People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
That's not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.
Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.
Bullshit. The technology WAS better.
Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.
back when using your real name on social media was idiotic
My mom then: don't put any personal information on the internet!
My mom now: I just need to put my social security, credit card info, and full street address and I can see which Seinfeld character I'm most like!
Still is
The thing about AIM, was "OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!" A lot of people didn't have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.
I remember the day that the Old Internet died for me.
I saw my buddy was online on AIM, and I messaged him looking to shoot the shit. But he had just gotten a smartphone, and was logged into AIM on his smartphone, and it was not a good time for him to be shooting the shit because he was out and about doing stuff. So he was like “what do you need? I’m busy”.
Which is not something anyone had ever told me on AIM before. If you were on AIM you were by definition bored and looking to shoot the shit.
I guess we grew up too.
Ouch.
Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.
We've effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.
No, it's because it wasn't full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.
Well, then the Internet wasn't a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.
some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.
AIM also had built in file sharing.
Wow I completely forgot about this and now I'm awash in a sea of nostalgia. We used to just send each other mp3s over AIM and it was so chill. "Hey check out this song I'm listening to" "OK cool thanks" like it was no big deal. Ahhh
It was even better than sending a file, though. You could just point the settings to the folder you wanted to share and anyone on your buddies list could browse the shared folder and download what they wanted if you were online.
AOL hired the Winamp guys and they immediately pioneered the Gnutella firesharing system. It was available for less than a day before AOL corporate went "Oh shit" and tried clawing it back. Too late.
You pay a monthly fee? Mine's free. You do Nitro or something?
Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.
We're still living in the Eternal September. It used to be that there was a certain etiquette to being online. Don't ask a question someone else already asked, don't pretend to be an authority on something you're not, and so on. Then September 1993 happened. Suddenly there was a much bigger new cohort of internet users who needed to assimilate to the culture. It was an endless cohort of people who didn't know how to behave. October came around more new user, November, December were the same. The change didn't happen quickly. It took decades but it started then.
This is the right answer. Also the internet hadn't been overtaken by big companies and bots. And law makers was just starting to understand what it was, so it wasn't censored left and right. It really was a magical time.
"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.
In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.
clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later
Email is actually great, it's the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn't need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.
It's not great at all. It's messy and disorganized and confusing and very much not private, and people don't use it properly. No client can fix that. If it was "the original fediverse" we wouldn't need a new one.
Everything you did on the Internet didn't exist just to sell you something; you weren't a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels...!??
I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new...
P.S. Maybe it's because I'm autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we're going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.
Fuck that, I'm nostalgic because there was an actual aesthetic with character. "Modern" flat UIs are boring and flat.
lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.
Remember:
Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there's no "big box" overhead.
And shipping will be FREE!
Really, because I'm more nostalgic for having hope for the future.
MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.
And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.
People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.
I could only get AOL in my town back in 1995 or so. Back then you had to pay… by the hour? The minute? Something like that. And AOL wasn’t a 24 hour service, it would shut down each night and kick everyone off.
I almost cried reading the explanation.
If I was not banned from Facebook I would add this to groups and then argue with people about ☠️