Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
Video title: “How to unlock the demon door on the fourth level of Demon Smasher Elite”
“Hello, video game fans! Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Last week I posted a video that isn’t relevant to this video, but I need to drag out the time on this one to game the algorithm, so I’m going to rehash and plug that video. I’m going to shout out to my Patreon subscribers with ridiculous usernames I won’t pronounce well. Now let’s get to the part you’ve waiting for: I’m going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter. Okay, now you’ve skipped forward to what looks like the area before the demon door part of the stage, but I’m going to talk about some unrelated anecdote about this game or maybe the game devs, and then plug my Patreon account and mention a completely different game that I’ll be streaming next. Oh and here’s the five seconds of the video you wanted to see when I tell you to click the right mouse button on the hidden lever next to the demon door in order to open it, except you aren’t seeing it because you skipped forward too far and gave up. Don’t forget to like and subscribe! This video has been brought to you by Nord VPN.”
Drives me crazy when I see this kind of format for things like programming. Nothing like pausing the video and trying to see what their code says.
1996 is on the latter end of what I consider the early internet, but I really miss the Video Game FAQ Archive (GameFAQs) which was murdered by a thousand cuts culminating in the death of the gamefaqs.com domain. FAQs used to be so good, these days the same information is dispersed over 50 pages of an HTML “guide” that is more ads than information, and often for less complete information, if it’s not just a YouTube video that’s even worse and shows you things but doesn’t explain them at all.
Wikihow is pretty good. Most offer a written and illustrated article as well as a video
Same. I missed those days where you can just control F to the part of the page and get the info you wanted. Now it’s wait for 2 ads to play, scroll through the intro and then a bunch of scrubbing to find it.
Has writing really become that hard to do?
It’s probably more to do with discoverability and monetization. I’m generalizing a ton, but I feel like there isn’t even a ton of super useful YouTube tutorials outside of beginner content because that gets the most views.
YES, this is such a peeve for me!!! I’ve developed an aversion to viewing video content unless it’s for something I truly need to see done. And even then, I’m more likely to check wikihow and endure their gifs than I am to watch someone’s video. It’s just so overdone.
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@bstix Yes. Also when you’re blind, software tutorials in particular are either 15 minutes of nothing but music, or someone going “to do x thing, all you need to do is click this button, drag this slider to here, click this until it says this, type this into there, and you’re done.”
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
@bstix soon will be very hard to find written ones that aren’t done by AI and full of dubious info.
@bstix damn, I thought I was alone with this. It’s incredibly frustrating that everything is a bloody YouTube. My theory is that people dream of those €€€s coming in from viewers.
@bstix It’s that writing doesn’t earn money like YT does. :(
Well, we write detail rich, history filled, alternative versions presented tutorials and how tos all the time on CoffeeGeek.
They can be found here:
@bstix@feddit.dk @Provider@feddit.de
Written tutorials are not hard to do, but before I tell you what they are, just a reminder to like and subscribe to this post, it really helps me out.
Now let’s dive in!
Written tutorials are just not as easy to “monetize”
I know what you mean. “-site:youtube.com” has become part of a lot of my Google searches.
@bstix @Provider I’ve been a programmer for over a decade. I inevitably spend part of every day searching the web for very specific or very general problems. Not once have I watched a video to find those answers. There is nothing more boring than watching someone else write a todo list app (seriously, stop making these) for exactly 10:01 minutes.
@bstix @Provider I love Instructables.com
@bstix @Provider I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing) but I can tell you that this not the first time I’ve seen this complaint and it has had an impact: I had several tutorials to produce this summer and planned on doing them as videos. As the summer approached I saw comments like this and switched to blog posts instead. So, I just wanted to let you know you’re not shouting into the void.
I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.
@bstix 💯 embedded videos forced to fit into 256x256 pixels where you can’t read shit.
@bstix
And wondering why you need X or Y that doesnt relate to what youre doing only to find out it was a commercial 🙃
@Provider @rhinocratic@bstix @Provider I was one of the guys who used to write those, for Microsoft and others. I was at Microsoft when the boom dropped and most and most written documentation projects in favor of minimal on line help files and CBT (pre-video scripted feature demonstrations. The project (the Word for Windows technical manual) was shuffled to Microsoft Press, which didn’t want it, leaving me in the middle. Fun.
