Here's the funny thing about propaganda:
It gets started by someone (or a group of someones) with an agenda, but when it's effective, it gets swallowed and spread by well-meaning individuals who simply don't know any better. When this happens, it becomes even more effective, making it a vicious cycle.
Not everyone who spreads it is doing so for nefarious reasons (though many are).
"X doesn't justify Y."
"What kind of monster are you to deny that X is true?"
"Don't change the subject."
"Don't YOU change the subject!"
Every time.
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...and I've officially let myself run out of my ADHD meds.
Shit.
Help SDF grow the #fediverse and get some fun stickers and badges! sdf.org/?store
#fundraiser #support #community
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Well shit.
I got the parts I ordered from DigiKey. I didn't realize how small they were. I've soldered SMT parts before, but I don't know if I have a steady enough hand to do these ones by hand. 🙁
Good thing I only ordered a few.
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Hi ! Could you update the toot with an image description, so it's accessible to everyone, please ?
For instance :
A super-hero with the letter G on their torso lands on a devastated land.
A civilian : "Look ! It's the Good Guys!".
Good Guy : "Fear not citizens ! We have the situation under control. You see we have destroyed all of the hospitals, schools, and all public places the BAD guys may have been hiding."
The civilian, concerned : "You evacuated civilians, right ?"
Good Guy : "We told them to flee to the refugees camps ! Which we've also destroyed. Can't be too careful. Don't worry, anyone that we missed will die of starvation because we've cut off the food supply !"
Civilian, terrified : "What ? Why ?"
Good guy : "We're the good guys !"
To those who argue "my VPN can't track me because I pay them in bitcoin":
You know they have your IP address, right?
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Sensitive content
Sensitive content
So, I was bemoaning the fact that finding chips in a DIP format is getting harder and harder because everything's moving to SMT. I don't hate SMT chips, but they make it rather difficult to play with them on a breadboard before using them in a project.
It just occurred to me that if I'm going to the trouble of designing a PCB in the first place, nothing stops me from sticking a single chip on a PCB with a bunch of pin headers to turn it into a quick and dirty "DIP chip" for experimenting with on a breadboard. I can even do this with a bunch of different chips on a single PCB that breaks out into multiple different units.
I'm sure I'm not the first person to have thought of this, but it was definitely an "aha" moment for me.
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I love it when the photo of a component and the schematic drawing on the data sheet disagree with each other.
(e.g.: digikey.ca/en/products/detail/…)
Guess I'll have to wait 'till I have the physical component in my possession to find out for sure.
#ZhenHouseZhenBonkwave a lifestyle show set in #lambdaMOO #live with English and #Chinese every 1400UTC Friday #archived
anonradio.net:8443/anonradio
#bonkwave #music @keefmarshall's #newRelease Sea . Sky . Clouds music.key13.uk/sea-sky-clouds/
Join us around @me's Paradise Sushi in lambda.moo.mud.org port 8888 (if you have telnet)
In which UNK attempts to explain the #ClassicOfChanges to me and I talk live about how MOO avoids repetitive creation work!
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#archive archives.anonradio.net/2024051…
Some audio disasters done by me during the show but thank you everyone for being in-MOO and in SDF commode chat!
@scm @handyc in moo too next week right!
Thanks again!
@keefmarshall
music.key13.uk/sea-sky-clouds/…
@me @SDF
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Gee my GOP Rep finally cares about "antisemitism" in the latest newsletter. Calling student protests "support of known terror group, Hamas." Calling student protests "antisemitic violence." Showing great care for the poor Jewish students and faculty, without a mention that many of those Jewish students and faculty are among the protestors he's throwing under the bus.
He didn't seem to care about antisemitism when synagogues were getting firebombed.
It's almost like he's using Jewish people as a prop for political gain instead of treating them like human beings with diverse points of view worth listening to. 🤔
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It's also the party line. Easier to conflate the Party Line with 'propping up for political gain' than to conflate antisemitism and criticism of Israel.
(and all too often, they forget the person who popularized the word 'antisemitism' - a fun thing to look up.)
For all the filtering options that DigiKey has on their web site, I wish you could filter based on minimum order quantity.
No, I do not want to buy 3000 voltage regulators.
When a bear attacks you, you generally die and then it's over. When a man attacks, you live with that trauma for life.
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The great thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.
The terrible thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.
8-Bit Homebrew Processor
!retrocomputing
So, this isn't exactly retrocomputing and it looks like it's from four years ago, but I just found it and thought that many here may find it interesting.
This guy built a simple 8-bit CPU out of essentially discrete logic circuits (from what I've see so far, nothing more complex than a 4-bit adder chip) and explained the entire process.
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLow…
Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!
Teile deine Videos mit Freunden, Verwandten oder der ganzen WeltYouTube
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2. The thing is, while rolling back experienced computer performance/degrowthing computing clearly has to happen
I think hand-wired 8 bit computing is an educational rather than practical thing. (Obviously 8 bit AVR MCUs are a practical thing). 32 bit physical lisp machines on fpgas! (Eventually)
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Unlike me, you should talk to @amszmidt. What do you think about the existing port/emulation of the 1985 LM-3 #MITCADR to #HDL as a starting point for a modern lisp computer (instead of the scheme things that happen sometimes)? (I've tried and failed to get involved because of excuses. ;_;).
I forgot the LM discussion of Actually Using The Extra Bits Available.
@me @retrocomputing
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tracykidder.com/the-soul-of-a-…
The Soul of a New Machine by Author Tracy Kidder
The Soul of a New Machine endures as the classic chronicle of the computer age and the masterminds behind its technological advances.Tracy Kidder
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abandoning semiconductor technologies and making computers out of simpler parts
I remember reading an article a while back about basically computing using cards which block or allow light to flow as a series of logic gates. Another way to think of it is reinventing the punch card.
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Hmm, I can't remember now if I've linked the guy doing his own semiconductor etching in his garage. I definitely have elsewhere, and that's kind of similar.
Just in case: Sam Zeloof
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"Hi, my computer is giving me issues."
"Ok, are you running Spyware 10 or 11?"
"Spyware 11 with Adobe Spyware Suite and the latest Chrome-Spyware. I'm having issues accessing the corporate spyware as well as Facebook Spyware."
"Mmm, ok, let's try running Spyware updates and rebooting your Spyware."
"Ok..."
It's like "Being John Malkovich," but it's all spyware.
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Maintenance and Release Schedule
☁️ Nextcloud server, a safe home for all your data - nextcloud/serverGitHub
@Björn Schießle I think I figured out my problem. I'm running an older version of PHP that is no longer supported by later versions.
Edit: It irks me that it didn't warn me about this before now though.
Accused: "Your honor, it would be impossible for me the live at the standard I have become accustomed to were I not to rob banks."
Judge: "That sounds like a reasonable defense."
“It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”
OpenAI
What we criminalize in individual behavior, we call "innovation" when it comes to Big Tech. The whole system is bought and owned by Big Tech.
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If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
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I like the web now, but "the good old days" are basically everything before Facebook. Especially the 90s where it felt like a playground with unlimited possibilities and everybody was having fun.
(I know not everyone was having fun, it just felt like that).
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most of the sites we visited were run by individual people whose personality was all over them
a few really BIG ones were run by groups of like five volunteers, in aggressively counter-hierarchical ways
not per se professional (-ly designed or written), but really authentic personal homepages. A feeling of autonomy: I can do this too. No / very few marketing posts.
Also: more rubbish, but without monetary drivers. No influencers.
the immense reading diversity that blogs gave - and getting to control what it was I was reading (via my RSS reader).
I still do! But f'book sucked up all the writing and g’gle killed the easiest-to-use RSS reader, and Twitter took up the attention of most witty writers - and many of the blogs I followed slowed down.
I miss community of word-based people, in other words.
(Here's a place I have it! But it's dwindled.) (I've been online-ish since 1981. Ups are great. Downs: bah.)
I came to the web a bit later, right around the Myspace era.
I guess what I miss the most is the sense of the web being fun and inviting exploration. Fediverse does bring some of that back though, for sure.
I miss when it was more person to person. People had "home pages" and websites, often part of a ring of like minded or thematically relevant places to visit.
I miss when the content was made by humans for other humans to look at, instead of being directed at some algorithm that must be gamed to gain visibility, or to ensure it generates value for shareholders.
Forums and Mailing list culture in itself, while not devoid of its own problems, was preferable. So from 90s to early 00s.
I miss when people made sites for fun and not everything was trying to sell me something or harvest my data.
I miss when an adblocker wasn’t a requirement to use the web.
I miss when websites had personality and design and it wasn’t just copy/paste cookie cutter blocky on a white background with the same 3 fonts everywhere.
I miss not needing 10+mb of JavaScript just to load a basic homepage.
I don’t remember the when specifically. It was just kind of a slow burn into death.
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90s: forums
Never quite put my finger on why both were better than social media, but I feel strongly that both were
blogs (and this includes blog networks like Gawker, GigaOm and corporate websites with a blog section etc), personal websites about niche interests, only having to fight one algo (google) because there were a lot of real humans driving traffic places.
I remember making fun of web curators and now I'm like damn, I miss the curators. This is a weird question to answer because in a very real way it's that I miss when I was younger and more naively optimistic and the web felt like a big conversation among my friends, which is stupid and provincial.
but I also miss the part before "unicorns" and VCs with too much power. Like who gives a shit if a bunch of dudes are pretending your company is worth a billion dollars. Maybe it's hindsight bias but I feel like there was more making fun of dot com bubble companies and then in the zirp times more people took equally stupid companies seriously because far more money and power were involved.
