process. It's always been this way and always will
The only thing you can do is disengage. It hurts to see something you love dying, but all things live and die in time. Just move on to the next thing that interests you and help it to grow and thrive, enjoying and experiencing while it's still honest and real
ai's been killed by suits for years now
Living under Capitalism is a dystopian nightmare
@@JonathanHeydh-vy4ywwe don’t live under capitalism we live under Judaism.
They wear funny black little hats btw
Internet lore and calling out the modern day brain rot. My favorite type of content! This video shall blow up well done!
Thanks legend appreciate it
it's wacko 2 ponder on what's never has altered,chumey. @@ExtraMintyy
can't tell if you're being ironic
I’d say the mid 2000’s to early 2010’s was the best time to be on the internet before the optimism got chucked into a furnace and we seemingly got transported into an alternate timeline where humans will be less prevalent on the internet than A.I.
"The internet is for -porn- AI!"
Earlier years had their charms too, from what I saw of it, but ... yes. Though I personally found mid-00s quite a different beast from early-10s (which was the peak for me).
Kind of nice that you don't just randomly run into Goatse and pals now, though.
Thanks Obama :/
@@DMC-octuHonestly, running into Goatse, lemon party, meatspin, etc. was peak internet. No one understands the old mantra of "Don't feed the trolls" nor "Don't post self-identifying information online" and are confused as why the internet became a cesspit of corporate control, vapid and extremists takes, and constantly being targetted by ads for the THOUGHTS they think.
Yeah it's not like the technology really saw much of a jump. With the exception of AI we have largely been using the same tech, just more optimized and faster speeds.
Not to mention the reason why millennials tend to be depressed is because we saw that hope and optimism taken away. Gen Z might remember parts of that internet for being on the tail end, but they were probably too young to actually remember much.
UA-cam was 1000x better 10 years ago before they deranked everything that was even remotely interesting. Now it feels like all I get is corporate bs.
Mostly because of google buying UA-cam
I completely understand. I just wanted to share some fun stuff in my life, and I get tossed aside by the popularity machine, because of course they want quantity, not quality. Oh and it also must be something that's a fad and trending.
@@JonathanHeydh-vy4yw On the other hand, if Google or something big had not bought them, UA-cam would have quickly been outcompeted by some other site bought by Google or Amazon that could host video content - very possibly Google Plus itself. UA-cam desperately needed more server space, and Google had it in spades. I think they made the right decision at the time, even if their corporate overlords cost the site its soul down the line.
but why it is just because google or window take it over youtube an than all things are changed than look to the old youtube an than the new when google or window take it over
@@danielclaeys4976 I hate to say this but the United States and it’s so called culture values philosophy norms beliefs etc are nothing but a laughing stock of the whole planet
When you’re at work and think about all the things you’re going to do after work. Clean, workout, rearrange your whole house, play video games. Then you go home and do nothing because you can do anything you want. That’s the Internet now…it’s right in your pocket. You used to have limited internet time so you had to make it fun or useful. Now we can access it in the car, on the toilet, in the woods. There’s no escape!
holy fuck youre so right
When you say "anything", does that mainly mean spending 3-5 hours scrolling through UA-cam/Twitter/etc? If so, I relate to this SO HARD.
I've been trying to substitute my time on UA-cam with other hobbies/activities.
Slow but steady!
@@JLCL01 it’s crazy…I’ll be scrolling and realize then just throw my phone (somewhere soft) so that I stop and do something else!
I feel the same, but with videogames. I remember looking forward to after school and on the weekends when I could game all I wanted
One thing I once read was "the real world is now an escape from the internet."
Everything is controlled. Can’t even speak your mind. It’s not a communication playground anymore. Feels more like you’re trying to have a conversation in the middle of class and the teacher is getting mad.
Dude you kinda nailed it. It's insane
Cause everyone is also the teacher lol.
The heat is turned up so slowly that the frog never jumps out of the pot. He just enjoys his nice warm bath until it's too late.
Real. It rapidly went from having a space to be myself to being extra surveillance on top of how bad surveillance has gotten irl. I’m miserable.
UA-cam censors so much stuff.
this is exactly why i stick with neocities and spacehey! i miss the creative chaotic and colorful internet so bad
It didn't even have to be chaotic. I mean look at 2Advanced. It wasn't really chaotic. It was "FUN". It was "WILD". It was "UNIQUE". It was "INTERACTIVE". It was "TACTILE".
Im honestly glad Im old enough to remember 1990-2010 internet. Probably the best time of my life, desu.
