Microblog Memes

The internet didn't want you. You used the internet at your own risk. You were the outsider there, and I miss that. Anything friendly was still trying to figure out how to sell things to you on the internet.

I miss forums. Reddit and discord and gb ruined it.

There's still rss.
There's still email.
There are still blogs.

And there's gemini.

Blogs never begged for dopamine

The little counter I put on my page certainly did! Got so excited when it reached 100, even though it was mostly me.

"email never throttled you"

Someone forgot about the good ol' days of spam? Chainmails? Viruses? Here's an example of a classic virus,

YOU HAVE NOW RECEIVED THE UNIX VIRUS

This virus works on the honor system:

If you're running a variant of Unix or Linux, please forward thismessage to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random.

The "old internet" still exists mostly. People have moved on to other things. You can still use IRC, Usenet, RSS, BBS, Forums... they all exist. They may not be as popular.. but a lot of the old web tech is still out there.

Absolutely miss that old internet.

It had flaws aplenty, but anyone could pick up a “…for dummies” book and cadge together a website. Plenty of free website generators and hosts, too. All those personal pages, family pages, “Hello World!” pages, personal hobbies and small businesses…. Then of course the newsgroups, freeware apps and tools from generous people filling in the gaps in available software…yeah. It was completely unpolished, wild, and unpredictable…but it was awesome, available, and far more egalitarian.

I do miss it, the zeitgeist anyway. Sure. Modern speeds and frontends are nice, but everyday people are priced out and corralled, monetized and stalked. We’ve become the coppertops of The Matrix; exploited, mined, and willingly, in some cases, enslaved.

The old internet died when we started gamifying human interaction.

Get rid of up/down votes. Get rid of reputation points. Get rid of Emojis. Get rid of all that shit. That shit has lead to dopamine overload, and the extremism in human interaction both on and offline.. cause people don't just talk to each other anymore. Humans, on the whole, just regurgitate ideas and comments back and forth that previously got high marks, thus getting them high marks. People tend to be afraid to speak unpopular but necessary truths because they are scared of their magic fairy points being reduced by an onslaught of downvotes/dislikes/whatevers, Or god forbid something you said be misconstrued and a whole hate train pile on you because you have 30 downvotes so obviously you are wrong and evil and bad, thus resulting in interaction being skewed ever further towards more and more extremes in content because of the incessant need to fish for that next hit of the gamified reward systems.

Its toxic as fuck.

Human interaction shouldnt be gamified. It should just..exist.

Fuck you, yes it was perfect.

RSS still works pretty well.

We need to reject web3 and create web 1.5. a modern version of web 1.0, without the bullshit and platforms.

We used to make our own WEB PAGES!

Twice this week I've looked up some song lyrics origins/meanings, and it's obvious the old sites are just running LLM summaries of every song they have in their DB.

Wikipedia has notoriously been vague on this, only covering it with a couple sentences for some interview source etc. But those couple of sentences said so much more than the 20 paragraph essay of an LLM trying to figure out and explain creative writing.

It used to be fans chimed in with their ideas and sources, establishing a solid lyrics origin or meaning. But apparently that's dead now for the big services and the blogs that exist buried under SEO.

Seriously, do it now and see what I'm talking about. It's absolute spew.

i donno man. i still use rss, and they solved tracking by not putting the article in the xml, just a link that ends in source rss.

So glad RSS is still around. My beloved

I still use my feed reader ever day.

Blogs never begged for dopamine

My livejournal certainly did.

Pocket is shutting down on July 8th, but you can retake control of your reading with Wallabag, a self-hostable read-it-later app.

For RSS, try FreshRSS--simple, private, and available to run however you'd like.

The tools are out there. The web can still be yours.

Also, you didn't need to have a mobile phone just to sign up on a site.

Forums. Good old days.

past tense

I still use these things. People who post this shit are telling on themselves.

The Internet was once called "the Wild West" when lack of scrutiny was enabling all kinds of things like rampant copyright infringement and thinly veiled pedophilia (see "lolita"). As in the actual wild west, pioneers were inventing new tools to survive and thrive. Brief periods like this are probably normal before entrenched players - whether they're railroads or media giants - roll in and lay down an organizational layer that makes it a lot easier for typical people to participate. In doing so they also tell the government how to regulate the new world to make sure their profit models still work. Then they take credit for the whole thing.