I read someone say “I miss when there was a million websites about 3 things instead of 3 websites about a million things”. I think that’s what I miss in a way.
Curated lists of sites, Search results filled with websites made by real people.
Sites made with simple tools that you didn’t need to go to university to understand. A more human web.
The web needs more gardens and fewer shopping malls.
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Many people think I'm mad when I say that I miss web-rings, but I really do.
Surfing to a random unknown site, discovering new people, places and topics was truly magical and fun.
Nobody was worrying about SEO, algorithms, perfect cover photos or click-bait titles. Bliss.
For me, it was the high level of "human" that was the original web. Directory builds, web pages, heck even protocols like HTTP were all fairly human friendly.
You knew someone had to make all of it. Someone had to bodge it together with only a vague idea if it might work.
We lost a lot of that in the ideal of being "efficient" and "optimized".
Information density. 'White space' and fancy graphics need to be carefully considered things at 800x600. Now 'white space' is shoveled in like sawdust into a sausage from 1943.
Also simple web pages. E.g Alien Adoption Agency and Cybots did a lot with very little.
And the absolute chaos of early P2P file sharing. Want Weird Al? We got that. Want the Japanese police database? We got that too.
And being able to self host without as many security bothers.
Up to the mid 2000s. cgi/php bulletin boards - some still exist - but hosting and moderation was a thankless task, so the people who did it, really wanted it. Digg then Reddit kindof killed those off, but a few (classic car and car repair) boards are still kicking and still have a wealth of good advice.
1/
independently run webforums over centralised forum-y platforms (reddit, discourse, ...); independent mediawiki wikis over wikia-at-best (and like, a discord with information on it at worst); independent blogs
(admittedly there were still some centralised services like blogger or invisionfree, but like, it still had more of an independently-run vibe? and more devolved control so to speak)
I'd place that era at maybe the 00s or so?
(self-hosted) blogs were great, because you'd get a link to something interesting, read the blog post, and the entire experience was tinged with quirks from the author. And then you'd find other interesting things on that same host, or linked to from the host.
Kind of like going down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, if every Wikipedia page had vastly different colors/themes/fonts/layouts, copious information about the page's author, and no standards at all.
1/2
I miss sites where no comment was posted until after it was approved by a responsible human, but were still somehow popular enough to contain substantial discussion on a topic.
I miss being able to put specific phrases I knew to be on particular websites in quotes in a search engine and have those results come up near the top of the results.
I miss the feeling of interacting with content on a "pull" basis — actively choosing to click a link and deciding where look next — vs. the flood of content that is constantly *pushed* to us now.
I used to have that sense of following a breadcrumb trail and discovering new things. Now I'm a curator of a flood of homogenized stuff, and it feels as though I'm expected to just to sit back in my chair and consume each piece indiscriminately, no matter the quality.
It was more grassroots back in the day when I started. Now it's like super predatory commercial maximize the profits for the corporations and spy everything you do. Back then it was just silly people making silly websites and sharing things just out of the goodness of their hearts.
What has ruined things for me:
- Search Engines find just garbage results
- Everyone "values my privacy"
- The content to ads ratio has flipped from 9:1 to 1:9
- Chat boxes, chat boxes everywhere.
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Individuals sharing their experiences, passions, and knowledge via personal blogs. The longform, _discoverable_ posts from non-techies were gold.
Would love The Big G to offload Blogger to an indieweb group who could relaunch/revitalise the community with ActivityPub support.
* More goofy pages, like weird flash games or geocities
* Visitor counters instead of Google Analytics
* Much less ads 😅
for "being online", it'd probably be local BBS (Smitty's Place!) then IRC and the vast new world of communication these brought. Plus bigger hubs like Prodigy and Compuserve. You could dial in from a hotel! Carmen Sandiego!
For the 'web', the era of "this website is UNDER CONSTRUCTION!", starfield repeating backgrounds, java music players for mod files or midi files. At that time, a website felt more like someone's room, slightly messy, rather than polished marketing and perfection.
I liked the pre-social-media web around 2000-2010 with lots of personal websites, blogs, and forums where I was interacting with a small-ish number of people.
A few days ago I also noticed that even material from university courses seems to be harder to find these days. Before professors would host it on their websites. Now it’s often available only to students
for me its the sense of exploration and being in a space that was inherently not commercial or actively anti-commercial
but part of it was also being naive to how capitalism was ruining the world and the web, so im sure that if i had naive goggles again, perhaps that would be a big part of that experience
mostly I miss the blogging days when folks online had a different CMS, some homegrown, there weren't really "themes" but just bespoke designs so everything looked quirky and different.
i also miss online recipes that just had... a recipe and not three pages of SEO goop.
I miss my Google-fu skills, where in 42 seconds I could find anything I had ever read. Alas.
But I really miss the early days of Science Blogs--when scientists could really do #scicomm and people seemed to want to engage with that, instead of bringing all their conspiracy theories there instead.
It felt like there was a huge interest in interoperability and forming communities - after finding a good blog, you could check their blogroll and find others.
If you liked the content but didn't want to visit you could subscribe to an RSS feed.
Big companies online acted more like internet infrastructure providers than companies - e.g. RSS support and easy "use your own domain" email addresses from Google; people were using Twitter to trigger automation services. Fun stuff.
What I miss the most is the "good old days" of the Internet (which I first got access to in the mid-90s) that were driven by protocols more than "sites" and "apps."
Which meant much more choice of user interface (mailreaders, newsreaders, IRC clients, etc), and not having to have a separate browser tab (we barely had browsers, much less tabs!) open for every different forum, chat system, etc, that you interacted with people on.
For me the good old days were 2000 to 2005. Today, a lot of websites feel like gated communities. They often nudge you to make an account or are unusable without one, and visiting them feels like being monitored. Back then, a website was just something you read.
Another thing that was better was that when you found a website about a topic, it was usually because someone cared about the topic, and not some content farm. Thus, it was easier to find actual information.
not having idiots blabbering 100% nonsense and seeing their thoughts and ideas spread like wildfire and be repeated by thousands of people immediately.
It would be nice if we didn't come up with a like button on things to vote/downvote and spread ideas.
The web seemed a lot more navigable, either through webrings or just links, it was felt easier to stumble on new and interesting websites.
A lot of websites were more creative and artistic. Literally interactive art with bespoke interfaces that could feel like anything, as if they were alternative universe operating systems.
Search before google was better. AskJeeves was clever, Fido and Altavista were perfect for finding what you wanted.
Fun effects to boot!
Two examples:
- these days if I want to know how much is a ticket on Cheap Tuesday Cinema, I have to wait a Tuesday and go all the way into buying it, the cinema website doesn't say it anymore and reddit is out-of-date
- the only website that has the hidden lyrics of a Tears For Fears song from 1985 is an old style fan website made between 2004 and 2010.
It felt like there were *more* websites? All of them small and niche - really catered to a specific set of interests.
I was a mod on a Green Day fan site. I was a mod on a small fan fic website. I built a Harry Potter fan site and connected it up to heaps of other HP fan sites. I spent a lot of time on Neopets and Habbo Hotel. Forums! So. Many. Forums.
And all of these sites looked different and functioned differently.
Everything now just feels and looks the same.
I miss:
- Lack of intrusive advertisements
- Lack of paywalls
- Working search engines
- Small web browsers with small memory footprints
- Quirky sites with cult followings
- Pages that actually had a bottom
- Content that wasn't SEO drivel (it wasn't always "good" content, but it was honest)
- A genuine sense of discovering something cool when you found a new site
I feel like I spend more time fighting frameworks and deployments than actually building. And don’t start ideas at all because of the time needed for a cold start.
The early 2010s, when the web was already quite mature but services like google search and amazon weren`t yet enshittiefied to the moon, but instead useful.
And also the time before 2021, when I started finding out about how deep tracking is actually embedded in pretty much everything in the web. Questionable Cookie policies, bullshit lying privacy policies and unnecessary log in requirements have killed a lot of enjoyment I once had, when browsing the internet.
In the early 1990s after I had left Cambridge, I could type "finger cellodad@mit.edu" in a UNIX window and the local server would tell me he's in the terminal room in the basement of Building 4, and has been logged into his favourite terminal for so many hours and minutes.
Innocent times.
(Then we'd open a zephyr window and chat).
(That was before the "cello" and the "dad" was part of our lives, but you know what I mean).
Also feeling like there was so much promise ahead with this technology, and naively not seeing how it would be co-opted by the worst elements of humanity. (1/2)
what I miss from the old web, I revisit in Hypnospace Outlaw.
Happening upon winding journeys through passionate knowledge dumps, niche humor, and/or grassroots community, all tenuously connected through links from webrings, forums, and/or irc messages.
Modern algos’ peddlings feel like fast fashion compared to the old internet’s antique shop. Sure there was technically less there, but it felt more infinite, with more charming possibility abound. All found instead of given.
Spacer gifs! (Just kidding.) Before the supremacy of full text search , sites like Yahoo had curated directories of links for resources on particular topics. Search results are so junky now ( and likelier to get more junky with AI generated content) that it makes me nostalgic for handrolled directories that had some vetting for inclusion.
Also miss cached results on Google searches.
I think that pretty much everything on and about the Web was better, in some real sense of the word, in 2007 than it is now. The Web really peaked around 2012, but 2007 was the last time it felt like it wasn't out to get us and we were out to get them.