Capitalism and Silicon Valley almost destroyed it all
Omg. The desu 😂
Desu desu desu desu desu
"honestly" adds nothing to the point
This man this
For me, somewhere between 2012-2016 is when not just the internet; but society as a whole started getting pretty uninspiring. In addition to the tech corporations; smart devices and social media has warped everyone’s minds. 😢
It’s because the internet used to be a thing you had to sit down and make time for. Now it is everywhere around us and in all of our pockets at all times. It was a thing to explore. Now it’s just a way to escape.
smartphones were the downfall of the internet
We used to respect the computer at home or the office
Well said
I used to to explore and escape society and treated it like an oasis. Now society followed me in and are basically dictating things. There are only a few pockets left to run to now.
Not exactly. The real issue is what it has become. Back in the early 2010's you could have a cellphone (not a smartphone) with social media clients, and you could share your life on them. It wasn't about how many likes and popularity votes. It was about sharing a slice of your life.
Now it's become, a "share my fake life to make me seem rich and populahhh" to make as many people love me.
The old forum system was so superior. I still use old forum posts all the time to help me fix my old cars. Thankfully the info/knowledge still is out there from back in the day. You can actually FIND for the information you want from an old post. No algorithm pushing you in the direction it wants. Trying to find the advice you actually want from instagram or similar now days is near impossible. Unless it’s in a new fresh post that’s “trending”… it’s not happening
old forum posts wont always be there, and a lot of it is gone by this point too
wayback machine can only do so much
IG is a picture app idk why youd look there. Reddit maybe, but the issue with that site is utterly incorrect advise can get upvoted enough to seem legitimate. That would have never occurred in an old forum. Discord is so fragmented and subdivided so good luck finding anything while sifting through a million irrelevant memes and gifs.
the net has become less of a practical tool, and now mostly a marketing device
I kind of hope there will be a kind of revolution in the internet someday, breaking free from the limitations of your go-to-sites and going back to the wild internet without limits. It sounds unlikely but as every site gets more strict and controlling, I'm sure there is a chance of something like this happening one day
It's hard to have fun online when you have to beg for a livelihood by becoming a "personal brand" or selling a course
I'm an artist and have been posting my art online since the early 2010s when I had to take photos of my drawings on the back of my algebra homework with a cheap plastic camera, plug it into my computer, and email the photo to my friend who had less strict parental controls on their family computer. In the early deviantart days, I could easily garner dozens if not hundreds of likes and followers with my crappy colored pencil drawings covered in grease stains drawn after finishing my school lunch. Now, social media algorithms won't even show my art to my own followers because I'm not posting enough, not posting the "optimal" amount of tags, not creating short videos, etc. After around 12 years of posting, I stopped this summer when it became clear to me that sharing my work would do nothing but result in my art being scraped for genAI. I refuse to even post my art on my own neocities site until i am able to start using Glaze or Nightshade on my work.
Or be like those clickbait garbage that purposely types the most prepostorous garbage on twitter for sensationalism bullshit
@@LilChuunosukeplease don’t give up, I would love to see your art.
Your art and my “art” will be better than any ai art no matter how many ai bros will try to tell you otherwise
@@LilChuunosuke yeah the internet has turned everything into a giant rat race to only be monetized in the most optimal way possible. Probably why everything feels samey now.
@@billnocolis9368 Well yeah... art made by a human is always gonna have character to it. It's a little piece of you, made with love. AI is never going to replicate that... but the AI bros don't care about the passion and the craft of it.
I really hate the minimalism trend 😭
I'm with you on that one.
It's because corpos have no taste and don't wanna spend money for real artists, so they try to force their poor graphic designers to do something that's not in their skillset. I also kinda blame it on them trying to ape on indie brands who didn't HAVE a whole lot of money to make these big, flashy graphics, and these corpo shitheels thought that was why people were supporting these brands (and not, you know... trying to support a smaller company instead of these big-ass shitheel corpo juggernauts).
Popularity. The internet went from being a place outcasts, Tech Entheusiasts and geeks would enjoy. Everyone saw you as a super hero knowing how to navigate and communicate with a browser let alone code. Now that everyone is super, nobody is. Society now reflects our getaway from society. It's depressing like a kid finding out he was never special.
The web was ruined by capitalism and consumerism and greed
I'm still special. I get shunned by the popularity machine, but I carry on making stuff, even if NO ONE sees me.
Sometimes, being special, is about being resilient and going through with it, for the sake of doing it.
The internet used to be a refuge. In an ironic twist, being *offline* is the "refuge" nowadays.
@@GnarlyChop Good for you. Glad to see people enjoy their interests. I don't really care for the word "special". I see too many people suffer from bad ego death realizing the fish in the pond are just as big as them. A lot of people I know say thry can't push themselves to do anything cause they're "not as good as they want to be". Have to remind them that they don't really love what they do if all they can't even show the courage to fail and learn from it.
@@AlexeiVoronin will it’s because of capitalism And there’s nothing wrong being offline
There's two things that contribute to this that I don't see anyone talking about:
1. Globalization - Americans might not know this, but the old internet was far more national than the current one. Each country had its own internet culture that was stronger and more prevalent than international online culture.
