BACK IN MY DAY (jk my day is ongoing 😜), many popular sites were called “e/n” sites. This was like before blogs, before Google, etc. Back then, the web wasn’t very feature-rich, but it was “loud.” Contrast that with now: there are more sites than ever and wayyyyyyy more users than in the late 90s, but the www is very quiet and isolated (or isolating? I’m not sure how to phrase it).
Anyway, I think about this a lot, and I came to Lemmy to escape the labyrinth of marketing funnels that we call the www, but the element I can’t quite figure out is like where’s the social element on the web? I see many forums for like whatever niche subject, but where is the e/n chatter? Where do people like…be people in a very general sense? I was looking at the …sublemmies I follow, and they’re all like niche stuff. I really don’t even know where to post this question (so please pardon me if I screwed up and feel free to redirect me).
In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?
Funny thing is I have this kinda skip when it comes to the internet because I was on it in the non www days until 95 (kinda more the start of www but I did not use it and few knew about it) Then like I kinda started using www around 98 with yahoo and excite but I prefered excite. Slashdot was kinda the first www thing that harkened back to newsgroups for me but reddit came closer and this really scratches the itch.
Awww yeah! Slashdot.org!
Back then web search was terrible tho. I thought Google was such a major improvement in like 2000ish. I did not foresee it becoming a monopolist. Naive, I see now.
see I was late to slashdot to so if was like into the aughts before I was even on it. For that matter I did not even know about google until 2000 where it was mentioned at a conference by folks. you should try google.