* We were generally trying to invent new, not replace old with " but over HTTP"
* We were generally ok with the non-dynamic Web Site
* Individual creators and ideas mattered more than corps and agendas
* it still felt cool to code
Early 2000s when I went round on all my friends blogs to see their new posts (with a wide variety of contents) and people would comment on each other's blogs.
PhpBB forums for specific interests.
the web in the 2000s, probably mostly around 2003 but no later than 2008. Lines up with my teen years, and when I first got regular unsupervised access to the web.
Some of it is just nostalgia, but a few big things that come to mind:
1. You could still learn how to make websites by looking at the source code for websites that had interesting stuff on them.
2. It was relatively common for people to make quirky personal websites.
(1/)
I miss the experience that you were exploring a digital neighborhood of personal websites which linked to each other and useful PHPBB threads.
You occasionally see glimpses of those days in some people's blogs & digital gardens.
Viral stuff spread slower, without commercial or centralized aggregation. A lot more word of mouth. Like, what if we didn't build a whole industry around affiliate links, around attention farming to drive eyeballs to native advertisements?
I understand people have to make a living. So I guess I miss the pre-gig economy and pre-SEO information environment. More artists and writers had the luxury to share information and art without it being branding work or hustling
in 1994 we were talking about hacking the HP48 calculator in the comp.sys.hp48 newsgroup and Dave Arnett the designer of the calculator chimed in. I was in a country which five years before was behind the Iron Curtain. The ability to connect with everyone ... it was an undescribable heady feeling.
It lasted for a while... IRC and forums took over from Usenet but it was similar. It ended somewhere around 2012 (Facebook IPO) - 2013 (Vine launch, Google Reader shutdown).
It feels like now there are no innovations that are cool. Just enshitification, and useless crap being added to platforms.
Early 2000’s internet was exciting and hopeful, 2020’s is boring and dark
The good ol' days were, of course, when I was younger and my brain more pliable and everything new seemed cool and worth learning.
But what really made the web useful was its ability to directly connect people in an immediate, yet asynchronous way. Think email, then forums, then live chat...
What we've lost is that these things are mediated by people whose motivations are - and always were - to make money more than anything else.
They used to be written and run by hobbyists.
Almost every person's web page having a manually curated list of links.
Not counting ads, certainly today's web is all about links, but they are often specific to individual posts.
I miss when a person would have a page with 5 or 10 links where the implict understanding was, "These are topics or other sites I really love. You should check them out."
Not listicles, not references. Just a peek into the page owner's interests.
when stumbleupon brought actual joy and discovery. When people built websites and created and shared things without worrying about “monetization.”
In fact, probably before monetization was something anyone talked about.
I think most people used to first share, then (maybe) see if they could get paid for it. Now there’s so many people just angling for a buck. It’s fine, people need to earn livings, but it’s not fun or joyful.
For me that’s probably early 2000s.
1. I wish I could get good RSS from all the sources I care about, instead of being forced to access the hegemonic social networks.
2. Web pages used to be just pages. Now you cannot tell easily what they are doing in the background.
3. Simplicity. You could understand the internals of the web page you were visiting.
4. Decentralisation. It was a web. Now it feels you keep hitting the same two or three servers or companies. Great technology for society now serves the capital.
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More creative expression in design before all sorts of "best practices" took hold.
People making their own sites as passion projects rather than just firing off what are ultimately ephemeral blurbs on much of social media.
Sites weren't bloated messes, demanding people sign up and sacrifice personal information.
The attention economy didn't exist. Sites weren't going out of their way to get people to stay on them, wrecking their mental health in the process.
Bloggers and webrings and forums with BBedit.
LiveJournal before 2006.
RSS before abandoned by too many websites. Thankfully starting to make a comeback.
Open source directory DMOZ.
Searches that brought results from actual experts instead of ads and algorithm messers.
Information about local live punk and blues and rock shows.
Restaurants that had their location and hours highly visible.
Email that was treated as asynchronous communication and not real time. Not a phone!
(a) Low barrier to creating stuff on your own site; i.e. could fire up FrontPage or Dreamweaver and upload to FTP even without knowing HTML.
(b) Hyperlinks just worked without ad metadata, forced logins, needing specific apps, and so forth.
(c) Relatively easy to find things without having to sort through dozens of SEO spam listings.
(con'd)
(d) When separate applications were useful or even needed, they were task focused instead of company-focused. Pidgin/Trillian/etc. for IM, Thunderbird/Eudora for e-mail, and so forth.
(e) Didn't have the feeling of "jumping ship" every time some service was bought out or tightened the screws. We were all spread out, with a lot less single-point-of-failure modes.
@xgranade (d) points at something deeper IMO: *everything* was less company-focused. You didn't have the same feeling of companies trying to keep you in their Ecosystem(tm).
AOL was the obvious exception: they actively tried to conflate AOL-the-service with AOL-the-browser with "the internet" as a form of lock-in, and were generally viewed as weird for it. They were just far ahead of their time, in a way.
Now we have Google, which makes many things that integrate with each other, most of which you're viewed as weird for *not* using. (And Apple, who from a certain angle look like they're trying really hard to be like Google, at least on the software side.)
A URL taking you to content, with no need to login, no cookie spam (nor cookie banner spam), and the ability to share that same content just as easily as you got there in the first place.
Now everything is centralized ad-focused platforms.
Being able to make a web page in notepad, without a compile step.
Not assuming a website is trying to spy on me.
Not assuming someone is going to hold every word I say against me a few years later.
Not needing to know 5 programming languages to get anything done.
Not having to "perform" for the audience on social media.
Not needing to assume every page is a bald faced lie until proven otherwise.
Planet Aggregators for topical RSS feeds.
we lost and gained so much that the "good old days" were just best on balance.
A few things I miss:
1) More character in websites and online personas.
2) Web design that was less slick but somehow both more information rich and less cluttered. Less obtrusive ads, less white space.
3) An assumption that most things on the web are unmoneyed.
4) When social media was fun, rather than profitable.
5) Google being good.
6) Blogs, RSS, text-based content in general being more important.
static HTML websites.
Without infinite scroll, MiBs of JavaScript to render a single-page information website, the slowness, the badly reimplemented in JS scroll, the accessibility issues of all that, and the general jankyness.
With links working immediately, instead of a weird half-second delay because every link is now overloaded with fifty different event handlers that are not actually needed for any of the functionality.
And with the "Back" button working.
One thing I really miss is the personal website that existed to provide information. You could learn about someone's profession, hobbies, whatever. One of the few remaining examples: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~k…
There are still personal websites, but they're mostly for promotion and building a brand rather than providing information.
These were the sites from the very beginning of the web, the type that folks made as soon as they learned about the internet.
Assuming a person like me was behind a website, not automatically a faceless corporation (sometimes loaning their website to users like me).
A sense of wonder, at being able to reach people far beyond the limits of my city, the border of my country.
A sense of fun and that none of this mattered too much.
Before social media.
Social media corrupted everything. Now every thing written is designed to "go viral."
Infoseek. I miss infoseek from the bottom of my heart.
Way back in the day I was a tester for infoseek and they gave me training on how to manipulate a search engine. And for a few years, even beyond the end of infoseek, I was a bit of a search god because I knew how to massage my input to get optimal output.
Those days are long gone, and infoseek disappeared even earlier than that, but I really miss the search engine infoseek and how well I could communicate with it.
Free geocities WYSIWYG sites
AIM chat rooms
SmarterChild
NeoPets
Modem sounds
Yahoo Music
AskJeeves
Akinator
OGame
Pre-yellow-text-thumbnail “WATCH THIS BEFORE YOU…” YouTube
I miss the newness and creative exploration.
I think being sold on the information superhighway, it used to have a lot of that straight forward. Information. Placed there by someone who cared enough to place it there. And the rest was easy instant mail with people from around the world for the first time. Without a third party snooping on everything. Felt sheltering actually.
Now the information is bait for suddenly trapping you in a mall, making a puzzle out of the exits which often requires your data in exchange for payment.
Hypnospace Outlaw | Internet Simulation Game for PC, MAC, and LINUX | Home Page
Hypnospace Outlaw is an Internet and OS Simulation game set in an alternate-reality 1999. Hypnospace is for PC, Mac, and Linux platforms, and will be distributed on itch.io, Steam, and GOG.com.www.hypnospace.net
Molly, it was nice when you could find information and not fight through every solicitation, related or otherwise, trying to separate you from your hard earned money. It is even worse now that bad actors are everywhere trying to scam you, con you, steal your Identity, etc. No one can be trusted.
The premise behind Battlestar Galactica is worth a moments reflection. The network in that world almost brought humanity to extinction. Only an air gapped (not networked) ship saved us.
I've thought a lot about this -- and for me, the internet used to be a place. You "got on" the Internet. Typically, you had one computer, and had to sit in front of it to do internet things. This naturally limited how much I could be on the internet, and it restricted the consequences of the internet to That Place.
The transition to the internet being an overlay on reality really started with the double-punch of early social media and the launch of the iPhone.
The joy of a universe of personal webpages. Lots of people had them about whatever their interests were. You could just wander and bump into so many things.
Webrings were great for that! I also enjoyed being able to type random words in as a domain name and if anything came up it was probably interesting (and not adult).
Sites were usable without ad blockers. Every (ad) paragraph wasn’t (ad) broken up. Search engines returned what I searched for, not something I didn’t look up that’s a more popular (but objectively different) search. Where there weren’t always auto playing videos on every page. Where content wasn’t obscured with giant sales overlays. No “chat with our reps!” junk floating around.
It had ads (in flash!) but was still usable.
Maybe 2010. I’m not sure when it died, but around there.
