Why did it used to be so fun to be on the computer?

The old internet is still there. It's just dwarfed by the colossal amount of shit piled up on the shit sites.

As a general rule, stick to free and open stuff because the motivation of the people doing it is to give to the community, rather than make money. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin rather than Xitter and Reddit. Just stay away from Facebook. There are lots of old style bulletin boards still around for various interests, and they are often more used than FB groups.

I stopped putting adverts on my sites ages ago because I hate them so much. I don't want to be part of the enshittification.

I feel like it was the shift from having many small, tight-knit communities run by passionate people to having a couple massive, impersonal communities run by corporations.

Like, for example, back in the day I spent all my time on Worm's Sci Fi Haven. I knew everyone there, and built relationships with people. It was a healthy community run by a guy that really cared about fostering that community.

These days, the closest thing you can really get to that is a subreddit or a Facebook group. Even Lemmy, for all its good points, it's built to be a massive conglomeration of users - in opposition of the more "insular" communities of the past.

It was new and exciting, you discovered all the interesting stuff you could do with it.

Before the internet, you only compared yourself to your friends in terms of skill, it fostered healthy competition that drove your skills to be better.

Then came the internet, and it was great, specialist forums showed up, with roughly a few hundred members, may be a few thousand members for the really big ones, these were still small communities and you still could compete with your skill in a friendly manner.

Then came the big generic social media sites, and they were great, you could talk to anyone, share experiences with a truly gigantic audience and browse a never ending stream of content.

Then the big generic social media sites stayed, and their members created groups about the same thing that they used to go to specialist forums for a few years earlier. Why would you go to a specialist forum when you had a social media group available with just one click?

Then the admins of the old forums saw that users left the forums, and after a while with few updates and fewer new users, they saw that it wasn't worth it anymore, and closed the doors.

Over at the social media group, user's no longer competed with their skill against a small group of their peers, but against a truly gigantic group with people many, many times better than themselves, this have and will continue to kill enthusiasm for their work.

Then a switch flipped in the social media sites, content is no longer sorted by timelines or likes, but what drives engagement, still this seemed fine, as people obviously enjoyed engaging content, but trouble was brewing....

Members soon learned that they could game the system, the social media sites all uses a complex system to determine the best way to display content for maximum engagement, and members learned what made the system promote their content.

Somewhere along the line, sponsors came in, and started paying for ads in the content, then they started demanding that the rest of the content outside of their ads also conform to their standards, this made the content even more generic and formulaic, few content creators dared to be too different.

This is about where we are now, everybody is talking, but few are saying something.

You know? It wasn't always like this

Not very long ago, just before your time

Right before the towers fell, circa '99

This was catalogs, travel blogs, a chatroom or two

• Bo Burnham Welcome to the Internet

It was innocence. Before you were suddenly bombarded with every horrible thing man can do via sensory overload. I remember going on in 95-96 and it was chat rooms far as the eye can see. Now we have 8k war footage and carnage livestreamed 24/7.

It was a luxury. Now it's a necessity. If we don't have access it causes anxiety. If we have access we're being tracked

Because capitalism uses computers backward https://theluddite.org/#!post/capitalism-makes-technology-backwards. And it took them some time to figure out how to monitize the internet. You weren't always the product.

For me the old internet was an escape from real life. I hate crowds, so I preferred the internet in '94. It was fun, new and all other nerds were just like me, so I understood them (ok, most of them). Now 'normals' have taken over as well as companies.

Yea olde internet was for sharing useful information, learning and communicating with like minded, now internet is primarily for earning cash (companies) and having opinions sent out/manipulated. To much noice, not enough information.

It still is for me. Maybe you're doing it wrong.

Welcome to aging. It's been like this for everyone forever.

Edit: It's ok, go ahead and downvote. When you find smells are a little less intense, colors are a little less vivid, or experiences are a little less pleasurable, go ahead and blame others for that, right? Surely it doesn't have anything to do with your own inexorable march toward death? Knowing that things were better before now is a new phenomenon, never experienced before by any prior generation, right?

Edit: You'll see. YOU'LL ALL SEE

Mainstream internet today is ego-driven.

