i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
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The lack of massive copyright strikes, barely any intrusive ads, little to no subscription services, and the simplicity of everything. Now, you can’t use music without angering a company, gotta pay for reading damn articles, and now you gotta sign up for an account in everything.
A lot of it boils down to the users. Personally, I miss when the internet mostly consisted of us nerds.
Back in 1995 when I first got online, the web was very much a nerd domain. You needed a certain level of computer knowledge to get online, which really acted as a filter. It meant that most of us shared a certain level of understanding and the drive to use such a medium. We disagreed on Star Trek and Star Wars, but to the outside world, we were ALL nerds. Back then, the average person didn’t even think of going online.
These days, even the most tech illiterate can get online. In fact, they don’t even think about it; it’s that integrated in their daily life.
While growth also gave us nice things like large forums, web shopping, YouTube, etc… by and large I think we’d be better off if this was still a nerd domain.
I really miss those days.
Heads up: Lemmy will either get less popular or more popular over time. Neither is ideal.
And while it never feels like it when you say it, but these are [going to be] the good ol’ days.
Yes! My ex and I used to build all kinds of computers back then. Of course they used to blow up rather quickly. It was a slog trying to figure out where I left off once I got up and running again. Shopping - I bought all kinds of stuff on the internet back then lol. Enough said.
The early days of web shopping sure were interesting. I was a very early adopter compared to most people.
The very first thing I ever bought online was a flashlight back in 1999. Which was such a novelty at the time that I actually visited the two guys who ran that shop from a literal broom closet in order to collect it. I was like their third customer ever. These days they have 75 employees and around 7 million euros of revenue.
Collecting a web order seems silly now, but at that time it basically avoided a two week wait. Back in 1998-2005, if you bought something online in the Netherlands, you usually had to transfer the money by bank. Which took a few days. After that, they would send the product, which again took a few days.
In 2005 we got a new online payment method that let you transfer the money immediately, much like paying at a register. That made it way more convenient for everyone and you saw massive increases in spending year over year.
Don’t gatekeep the internet. That’s what lobbying ISPs and telecom companies are for. /s
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot that Lemmy was filled to the brim with Linux nerds. The most-common nerd-gatekeepers, right before tabletop players. Explains the downvotes.
Personally, when I look at the average user on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (at least the blue checks), etcetera, it makes me wish we actually did gate keep.
And here I thought Lemmy was smarter than Reddit.
The modern Internet is very political. It’s hard to go anywhere without hearing about the same assclowns everyday. And there’s less variety in websites. Lots of websites are gone and are now just a Facebook,Twitter and discord.
The internet was always political. We just replaced the prevalence of some kinds of conspiracies and crazy statements with the prevalence of others. Bigotry of course was always there.
Bulletin boards. I’m not the biggest fan of Reddit style boards. Because voting can hurt discussions. Due to users can just downvote you and call it a day. They don’t have to tell you why and how you’re wrong. So less discussions.
Downvotes are fine and good, but downvoting affecting the visibility of your content is insane. Screw Reddit for that.
A mechanism to promote quality on-topic content and demote noise can be pretty valuable, especially somewhere with a high population. The original thinking on Reddit (and I’ve been there long enough to know) was that people would use voting as moderation, not agreement or disagreement.
An upvote was to mean “content like this belongs here” and a downvote the opposite. There were no comments at first, but it reasonably applied to them as well once they were added. Unfortunately, votes are too simple and too opaque to maintain a norm like that. Were I designing a discussion system, it would probably use labeling like Slashdot rather than simple voting.
There is no way possible you can make humans actually follow that principle. People always dumb things down as much as possible, and “I like this” or “I dislike this” is default. That’s the problem.
Sure there is; you can make the UI require it.
Make what UI require what? I think there is a misunderstanding here.
A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.
I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.
And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are “um,so”, and all we’re looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it… and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.
You also can’t ctrl-f a video. It’s by far the worst format for information.
And in terms of actual information per kilobyte, it’s often absolutely laughable compared to text.
Everyone’s using video for everything these days because that’s where the ad money is. Hooray, the tyranny of capitalism.
Exactly this! My hearing problems don’t help the matter at all. Also they’re painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.
whats up guys in todays video I’ll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe
So today we’re going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I’m doing a video on tying shoes.
Without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it’s something that you need to know. So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you’re in the right place! We’re talking about tying shoes.
So without further ado, let’s jump right in.
So in this video we’re going to talk about tying shoes … [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]
Stumbleupon
I found so many cool sites with that addon back in the day. I fear a new version would be so ad infested and curated that it wouldn’t be worth it.
Cloudhiker is the new one.
Flash animation.
We seriously need a new scripted animation replacement.