* visually distinct and exciting websites
* regular short-to-medium posts on a variety of sites that made you want to check back or follow via feed
* seeing cool things and saying "oh wow I want to do that on my site"
my favorite period of the web was around 2003-2009 but tbh that's also just when I was coming up in the industry so I'm biased
Not actually sure...
I think shortly after flash player died and before they figured out how to abuse JS even more (that is, ignoring the *old* old days of window manipulation), the web was less annoying.
Still annoying enough to need an ad blocker and flash player blocker, but maybe you only had a newsletter popup and ads, instead of newsletter popup + static ads + autoplaying video ad + cookie notice + GDPR consent prompt + difficult captcha to even access the site.
for me, the thing I miss most is the up-front feeling that the web was built by people and for people.
Rationally, I know that people are still building the web, but everything feels so smoothed over and dehumanized now.
And when I ask myself "why does this exist" about most websites now, the answer is "to make money [on ads/investors]" rather than "because someone thought this should be on the web"
Kind of an abstract answer, but everything is so featureless now.
I miss:
1 - the early 1990s when "the World Wide Web" was just one of many different possible systems for sharing content (others being gopher, hytelnet, etc) - and we were all trying to figure out what this "Web" was all about.
2 - that same time period when you could create a basic website using vi or emacs without any special knowledge
3 - the early to mid-2000s when we had blogs and were commenting on each other's individual sites, with discussions flowing back and forth.
I remember when I first signed into the net in 1988, commercial activities weren't allowed. I remember the first spam (for diversity visa attorneys) was at least four or five years after that.
It felt like anything was possible and that the net would change the world for good. That could have been because it seemed like everyone in it at that time was well versed in Star Trek and carried its philosophies online.
A lot of people here describing technical things- but I miss the social aspect. For the vast majority of internet content pre-2014, there was little reason to question the earnestness or motives of the person posting it.
To contrast, these days a savvy user must ask "Is this bait? is this clout-seeking? Is this AI-generated?" before taking it seriously. We have 100x more information flowing to us, and yet we have to put in triple the effort for verifying each piece.
1992: a friend introduced me to the academic web. Archie, Grep... it was an exciting arena filled with possibilities. Way more exciting than your average BBS.
Mid-90s: When I started designing sites, dial-up was dominant & we aimed to keep each page below 50kb, graphics included. Contributing to the world's biggest library was a buzz.
Late 90s: those of us who could use Google were Gods, for a little while.
Then ads crept in, Google became evil & enshitification took over.
One frequent refrain for me in many computer contexts is “Don’t suggest anything and don’t guess what I mean!” Usually with one or more expletives.
I miss the longform debates of the blog era, I miss the pre "oh shit they're actually evil" days of twitter, google, and Facebook, and i miss the days when internet tools for democratization seemed more powerful than internet tools for repression.
Might've just been I was naive.
All the other games worked offline.
Like honestly, single player games that need constant internet access are the biggest atrocity of current times, shortly followed by these illegal cookie "notices".
Being able to look something up and get the information I wanted in the first page of hits, instead of pages and pages of years-old reposts, useless wikihow shit, referrers, pop-up advertisements, etc.
EDIT to add: I'm old as hell.
I think that most of all I miss blogs. I learned so much about software engineering and the Linux ecosystem from bloggers, especially via the open source-related blog aggregators (Planet Gnome etc.).
Very few people blog about their niche interests any more and even if they did, you wouldn't be able to find them because search engines no longer work. I can't even find my own blog via Google unless I use a "site:" modifier.
I miss you, Groklaw.
I am old enough to remember the very beginnings of the web (early 90s) and have had some form of personal web site since 1996. And before that, an active presence on Usenet. My first email account got set up in 1988.
The "good old days" are simultaneously a real thing and an exaggeration.
I think my favorite time for "doing stuff online" was second half of the 00s. That was about peak "small group blog and hobby/enthusiast web site" timing. It was almost always possible to find multiple major web sites dedicated to whatever interests you had, while at the same time things like Google actually worked (not just for search, but for things like maps and YouTube, without burying everything in ads or being overwhelmed by SEO shenanigans).
The farther forward you go from about 2010, the less pleasant overall the web and the Internet as a whole got. Still pretty good at the start of the decade. Early streaming Netflix was, to be honest, genuinely awesome. But the early 2010s were the time when Google started to become overwhelmingly an ad tech business, and social media sites stopped being mostly chronological listings and started shoving "engagement"-tested items at you left and right. By the late 2010s, at least to me, the decay was obvious and I started getting extremely jaded about the whole online experience.
The farther back you go from about 2005, the more you run into obnoxious cultural issues of the time. I know a lot of fellow Gen X-ers who think "What do you mean, that was a long time ago! 1999 [or so] wasn't *that* long ago!" , but for queer and neurodivergent Gen X-ers, the 1990s may as well have been a different historical era. Even though we could (and many did) find our first online communities back then, it was often very much not a nice place. Like Usenet: A lot of people speak at least semi-fondly about it, but it was a place that had *way* more tolerance for overtly bigoted people than many large Internet communities now, so long as they had some technical or domain-knowledge chops.
So from my point of view: yes, there was definitely a "better time", but it wasn't all as nice as people remember.
My definition:
1. A period when smartphones and tablets weren't owned by almost every single person. There was some level of effort needed to access the internet.
2. Niches weren't conglomerated in a few places like Reddit and Facebook. There were (often self-hosted) forums with their own small communities, and those groups grew without algorithms and SEO. You can still see examples of this type of community today, albeit far more rarely. (More...)
Search engines that would search for what you asked for rather than whatever some advertiser is selling
Web sites that were self contained & didn't rely on endless resources & scripts from other sites
News sites that tell the truth .. OK that's more of a desire for the future
Social activity around but not mediated by computers! Sharing a screen and taking turns to play games or browse the web with friends.
Blogs and geocities and other easy entry ways to be a part of Internet activity, building and referring to other people on the same level. Idiosyncrasy and serendipity.
If song lyrics were online, it’s because some person cared to share them rather than because there was SEO money in it.
I liked being able to browse things quickly without worrying about clicking something that will give me malware.
I also miss how diverse websites used to look. I miss Flash animations. That little software made the web creative and accessible to a not of non-computer people. Now it's all bootstrap clones. It has it's place, but everything is just a scroll feed now.
I miss sites with a personal vision and feel that you could just explore, because they weren’t laid out as blogs.
And while this was never true and it’s ridiculous anyway, I kind of miss the feeling of being caught up. Like there was a point where you’d seen all the web, or all of the part you cared about.
pedestrian CSS, little to no JavaScript, and the only tracking was a simple counter at the bottom of a page.
I also miss all the old forums I was on.
My good old daze of the Internet were pre-web, which is why I said before 1995 (when it seemed to me everyone discovered WWW and the signal:noise ratio dropped).
It was hard work then, but I always went back for more.
I had to order a 9-pin plug and solder my first modem cable, and that meant a friend dictating pin numbers on a rotary dial phone--like a savage 😀
@molly0xfff@hach
2) Understanding web pages and how I am interacting with them and what they know about me.
There’s multiple distinct ways in which I miss the “good old days”:
1. The feeling of the web not being “serious”, in the sense that nothing in the world seemed to truly *depend* on the web. You could hang out with friends, turn in homework, do banking (Although I wasn’t old enough that it mattered to me yet), all without the web. The web was an *addition* to life. Something fun to explore.
Websurfing! The ability to jump from link to link as topics interest me!
That's the one thing which to me feels like it really has disappeared. Even on blogs, its rare for me to find them linking the concepts they discuss, & if they do its to previous articles of theirs.
Wikipedia seems to be the last bastion of it! Though that's also internal links.
I try to make up for this, give my readers a taste of what I miss. But that just informs me of how difficult linkifying is!
When information was the focus, not advertising or social networks. First Gopher, and then the early web with the human-curated directories, and web rings. Even early days of Google, when "googlewhacking" was possible (finding search terms with single result). And the personalities of blogs run by individuals.
Pretty much during the period after connection got easy (circa 1998 or so), through the pollution by ads and Facebook (about 2005).
I miss the technical barrier to entry that usually kept the internet nerdy without being hateful. The worst thing you got were flame wars about Star Wars vs Star Trek and there were no memes clogging up the discourse.
Communities were small islands instead of vast oceans of social media. There was no "reach" so trolls upset a handful of people before being kicked, instead of infecting the entire internet. People made actual friends on those forums too.
1) - You actually had anonymity and most of the people on the WWW in the early days behaved respectfully and intelligently.
2) - No predatory companies or governments absconding with every piece of your personal information and online movement, etc. Essentially, the creepy underbelly of today's Web hadn't developed yet because it was all too new.
3) - Very few ads!
4) - No malware to worry about!
I miss the times when the internet had individuality, a to me at least more carefree attitude, and less of a capitalistic, dystopian stronghold.
I miss the time when the Internet was a free, human-controlled place and not a bot/AI-filled lazy hellscape.
I miss when the culture was a bit more innocuous, carefree, and WAY less uptight over tiny, trivial things. (though bad actors always existed, let's be fair)
I miss when the layouts of webpages weren't all just optimized for mobile, and desktop users had a good experience too.
I miss when webpages didn't need ten million scripts and templates that make them more bloated than a puffer fish.
I miss when you could read every article for free, and you didn't need any external scripts or sites to just view something.
I just miss the old internet, it was more fun, more free, more human (which is a key word), and less of this uptight, bot-filled, capitalistic hellhole.
Also, when search worked well and found stuff you didn't expect. Ten blue links.
I also miss message boards.
