this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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I'm deeply jealous of people who experienced the early internet. For me it has always been like this.
People say that early internet was like the wild west, and I agree. And I feel like a weathered old cowboy who saw my homestead on the frontier get surrounded by buildings, cars, industries, smog, noise, and the never ending growth of the population.
Capitalism fucked us all, and it keeps fucking us, and it will kill us.
In the early days, there were a lot of porn ads before ad blockers came along. There’s a nice sweet spot somewhere between that invention and the internet of today.
I was there when people when people were sending around Goatse pics and all our info came from Alta Vista.
It was pretty sweet, apart from the prolapse.
My dude, YouTube used to not have ads
The only time in my life I have ever seen ads on youtube is when I've watched videos on someone else's computer or through "smart" TVs.
I am genuinely shocked that anyone puts up with it. Then again, I get it, not everybody knows how to get around it, and, more importantly, they are working very hard and will succeed at eliminating the possibility to circumvent it.
I learned if you report an ad for being offensive it cancels all the ads after as well as ending the current ad immediately. And it just takes an extra 2 seconds and 3 clicks. Works on smart tvs, phones, and my Xbox.
I don’t even feel like I’m lying because ads inherently are offensive to me.
It's even worse - you can set it up for them, and one minor inconvenience later they're back to how they used it before, ads and all. A lot of people truly don't seem to care.
And Facebook used to just literally have your friends statuses show up on it and that was it. No ads or sponsored content.
But I’m also old enough to remember when getting somewhere involved using a map and asking for directions at gas stations.
Facebook was only glorious when it was made for college kids. The restricting of boomers and children was what made it great. It was the perfect app to boost/record the college experience.
Man, for all the advancements in technology, I fucking did this last week lmao.
My GPS was telling me to "continue to the intersection of Grand and 12th" then "take the third exit in the roundabout" when Grand and 12th was a stoplight and there was no roundabout in sight.
Well at least you’re well versed in the old ways.
I experienced a weird middle period because my parents had kids really late in their lives compared to most people. I experienced a lot of old tech because they liked to hold on to it. I remember my parents using maps to get around on a road trip and remember our VHS player but the first console I used was an xbox (though they never let me own a console 😔) and, because my parents were concerned about internet access, I didn't get online until quite late in life compared to my peers. So I am very familiar with the old tech native to the millenial and gen X generations but have only experienced the internet post centralization. Bless my parents for keeping me offline as long as they did, I think this was a net good, but damn it I wish I could have experienced the wild west age of the internet. It wish being online felt like an exploration.
Wtf? How did they make money?
It actually cost them a couple of billion a year to run it. Goal was to monopolize online video distribution before monetizing.
They didn't
Oh my sweet young man. The internet in the early days was very open source and about proving connectivity, at least with the little people like us. Monetization drove people away like crazy and we segregated to places that didn’t have crazy pop up porn ads every time we clicked on something.
In my opinion Bill Gates is the most responsible for ruining the internet. He used his money to go around to universities and governments and private entities around the world and convince them to start monetizing what used to be all open source hobby work that was bettering mankind.
"You don't really know what it is you have until it's gone. Gone...gone."