What made people so optimistic about the web in the 90s? When exactly did that optimism die?
>>108432892Its the natural progression of technology. Steve Jobs likened it to seasons from spring to winter. In spring, you have early adopters getting their first mover advantage. Summer is where they pour on the effort to make the most of it. Autumn is when they harvest the fruits of that labor. And by winter, the hot new thing is just table stakes now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7i9ru7HB8
>>108432892hard to pinpoint the exact date but some time in the early 2010, around 2012 or so
>>108432943Now, if you subscribe to this, you're constantly chasing the shiny. 90s web, 00s mobile, 10s crypto, 20s AI, 30s quantum, 40s worm holes, etc.
Oh you sweet summer child. You can't even fathom the idea of not having a way to connect with the outside world 24/7. I don't even mean this in an ugly way, just the whole world changed and most cannot understand a world without it if you've never lived it (or what it brought to our lives, good and bad). People take shit like IRC for granted but it laid the groundwork for all the modern text chats you use today. The magic started to die in the early-mid 2000s. By the mid 2010s you could tell less and less felt genuine. Now it's slop and all the old locally hosted shit is actively dying. I guess if I had to sum it up, it was once a wealth of knowledge and intrigue, now it's increasingly slop all the way down. Sorry for le reddit spacing btw.
this level of human communication, allowing tons of data to be accessible to everyone from everywhere, and the ease of use for getting fairly complicated tools into everyday peoples handsthat was really an exciting thing at the time, prior to the existence of the public internet doing that involves the handling of physical items, and travelthe web meant any book with any knowledge was out there for anyone to readapply this same line of thought to any medianow of course it didnt work that way in the end but the idea of it was super cool, and people who knew how big it was going to be were hyped about it
>>108432984Good post and it's not reddit spacing. Reddit spacing is unnecessary/compulsive newlines, not tasteful paragraph breaks.
>>108432943Only that every hot new thing is just making people's lives worse nowadays.Tech sould have never progressed beyond the mid 90s.
So many unrealized possibilities that nobody had even imagined yet, it was a sandbox of creative exploration.
>>108432892Most people seek to help one another, and want a brighter future. In a web context, a lot of the work was done by scientists and engineers, who are excited to build something with clear benefits for mankind and also happens to be cool as hell.But people forget, every generation, that the ones calling the shots are politicians and business people. These groups are only concerned with power and control, and their successes will inevitably result in a contraction of freedom on the whole. Therefore, every major enterprise starts out with promises from the leaders and optimistic workers, only to become retrospective falsehoods and an ashamed collection of individuals that are now realizing the bricks they stacked were for a prison.
>>108432892>When exactly did that optimism die?The moment that people started buying their teenage kids computers.https://youtu.be/VpAZPPCLCUI?
>>108432984Simple allegory, internet was like a super cool library at first, but now it's more like a pay per view cable tv shop with forced advertisements.
>>108433114We didn't know how good we had it
>>108432955social media ruined the net and society
>>108433125Just look at what media looked like back then. If you take away the internet from that equation and then compare it to now we have more.
>>108432892>What made people so optimistic about the web in the 90s? We were about to be connected with everybody on the planet!!!>When exactly did that optimism die?We got connected with everybody on the planet indeed... :(
>>108433128sounds right to me. i guess myspace was fun for a brief second.
>>108432984>The magic started to die in the early-mid 2000s. By the mid 2010s you could tell less and less felt genuine. Now it's slop and all the old locally hosted shit is actively dying.It started long before that. It was around the mid to late 90s when people started getting internet access to their houses and kids were allowed to use it.Do you see the case in my pic? Notice that it has a key lock. Something that modern computers don't even think to include anymore. It's just a simple ancient solution that fixes a problem with like 50% of the internet of it was used universally.
>>108433170>Pic rel.
>>108432892>Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.Google Project Xanadu. Ted Nelson figured out the web 30 years before.
>>108432892Because the web was exciting and you could make or find anything on it. Not like now where it's a pipe for corporations to shovel slop into and us to consume slop out of.
