One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.
You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
For me, probably IRC and old school forums. Nowadays, everything is monetized, corporate, and all about engagement; either farming it as user or monetizing it as an owner.
Lemmy does kind of bring back some of that old school forum vibe with modern niceties though.
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of ‘notifications’. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit ‘matchmaking’. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
I’m so sad that I missed out on this era of the internet. I only got online in 2020, just horrible timing. all you older folk were so lucky
The worst mistake we made was making it easy enough for normies to use.
You want higher-quality people, you need to make it harder to use.
One day you’ll be able to tell your kids that you lived the golden age of streaming. You didn’t have ads. You could binge watch a whole season in a day without the service tricking episodes out once per week to try to increase user anticipation. You didn’t have increasing numbers of streaming services dividing the pie into tiny pieces such that you had to pay 5x what you used to pay for cable to watch the things you want. You didn’t subscribe to those services only to find that you needed to get a fancier membership type to watch the show you were actually interested in.
You may have missed the birth of social media. But you lived the age of excitement about ditching cable, only to watch some massively rich companies create a monster bigger and uglier than cable ever was.
The modern internet can be more interesting than the old one ever was once you start to explore it, rather than hanging out on like three websites total.
agree, hanging out on little websites and blogs is a lot of fun. one of my favorites is tilde.town, lots of cool little microblogs there
If it makes you feel any better, while I got to experience it, I’m also so sad that it’s gone and not coming back :(
Why’s that? What part from that era would you like to see again today if you could?
For me, probably IRC and old school forums. Nowadays, everything is monetized, corporate, and all about engagement; either farming it as user or monetizing it as an owner.
Lemmy does kind of bring back some of that old school forum vibe with modern niceties though.
Forums. Gaming guides made by actual gamers. Clans that are recognizable and actually respected, playing against the same. Email being the main method of ‘notifications’. MSN Gaming Zone. PS2 network gaming, and not having to pay a fucking fee to play with your friends and those halfway around the world. Hosting dedicated servers. Lists of available servers and games to join, instead of this bullshit ‘matchmaking’. Modding games, and to an extent programs. Websites not having 50 fucking layers of Javascript garbage just to load what is effectively a static page. Before analytics were everywhere, before ads took more real estate than the content. When Google was just a search engine.
E: Gamespy. Also, I also had someone in vrc recognize my name, and also recalled my clan, from back when we were just a Halo/Custom Edition group. I was so fucking excited, to be recognized, almost 20 years later. My clan is still going, though the numbers are single-digit now. Life happens.
A lot of stuff, but basically, before the internet was shit, and simultaneously, corporations taking over humanity.
Gamefaqs back when it was a bunch of txt files
Sad no one will experience it again.