2. Puritanism - As the Internet grows, seemingly more and more people turn into stuck-up puritan hall monitors that want to censor away and remove everything they consider problematic. The lack of this mindset is what allowed the carefree, edgy, brave aesthetic of the internet in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s - people were shamelessly edgy just as much as they were shamelessly cringe and free.
Internet was cool as only as a small, highly technical group of nerds cared about it. When the general public took interest (at the latest with smartphones) it went the same way every public place becomes, ad riddled, sanitized slop.
It was always fairly semi-international for me. I ran into all sorts of Canadians, Brits, and French online on MSN chat rooms.
I think two is the biggest factor here. Now, you have to walk on eggshells and someone will still get offended.
@@Saltedroastedcaramel It is an insanely big factor, because part of what allowed the old internet spirit to exist in the first place was boldness and a "wild west" approach to content online.
facebook desperately needs censorship
I definitely prefer a less 'efficient' aesthetic. I mean, we kinda accept the blandness because it's the most 'optimal', but maybe we should stop and think for a bit, why we are so obsessed with this efficiency. Life is for living, and that includes visual enjoyment, not just being the most optimal worker drone.
Money. The numbers say minimal makes more money, so everything that isn't that is abandoned with the crackhead's disgust for his family. It isn't more money so it's chucked.
That wont happen because money. Even if you did manage to make something work, everyone would immediately start to copy it. Look at UA-cam thumbnail pictures for their videos.
@@kosmosXcannon that's why capitalism is a bad system
In some ways, minimalism has gotten a little INNEFICIENT. These days, i sometimes can't figure out if something is a button or just a graphic... Back in the day buttons were 3D!
Everyone who changed the UA-cam algorithm in 2012 needs to be put on a 8 minute trial
i loved it it was so nice
Every once in a while, I find a cool corner of the internet that feels like it used to, but those are like little islands in a sea of sheep.
poetic..
Yeah I managed to find a discord server kind of like that. It isn't quite the same, but it's the closest thing. Largely because it's a chat group and threads are not really a thing. I like how in the main chat people can be having multiple discussions over each other. Still once it is done, it is done. Threads could have kept it alive buy bumping it to the front page again.
I promise to be one of those islands... Even if I get shunned by the popularity machine. :D
@@GnarlyChop Stay true to yourself, you got this!
Bring back 2 things:
1. Everything on the internet is a lie. Girl? Guy in real life. Child? Already FBI.
2. Government & Corpo Partnership, go away losers, we dont want you.
That's the most ridiculous way of rephrasing "There are no girls on the internet"
The issue is the normies fucking got online.
> Government & Corpo Partnership, go away losers, we dont want you.
That never existed anywhere.
3. kick out normies and bring back gatekeeping
not gonna happen, too much money in the game now
@@TheSaival the normies are already kicked out. That is why we are in a UA-cam comment section and not some fancy IRC channel with a dozen bots designed for simplicity.
Something I don’t see talked about often that I think really made the internet fun was that accessing it was done solely through a computer and “surfing” the internet was something you did in your free time. It wasn’t on your phone, it was something you did when you got home from work or school. The ability to customize your profile was lost through phone apps becoming the popular media outlet. The last time I felt happy or inspired on the internet was using Tumblr in the late 2010s. I would still use it on my iphone during the day, but coming home from school and using it on my laptop was a far better experience and totally separate from my day to day life. I’d spend hours coding my profile layout just like I had done with my Myspace a decade before. Everything becoming a mobile centric experience imo is a big part of why it’s not fun anymore.
100%.
Happens every time a technology becomes mainstream & commercialized. It seems most developments of the internet in recent years were mostly about maximizing ad revenue and data collection rather than actually improving the core technology / user experience.
Coming from a person of that era, a lot of the early internet was the same. It was just the lack of structure and plenty of competition (no social networks) that made it more fun though.
But ad revenue maxing and unregulated data collection was always a thing. It’s just more known now.
@@KayzewolfYeah, the dependency on advertising has become more noticeable with growing public attention. This creates a need to make environments good for advertising, requiring more regulation and data collection. Really, most forms of media have the same issue with puritan regulation and advertising, just in different forms.
To hell with capitalism and consumerism and those big tech companies of Silicon Valley and this society in general
@@JonathanHeydh-vy4yw fancy words but I think you mean corporatism.
America is becoming like robocop.
OCP a big tech company owns the cops the hospital the city the government. They practically are the military.
This is what happens when Normies get a hold of something. We just didn't gatekeep hard enough.
this
Unfortunately I think the internet was always going to end this way. It wasn't a niche hobby or such where that was viable. You are right though.
Swear the Internet doesn't feel that big anymore. No more mystery and wonder. We've found a home on the same two apps we use everyday
Aggravated by the continued decline of search engines in general and the specific and niche useful information being in group apps.
Probably because you're sticking to the main social media platforms, as opposed to venturing out.