>>108433063>implying tech has ever made anyone's life better longer maybe
>>108432892>When exactly did that optimism die?I think that when internet culture began to proceed real life in how we interact with others on the internet, which was supplemented and amplified by social media access on smart phones, what was once considered a form of communication became an alternate reality not so different from something constructed by Hollywood.
>>108432892When contrarianism became the go-to view no matter what the subject was.That and the mass on-boarding of facebook-tier racists and low iq losers.
Remember how hard it used to be to find porn? Even just still images. Now we can find 1080p hardcore shit in about 30 seconds by typing porn into google. It just became a degenerates paradise
>>108432892> What made people so optimistic about the web in the 90s?Computers were still mostly exclusively for intellectual and hard working white people.
>>108432945damn that was actually deep
>>108432892>When exactly did that optimism die?once we all got it
>>108433176god take me back
>>108433525Depends on how far back you're talking about. I remember those clip sites that got updated daily with two or three clips from a movie back in the early '00s. The clips were just a couple of minutes and low resolution compared to today (and sometimes when you clicked a thumbnail you got transported to another similar "partner site" instead of the clip you wanted), but it was at least there and easily available.
>>108432892I remember a shitload of bickering about computers as a kid. Lots of industries had some form of "Now it's all done with computers!" gripe, and a lot of people clung to "I don't know computers".But it was an old dogs - new tricks situation. The threat wasn't "the computer will replace you", it was "you have to learn computers".Right now, a lot of people are viewing AI as "the computer does it for you". Problem is they don't understand you need a human to guide the AI.Agentic AI is much more of an actual threat to people's jobs. But it's still a situation where the tech savvy people are implementing the cool shit. It doesn't mean your non-tech savvy employee is suddenly able to do the same thing. But retards see they can publish a static web page and declare all software development over.It's tiring as hell.
>>108432892Anything was possible, you had access to not only your computer and resources but information now across the internet to other computers sharing their resources.You could join communities and talk with people about anything, you were no longer in a social pariah for wanting to get fucked in the ass by a horse.The optimism dying is the innate conclusion of everyone realizing that
>>108432892demographics + accessibility
>>108433053>is unnecessary/compulsive newlines, not tasteful paragraph breakstourist, go back
>>108432892We had fun, capitalists didn't know how to enshitify it yet.
>>108432892https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdelic
>>108433114>the last pic is now 12 years oldi shudder to think what it could be like now
>>108434395Literally no uIf you don't understand what I'm saying it means you are a tourist/shill who has "complain about reddit spacing" on your list of tips on "how to fit in on 4chan."
>>108434400The writing was on the wall as early a 1999. I remember Jeff Bezos winning Time's Man of the Year award.
Didn't it basically die with the dot-com bubble? Speculators ruin anything fun.
>>108433053>read 4chan archives>see "reddit spacing" in all the posts.Fuck off jeet
>>108436385Non sequitur.
>>108432892News websites barely existed, they weren't omnipresent to spread demoralization everywhere, you had to watch TV for that. The few boomers using internet were contained by swinger communities or internet radio.
>>108436385Only jeets are obsessed with reddit spacing as a way of showing in group
Sorry, but the reason is Japan. The internet provided the world a load of the omnipotent optimistic futuristic Japan of the 80s-90s.Anecdotal evidence: my childhood was shaped by emulated Japanese games downloaded with dial-up, many many of them
Don't get me wrong it got worse in the 2000s but nothing was as bad as once you introduced smartphones to people.That shit wrecked society.
>>108437096Yes, the computer was a filter. Only for people who seriously enjoyed the internet. The phone was a bridge too far. Casual lazy retards logging on and doing dumb shit.
>>108432892>>108432984>>108432997The backdrop in the mid 90s was the cold war was over, and the west had won. The internet allowed anyone to theoretically connect with any other user around the planet. This tied into the futuristic and neoliberal "one world" zeitgeist going around at the time.>>108432955>>108433128Really the internet died around 2003 - when Google AdSense came out. Those building/running the internet realized clicks and views had value. Once a profit motive became the main one, the free and creative feeling exhibited during web 1.0 was extinguished. Iterative refinement of attention hi-jacking algorithms and ad-tech over the years gives us what we see today.
