Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
@bstix
And wondering why you need X or Y that doesnt relate to what youre doing only to find out it was a commercial 🙃
@Provider @rhinocratic@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don’t need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I’d have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.@bstix everyone wants to be a movie star
The worst are the videos that are little more than a Windows desktop and a syntesized voice of a tutorial that could be written. Additional negative points for instructions writen on Notepad on the screen on that video.
Drives me crazy when I see this kind of format for things like programming. Nothing like pausing the video and trying to see what their code says.
@bstix best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04
Video title: “How to unlock the demon door on the fourth level of Demon Smasher Elite”
“Hello, video game fans! Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Last week I posted a video that isn’t relevant to this video, but I need to drag out the time on this one to game the algorithm, so I’m going to rehash and plug that video. I’m going to shout out to my Patreon subscribers with ridiculous usernames I won’t pronounce well. Now let’s get to the part you’ve waiting for: I’m going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter. Okay, now you’ve skipped forward to what looks like the area before the demon door part of the stage, but I’m going to talk about some unrelated anecdote about this game or maybe the game devs, and then plug my Patreon account and mention a completely different game that I’ll be streaming next. Oh and here’s the five seconds of the video you wanted to see when I tell you to click the right mouse button on the hidden lever next to the demon door in order to open it, except you aren’t seeing it because you skipped forward too far and gave up. Don’t forget to like and subscribe! This video has been brought to you by Nord VPN.”
YES, this is such a peeve for me!!! I’ve developed an aversion to viewing video content unless it’s for something I truly need to see done. And even then, I’m more likely to check wikihow and endure their gifs than I am to watch someone’s video. It’s just so overdone.
I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.
Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you’re doing or selling you crap.Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.
Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They’re being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.
I remember:
- CompuServe chat rooms
- Playing Neverwinter Nights, the “original MMO” some say, on CompuServe
- Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
- Usenet and FTP
- mIRC
- Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
- Penny-Arcade
- Something Awful
- New grounds
- stickdeath.com
- Rotten.com
- Ogrish
- all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
- Fark
- Digg
Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.
There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I’m pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.
Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little “bus” that somebody could “drive” and all move to a different web site together.
Oh. My god. Why did I never know about that. That would have been incredible. I feel honestly robbed now T_T
@Provider It’s the "Just call!’ of the internet. Somehow, people think that having an extended interaction is peoples’ preference.
I would kill for a transcript.
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.
expired
So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.
Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”
Good grief I’m old.
I mean, what do you want? People to talk about dialing into bulletin boards?
@Dubious_Fart Technically not the internet, most of them… but YES!
Now where did I put that list of FidoNet nodes…
Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It’s work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.
In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !blogging@feddit.de
Good bot
(…do we say this here?)
I want to be on record as being kind to our robot overlords, so I’d say “good bot” for good measure.