In less than 2 years ads are now A.I generated where 30 - 50% of comments are A.I generated for conversation bait. That is another reason things are based on funnels and making you go deeper for some type of end action. Usually purchases and information gathering to sell
Yeah, elements of Dead Internet Theory are definitely provably true, like the AI-generated comments and shit.
To me, two things killed the old internet:
Social networks. They killed two things that made the old internet worth it: 1) anonymity 2) webforums
Mobile access. Before mobile access, going online from desktop was a ritual. You dedicated time to it. You knew the time online was limited, so you made the best use of it.
Big Brother wants to remind you he’s always watching.
I am almost forgotten till you reminded me are you big brother
Yeah 1984 warned of a lot of things that are common place and normal to today.
Yeah 1984 warned of a lot of things that are common place and normal to today.
I hate that show
@@grilledcheese9297I know it sucks
The issue with the late 2000s and early 2010s is the amount of ads and pop-ups, combined with the insane spread of adware, malware, and bloatware. I was working as a computer tech on the side, and I would visit 6 houses a week removing adware and bloatware that was slowing down PCs. It was normally something checked by default to install, while installing something else. And apps claiming to clean your pc, or increase your speed was commonplace, but they too were usually fronts for more malware. I can remember thinking to myself "why am I even paying for the internet?" because half your time was spent clicking through ad pop-ups, while the other half was spent waiting on the hourglass cursor to turn back into an arrow.
Good point.
It’s mostly because of capitalism
Now, every website has trackers
lol the computer tech guys my mom would get to fix the messes i would cause as a child from just . really liking toolbars and kazaa. ended up family friends the way they were constantly coming over hahah
@@howvery_ we live in a capitalist hellhole
tbh, i find navigating modern websites actually harder, and even finding things in general.
google has gotten objectively worse over the last 5-10 years.
im on the internet since 2008 and being honest the 2010s were quite something.
if i could go back in time and relive my youth i would totally do. especially with hindsight on how to easily have an financially worry free life.
i haven't found any alternatives to google much better though. has every browser become worse or are we imagining?
@@MrAzureJames Like many things nowadays, it's become a pathetic race to the bottom.
They try to offer you ""quality"" content instead of giving you the content that you searched for.
@@MrAzureJames Yandex
@@MrAzureJames Y4Nd3x
Because more often then not people treat the internet as a business rather then a hobby or simple entertainment
The Internet was for nerds and programmers... the normies laughed at us for using our computers constantly. Now they sit like Zombies in front of their Devices and scroll endless content.
Normies ruined it. People love to blame corporations, which is true in the direct sense, but corporations can't thrive without normies. Corporations are mosquitos, normies moving in turned it in to a swamp for the mosquitos to thrive in. The iphone also helped open the floodgates too.
I do genuinely think 2003-2013 was the best era of the internet.
There were still active forums, a number of active virtual worlds and flash was actually supported.
I agree
Absolutely, broadband connection while practically no restrictions/regulations/commercialisation. The absolutely beautiful wild west era of the internet
2013 is pushing it a bit but yeah that was the best time to be actively using the internet in any capacity
fully agree, it seems the world ended after 2013
Why 2013? If we're talking about censorship, then I'd say 2017 was when it went down hill for the big tech platforms, but there's still alt tech, forums and chatrooms.
As a child of the 90s I miss the unsanitized wild west internet of the late 90s/00s. At 12 years old I had already seen my first video from Chechnya. Kids today would have a breakdown.
I think there was a huge chunk of internet history that fell through the cracks of the script for this video - user monetization. People used to make content and publish content (of any type) just for the heck of it. There wasn't a hint of cash on the horizon so everyone was like chill. Once we were able to monetize things such as IG profiles, FB groups, YT videos that turned the entire content machine on and it began the competition towards "the best [placeholder]", clickbait and a bunch of other stuff that wasn't even remotely important in the '90s or '00s.
So yes, internet looks worse today (I personally don't think so), but 15 years ago only corps could make money via online mediums. Even FB and YT were created with the idea of "let's give people a place to hang out" rather than today's mindset of "let's make money online".
Even this very video was created to generate income. Not saying it in a bad way - I also work and earn online, but that's the jist of it. If it weren't for that overarching goal of making money ExtraMint would've probably just record Peter Griffin impersonations, log off and not toss and turn in his bed if this video will hit the goals or not.
THIS. This is it right here. The internet used to be just another hobby. No money COULD be made, as it had not been "invented" ( for lack of a better term) yet. This is why the older internet feels nicer. People were creating simply for the joy of creating.
It happens all the time, the minute money gets involved, it all goes out the window.
Capitalism doesn't work for humans
I would also add on that social media made everyone more comfortable about providing their own personal information. Then people like Zuckerborg had the bright idea to package that information and sell it to the advertisers. Then cellphones come into the mix by adding more people to contribute to it. Now everything is designed to essentially track you.