@bstix @Provider
Heard on NPR this morning, that UNESCO has declared “computer learning” ineffectual. It goes with a study I read some years back that showed that retention is poor when reading from a computer screen instead of textbooks containing the same information. Physiologically speaking (brain function), a textbook provides tactile and spatial memory “hooks” that the sameness of a computer screen does not, that enable superior recall at a physical level. “Muscle memory” if you will.deleted by creator
This is one oft the longest Threads I’ve eher Seen in lemmy.
OMFG this so much. Especially since most tutorials are ponderously slow and tedious. At the other extreme, are the ones with no subtitles and no sound where you are expected to follow a cursor flying around the screen clicking on things and are supposed to understand what happens. Those in particular should die in a fire.
Oh gosh, this! I am way better at picking up what is relevant to me in a text article while scanning a text than waiting for thing to happen in a video. It’s so infuriating sometimes. Also, video streaming is using so much data that I would rather not do it when I am using mobile internet… So yeah, bring back text based tutorials…
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@bstix @Provider Agree, provisionally. I mean, I do a lot of stuff where the visual element makes a great big honking difference & if someone tries to describe it in words & aren’t absolutely amazing at it, meaning can get really lost in written directions.
On the other hand I absolutely adore the printed how-to book that came with my 50’s sewing machine & it is, in fact, very meticulous in describing the physical situation (OK, it also has some drawings) 😊
Yeah, you could skim pages, or read thoroughly, search in the text, easily jump back to the previous paragraph to skim a bit again, google (or DDG) for terms you remember from an article to find it again, etc.
Not just tutorials, I enjoyed reading tech or product reviews, like the original Anandtech when Anand was there, that all seems to be going the way of obnoxious youtubers.
@bstix
I couldn’t agree more. I want a manual. A text. But I don’t think it’s writing that’s become hard to do - a lot of people just really hate to read.@bstix A friend once said “videos are for marketing; text is for instruction” and it made it all make sense.
@bstix The ones that annoy me are the youTube videos that are text on the video but just a music overlay… no verbal instructions at all and since Ic an’t see the video period it is useless to me.
Has writing really become that hard to do?
The cynic in me says yes.
@bstix @Provider Same. I hate video tutorials. I play a lot of video games and sometimes I need to look something up, which sometimes means I get lucky and someone has written a decent walkthrough down, but often times means I have to start and stop a damn video over and over and over to get the information at the pace I need.
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@bstix @TechEnthusiast 100% This is especially annoying when I’m trying to find out how to do something in Python or whatever programming language I happen to be playing with. I am blind and use a screen reader. If the text is written, I can review word by word, line by line, character by character, ETC. This is important when trying to learn programming.
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@bstix everyone wants to be a movie star
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@bstix @Provider @gvwilson writing is as hard as it ever was, but monetization of ad-hoc tutorial content is far easier and more lucrative on youtube. People are literally being paid to pollute your search results with video.
I’m actually optimistic; I think eventually youtube will face too much flak for this kind of garbage, it’ll start affecting viewership, they’ll tweak the algorithm or the partner program to punish bad tutorials and there’ll be a renaissance of the written stuff.
@bstix @Provider God yes. I recently bought a bottle of rum that has a ridiculous ball valve built into the neck so my first attempt to pour it yielded nothing. Googled it & a YT video came up—something ridiculous like 7 minutes or longer—that could have been handled by a single sentence on the label. (Or better yet, not using a ball valve)
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@bstix couldn’t agree more!
Most of my students preferred video, even if with very few exceptions slides + text was better for them (for the stuff we did).
Also *good* video takes forever to make, good text+image tutorials slightly less forever but the search is much easier!
@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don’t need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I’d have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.@bstix best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04
You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.
@bstix @JenWojcik Agreed, life’s too short to watch people’s tedious meandering videos.
@bstix @Provider I’ve talked with several people who have multimillion follower accounts on youtube, and their experience is just like mine: you can spend x amount of time on writing a detailed blog post with pictures, or you can spend 3x that time making a video, and the video will get at _least_ a thousand times more viewers than the blog post.
