That's the spirit. I hope this did not discouraged you in any way. This post was never intended to bring you down, but rather to raise some awareness to how beautiful the internet could be...Yes, I'm making this up. Tbh it was just a literal showerthought - I did not think this would discouraged anyone. I'm very sorry!

I don't ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.

In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you'll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there's no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.

That's the spirit! One of the great things about the Internet is we can build our own alternatives, like with Lemmy and DIY servers. My friends and I have our own little Internet ecosystem. Outside of some Lemmy time, my personal Internet usage is largely served by our arrangement.

What do you use as a Google Photos replacement?

Well, at least we have Lemmy.

I dismiss this comment because your age and race are ambiguous and everything else! /S

Seriously though I kind of feel like Lemmy has at least some of that nostalgic feeling. Surfing through instances, finding that one semi-active obscure interest community you fit right in with. It's definitely not the same but nothing stays the same.

The worst comment section of all belongs to Instagram. Absolute cesspool full of the most moronic people i've ever witnessed. Smart phones killed the internet. We need something that isn't THE internet, and is only accessible if you have the patience and knowledge to connect to it.

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Marketing ruins everything.

well, at its heart, the 'www' was supposed to be a bunch of documents linked to each other contextually... in a similar vein Wikipedia handles things

you ever try and use the web without images? genX remembers.

Social media empowered narcissistic self-publication, which is one of the main things that ruined the Internet.

The problem is that the subject of discussions was moved from objective topics to the self. Every topic being discussed is now tainted with the insertion of the self as part of the topic, for the purpose of garnering attention to the self. Instead of the topic being discussed, now it's "Look at what I'm talking about, isn't this interesting what I'm telling you?"

I think the Internet really did make people more knowledgeable overall, but my personal theory is that, as a collective, we are in the area of knowing that dunning-Kruger effect takes place. With our current collective intelligence machines really crystallizing that to me, where if ask an LLM something it doesn't know, it will act like the average person on the internet and make shit up and assume it close enough.

The information age really speaks to the idea that information is not knowledge, but knowledge can be formed from information. I think the next major revolution and why social media algorithms, AI, data science, etc are so hot is because they are attempts to enter the knowledge age. To take all of this access to information and truly learn something from it, at the same scale.

i think the fact they use every psychology trick to hook and deceive them has some significant impact in this.

Please don't get me wrong: I have the greatest respect for all those who try against all odds. I just think that the idea of the Internet utopians was that the Internet would promote enlightenment, understanding and education. I simply have the impression that the opposite has generally happened.

Your post gives vibes of elitism... I don't think your intelligence argument holds any water. The Internet of the late 90s/early 00s was easy to access.

The difference from before is the advent of social media. The stupid have been on the Internet for a very long time now. But you would't hear them much.

I know we had bulletin boards before, but social media, particularly Facebook IMO, allowed more people to express themselves and gave everyone an audience.

Also the rate of change is accelerating.

No sign of slowing down yet. Except maybe for wind but hopefully floating comes into its own in the next couple of years.

40% renewables for electricity.

Not to make perfect be the enemy of good, or to poo-poo that progress…but electricity is only 1/3 of GHG. And demand for electricity goes up with the move towards EVs, so while we take the energy out of the “transportation” column, we put it into the “electricity” column, at a 60% discount.

Thats…good. It’s progress. But it’s honestly such a baby-step in the grand scheme. We should be using green energy and EVs exclusively by now, and significantly cut down on meat and dairy consumption. We should be a lot further by now.

I blame Nader, the hanging chads, and Bush v. Gore…but mostly Nader. Had he not run in 2000, the majority of his voters, particularly in FL, would’ve voted for Gore. Nader got 97,488 votes in FL. Bush won by five hundred and thirty seven votes. That…the spoiler effect that resulted from an idealist candidate (and the shortfalls of FPTP, not to mention electoral college), is making perfect the enemy of good.

The same could also have been said of NH, by the way. 22,198 votes for Nader, Bush won by a margin of a third of that. Either FLs 25 or NHs 4 EC votes would’ve flipped the election and the course of history.

All probably true, but all the technological progress has done little to change the fact that we continue to destroy the world we live in with our eyes open. This is my point: technology is generally not used for the good of humanity, but for monetary gain. If we wanted to, the world could be a better place, but we don't use our resources that way - they are not managed by the general public, but by people who don't have the good of humanity in mind. I think the Internet is a good example of this: Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the www protocol, didn't earn a cent from a patent or something like that - he was just interested in scientific exchange at the time. In my opinion, that's a true hero, not Steve Jobs (he was a great businessman tho).

As far a I know the porn industry has actualy driven innovation in various web-technologies including streaming, e-commerce, VR...and now probably AI, I guess.

The Internet is really really great 🎶

Social media is a huge part of the problem..

Stop using social media and 90% of the internets issues stop affecting you.

Search is still fucked tho

Thanks so much for that link! I have the impression that the point has been reached where there are enough users to abandon all open standards, which were certainly necessary to achieve a relevant user count in the first place. Now the so-called platform economy has become a reality. That was inevitable, I guess. All major social networks have been working towards this for a long time.