Which is ironic since the common knowledge back then was to never post personal information online. Now everyone does the opposite. People might not have known it back then, but that knowledge helped gatekeep the online space.
I was just thinking about this a lot last week. Lately I feel so much less inspired than I have over the last 10 years, and I think the internet changing into what is now is a huge component of that. Like I miss old tumbler, and youtube, other artists and ideas coming together, actually getting hooked by interesting content rather than drowning in algorithmically chosen time wasters, the absolute freedom we used to have... I miss that.
Also, if you live in a place where there's not much to do besides go on the internet, it was a great escape. The internet wasn't just a time waster but a way to interact with the world and be exposed to new ideas and stuff. Now it feels like it can either only be a time waster, or used for buisness, and that's it. The days of the internet being a fun creative playground are gone. I hope it comes back.. it probably won't, but I can dream, right?
I'm so sick so soul-crushing utilitarianism
Or the opposite. No listed phone number so you can't call and get help which leads to chatbot or outsourced email hell.
you misspelled Capitalism
@@lasciviouspaine i feel like the utilitarianism is just one of the symptoms of the plague that is capitalism, which i variously refer to as neo feudalism or corpofascism 💀
I think following ROBLOX from birth to present directly shows the decay of the soul of the internet
Yeah it’s crazy to think I’m about to turn 28 and I was playing Roblox when I was 9 years old. I still remember my old account name, just can’t get the password. Which sucks cause according to my little cousin I have tons of “rare” hats and could sell the account lmao
@@surfingbrrrdcan't you do a reset password with your email address?
Everything is bait now. Ragebait, Clickbait, Fearbait.
Doomerbait.
19:47 Yes because when I look back on something I use when I come home from work, the words I want to have available to me to describe it are that it's "functional", and "productive".
Ah yes, this food I eat functionally filled me up.
This movie I watched definitely passed some time.
This book I read certainly was full of words on paper I could skim through.
This desktop environment I'm using sure does get me to things quickly.
I'm sure glad this user can demonstrate their personality through only a profile image and a banner, wouldn't want to see more color and personality on a person's page.
This is the kind of stuff purpose built for an NPC from a video game, not for a diverse human experience. No wonder it is so full of AI posters, the modern internet is basically made for _them,_ not human beings.
This makes the modern world look like a dystopia. We need to fight againt mimimalism before it's too late and the world turns into 1984!
A lot of the time simply being boring or ugly is enough to make a plain interface counter-productively designed on top of that, too. Sometimes being flat, monochrome, and "efficient" makes what you're looking for hard to find in an interface. Often buttons and features are "hidden" until you do something unexpectable, too. I believe this got much worse when smartphones and tablets started to dominate. Or a web page/program is so ugly or annoying that you can hardly stick around long enough to figure out how to do what you planned on doing. Modern Steam really does that for me. When it opens I feel the urge to run away from it.
Fun aesthetics matter, and a comfortable balance can be struck. Most tech companies just don't care as much as they should.
@@Hobson64 The funny thing is I actually don't think steam is customizable enough, this is why I use CSSLoader-Desktop on it. I wish they had custom background images on store pages like itch does. I do agree that some of the best features like the Curator system and Interactive Recommender/Discovery Queue are VERY tucked away in a heap of total clutter though.
But that's... kind of a problem with the steam store, not the steam application itself. This would be a problem on a regular web browser. I don't really have many complaints with the _actual program's_ UI other than it using a chromium backend thus being really janky and memory inefficient in a way only a chromium based application can be. I simply can't do without features like Steam Input anymore honestly, due to how MUCH functionality that has, I'm certain I've done things with that nobody else on this planet has done, like macroing entire words to a button which is something valve CLEARLY did not account for due to how much making that happen crashed the interface, but they let me do it anyway. Steam isn't really the first example I'd use as something that has gone too far.
Corporations need more drones to mindlessly consume content. But man does not leave on bread alone.
2002-2012- Internet, Movies, TV, Comicbooks, Video Games...It was a goldenage.
exactly why my portfolio website is 90s adjacent hosted on neocities (revived geocities)
I love this!
Little note for people watching this; the Y2K thing was known about for quite a few years before 1999 even started its year, and while older computers like Commodore Pets and Apple ][s weren't really designed to understand this, the banks and governments had spent a few years by 1999 fixing the "bug" here there and the other to make sure systems knew what was going on and to account for it. At least one I remember reading (I can't find the sauce anymore, this might just be my concious hallucination) said something to the effect "I just told the computer Anything before 50 is in the 2000s. That's their problem in fifty years."
i miss how the internet felt in 2005-2007
More like 1999-2004, but yeah, same sentiment. I feel like by 2007 it was already on the downslide.