One of my videos has gotten approximately a quarter million more views than everything I’ve ever written online, combined.@bstix @daviddlevine 💯 And you didn’t even include text searchable!
@bstix @Provider It isn’t that writing is hard to do, it’s that it’s hard to monetize and get Google to care enough about to suggest people to read it over checking out a video on a platform they own.
I’d love to just do written content 100% for all I do, but it’s becoming sadly apparent that having no video element is missing out on a large audience these days.
@bstix @Provider Too many people’s attention spans are mangled beyond repair by TikTok culture, which is a purposefully brain degenerative thing. I feel so strongly about this stuff I will usually unfollow someone who posts primarily video clips. When I want a video, it’s because it’s something I went looking for on purpose. Not because I can’t follow linear thoughts. (Yeah, color me crabby, but since you brought it up…)
@bstix totally agree… transcripts are like the only other option or setting the video speed playback really fast…
@bstix I don’t think it’s because writing things is hard but people have become increasingly passive. Why sit down and read for an hour when you can just have someone explain it to you in only 15 minutes
@bstix @Provider
I felt the same until recently. I find concentrating very hard to the point of leaving the cinema early for about 8 in 10 movies.However I have become a huge fan of Fireship on youtube where the videos are very short (e.g. 100 seconds) and also amusing. For example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRMPKQweySE@bstix @Provider I recently canceled my membership with medium.com. It used to have a nice number of professionally written and useful texts (at least on programming topics) but now every single text I open is ChatGPT written with nothing useful in it.
@bstix @Provider Video tutorials are the thing to do now because they can be packaged into a saleable course, and also because it’s easier to be discovered on Youtube than on the open web. It sucks because coding and related topics definitely work better in written form. Most of us are able to read faster than watch.
@bstix Sometimes it really is easier to show than to tell. Video tutorials make a lot of sense for navigating complex bike maintenance procedures. Much easier than reading the documentation provided by SRAM, for example.
@bstix i totally agree with that. videos are ok if they demonstrate how to do manual things like repairing a bike chain or drilling holes or even cooking things. but with cooking the usefulness of videos ends. mostly a written receipt is much better, more informative and faster to get than a 20 minute video of how to make pancakes. and videos that imitate computer tutorials are absolute nonsense. maybe for repair work like switching ram or installing some hardware, but even then i’d prefer a written instruction. you can’t really fast forward videos but you can easily skim a text or search for special words in it.
@bstix I absolutely prefer written tutes, but youtube makes it easy to get paid for content, so there is incentive to favor video. Those of us who prefer the written form need to think about how to achieve similar compensation for a given time investment by creators.
“Has writing really become that hard to do?” According to Grammarly, it has! 😒
Other video peeves: background music too loud, person in vid trying to be a comedian, insufficiently rehearsed (“Umm, er, uhh, now take this wire and uhh … what was I doing? … umm … how come this isn’t working? …”), etc.
@bstix Worse, you wait through 2 unskippable ads to find out if this is really the video you want.
@bstix @Andrewhinton So say we olds.
@bstix @Provider In the tech publishing industry, a lot of folks bought into the Facebook-sponsored lie that Millennials don’t read and only watch videos.
Pragmatic Bookshelf still has some great tutorial-based books, and DigitalOcean has excellent free tutorials on a variety of tech topics. (Disclosure: both of those are former employers of mine.)
@bstix God, I feel this. It doesn’t help that many written tutorials have been ceded to sites with sketchy or flat out wrong information.
@bstix @Provider Facebook murdered the written word by lying to advertisers about engagement with video content. Straight up lying through their teeth.
And now I’m on the point of dropping a number of youtube channels I’ve subscribed to for YEARS because the algorithm is strong-arming them into pumping out “shorts” and my feed is drowning in 20sec auto-repeating portrait-mode videos. NO!
I want short informational text and loooonnnng droning background video, thanks!
@bstix
As a technical writer, I can’t agree more. Video tutorials are time sinks for most topics. I absorb a lot more information if it’s text I can refer back to.@bstix I agree, but note that YouTube pays people who create popular tutorials, something that was never as lucrative for people writing
@bstix this, but also sometimes I do need the video tutorial for certain things
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@bstix I usually run youtube tutorials through https://github.com/obra/Youtube2Webpage to convert them to a usable format.