I made some amazing friends while using them and even met my spouse that way as well!
The depth of conversation on niche interests on such sites is something I sorely miss as well. There was nothing like talking to people who had studied topic X formally and/or informally for many years.
Someone might ask an obscure question that someone else would know the answer to weeks, months, or even years later! That rarely if ever happens on social media.
the sense of frontier, boundary pushing, liberation but most importantly community.
Via LUGs, we did a _lot_ of community outreach via installfests, meetups, tooling activists and computerbank organisations refurbishing and redistributing computers.
Genuinely bridging the now clichéd "digital divide".
We were going hard & felt like we were winning (or had won).
Now it's more like trench warfare & it feels like we're being slowly pushed back & the feeling of winning was illusory.
random websites of people you'd stumble across while looking for information.
the time and energy they put into documenting a specific niche that interests them, on their own website.
"hand crafted" html, however ugly
the lack of adverts and focus on content quality, over style.
less css - letting the browser choose the fonts based on your preferences
web rings and hand craft lists of "my favourite sites" and "my friends" websites.
-- the early-mid 2000s
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.ioI I miss the days when people created web sites for fun, not with visions of dollar signs in their eyes. Sites without calculated strategies and data scientists plotting out the next six months. Sites that were the product of one or two people with a goofy idea and what the hell.
That ended either in 1999 or 2005, depending….
Zines
All Rights Reserved. ©psegalPermission to reproduce any content from Proust Said That is by written permission from the author, P Segal. Premiere Issue Issue Number 2 Issue Number 3 Issue Number 4 …Proust Said That
Flash games! I really miss Boxhead.
Apps, websites, and services that were not subscription based!
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- Feelings: The experience of finding communities of like-minded people and being able to participate and join in
- Long, intimate, focused text conversations with the sense of having both sides' focused attention and engagement, unscheduled and impromptu
- Communities, with an informal but real sense of membership and identity and participation, with in-jokes and references and the like
The 1980s were the golden years and a wonderful time in the lifecycle of the internet. It was global, but small, mostly academic and research organisations on it. It was magical because we were so wonderfully excited about being able to write to one another and exchange thoughts and ideas multiple times in one day. You have to understand prior to this we had phones and letters and faxes but email made available to average people a new fast text based medium. The emergence of the usenet and news groups and then icq and irc as real time tools ... It was magical. That thrill you feel at novelty and new horizons.
Of course we loved it so and so few people knew about it so we're regularly raving about it socially and explaining this amazing phenomenon to those who couldn't imagine it. We dreamed of a day that everyone could use it.
Of course then it grew and because the entry bar got lower and lower and lower than any historic medium so did abuse. Two big modes of abuse or misuse emerged and have grown to dominant forces and now we're not so sure what we wished for any more.
The two modes I allude to are at their simplest perhaps, malice and incompetence. At no real cost bad actors emerged early and we have a world of spam and scam like none before and grew into active misinformation and political manipulation campaigns. But for the same reason the blogger and all the variants on that (self publishing had never been easier and was suddenly accessible to anyone with a small and diminishing learning curve) ensured that literally anyone, including the incompetent and inept could present themselves and win audiences if they had an appealing message (if a stupid one). And so we live in a world of flat earthers and moon landing hoax theorists that unite globally like never before etc. etc.
All consequences of a sinking entry bar. The only solution we see is to raise it again. Which creates friction. Just search for Tickle vs Giggle.
HTML was accessible to non-experts. I recently relaunched my original 1994 home page in HTML5, hand-coded and standards-compliant. The amount of work required was ridiculous
Ted L. Johnson III's Web Page: Hand Coded Since 1994
Ted L. Johnson III's original and ever-changing hand-coded web page: a photo of Ted in 1964 looking very Punk, contact details, and links to other early web stuff.ted.tedjohnson.us
I miss the competition between services and websites especially in the Web 1.0/2.0 days. That was fun times.
Today there's monopolies everywhere you look. 🙁
Conversely, the days of StumbleUpon. There was real magic in those tiny sites that filled the Internet.
I miss the feeling of interaction and interconnection:
- Every site/blog had RSS and you could follow them easily.
- Many sites had comment sections that were not garbage fires.
- (Non-Reddit) forums for just about any hobby/interest—you’d stumble upon great little communities like secret gardens (there are still a couple in existence)
- AIM—different than texting. Availability, away messages, handles, interoperability to ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, etc.
I can talk at length about this.
the lack of responsibilities, although Lessig was already pointing out how things could go wrong. The possibilities? The fact that it was a kind of in-group signifier for people who were into the same kind of stuff? The lack of financial incentives for pretty much any of it, just amateurs doing it for the love of weird stuff.
Huh, there's a lot of overlap with the Fediverse as it is today.
Being able to find accurate help with a tool, for example a specific WordPress theme.
5 years ago I could google Wordpress Elementor Image Resizing Issue
Within moments I would find out what was going wrong and how to fix it.
Now when I search that I get sponsored content and clickbait pages that have to do with part of my question, like Wordpress Images but not the actual answer to my question. I mostly get results for image optimizers.
I miss the serendipity I'd find using search engines that actually worked.
I miss the community that was less burdened by corporate bullshit.
I miss talking realtime to kind strangers on ICQ.
I miss the wonder of discovery.
I miss web pages created by passionate hobbyists.
I'm sure there's more.
Second part of reply that wouldn't fit with the first part:
But there was more effort then, in the old days, to get clicks on external links because those clicks brought in money. Browsers, even Firefox browser, present paid links to sites. Also search engines have more and more also less obvious paid advertising , links, and results.
In the old days the web was more about sharing information and less about monitization and less about spreading disinformation or bloviation.
Chatting about pro-wrestling, sci-fi, X-files, and Magic the gathering on Usenet and early webforums.
Scrolling through Usenet listings to see if any new groups had opened up.
Mostly it felt _knowable_ even if I hadn't visited certain websites, I could find them, and they'd be accessible. There was a logic to it, even the undiscovered parts.
StumbleUpon was probably my favorite "Web 2.0" thing ever. Finding the coolest sites and blogs, much like webrings, which I'd never heard about because I came to the web in 1999 and had very little working computer knowledge out of high school. The closest we have now is ooh.directory/ which I just recently discovered.
The randomness of the web is what I miss most.
ooh.directory: a place to find good blogs that interest you
A collection of 2,266 blogs about every topicooh.directory
Mostly I miss:
- the large number of semi-public topic-focused spaces (e.g. irc channels, forums)
- the large number of content-deep websites run by individuals / small groups - and the search engines that indexed them and made them discoverable
(approx: late 90s early 00s, falling off in 06-07)
I guess I could do it still, but going to geocities to find final fantasy art on a dedicated fan page was nice.
It seemed more hand-made, more for us.
Or finding a website that someone hosted on their own, not affiliated with any platform, and then sharing that with friends. Seemed like whoever made the website had their piece of internet real estate and owned it.
On that note, I think he still exists, but wasn’t there a guy who did flash art, and it was great?
I'm simple. What I miss is the days (2003-2013) when I and the people I share interests/values with could gather together in single shared spaces and have conversations about things we cared about.
After this was a period where people like me couldn't use public spaces cuz everyone was being chased out of public by organized right-wing harassment which the platforms coddled; and now, everything's balkanized into walled-off, corporate-controlled private spaces (Facebook, X, Discord).
Each "era" had its own good and bad parts:
1970s and 80s:
BBS's, Usenet
Post your comments and hope for responses some time *tomorrow*. So you *think* about what you write! And write mostly in "email style," because it's *NOT* a real-time "conversation." The "online" relationships are more like being a "pen-pal."
…
I’ve been a user of the internet since 1987 (mostly just email back then) and I’ve worked in computer networking and networked software since 1993.
I miss being able to (mostly) rely on the information you found out on the ‘net. I miss search engines that gave you the results you were looking for, rather than the results that get the search company the most ad revenue. I miss Amazon actually caring about customer experience rather than pretending they still do.
1. ISPs including a small basic web hosting account and email address with dial up service.
2. UseNet
3. Finger
4. Dialing directly to tech support.
to me, there seemed to be the possibility in the early 90s of a more egalitarian society, a leveling of the playing field where everyone could have the same level of access to whatever information was available.
Very soon thereafter, Microsoft got busy crushing Netscape, so the writing should have been on the wall that rich tech companies would not be playing nicely.
I didn’t foresee all of the tracking, the sale of personal information, the surveillance. Or those Boston Dynamics robots which scare the bejeebus out of me.
myBB forums, lots of good friendships there. and even up to the dominance of XMPP and interop chat clients!
and a reliable google search
Forums for early 00s webcomics. It was a golden age for them. Dumbrella, which largely turned into the TopatoCo family.
The Achewood forum was always hopping. I remember Ryan North registering there to promote his new experiment, Dinosaur Comics.
Pre-web the Hecklers Online section of AOL with its games and terrible prizes was an ideal hangout for tweens and teens in the mid-90s
Today the internet is much much larger, yet it feels tiny and suffocating at times (a feeling that the Fediverse has helped to alleviate), and I'm old and tired.
Regarding "when", for me it was mid to late 2000's.
I miss the feeling of being alone in a huge crowd, unobserved until I wanted to be noticed.
I miss the disconnect between flesh and cyber identities.
I miss feeling like part of a separate, weird world.
I miss opening the AIM directory and saying hello to strangers with cool screen names.
I miss the feeling of eager anticipation as I waited for the modem to connect.
I miss the wild diversity of websites and communities.
I miss being able to disconnect when I needed to.