@virvum_cypher maybe for you. i meant 2005 - 2007. we had myspace 😊
the internet was supposed to be this great and wonderful place, full of individuality and character. the 1990s dreamed of that future, and the 2000s began to bring it into realization.
but that all changed when -the fire nation attacked- the algorithm and ad corporations took over.
they took this beautiful world-a world that could have been the closest thing to a "utopia" capable of being made by humans-and they crushed it under their greedy corporate fists. they turned our beautiful world into a profit-driven hellscape. where there was once beauty, there is now gray. where there was once individuality, there is now conformity to the almighty algorithm.
they didn't just pave paradise and put up a parking lot; they paved the world we created together and turned it into yet another drab, lifeless, corporate office building.
and those of us who chose to stay have slowly lost our ability to fight back. now all we do is stand around the water cooler and reminisce about that beautiful landscape we used to roam as free people.
But what is the alternative? Bringing back the pre-facebook internet won't help today or would it? How has the internet "back-slided"?
When i got on the Internet in the 90s i was filled with wonder and hope for the future. 30 years later there is no wonder and life is much more miserable. Better or worse is a matter of metrics, but most people i know are more miserable and more miserable than the older generation was at this age. Nothing like 30 years of proof to ruin the hope and fun of an incredible invention.
It's not just the internet, it's everything. Logos became minimalist, wrappers (on chocolate bars, etc) lost their colour and fun - while the actual products lost their flavour (and half of their mass, for five times the price). Restaurant chains such as McDonald's, everything loses the fun, and becomes one monotone colour with a simple logo in a basic font. Somewhere after the year 2005, everything became lifeless, soulless, boring, plain, and ALLLLLL about money. Fun stuff was replaced with large corporations, and all decisions started to be made by people in suits who know nothing about what we want, because they only see us as sales figures.
As a kid i went to the internet for the internet. For the novelty of it all. Now I go to the internet for the content. Internet is now just a background thing that serves you from the shadows.
Worlds online being shutdown really, really upsets me. It's still my favorite cyber realm i ever experienced. the loss of maximalism, customization, and freedom on the internet just gives my spirit the blue screen.
America's puritan values have had a massive effect on what is marketable and valuable, even globally. The internet was niche thing for a while, it wasn't really a place that businesses went to advertise unless they were big enough to use it as a side option. Things didn't need to be squeaky clean, and most of the people using it were enthusiasts or had some deep interest in something online. So culture developed on the internet, washed over other people who were already online, and stayed there. Now, with everyone using the internet every day, "real life" culture bleeds in a hell of a lot more, and everything has to have monetary value. If we can ever make a sequel and keep monopolistic corporate interest out, we can have the original internet back.
And it’s mostly based on Calvinism
that's what you guys get for thinking America was cool
@@lasciviouspaine yeah some of us had to be born here so we just have to deal with it. It could be worse, could be better
@@lasciviouspaine and America was founded and built on stolen native land
You might have some truth with America's puritan values. I would largely blame it on California's values purity spiraling out of control. Most of the big tech companies came from Silicon valley after all. As far as I have known the west coast has always been a bit of a meme with how insane they are. Thanks to the rocky mountains the entire west coast could be considered as being an island with how isolated they are compared to the rest of the country. Now more people have adopted the California values because of how influential big tech is.
My best memories are from 2000 to maybe at best somewhere around 2013. It all went rapidly downhill from there and here we are now... I also miss how easy it was to meet people and make friends. Random chatboxes, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! groups and so forth. Everyone was willing to have a chat. Now we have "SOCIAL" media and I've been with social media from the start but I've yet to make ONE friend through social media.
Now I'm more determined than ever to maintain my personal website. It's far superior to running a social media account. And it seems like it's easier to get in touch with people who have their own websites, too. Just gonna stay in my nostalgic corner of the interwebs.
Anyone else here remember Ebaum’s Worl? Hands down the greatest website of that era and foundation of my relationship with the internet. Easily made up 98% of my entire browser history for the first 6 or 7 years, and my favorite memory with all its hilarity, horror & humorous oddities. It was literally a handbook of human nature captured in Java & Flash.
And OP is right about having to search for these hidden gems, but it was fun & I miss it! It was also a badge of honor if you were the kid in school who always found the funniest shit cus fyp didn’t exist!
RIP Ebaum & the interwebs.
14:36 This is literally makes me mad and several times depressed on daily basics since you can't escape it anywhere. People and corporations who pushes minimalism to absolute insane bland levels deserve "white room" punishment to taste their own medicine.
(...I don't understand why my previous comment was shadow banned, so I made new one. UA-cam hate when users dislike modern minimalism?)
Extramint back with some minty fresh content! It's crazy I recently just wrote about this topic the other day. Love your take on it!