@bstix @Provider Flip side: I started a project to teach people obscure skateboard tricks (blatant plug: www.freestyletricktips.com). I wanted to cover both sides, so I made videos, took screenshots from them, and made a website to write detailed information that was easily skimmable, searchable and translatable.
Something like 90% of the audience go straight to Youtube - and then ask questions covered on the website! It’s maddening.
@bstix When I learn something new I write it down and hope to put it somewhere on the web where people find it. Sadly shit like steck exchange don’t allow that. So I have some blog entries and some github snippets and other things. Just hoping the search engines will find that.
Sadly they all return youtube videos because google needs to make money and doesn’t care about search anymore …
@bstix @Provider Agree. However, written manuals don’t generate revenue for the maker (and Google).
I used an installation technicians’ manual today to troubleshoot one of my heating/cooling thermostats. The manual was smaller than A4, printed double-sided in a small font with small pics. It contained a busload of useful information. For the makers of such devices, enabling technicians to use and troubleshoot them easily, massively improvers their market adaptation and number of support calls.
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@bstix @Provider I suspect the first video provider that provides searchable captions to jump to a point in a video has a chance to beat out YouTube.
YouTube does have automated captions, and Google leverages this for some searching, but looking at a specific video and trying to find the relevant part is…more complicated, even when the video creator makes chapter bookmarks.
@bstix ☝☝☝☝ THIS!! THIS!! THIS!! THIS!! THIS!! THIS!! 💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
@bstix Oh my god yes. I spent $60 every few months on one of those thick-ass “How to Adobe Photoshop” books with an included CD, and worked through the tutorials chapter by chapter, and that’s how I learned every computer skill until the early 2000s. Textual tutorials that are well-written and well-edited are POTENT because they deliver skills into your head as quickly as you can absorb it.
Bonus: *paper* books have the advantage of sitting NEXT to your computer and not taking up a third of your screen real estate, which was super important 30 years ago when screens were tiny.
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@bstix I have watched some very good video tutorials on how to do stuff in Excel and how to make things in wood. But I agree that it does depend a lot on the person doing the video, and the majority are really bad and to be avoided
@bstix That’s the wrong question. Putting tutorials online instead of providing printed tutorials is one of the ways organizations cut corners and cut costs. Now, watch people normalize their experience by responding to you, “YouTube provides transcripts!” And they do (go to a video, click the three dots icon under video on right, see “Show Transcript” link) but a transcript isn’t usually written by a professional tech writer.
@bstix @Provider I don’t mind some video tutorials. When you’re learning a specific technique or it’s a more thinky thing, sure. When I’m trying to configure a device/program, or doing builds for characters in a game, yeh, it’s bloody annoying.
I’m just thankful the cooking world still relies on written recipes. To the point that almost all recipe articles have a “jump to recipe” button these days. Hell, any video of a recipe worth its salt has a link to a written recipe 😆
A written tutorial is quick to skimm for those that know, what they don’t know.
But if you don’t really know, what you need to know, a video can be life savior. I’m sure you’ve tried desperately to figure out, where that exact setting is located, when the written tutorial is a bit vague about it. Or the system has changed, since it was made.
@bstix not hard, just hard to monetize
@bstix I feel like the basic unit of communication for young people now is the video and not the written word. IMO it is inferior but so it goes…
@bstix @Provider @stuartl yes unfortunately.
https://flameeyes.blog/2021/10/05/reader-is-dead-but-what-about-writers/
(Don’t get me started on bad video tutorials https://flameeyes.blog/2017/11/29/are-tutorials-to-blame-for-basic-it-problems/)
@bstix @Provider “Has writing really become that hard to do?” Yes, reading is harder now for them, so you can imagine how hard writing is. Not only that, for the newest generations even watching a long video can be hard, what would explain the success of tiktoks, reels and all that crap.
