this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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That's an exaggeration. We had nice things back then with forums and ICQ\AIM\others, which we don't have now, but the tech allows us to have them. It's the society that has degraded.
The technology is working against it too. App search engines are just spam ads now and will never find that niche forum that has what you are looking for, like they once did 20 years ago.
I remember finding them in web directories, populated manually by people, and from people sharing links.
A search engine was the brute force approach, and you'd find something useful after some manual work on 20+ page of results.
I think a lot of stuff got adjusted when mobile became a thing.
Instant message apps just got replaced with Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
Monetisation is a huge problem. Nobody ever expected to make money off a wonky old webpage they made in HoTMetaL, or a MySpace page. Now everyone is on homogenised platforms, they're quite happy to accept bucketloads of money to project whatever you have to say to the masses, and none of it is good. All the hate you see out there isn't society. It's money.
This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn't seen in a while and it's wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don't use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like...how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They're so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.
And that, I think, is the core difference. It's not that the phones took over, it's that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.
And that's the entirety of the modern internet. It's why tiktok is so popular. It's why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It's why Twitter took off. It's also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn't that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website's leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.
I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it's different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you're a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it's building and building and it seems like it'll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you'd appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it's just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.
I just want to say that you’re absolutely wonderful with words!
Alternately, Whatsapp, Signal, etc... are instant message apps. I'm a little surprised none of the messaging apps that had been popular on PCs managed to stay popular on mobile.
I know, right? No matter how rude I am on one forum I still frequent, or in a groupchat of friends, or in family chat, it just dissolves because everybody wants to understand each other. In "global" social media it's some PvP, as if people didn't have boxing pears to vent their frustration there.
Forums are still around. People just got lazy and started using reddit instead. Search engines are also to blame since they don't bring up smaller forums in search results. People can go back to forums if they want.
That's the point. One can think what they want, decide and go there. Or one can just leave their home and walk with the crowd wherever it brings them. (A metaphor.)
Social media make it appear like you could live a life like the latter. Doing all things you need. Just walk with the crowd and never decide.
People are afraid of even the tiny bits of freedom, when they are looking at it from that human stream which never leaves them. They think that outside of it, if a decision they make is wrong, they are lost.
It's psychological, all of it, like a very subtle and less deadly slaughtering block.
Reddit is a forum. If you don't think so I'm curious to know what differentiates it from one.