Why do I feel like the reason some websites are having that minimal design is because of mobile devices being a thing, since some people will use the browser and go to sites that PC users also went to.
thats exactly the reason, and as time goes on it gets worse because they optimize sites for smartphones more and more while ignoring/neglecting the desktop experience
This plays a big part. Back in the day I had to maintain my own site, as two sites, one for pc (html) and one for mobile (wap/wml, xhtml). Now it's css/html to maintain both, but for it to work well it's best to keep designs simple for responsive design to display good.
I have kept my original mobile site online. It hasn't aged well. I no longer update neither version, or any of my sites for that matter. Footfall fell off around 2012 due to a certain social site embedding websites within their garden - which is probably no longer supported (wouldn't know, I deleted that socials account a decade ago).
You're not wrong... I remember when 'View Mobile version' used to be a thing. You'd go on a website and all the writing would be tiny; you'd have to press something to make the format more viewable. But now, even going on a website on a PC is basically looking at a blown-up version of a Mobile web page.
@ridethelapras Not to mention that "desktop mode" is a thing in a browser app like chrome mobile when it comes to visiting sites on a phone, so that's something.
@@ArjunTheRageGuy oh, and overzealous censoring. No idea why my last comment was nuked. Yet things like that just stop me interacting on the web much.
We need more people creating rather than doomscrolling to watch others do random things for attention.
Saved you all a click, it’s social media. Tik Tok, Twitter, IG, Reddit, ect are terrible
bro if they seeing this they already clicked 😭 have a good one tho og 💯
I just really want to make a new Internet right now, seriously I really want to
Its googles fault they are even deleting all my comments trying to explain lmao
@ethandtheangryenglishguy8253 How tho?
I'll go farther, government, payment processors and copyright is probably biggest killer of internet, people like blame social media, but social media is only way it is, is because payment processors, they literally can deny people payment processing because of things like political opinions, and there literally nothing you can do, because it consider a trade secret.
Back then it was from nerds from nerds; Now its from corporates for idiots.
The internet was the last bastion of free thinking till the mid/late 10s. From then on everyone just flooded the social media. Prior to that it was considered somewhat nerdy, hence ppl below a certain IQ level were just not there. Which made it more fun and exclusive. I was honestly wondering in those years how long was the internet going to be free and unregulated - well, not for that long. Now it is like the waiting room of a city hall while waiting for your drivers license renewed. Pure corporate hell.
I think anonymity was a big part of things. I remember feeling more free to speak my mind and act differently in online games than I would in real life. I was able to showcase interests and pursue things with online friends that I'd never want to admit to around friends or family. It was a way to be free of societal norms and breathe. But as things became more personalized to the individual and the almighty algorithm took hold of things I noticed I was holding back. Every time I'd sign up with a new social media platform I'd get suggested friends that were all people I'd have to see in person at some point. So I was less vocal, less imaginative, and less myself than I was prior. Now that I'm an adult, even the internet feels stifling, just like everything else.
WE FRUTIGOONING WITH THIS ONE 🗣🗣🔥🔥🔥
You’re goddamn right 😈
Lol 😆 😀👍
1999-2009 was my best years surfing the net
Flash games, gamefaqs, good UA-cam(video response beef), RuneScape, etc
I feel for those that didn’t experience the internet before it turned to shit
2000s internet:
Flash games, 'Broadcast Yourself' UA-cam slogan, top videos being made for free with pure passion, no ads or sponsors, no spying
2020s internet: SEO, bots, brainrot, farms, monetisation, AI, sponsors, spyware and ads that waste half the water on the planet, default pfp gen alphas in comment sections
Hm, maybe we are just blinded by nostalgia? 😂😂
what do you mean no ads?? remember those toolbars/spyware that you could never get rid of? Endless pop ups because ad blockers didn't exist yet. Shitty early dynamic html, pre-modern javascript...
@sebp400 Windows XP didn't come bundled with spyware and bloat unlike Windows 11.
Also modern websites are on average 10x more bloated than they need to be with trackers, analytics ads and pop ups everywhere.
All this bs is considered normal in 2024
Go back to 2005 OS or web browser and see how many servers it connects to ootb
@@sebp400 Windows XP did not come bundled with spyware. Also modern websites are 10x more bloated with trackers and analytics
Open your eyes 😂
The 2 upvoters should also remove them
You have proven you did not read my comments.
@@ross3695_basedhax "upvoters" 💀
It's so ironic since redditors ruined internet humour
alternative title:
i’m depressed
Even in the 2010's. It wasn't so bad.
Things seemed to change when Politics ("brigading") and Big Business came in.
There seemed to be more disagreement and less wholesome content at that point.
True
I’d say the downfall began on tumblr when the tumblrinas started being triggered by everything
By the year 2001 many Net Artists, as it was called, were already working in retro tech ‘90s aesthetics and elite folks all over the net couldn’t get enough of it. We just had different names for the style as none of these more contemporary terms had been coined. But the movement was fairly widespread and pervasive for being true underground at the time..
artists/groups like Paperrad, Cory Arcangel, Jodi, Dragan Espenschied, Johnny Rogers, just to name a few.
