A little bit tangent, and I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses... but been playing with it for the 30 minutes, and most of the videos look so real? Like when you go on TikTok / Instagram nowadays, there are obviously unlimited amount of content. But there's this sense of everything being edited multiple times, people trying to create their own "brand", nothing looking real. It's a shame how we over-financialized everything and sucked out the fun. Or maybe I just got old.
Side note, I'll also recommend people to look up "X city in 1990s / 2000s" on YouTube. San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, London and etc. have cool slice of life content from people who were very into camcorders.
I was on tiktok in 2019/2020 and for a brief period it was just ordinary users messing around and posting whatever they felt like. No tiktok shop, very few ads or thinkpieces, nobody was trying to build an audience. A lot weirder and a lot more fun
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.
I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.
Wikipedia didn't exist. It was possible to run out of websites to visit. People were, in general, super friendly, aside from the trolls on AIM trying to crash other people's clients. (IRC was a separate place though, I mostly spent time on websites.)
Forums had horrible UIs, the latency was awful. Compared to dial up BBSs that came before the user experience was much worse.
Everything was authentic. People just doing stuff, posting about what they loved. Uploading art they made and photos they took. The barrier to entry was high (you needed to own a scanner and be able to figure out how to set it up!), but not so high that determined non-technical users couldn't muddle through and still make great things.
Same. For me, usenet was "social media", long before social media was a thing. I remember in college hanging out in a newsgroup for people looking for a pen pal, and later exchanging letters with someone on the other side of the country whom I never met in person.
Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.
I've been on the Internet since 1999, and I feel a strong sense of nostalgia for those early years. For me, the period from 1999 to 2010 was the "golden age" of the Internet. It was a time of exploration, creativity, and genuine connection. I imagine that people who joined even earlier might feel a similar nostalgia for their own era on the web.
I also wrote about my experiences and why I consider this time the golden age in a blog post here: <https://susam.net/web-golden.html>.
Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.
Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.
Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.
I'm a couple of years older, and I generally agree with you. But even up until 2016 it was generally tolerable. There was a point in time when every single social media changed from "you and your friends" to "you and the world". Which opened the hellscape of influencer and branding world. I'm not sure what exactly accelerated it - Facebook/IG going algo-view first, TikTok starting to get traction even when it was just a dancing app, or the entire A/B science. Oh well...
What happened right around 2016 was a combination of the internet being weaponized in the political space and the destruction of of revenue for legacy media because of Facebook and Google and other walled systems which ingested their IP and served it to their users. This effectively made people paranoid of data that didn't immediately fit into their world view because the concept of any shared truth was shattered and at the same time it felt like everything and everyone on the internet was targeted to misinform you.
The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.
This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.
IMO we need to move past the follower/following model on social media.
Having followers is the best way to get followers, which creates a fame snowball.
The result is that a few uploads get a bunch of attention, and most uploads get very little attention. The typical user feels lonely, isolated, neglected. Jealously means the attention-rich users, the ones with lots of followers, become targets for bullies -- and that leaves them miserable too. No one is happy.
Platforms with a more equal distribution of attention, such as IRC, didn't have these problems.
It's a Geocities archive containing websites hosted on the platform from the 90s/00s. I really like the creativity and authenticity in the archived sites, it's like looking at a mirror into the past.
For me it was 2003 to 2010. I said this multiple times, and it is that I'm working on a essay about qhy Internet was more enjoyable back then.
But sometimes I think the only reason (or the main reason) is that I was a teenager. It isn't about internet, it is about the user and how they saw the worldwide at that time...
I think a big part of it is that this search doesn't involve "the algorithm" at all. There is no recommendation engine here, what you search for by pure ID is nothing but the unfiltered schism of what people record with their phones and unpretentiously/accidentally click "Upload" with no hope of clout chasing or really even a bare inkling that anybody might actually WATCH what they recorded.
I see parallels with this and RuneScape. Now it's all about efficiently grinding stats or flipping stuff on the exchange. Back in the day it was all about trimming armor and buying gf.
I think that has more to do with being a kid vs being an adult. Kids are probably still buying gfs on Roblox and Minecraft today (disclaimer: I have no idea what kids play these days lol)
> I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses
It's not rose tinted glasses, it's just a poor comparison.
The absolute vast majority of these videos have double digit if not any views. You're seeking them out, using a little quirk of naming and the poster's DGAFism. There is no pretense of promotion to a large audience or virality. Anything spoonfed you on a Tiktok or Instagram feed could not be more different. The default Youtube experience is the same as mass Tiktok. Moreover you can find plenty of similar material like this on Instagram and Tiktok if you go looking for it, that is after all what most people are using it for, bumming around with their friends. The algorithm isn't going to spoonfeed this to you, and obviously Youtube never did either.
I believe Reddit in particular actually has gotten much more optimized in the past 15 years. I don't think this is rose colored glasses, the content really is much more engaging and addictive, with more short form videos and content that can be understood immediately at a glance.
This may be so, but I don’t know how it counters the fact that there is more essentially unwatched and obscure content produced on these platforms than ever.
And it's not like this particular content was once popular in the "good old days", the view counts are literally 0 in some cases.
There's definitely a lack of authenticity these days.
I was on the park the other day and there were these two dudes and one was filming the other walking and talking to the camera. They'd look at the shot and then he'd walk back and do it again and again. Multiple times.
I've also seen people talking regularly to their friends and then suddenly go into "influencer mode" and yell "tell us what you think in the comments! :kissy_face:" then go back to regular talk like nothing happened.
The word "cringey" is overused but it feels like such an inhuman behaviour and so weird to see live. Like the person just suddenly got possessed by some entity other than themselves.
Side note, I'll also recommend people to look up "X city in 1990s / 2000s" on YouTube. San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, London and etc. have cool slice of life content from people who were very into camcorders.