In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You’d stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.
The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to “maximize engagement” at all costs. They’re all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.
The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There’s no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it’ll be a bunch of low effort “Top ten” lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.
Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t push anything on you. It’s just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.
When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was “What a novel idea, but that won’t work” before taking a moment to remember that’s just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.
I’ve just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020’s Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.
In the 90s it always felt exciting to go online and see what interesting things you could find. There was no AI driven dopamine feed to keep you doom-scrolling passively for hours - you had to actually go looking for stuff. You’d stumble an interesting website, then follow links from there to other things. Finding a cool website felt like an accomplishment. It really felt like something special.
The internet has now turned into half a dozen walled gardens blindly trying to “maximize engagement” at all costs. They’re all competing to just retain eyeballs as long as possible with low effort content shoved down your throat.
The rest is a bunch of blogspam fighting for the top page of Google. There’s no use even bothering to search for things anymore, because no matter what you search for it’ll be a bunch of low effort “Top ten” lists, probably written by AI, containing just enough superficial bullshit optimized for SEO to make it to the front page of Google.
Wikipedia is probably one of the few places you can still experience what the 90s internet was like. You can spend hours going down a rabbit hole, but it doesn’t push anything on you. It’s just there, waiting to be discovered, if you want it.
When i first heard about the fediverse, my immediate reaction was “What a novel idea, but that won’t work” before taking a moment to remember that’s just how everything used to work. The Fediverse is just Usenet.
I’ve just become so brainwashed by the dystopian hellhole of the 2020’s Internet that I forgot what it was, and what it could become again.