Just found a great article on it: noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild…
It was more like a forest. Wild. Chaotic. And surprising. Requiring exploration and delighting when you found a new village.
Now it’s more like a city. Busy, noisy, full of adds and well trodden streets.
As a result, a muscle I’ve lost is how to find villages of people that care about a specific thing. I don’t know how to join a new forum and start talking. It’s like I’m on a street with everyone passing each other by.
We Need To Rewild The Internet
The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.NOEMA
I have been too online since I was a teenager in the 90s. Made Geocities pages, lived on IRC and ICQ, used newsgroups, etc.
I don’t really miss it. It’s always been balkanized (various chats, various phpbbs, slashdot, digg, something awful). The same arguments around moderation.
The tech was just awful. Browsers had splash screens they loaded so slowly. JPEGs were progressively loaded. Flash and Java abounded. Security was nonexistent.
But no outbrain. I do hate outbrain.
- Altavista and then early Google
- Websites with reams of content written/curated by a single person (some still exist and still new ones get created e.g. otokano.com/colors-by-pigment/)
- StackOverflow (still quite good)
Watercolor Paints Database - Watercolors By Pigment- Dr. Oto Kano
Welcome to the largest watercolor paints database! You can look up over 3800 watercolor paints listed by pigments, with access to paint info, videos, swatches and where you can buy them.Dr. Oto Kano
LiveJournal: was a vibrant set of communities. It's dead now.
Usenet: that's pre-web and never really got an equivalent replacement.
I miss search engines showing me only results that actually contained my search terms (and didn't try to guess what I "actually" meant, didn't show me barely related results, didn't force massive numbers of ads, videos, "similar searches" or other junk and actually did respect when I used searches that included quotes or negatives etc. In short Google (and a few other search engines) of the late 1990's early 2000's.
Then I could actually do a search and find no results and trust it
I miss when the internet was not trying to destroy democracy
The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica affair was the end of our ability to use the internet free from suspicion that it was using us
@matthiasott Unexpected communities of people connected without large companies involved. Goofy esoteric experiments. Creating ephemeral things without worrying about how they might be used by some nefarious third party.
The feeling that just by putting something up on the web, it was now a part of a larger conscious collective instead of just another junk mail flyer drifting down an already overstuffed gutter.
I miss the culture of early internet gaming. People talked to each other. Shenanigans often ensued. It was easier to trust that the person behind a character wasn’t a pervert. For various reasons, people I met online were also roughly my age and it was easier to connect with strangers.
I once poured my heart out to a random person who I met while playing Maplestory. We would talk for hours and hours while playing. We never met in real life. It was my version of a penpal.
Alta Fucking Vista before the horridness of SEO
Blogrolls
Comment sections that were moderated and not full of crap
DIal up BBS sites
(pre) Eternal September
Flame Wars
Google Reader
HTML and no Java crap
IRC
(ask) Jeeves
Kernel Operating Systems
Linux
Mailing Lists
Netscrape
Open Source Movement
Personal Websites
RSS
Stumbleupon
Telnet
Usenet Newsgroups
(google) Wave
Yahoo before it sucked
Zuck wasn't here
I miss good old-fashioned email. Sending a letter to a specific person rather than posting a short status to your network.
I also miss the webcomic scene of the early 2000s.
Top thing I miss is instant messaging. Specifically, I miss the culture of being "away" or "available": I miss seeing someone online I haven't talked with in a while, and striking up a conversation. Without that signal that someone is around and actually interested in talking, it's a lot harder to feel up to messaging someone.
Also modern text conversations tend to drawn-out asynchronous affairs, while IMs tended to be more present in the moment, IMHO.
RIP Google Talk, 2013.
For me it was when my feed was sorted by date, not some algorithm pushing for higher engagement at any cost.
I want to control what I consume. The golden age was when that was the default for all sites.
I miss the web before the giant tech companies started stealing personal information and forcing ad interactions in _every possible way._
You know, those times when you were able to connect with your friends without some corporation injecting itself (e.g. IRC, AIM, MySpace and original FB), doing a search and finding a website (without having to scroll past sponsored links), and not being required to enter personal information to access everything.
Seriously, the internet feels toxic almost constantly now. I remember really enjoying it. Now I'm having to constantly fight it with tracker controls, advertisement blockers, and etc.
Wait, someone else who first experienced cDc from their fiction and not their tech? Tip of the hat to you.
Agree with all this, but I also miss things like early slashdot and early fark. And the weird, one off sites where you went to get your really strange content like ebaums's world and something awful.
Not part of the web, but I also miss Usenet.
@skinnylatte being able to post stuff without being at the mercy of whether an algorithm decides where the people who chose to follow you actually gets to see it.
I miss having more genuine and original creativity. So much particularly when it comes to video content is people doing copying a format or doing viral dances or using one of the same three songs that have been on half of the videos you’ve recently seen
The degree to which the web was chock-full of people pursuing their (often-esoteric) passions rather than trying to sell something.
I’m not anti-capitalist or anything, but I do feel like the balance has shifted a bit too far.
I date this to around ~2000, accelerated by the major social media networks in the late ‘00s.
People still have passions, I suppose, but even creative sorts seem to spend an awful lot of their time just… reacting… to things.
Exploration. Search engines are like dropping from orbit on a location. Blogs nowadays rarely link to each other and it's rare to find a little treasure trove of interesting content. Rather than being hyperlinked, it all feels disjoint and silo'd and monetized and dilute.
(Late 1990s)
Stumbling randomly into a highly passionate community of people who are very into something I have never encountered before, and it being separated entirely from my current knowledge base. Instead of everything being monetized, or broad appeal, or even profitable ever, just forums and people writing about.... something.
In the mid 90s I found a series of collaborative fiction pieces about tiny gods, mostly humor and similar, Greek myths with Douglas Adams rules, inc a god of typos.
Cloud interfaces (phones) are a lot like cars: you tend to get only get one, because you want the most modern and fast.
But having only one interface collapses work and play into the same device, the same space. So work and play are not very separate.
The advent of ubiquitous 'internet in your pocket' is roughly a decade old. I don't think we're fully aware of how it's warping culture.
I miss websites that tried to what they do well, the end.
Nowadays, I always feel like I’m playing defense against dark patterns, ad garbage, algorithms, SEO nonsense, and all the rest of the things that *have nothing to do* with the stated purpose of the website.
There are some exceptions, and those are the most fun places to be. It’s also why I adore small, personal websites.
The "blogosphere," particularly the local one. A couple of dozen folks, all writing stuff about the news and local events and food and all that, all of us linking to each other, reading each others' comments sections.
As Facebook became more ubiquitous, it just slowly petered out.
there used to be community-driven sites like Television Without Pity (detailed episode recaps of TV episodes from rabid but also critical fans) that got swept up into bigger corporate agglomerations trying to "monetize" the web
now those sites (including TWoP) are completely gone
I discovered this because I started rewatching the show E.R. on a lark, and I'd fondly remembered reading recaps of the show. but when I searched for them, they were nowhere to be found
I really enjoyed StumbleUpon. I miss finding all sorts of content on independent websites, each with their own look and feel. It felt like an infinite webring. I think the best part was the lack of comments from other StumbleUpon users.
I slowly stopped using it around the iPhone 3G release (2009?) since they didn’t have an app and I started doing most of my interneting on my phone.
I miss webrings and chunky graphics! Things these days feel too smoothed out and polished.
It's kind of like the Windows 98-era GUI aesthetic; it felt tangible but not to the point of skeuomorphism. I liked when my computer was making consistent visual metaphors.
I can't say this is really nostalgia, but I was at a place where we got a release of NCSA Mosaic 1.0 right about when it came down. NCSA ran a website called, "what's new with NCSA Mosaic" and there were few enough web pages that people would send notes when they stood up their first web server, and there'd be about a dozen a day.
There was a time when I'd visited about 75% of the then-extant web.
Single-subject web forums and the communities that arose around them.
FAQs and HowTos.
'Contact Us' sections that gave you an actual e-mail address to use and not a chat-bot or 'send us a message' box.
Bookmarkable URLs -- no single-page applications.
Long articles just being a long article you could scroll through, and not broken up into individual sections you have to click to get to.
Search engines that searched for what you told them to search for.
The hamster dance.
back when i was in the 5th grade or so (around 2002-2003) there were lots of flash games, i have fond memories of playing battleon.com's adventure quest, loads of really odd tiny flash games on sites such as weebles stuff, and we had in particular one site here that was really good: gratisting.dk (i think it was called) just loads of flash games and silly animated flash videos and songs
I don't miss the technologies from then, but i remember that period quite fondly
- I liked the DIY feel of old websites, like we were all still trying to figure things out, no mass-adopted formulas existed yet.
- I liked how people had to improve their computer literacy to do certain things, so skills were actually developed whilst using the web; browsing wasn't just a passive activity.
- Internet use inspired creativity.
not having complex client-side websites with thousands of lines of Javascript and ads, and tracking.
Gemini protocol really needs to become more widespread.
Mostly I miss Usenet, which I preferred to the web.
* Amazon was first to destroy their search (it's so bad, I usually now use Google to search for products.)
* Google search is starting to get annoying and FULL of sponsored results
I miss the golden days of forums, before Facebook groups
the golden days of Craigslist, before Facebook Marketplace
When we had to host our game servers and we could build communities, before instant matchmaking
I miss the days we could trust online reviews, before affiliate link blogspam and SEO gaming
I miss the days before every website and every app’s sole purpose of being became capturing and selling data about me, or filling my screen with of ads
I miss much more
weird enthusiasts building html shrines to some topic, designed in some unique insane way.
or, to be more precise: being able to _stumble_ across such projects as part of just strolling around the web, the way one stumbles across treasures in an unfamiliar city.
time: 1996-2006 maybe?
