I feel like it was the shift from having many small, tight-knit communities run by passionate people to having a couple massive, impersonal communities run by corporations.

Like, for example, back in the day I spent all my time on Worm’s Sci Fi Haven. I knew everyone there, and built relationships with people. It was a healthy community run by a guy that really cared about fostering that community.

These days, the closest thing you can really get to that is a subreddit or a Facebook group. Even Lemmy, for all its good points, it’s built to be a massive conglomeration of users - in opposition of the more “insular” communities of the past.

It was a luxury. Now it’s a necessity. If we don’t have access it causes anxiety. If we have access we’re being tracked

You know? It wasn’t always like this

Not very long ago, just before your time

Right before the towers fell, circa '99

This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two

• Bo Burnham Welcome to the Internet

It was innocence. Before you were suddenly bombarded with every horrible thing man can do via sensory overload. I remember going on in 95-96 and it was chat rooms far as the eye can see. Now we have 8k war footage and carnage livestreamed 24/7.

Because capitalism uses computers backward https://theluddite.org/#!post/capitalism-makes-technology-backwards. And it took them some time to figure out how to monitize the internet. You weren’t always the product.

For me the old internet was an escape from real life. I hate crowds, so I preferred the internet in '94. It was fun, new and all other nerds were just like me, so I understood them (ok, most of them). Now ‘normals’ have taken over as well as companies.

Yea olde internet was for sharing useful information, learning and communicating with like minded, now internet is primarily for earning cash (companies) and having opinions sent out/manipulated. To much noice, not enough information.

Welcome to aging. It’s been like this for everyone forever.

Edit: It’s ok, go ahead and downvote. When you find smells are a little less intense, colors are a little less vivid, or experiences are a little less pleasurable, go ahead and blame others for that, right? Surely it doesn’t have anything to do with your own inexorable march toward death? Knowing that things were better before now is a new phenomenon, never experienced before by any prior generation, right?

Edit: You’ll see. YOU’LL ALL SEE

I was a new Airline Pilot for a major u.s. operation as the internet and Apple Computers were simultaneously [pardon the pun] taking off.

AOL and other chat/message boards provided recently divorced me of that day, a plethora of social opportunities, far exceeding that which my former childhood church social habit, could begin to provide. I had to replace that habit as I had grown weary of the duplicitous sky daddy followers and their gatherings where they planned how best to shear the congregational sheep again, all the while crossing their fingers behind their backs.

All of these factors coupled with the company benefit of free travel which was as easy as grabbing my ubiquitous packed bag, and a quick drive to the airport, made all of the world I cared to visit easily accessible.

As a [still] budding writer wannabe, I recorded each of the encounters, using some likeness of the people, places and events to fuel a stack of Journals which contain enough fodder to keep Poe’s descendants busy for a considerable length. [3m+ words]

I am grateful that I happened to be in what was for me, the right place, right time, and enjoyed the growth years of the internet. Gone is the smorgasbord internet of my youth, replaced with that which is a more tenuous venue, one bereft of once prevalent h*man kindness and consideration.

Mainstream internet today is ego-driven.

I think part of it at least for me why everything is less fun is that we have been on the same minimalist design for over 10 years now.

The massive variety of website made by tons of diferent people’s . Not uniform garbage we got today .

Novelty most likely

In response to the tweet: the years don’t align perfectly but I was a teen around then and I can think of a few explanations:

• There weren’t forever wars and it was easy to be optimistic after the Cold War ended
• Guns were unpopular (like the assault rifle ban passed Congress in 1994 and it’s hard to imagine that happening today since people fetishize guns now).
• Certain drugs temporarily went out of fashion. Heroin and crack, especially, had killed some high profile celebrities and MDMA was the “cool” new drug. Big Pharma hadn’t really started marketing opiates.

Those are just guesses but most people probably didn’t have full blown computers, much less internet, in 1994 so I doubt it had to do with that. Word processors and video game systems were pretty ubiquitous by then but I knew plenty of middle class people who didn’t have home computers that went online.

Well, I think I can mention some ideas.

Most of my social typing/messaging was with Windows Live Messenger so if I wanted to talk with somebody (or they with me) we would need to be connected at certain times, unlike nowadays when we are always “available” so in a nutshell, FOMO was a big player here.

Also I spent lots of hours in certain forums, my favorite was espalNDS, a forum that was mostly focused in sharing links for Nintendo DS games (yeah piracy was widely open before, nowadays people make it seem like a taboo lol), but as with many other communities users stayed because, well the community, the discussion, the sharing (threads), many years ago it was shut down because of piracy reasons (also the closure of Megaupload affected these sites a lot), and even some of the admins of the site were imprisoned… For a moment at least.

I also stayed in more forums, but that one was the most prominent for me.

Then the evolution for me, and many others was the social media, RSS feeds, then Reddit and nowadays Lemmy.

I still think I spend too much time on the web, but most of that time is not with a computer but my mobile.