There used to be intent to the act of using a computer or going online

Nowadays we have access to the Internet and a computer at all times on our person

There was novelty and satisfaction with just being able to use it.

And as for the graph, well as it relates to the topic at hand:

And with the rise of social media and people always showing their best online you have people comparing themselves to those people who always show the good but never the bad parts of their lives. So people think they're doing terrible when infact their just doing normal.

And with the spread of negative emotion enforcing information online (which spreads via algorithms looking for what gets the most reaction and pushing it further (this is a whole topic unto itself)) you end up with a lot of people only seeing the bad in the world.

Not to mention the constant drip feed of dopamine from our little windows into the infinite. (Screaming righteous anger into a comment section, seeing funny memes, watching your favorite influencers do great in life)

You end up with a perfect storm of shit leading to a terrible feedback loop and people being unable to cope (and likely not learning healthy coping skills). Though it's not the only reason for it (as we can never truly know the mind of another or why they would do such a thing (I've torn myself up on that topic of for years about people I've cared about)) it sure as shit ain't helping.

I was a new Airline Pilot for a major u.s. operation as the internet and Apple Computers were simultaneously [pardon the pun] taking off.

AOL and other chat/message boards provided recently divorced me of that day, a plethora of social opportunities, far exceeding that which my former childhood church social habit, could begin to provide. I had to replace that habit as I had grown weary of the duplicitous sky daddy followers and their gatherings where they planned how best to shear the congregational sheep again, all the while crossing their fingers behind their backs.

All of these factors coupled with the company benefit of free travel which was as easy as grabbing my ubiquitous packed bag, and a quick drive to the airport, made all of the world I cared to visit easily accessible.

As a [still] budding writer wannabe, I recorded each of the encounters, using some likeness of the people, places and events to fuel a stack of Journals which contain enough fodder to keep Poe’s descendants busy for a considerable length. [3m+ words]

I am grateful that I happened to be in what was for me, the right place, right time, and enjoyed the growth years of the internet. Gone is the smorgasbord internet of my youth, replaced with that which is a more tenuous venue, one bereft of once prevalent h*man kindness and consideration.

It was new and exciting, with people constantly trying new things.

Now we're collectively running out of new ideas while rehashing old memories constantly trying to get back that old feeling.

The massive variety of website made by tons of diferent people's . Not uniform garbage we got today .

I think part of it at least for me why everything is less fun is that we have been on the same minimalist design for over 10 years now.

Novelty most likely

In response to the tweet: the years don’t align perfectly but I was a teen around then and I can think of a few explanations:

• There weren’t forever wars and it was easy to be optimistic after the Cold War ended
• Guns were unpopular (like the assault rifle ban passed Congress in 1994 and it’s hard to imagine that happening today since people fetishize guns now).
• Certain drugs temporarily went out of fashion. Heroin and crack, especially, had killed some high profile celebrities and MDMA was the “cool” new drug. Big Pharma hadn’t really started marketing opiates.

Those are just guesses but most people probably didn’t have full blown computers, much less internet, in 1994 so I doubt it had to do with that. Word processors and video game systems were pretty ubiquitous by then but I knew plenty of middle class people who didn’t have home computers that went online.

Well, I think I can mention some ideas.

Most of my social typing/messaging was with Windows Live Messenger so if I wanted to talk with somebody (or they with me) we would need to be connected at certain times, unlike nowadays when we are always "available" so in a nutshell, FOMO was a big player here.

Also I spent lots of hours in certain forums, my favorite was espalNDS, a forum that was mostly focused in sharing links for Nintendo DS games (yeah piracy was widely open before, nowadays people make it seem like a taboo lol), but as with many other communities users stayed because, well the community, the discussion, the sharing (threads), many years ago it was shut down because of piracy reasons (also the closure of Megaupload affected these sites a lot), and even some of the admins of the site were imprisoned... For a moment at least.

I also stayed in more forums, but that one was the most prominent for me.

Then the evolution for me, and many others was the social media, RSS feeds, then Reddit and nowadays Lemmy.

I still think I spend too much time on the web, but most of that time is not with a computer but my mobile.