Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn’t start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to “save us” with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of ‘ethical ads’, which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.
before Google exploited the popularity
A classic example of enshittification stage 1 and 2, for those unfamiliar with the term.
In the year 2000, an internet friend gave me FTP credentials to a directory on his domain so I could host images and post them on the forum we were friends on.
He provided this service to all the forum users because we were all like :woah: when he started posting images that weren’t just leeched from another domain.
Eventually he did ask users throw him a few bucks, and then he made a tutorial on how to get your own domain and do it yourself.
Which tells me I’ve been using filezilla for about 2/3 of my life.
I rented a web server with FTP in college, with my own domain that used my real name. I used it to transfer files to and from school computers. My classmates would sometimes forget their USB drives and think they just wasted a whole 3 hour lab session, and I would just quickly create some credentials for them and let them use my server. Everyone thought I was a god lol. These days, services like Google Drive have replaced the need for that (mostly), and everyone just takes it for granted. I think it’s funny that people are starting to see value in FTP again now that services like Google Drive and Discord are restricting the ability to use them for free hosting to post files onto external sites.
People seem to forget that before YouTube partnered with content creators people just kinda… uploaded stuff that they were passionate about. They didn’t do it for a living and they did not expect payment but might have asked for donations if their channel was costly to run. Sure, the production value and editing quality was a lot lower, but the core experience was still the same.
This is why I flatly reject the notion that me blocking ads on YouTube hurts content creators in any meaningful way, especially now that almost all of them are partnered with some kind of sponsor embedded in the video.
I still use it that way. Any time ive had a problem that wasn’t adequately explained by youtube or elsewhere, if I solved it myself, Id make a simple YT tutorial for it and upload it.
pays for own domain/no ads
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
Imagine having ads in things but instead of just being there, they opened in new windows, were loud as fuck, and opened by the hundreds. That’s what the Internet was like
Pop up blockers walked so ad blockers could run.
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
I’m 49, dude. And the meme isn’t about “the internet”. It is literally about the difference between people sharing stuff back then and “creating content” today. Shitty internet parts have always been shitty, but at least people didn’t try to monetize even their beloved ones’ death.
I’m 49 dude
Then you should remember these days more accurately.
People make social media posts instead of geocities pages these days. Content creators are more like the people who used to sell content online than they are the average chucklehead who made a geoshitty page.
People you see with lots of Twitter followers are exactly akin to people who ran pages on free hosting websites. When they link their merch, it’s exactly like how blogs and shit would sell merch.
Youre looking at this with glasses so rosy they’re completely blinding.
There is a 0% chance you knew how to use internet back then it seems.
When I was 18 I was pretty dumb, yeah. I once totally destroyed a hard drive by corrupting a file trying to make my PC background the “Anal Destruction” website logo
Young people are dumb man.
Yeah, so you missed that what OP talked about was very real. We had much more of those sites based on sharing, and they were much more at the front of the internet.
There were absolutely not more websites based on sharing in the early 2000s lol
You are literally on one of the very many websites dedicated to it, today, while bemoaning it’s absence
Some of the sharing sites from the 2000s monetized themselves and that upsets you. I have no issue with that. There are many alternatives because what he said is false. Go use one of them.
Bro that’s anecdotally false, there were so many ham, electronics and random research sites I perused on angelfire and geocities.
Quality varied greatly, but lots of thought went into making posts, diagrams were sometimes done in ASCII art which was its own headache.
Point is, I don’t agree with your take, and I don’t think my similarly aged friends would agree either. Internet of late 90s/y2k wasn’t an ad-free utopia, but the point was more about conversing and sharing info.
Lemmy is an attempt to return to that original intent, modernized as it must be.
You may want to give “HAM radio forums” a Google.
I don’t care if you agree. I care what’s correct. The Internet is many times larger than I was 20+ years ago, and all the same free networks exist. The really popular ones got big and monetized.
That’s just how success works with anything.
Hmm? Your argument and thinking processes both seem clouded.
Ham radio forums still exist, as they previously did. Did you miss the gist, that information exchange was more of a prime focus vs making money by cramming ads everywhere? Obviously yes.
The kids are nostalgic for a time they didn’t experience!
Use SponsorBlock for the “content creator”
I just don’t use YT. I’m not interested on stuff there. I much prefer blogs or the likes.
I don’t have a favorite blog. I just search for info when I need it and disregard every YT link, going straight to “real” web pages.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Normal guy in 2000”
as someone who was into computers and in high school in 2000, that that was not normal.
even if yo mean normal computer literate person, not even then… Most people did not run their own servers, was it more common, yeah, but it wasn’t a given.
Things were only free if you were into piracy, everything cost money though without as much marketing, but then it wasn’t a huge market…
Also ads were everywhere and worse…
We have pop-up blockers now–we didn’t then.
Ads could take over your screen.
We had geocities and angelfire
I considered myself a pretty “normal guy” back then and paid my domain/hosting and had a hand-written HTML+js blog/website with no ads… And plenty of “normal people” used to do that, even if it was a much smaller percentage of internetizens than nowadays.
And that’s why I avoid YouTube like the plague. 10 minutes of BS for 2 minutes of content. Fuck google for tying adspace (video length) to search returns and suggested video priorities. More BS = more adspace = puts your garbage video at the top of the list.
Shut up old man.
Millennials really can’t handle growing up can they.
Cope harder, boomer
You say. In a thread about millennials not being able to cope.