I miss the messiness. Every website was bespoke, and webcore looked like delightful garbage. It said something about the person who designed it. They put it there on purpose. It was human. Now everybody uses the same three templates.
I miss phpbb forums for niche topics. Tight knit communities full of unrepentant cringe. The joy of finding something truly bespoke and bizarre.
Some properties do not change Nowadays it is easier to search, but you still get lost
Resource scarcity, in two words...
Simple services rendered straightforward value propositions.
Twitter was arguably better when it was length limited, because the signal to noise ratio was higher.
Websites were more personal outlets because of similar dynamics.
Aside from the far right maturing into the medium and necessitating policing, now visitors are often "the product" and the content is whatever sugar attracts the eyeballs. The sense of safe exploration is just gone.
Good luck on the article!
I miss being able to search. Be it Google, or further back into previous eras, searches used to find more than just wiki articles or endless howtos or best of lists plastered with clickbait and malware. That was about 10 years ago I guess.
And you can add to that the loss of people actually seeing the internet in original form rather than filtered and windowed inside Facebook.
Facebook is the Internet now for most... that is the death of the Internet.
Not really a website, but I was into MOOs, or rather there was one MOO that I liked to hang out on.
That's defunct now, I guess there are others that are still going, or similar chat systems available today, but never found anything else that hooked me in the same way.
practically no dark patterns outside of mal-/junkware
almost everything is some level of deceptive now
and 
are changing my life again to the better!
websites with "personality" and individuality, content that was meaningful and informative with natural sounding copy (as opposed to highly redundant keyword-laden SEO-friendly copy), predictable and fully user-controlled interactions (as opposed to pop-ups and dynamic loading that changes the layout suddenly). Hard to say when that was for me as it changed gradually, but I'd say 10-15 years ago was still pretty good.
I don't miss modems, personally..
Never having to dig through a morass of SEO-driven text that exists to say as little as possible while getting eyes on the most ads.
People were full of shit plenty of the time, but it wasn't hard to find someone offering a sincere thought on something.
I miss geocities. Not cos I miss geocities but I miss a time when creating web sites was accessible and people were doing it because they loved it. I miss a time when something like geocities were able to be successful .
Ditto live journal etc
I miss visiting simple websites that do not have tons of effects and animations, auto playing videos, and a bunch of distractions.
I miss the simple pokemon site I visited that was just someone’s passion project. There were not accounts to be made, or ads plastered everywhere. It was just fanart, news, rumors, game info.
I miss being able to find what I'm looking for.
Search engines used to provide good informative links in the top five. Now I scroll down before even properly looking, because it's ads, selling, or sites that hijack your search terms.
Shopping sites used to show you the dozen relevant products only. Now they give you a few thousand items, most of which are purposely miscategorised.
Forums were subject-specific and topic-organised, so conversations weren't lost in everything else.
I miss the decentralized aspect of the internet. Websites. It often feels hard to stay in the loop with a game, a show or something.
It's just:
"See the full changelog on Steam"
"Download the patch on Discord"
"Follow on Twitter/Insta for updates"
For me it's the sense of possibility, that I could be a part of creating it by building and designing things. The move towards platforms and profile/template-based publishing destroyed that feeling (though it is re-emerging, albeit without the same feeling of awe).
On that last point, as a millennial it's a challenge to maintain a separation between (1) how the internet has in fact changed/got worse, and (2) my rose-tinted memories of how new and exciting it seemed at the time.
The treasure troves of people's personal websites. People seemed to share freely and build niches.
Then there was the lawless era of napster, limewire, and bittorrent that made media accessible for free and eventually closed the gaps between movie releases in the USA and the rest of the world.
The web back then was slow but diverse and rich. Now everything is peppered with ads, bloated, SEO optimized, and the same content is cloned and repackaged and gamified to be addictive.
I have never thought of missing old web days but now that you mention it what I miss is the feeling of not being exploited/digested/taken advantage of/be a product/etc that I experience now and that makes me be distrustful, careful, tired and worried about become addicted and water to much time when I surf. Let's say the experience has become less joyful and more tiring.
From the moment I got broadband internet (2000) to the moment Facebook got mainstream (around 2008 maybe). I liked that era because:
- people hadn’t started to expose their private life like it’s normal;
- search engines allowed for more diverse discovery;
- it was rather simple to do things online and offline.
This is as a user.
Now as a professional web developer, today is way more interesting and convenient, thou the reality highly sucks for a lot of jobs.
Useful search engines is one of the main things for me. They still worked 5-10 years ago but were already getting progressively less good at quickly giving you what you wanted.
Incredibly bloated websites.
There were always bad ones but today it's the norm.
Tracking, geoblocking, required logins and especially paid subscriptions became more and more normal.
Content farms, clickbait link lists on articles.
Also: algorithmic content suggestions.
They went from "meh" to... 1/2
It was like each meal was at a different, indie-owned restaurant where the chef really cared about the food and had his or her own charming quirks.
Compared to today, where the scene is dominated by a few big chain restaurants.
Meeting people online that made an effort to be at the same online place as me. Effortless participation seems to reveal people's worst traits.
Special interests sites and forums. Nowadays it seems everything's provided for on Reddit, Quora, Wikia (or whatever it's called now).
Not abusing http for purposes it wasn't designed for (chat, video, conferencing, DNS).
The websites I frequented were places I had to go out of the way to access intentionally. They weren't constantly appearing across platforms trying to vie for attention and clicks.
The platform took over the web and everything was forced to compete algorithmically against each other, instead of fostering their own audiences, they ate each other in front of the biggest possible audience.
I've been though the whole period and look upon all of it with fondness and appreciation for my experiences.
I don't long for any good old days though, I've always been working to build new, better days, and I've never been so excited as I am right now with the upcoming launch of truly autonomous decentralised technology from Autonomi.
So not AI. Jury still out there, but I see massive change and hopefully benefits beginning later this year from a sea-change in peer-to-peer.
Sensitive content
Reading this through #MastodonWebUI... oh well, where shall I begin...
Light websites, but also websites that'd be like the Mastodon web app without being CPU-heavy and memory-hungry.
Less empty space where content would be; more contrast in page content.
Faster transfer times (because usually all the JS and delayed loading just makes things worse, for example in Mastodon's web UI v4).
BPR (Before PageRank), when reach was views, when link farming was notionally to share links not get elevated results positions.
When web sites by individuals looked and were handcrafted, even if there was marquee and blink you could kind of ignore them.
Before we hated adverts.
This isn't nostalgia, it was a lighter, quicker more relevant environment. And we still did things that weren't web.
Good old (for me) was when you could do things online without intrusive "monetisation" thoughts. I run a personal website. Yet fight weekly with "is this a waste because money" which is just... Such a BS though.
A blog does not have to have a set schedule. No thinking about reaching an "audience" (they might find you, or not) or farming likes and engagement. Where no one is asking why you haven't setup a shop (with print on demand stuff) or a patreon...
the web was about freedom and discovery. We were going to topple dictatorships and meet amazing new people.
Web surfing was never a chore. “Can you believe this guy made a digital museum of zip ties, compete with forward and reverse zip sounds? I need to show my friends!”
Facebook and Google automated an essential human function: seeking. Then they segmented us into cages that never grow, and prod us with ads to engage and monetize us like lions in a victorian zoo.
Also, meta-information about what I'm reading: more and more it feels like I can't see who, when, and how an article was published on most websites.
Finally, there were no autogenerated sites that scrape stackoverflow and repackaged its contents with a different (and mostly broken) UI 😬
I miss being able to search for a product review and read the opinion of actual people.
It feels like the internet went from a communication medium to a monetization medium.
People just chatting and doing things for fun are being completely drowned out by marketing and manipulation these days.
I never thought I'd say this, but looking back, I kinda miss the pop-up ad infested web pages from 25 years ago. I didn't have to think about how they were trying to make a buck off me.
@Molly White I mis actually being able to read a web page without having to hunt for the actual content between ads. I used to be able to just mentally filter out the odd banner ad.
Nowadays, you go to click on something only to have some image load as you're doing it, causing everything on the page to shift and, surprise! You've just clicked on an ad.
This was late 90s-ish.
I miss social media — forums, IRC — that were about sharing a creative passion, supporting each other’s creation, developing a creative scene, and getting mad crushes on each other.
It’s become hard to find your people in a world where the business model is to show you ads instead of friends.
@iaravps I miss when the Internet was a people place, even in comercial social sites like YouTube and Facebook, where, now people work for algoritms and we don’t listen their voices anymore.
Lukly I feel some blogs are caming back and there are good podcasts here in Brazil.
I think people allways find a way…
I wasn't even around for what I'd probably consider the *good old days*.
It's a weird osmosis-nostalgia for a better time I never saw 🙁
Well... that and Club Penguin
While I miss using gopher, ftp and telnetting from campus to campus I wouldn't call them the good old days. I wouldn't really call any period that but I do miss the time when Google was just a new search engine, the blight of social networking was just Zuck's fever dream and advertising had not yet enshitified the web. I'm thinking 2000 - 2010, which unfortuately doesn't quite fit into any of the periods in your questions.
I'm a software engineer and have been online since '92.
I miss old IRC and old "talkers" - MUDs without combat where we could construct shared interactive text based spaces.
I also miss early Twitter when it was a mix of weirdos I knew and weirdos I didn't know.
