Internet users

I like that there was so much open source / freeware stuff that was useful and wouldn't bombard you with ads etc. And when you bought something you owned it. Everything is a bloody subscription nowadays.
 
The 90s were raw. A true wild west. It felt exciting to go online and be connected. I feel like 2007 ish was the smart phone era where social media exponentially grew from there and changed everything.
 
Anyone remember Strongbad Emails? An entire generation of people will never know such greatness existed :/

Someone did a compilation years ago of most/all of them, put the kettle on:


Returning from secondary school/college and catching th elatest Homestar Runner was THE thing back then.
 
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This is the oldest site I still use, albeit not as frequently as I used to. It's been my go to since the 90s for all computer related info.

I do miss the late 90's internet though. The net today just feels like a giant advertising platform.
 
I was one of the early Demon sign-ups, having seen cliff stanford promote it on the CIX bulletin board. I was around the 300th user in aug 1992. Demon had a 64K leased line connection to the US. Dialing into London using a 9600 modem cost an absolute fortune etc.

This was when you had to use KA9Q (which was fundamentally an amateur ham radio program) under DOS to access it on a PC. there were no websites, it was all email,FTP and usenet news. and a very basic chatnet that I forget the name of right now.

Those first 10 years or so where glorious as it really was frontier territory, every novel thing was great to experience for the first time.

But I guess it's like most things, once people get into monetising, 90% of stuff goes by the way, and you are left with the stuff all the money has been thrown at.

But to be fair, a lot of money has been thrown at stuff that remained non-monitised for years and years whilst trying to find a way to do so. Think of whatsapp, for a long time now that's been the default go-to app that has most enabled people to communicate 1-2-1, first messaging then audio and then video calling, all for no charge. And of course it is the go to place for family groups or lads weekends away etc to have group chat. It's been so popular, it's killed tradtional text messaging and forced all the telcoms companies to entirely re-evaluate their product pricing (who these days DOESN'T have unlimited txts as part of their plan ?...of which you probably only use a dozen or so a month).

And people go to youtube exactly because it is a vast repository of information. When I was recently tasked with building a gate, it was youtube videos I watched. Want to educate yourself on personal finance and pensions ?....youtube. Want to know how to open up a particular lenovo laptop ?...youtube. Want to do karaoke?... youtube. Yeah being interrupted now and again by ads is frustrating as hell.

However it is true that the enormity of possibilities that I saw back in 1992, has fundamentally percolated down to all the ways it can be monitised.

But I guess it is worth noting that even in August 1992, Demon was charging a tenner-a-month for internet access, so from it's very beginnings it's been about monitisaton.
 
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randal said:
Stop using Google to search, stop relying on Facebook. Use alternative search engines that don't have paid for SEO results. Stop watching YouTube videos that rely on an algorithm to provide you content.

The reason the internet seems the same is because we've all got lazy, we all rely on something telling us what to watch or what to read. You want something interesting? Go and find it yourself. It's out there, just harder to find.
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I have to agree with this, I fairly recently moved away from everything google (as much as you can these days) and have found lots of interesting things I would never have been fed by the algorithm
 
Freefaller said:
That's the issue - you're quite limited if you don't change your approach.

YT is just so convenient, as is google search etc...

I think social media is a bit of a trap too.

Out of interest what search engines do you use? I've been using DuckDuckGo but often do fall back to Google at times but I'm not on social media so at least I dodge that bullet.
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Absolutely. Google's product are convenient by design and I can't argue that it's very good at what it does. They spent a long time refining their algorithms, products and feature sets, and my perception is that they've now pivoted towards heavier monetisation and bias now they have a means to laser focus the results. I say "now pivtoted", over the last few years with increasingly noticable bias and targetting. With nobody to really go toe-to-toe with them it's only going to get worse in my opinion.


I recently De-Googled ditching my Pixel, YT Premium (they made that really easy by clamping down on out of country subs), Google Maps and Search. I switched back to Apple, Apple Maps and Firefox for a cross platform browser sync.

Search engine-wise I use a mixture of DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT, the latter more so for image searching or more complex tasks. i.e if I'm coding something, researching etc.


Is it easier? Is it better? Arguably no (not yet), it's simply just not as convenient or "familiar". Having spent many years in an eco-system anything that isn't muscle memory is going to take some effort to get used to.

Do I still get the answers I need - yes, fo' sho'.
 
Yeah I'm quite embedded into the Google ecosystem unfortunately (love my Pixel 9 Pro XL) and we have google hubs at home and door bell etc... Wife has a pixel too. I'm not keen on the apple ecosystem, so android it is... but yeah I need to try and wean myself off it a bit more - but we're quite embedded - i.e. family link, shared shopping lists, calendars, etc... the effort to escape would be quite high.
 
EH75 said:
Yeah early noughties was the golden age tbh. Now its all social media echo chambers and clickbait. At least this place is still going.
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This is essentially it. Just before web 2.0 and social media, but after basically everything else good.

:edit: Also don't forget, no matter what you might feel for times past, these are the good days still :)
 
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I remember, the days when you were nearly finishing downloading something, then someone tried to ring the house phone, which didn't ring but still crashed your connect and corrupted everything you'd downloaded for the last X hours and you had to start again :cry:
Oh and making a hardcore config for cs1.5/6 so you could still try and play against your mates with IDSN despite you having peasant dialup :D
 
Freefaller said:
Yeah I'm quite embedded into the Google ecosystem unfortunately (love my Pixel 9 Pro XL) and we have google hubs at home and door bell etc... Wife has a pixel too. I'm not keen on the apple ecosystem, so android it is... but yeah I need to try and wean myself off it a bit more - but we're quite embedded - i.e. family link, shared shopping lists, calendars, etc... the effort to escape would be quite high.
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It's really interesting when you think how we let these companies shape our lives and how we interact with one and another, and what we consume online.

More so when you consider how much effort it would require to not let them.
 
randal said:
It's really interesting when you think how we let these companies shape our lives and how we interact with one and another, and what we consume online.

More so when you consider how much effort it would require to not let them.
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Yep... it's actually quite sobering.
 
I remember using dial up 28k or 56k or wow ultra fast 128k modems to dial up AOL (are they still going in America?), and using Uni computers to download pr0n onto a 3.5inch floppy disk which would consist of a static image rendered painfully slowly line by line on-screen. They cottoned on, 1 of the lecturers during a lecture gave us a warning to stop accessing adult material using their computers.
 
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