Even worse, in a short time, if not already, AIs will read for them and will explain as if we were 5 year-old kids.@bstix
Might be more of a “reading is too hard” problem. I know a lot of people who don’t like written manuals/tutorials, and a few who refuse them altogether.Over the past few years I’ve adapted to this stupid trend by watching videos at max available speed and skipping like crazy. It’s a bit like skimming a page - still stupid, but I can usually distill a 10 minute video down to the usable minute quickly
@Provider@bstix you’re absolutely not the only one
@bstix agree. The reason is even sader.
Web-Search (google) is broken. It was okay. Now it’s not anymore. You never find written tutorials. All you find is SEO BS with affiliate links.
YouTube search still is kinda okay. Therefore you/we get better results there.
Side note / small hint in the meantime: when scrubbing the video look at the location that’s most popular. That’s usually the interesting bit.
@bstix @Provider A 3 minute video where someone shows you how to change your car’s headlights does tend to be better than a text description.
But it’s no longer a 3 minute video. It’s 25 minutes with a 5 minute sponsor segment, 15 minutes of faffing about, 3 minutes to plug pateron, 1 minute of intro and outro, and then 1 minute where they show the changing of the lightbulb but they cut away to a wide shot so the host can be shown clowning around and you can’t tell what he did.
@bstix
Y.E.S.!
@Provider @Rusty_invader@bstix @WideAperture true that. “I’m a visual learner “ is all well and good, but why not cut to the chase, with your eyes? 🤷
@bstix I’m always conflicted on this. I find written instructions hard to understand so I absolutely need something visual. But Youtube videos rarely help.
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@bstix @Provider Yes, here a discussion https://forum.waarneming.nl/index.php/topic,505255.msg2568877.html#new about the document manual
Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own ‘homepage’ (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem’s noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.
You were excited to get email because it was almost always from a human being who put meaning and intent into their message. It was like getting a handwritten letter compared to all the random terms of service update emails from a service you haven’t used in four years and emails from a service you didn’t sign up for because someone else thinks your email address is their email address and the outright spam in the filter.
Yes, agree and remember. I lived in very many different places in the late '90s. Often, the only method of communication was email. No landlines sometimes and certainly no cell phones.
I can’t remember the last time I got a personal email. I get some rather lovely ones from my colleagues, but a personal email is a letter, and nearly as extinct.
Lmao me too, a stats counter with like 13 visits
15 of those were me
And then my co-student refreshed the page a 1000 times for laughs and the counter went up, because I didn’t install a cookie with an IP check.
Now everything is stuck in corporate silos and largely out of reach.
I miss the somewhat more decentralized and anonymous nature of the early Internet and the Web. People were more likely to have their own Web site with their own shitty personal flare. Services were more infrastructure than ways to monetize the masses. Everyone was busy learning and trying out new things instead of just mindless content consumption or broadcasting their basic-assed opinion.
Things seemed more substantial. But also anonymity granted people the ability to not be judged by their failures. So trying things was less personally risky and easier to fade away in time.
Maybe I just got old. I would love to get back there, though.
People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.
There was Internet before Web servers.
When I think of the early Internet, I’m usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.
If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.
Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.
There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.
It’s been downhill ever since.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Edit: typo
Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.
Less ads.
Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.
I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn’t an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people’s accents.
I think it would be the separation between “real life” and “online life”.
Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.
Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.
I miss the anonymity that was the “default”, when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.
Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.
I remember:
- CompuServe chat rooms
- Playing Neverwinter Nights, the “original MMO” some say, on CompuServe
- Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
- Usenet and FTP
- mIRC
- Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
- Penny-Arcade
- Something Awful
- New grounds
- stickdeath.com
- Rotten.com
- Ogrish
- all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
- Fark
- Digg
Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.
There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I’m pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.
Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little “bus” that somebody could “drive” and all move to a different web site together.
So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn’t very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.
Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn’t make it. RIP PhotoVine.
What’s sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.
I mean, it’s great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it’s all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It’s not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It’s monotonous. It’s artificial. It’s driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it’s not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there’s lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don’t already know about it?
What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.
I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.
Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you’re doing or selling you crap.Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.
Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They’re being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.
I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn’t always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.
Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.
I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.
Back in the mid 90’s, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft’s Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don’t miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don’t miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).
Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn’t a thing for quite a while.
I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I’ve used ever since in various careers over the decades.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That’s when I noticed a big shift in online communities.
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.
Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It’s work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.
In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging
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