Less centralization. Things like forums, personal blogs and personal websites.
Chat networks also used to be more open and you could use third party clients like Pidgin to connect to several of them.
More self expression. Every website looked different and showed the personality of the creator.
Flash games and animations also allowed a lot of self expression (even if the technology had issues).
Forums. Avatars, ugly signatures with cringe PC specs, and all.
(Yes, forums still technically exist, but the cultural/social context of forums, and its usefulness, is long gone)
If you haven't seen this Ode to the Olde web: joanwestenberg.com/books/p/c5x… mastodon.xyz/@Daojoan@mastodon…
For me, it boils down to a sense of discovery vs a feeling of surveillance
I miss the internet: a zine — Joan Westenberg
From writer Joan Westenberg comes a digital zine reflecting on how the internet has evolved over the past 20 years.Joan Westenberg
1) old-school forums. so much knowledge on a singular topic, all distilled into one place, with the experts on hand, because that was *the* place to talk about your interest.
2) IRC when it was simply "mIRC" to the unwashed masses. Laggy servers and netsplits. ahh. the nostalgia.
3) advertising; pop-under ads were not nearly as bad as we thought they were in the early 2000's. advertising got so, so much worse.
3.1) web-rings! 😂
[edit]4) *every* page had a view counter!
Before fear.
Before folks worried about cyberstalking (stalking but with bits). Hackers stealing your money. Identity thieves. Surveillance. Naughty bits. Being caught seeing naughty bits. Privacy to chat with friends without conversations being public. Disinformation. Advertising. Internet/social addiction. Cyberwarfare. Election interference. Ransomware. I experience today's #web through insecurity and anxiety and ad overload. I miss the awkward relatively quiet net of olde.
So many things from circa 1995-2003...
- bespoke HTML websites
- screencap galleries
- small, standalone forums of a few dozen people
- webrings
- stumbling upon a sole-authored celebration or tribute page to something super-specific
- not getting yanked into some algorithm soup
- most of the web was personal, hobby, institutions etc, not commercial, not adds everywhere, not making money as main goal
- collaboration, setting links
- useable without tons of JS
- howtos, tutorials in written text, not long videos
- no AI generated spam websites
- distributed personal sites, blogs, … not all the content on one of the big platforms
- not hundreds of cookies (and cookie banners), no analytics and surveilance
- fun and weird
Proper many-to-many threaded conversations on mailing lists that I could participate in, but also be caught up with at the end of every day.
RSS feed full of webcomics.
... I think that's what I miss, but I'm not sure I'd participate in them anymore. I never did figure out the best way to "sync" my reading "context" with my phone for either.
@philip
A vibrant ecosystem of different independent Forums, Blogs and ways to interact with people.
The forums were able to be curated by people who knew the community they were evangelising and were able to censor without being sealioned by trolls.
Too much advertisements.
Too many popups.
Too many proprietary big corporations.
I think that all stopped when Google decided they had to “beat” other companies. First Apple, then Facebook, the Microsoft…
When the Web still was the Net, and we hat IRC, FTP, netnews and gopher. I miss the discourse, the amount of cultivated humor, the fun of exploration, the spirit to be able to try new things without thinking about lawyers and big firms and their claims on who'd be allowed to say something that they "own". It was very innocent, very naive, but also very cozy with much camaraderie and solidarity.
Something that's been bothering me about lifetimes.
When I got to this section in the book, I couldn't (and still can't) understand why it's necessary to specify lifetimes for the references a struct holds. I mean, if I have:
struct Foo<'a> {
bar: &'a String,
}Shouldn't it just be assumed that the data referenced by Foo::bar should have to live at least as long as the Foo object itself? Why does this have to be explicitly stated? Is there some scenario where you would want this to not be the case?
Edit: formatting fix
Adam Hunt likes this.
Lifetime elision only applies on function signatures. It might be because no one has done the work? Though I think it's nice to be explicit that the struct holds a reference to something.
Explicit lifetimes would be necessary for a struct with multiple references (or I guess a rule that says they're either all the same or all unique). These are not the same:
struct Foo<'a> {
bar: &'a String,
baz: &'a String,
}
struct Foo<'a, 'b> {
bar: &'a String,
baz: &'b String,
}More info on the elision rules is at the Rustonomicon.
Lifetime Elision - The Rustonomicon
The Dark Arts of Advanced and Unsafe Rust Programmingdoc.rust-lang.org
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
&self and return a reference.
Yes, you can still buy 4K TV's that are not "Smart" (surveillance). They're called "commercial displays" and as a bonus, they're more durable, too.
Prices start at $550 US for a 55-inch Samsung model.
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...the first two Samsung results on the page you linked are smart though (and I thought all of the Samsung ones actually were)
also, I've seen a *lot* of NEC 42" dumb digital signage displays dropping like flies lately...
@fedops @bhtooefr Some “smart” TVs look for unsecured Wifi to phone home and report your viewing against known content hashes if you don’t give them access.
A better solution is to connect them to your network, but then use their MAC address to assign a fixed IP via DHCP, and block that IP from communicating out of your network via parental controls, or similar.
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@Joseph Teller Sure. The vast majority of what hits my feed comes from Mastodon though. The ratio there seems a little better. Even still, reading posts that way doesn't involve me being tracked to within an inch of my life.
If nobody else used both, sure, I'd "miss out" on that content. I can live with that.
So you'd put up with the sound of crickets to spite them all. Good luck with that.
I need to know what is going on. I don't have cable tv (a real corporate problem) and my "social media" include my local weather info (via Youtube) as does a lot of my news sources etc.
And ALL my interests are in things that no longer have magazines or newspapers exclusive to them, instead them have Podcasts, Youtube Channels, etc. Same with most of the folks I communicate with in my life (since I lost so many friends and relatives to the Pandemic).
It's not the 1990s anymore.
@Joseph Teller That's not really likely to happen though, is it? At least not in the near future. Besides, if everyone jumped ship, there would be no content there to miss out on to begin with.
My original point though was that singling out TikTok as the only problem is rather silly.
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Reading up on NES ROM programming.
For some reason, memory addresses 0x0000-0x07ff are mirrored three times (for a total of four identical regions of memory). In a system with such a small amount of addressable memory, why would anyone do that??
I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about how China might be using TikTok to steal our data and manipulate us...
But why aren't we at least as worried about the U.S. billionaires who own the other apps stealing our data and trying to manipulate us?
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yeah, I am pretty sure the law is not supposed to single out specific people and companies, but is supposed to ban specific behaviors.
But we live in a post rule society where the deplorables respond with "well, see if you can stop me!"
I hope they fight it in court, and hope they win, specifically so congress has to write into a law what they are afraid of, and we as consumers can sue Google or Facebook or Amazon if they are doing the same thing.
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I would rather the chinese communists have my data than the globe-spanning, endlessly warring US capitalist empire and its 1000s of forward military bases, globe spanning CIA/intelligence apparatus, and its forever increasing, bloated "defense" budgets that always seem to wind up used for offense.
Fuck this analysis. Its time to stop being a capitalist pig and put your feet back on the ground. We all share this earth, it does not belong to the US.
@shsbxheb and what do you think the communist party would do with your data if they had it?
Would they sell it to local law enforcement?
Will they help anti-abortionists?
Will they use it to attack LGBTQ/allies?
Would they use it to bar you from certain jobs in the US?
Would they use it to psychologically manipulate you into believing the victims of genocide are actually the aggressors?
Would they use it to promote right-wing politics?
What will they do with it, friend?
When Mark Zuckerberg puts his goal to remove the USA from the world in writing, because it is in his way, then I'll worry about him as much as the Chinese Communist Party!
Read more before putting takes like this out into the world.
"worried about the U.S. billionaires who own the other apps"
🤦
#tiktok is co-owned by Jeff Yass
*the* biggest #GOP donor
robert: he's the vice chair of the f***ing Cato Institute
tiktok users are funding the GOP and conservative desolation of the #USA
i've typed this comment 5-10 times in #mastodon
why do people not know this?
why the f*** do people have this ignorant belief tiktok is magically different from #facebook? it's the same plutocrat sh**
influencewatch.org/person/jeff…
Jeffrey Yass - InfluenceWatch
Jeffrey ‘Jeff’ Yass is an American investor, co-founder of the Susquehanna International Group, and vice chairman of the libertarian-aligned think tank Cato Institute. As of April 2023, Forbes estimates his total new worth at roughly $28.5 billion.Jeffrey Yass (Influence Watch)
@rbreich
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Yeah, and you have no choice about the location of the stack. Yippee!
The 6502 was designed around minimizing cost, and this is one fun example.
But to be honest, I've never found the limited stack size to be a problem in practice.
Jonathan Lamothe likes this.
@Jonathan Lamothe Depending on the specific system, complex asynchronous code via timer interrupts (or raster interrupts, or I/O interrupts) is possible, but only one "thread" should use the stack.
For example, by default the Commodore 64 has a timer interrupt to trigger code to handle keyboard scanning, blinking the cursor, and other stuff. It's a non-trivial amount of code, but it does not mess with the stack.
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A thing that's been stuck in my brain for a while:
A couple weeks ago, @Cory Doctorow wrote this blog post about how AI shouldn't be used to write code (edit: among other things). I agree with his rationale, but I can't help but be reminded of a (perhaps apocryphal) story I once heard about a similar argument being made against compilers in the early days of computing. The same kinds of arguments could've been made back then.
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in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to SP⟁CED GO⟁T • •screenfor many years. I somewhat recently switched totmux. Both are solid options, thoughtmuxseems more popular.