Things didn’t percolate up to mainstream until a decade+ later with Vaporwave and the many micro iterations that have since fallowed.. Long after the OG originators had moved on for the most part. There’s a lot of overlap between the dawn of 8bit chiptune music, glitch art, and these early pioneers
Thought police.
*Thinkpol.
@@ridethelaprasbrainstorm blockers
skipping class to play games on Newgrounds in the school library is a good memory
wasnt tumblr heavy on freedom of expression artistically before they fell off?
yes but it also doubled as an asylum for the crazies
Yeah, nipple gate and yes freedom of everything.
@AnOliviaShapedGremlin
That stuff is still there, just that it's hard to look for because when you use the search function it stops you
In many ways, VRChat captures that whimsical, exploratory feeling of the Internet's early days. I love it
Simply the internet was better before because there existed more freedom.
Absolutely love this video, i can tell you made a lot of research to do it. Keep up the good work
Thanks, I had a lot of fun making it so I appreciate that! 😁
The difference is jank doesn't exist anymore. Sure things can still feel janky if they run like crap, but jank itself is all but dead. That jank site feel where it was pieced together by someone either who didn't care or didn't know how to quite properly make a good website is gone.
it feels dangerous and exhausting. it's either bots hiding everywhere trying to steal your account's data or ridiculously long video content that's 90% rage bait
I'm gonna be honest... 2019 was the last fun time for the internet.
Agreed! That's what I've been saying for the last few years.
yeah.. covid came along and everything went to hell
2014 dude
@kootunesscrewy I don't even know what elsa gate is man.. I miss old internet, forums and imageboards
@@kuvalauta179 (Welp, UA-cam purged the reply I made. But tbh, you don't wanna know what it is, man...)
I remember when people used to make fun of the internet for letting people showcase their personalities with customizable features. Now we miss those days. We shouldn't have been so hard on each other about that, because now it's gone and the world is a little worse because of that.
Censorship, no search engine, monopoly, and social engineering.
It’s full of insecurity magnets and dopamine hits now. Everything either pump and suck self confidence, gives or takes hope, it’s all just an emotional rollercoaster instead of just chillin
14:42 I just stumbled upon a home designer UA-camr and she said the same thing about minimalism! It blew my mind as to how that aesthetic slowly creeped into our collective awareness. And now you’re talking about the old internet days and makes me realize why I had so much fun as a kid, and why I (if I have to watch ads) prefer kid toy ads than some guy making money scheme haha 😂 love your video thank you for bringing me some memories! 😊
Glad you enjoyed it!
One thing I despise that has also ruined the internet... is damn copyright. Either now, you can't be as creative anymore due to videos being removed over it, or (back then muted for copyright) but now, you have bots who delete videos deemed copyrighted based on your own viewing history. Half the time they get removed more, if you save them in playlists. Especially old, nostalgic youtube videos and dank meme originals. So if you wanted to watch old meme videos, you might not find them unless archived off youtube.
3:42 actually reminded me that I need to take my pills this morning lol
If you're a young kid and you're intrigued about the early web, I want to tell you this video only scratches the surface. This is not a slight to the video, but the internet was one of the main creative outlets of the entire world for a very long time. It very slowly ground to a halt and became corporatized and paved over.
Everyone’s more angry, everythings more corporate, it’s time we face facts….and touch grass.
I feel the same way. We can't be the only ones. Do you think we're all more angry or angry voices are being amplified?
Social media changing from real time to algorithmic posts ruined them. Nothing like finding out about an event 11 days after it happened, but you see pictures from the event first.
Exactly this.
I have 100s of Facebook friends, but I only ever see advertisements and sponsored paid posts even though they are likely posting.
I enjoyed the xanga days. I remember downloading songs through limewire on dial up and one song taking a full afternoon. All that for Real Slim Shady.. and it felt … awesome!
Started surfing the web in 1997. It was amazing. Staying up all night playing quake and hanging out on web forums
I miss the soul of the internet and getting lost in rabbitholes with unique content! It's not super well known, but the video game Hypnospace Outlaw is a great 90s internet simulator that brought me back. Highly recommend to anyone wanting to browse around and solve some mysteries on a fictional geocities like internet!
Ah ytp's glad I could contribute to it, peak humor those days XD and still personally for me when I go back.
Short answer: It's all corporate bs or spiteful bs
There is another thing. Back in the days people in the internet were content creators in much larger percentage than nowadays. Now we are mostly consumers. It just so happens, there is no sinister reason behind it.
We could tell everyone to spin up their own websites or blogs and surely that creativity would reborn, but people won't do it or won't update it. Hell, people are not content creators even on platforms like facebook et al.
Also, back then people were into internet because of hobbies and similar thing. Now the internet is a hobby (or rather activity) by itself.