For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.
At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.
I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.
Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.
But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.
After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.
The cool kids (nerds) later just used Pidgin or whatever, but I remember that era as being the first intense competition over the internet. Probably says more about my age than anything else.
For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.
(I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)
As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)
The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.
Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.
Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
It was great for budding musicians of all types though
> Physical contact with infants was considered harmful to their development, and this view led to sterile, contact-less nurseries across the country.
A view which these experiments apparently contested, and now is probably widely regarded as abhorrent.
Poor monkeys though.
> Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.
I don’t know how one (especially anyone who has raised a child) could think contact is less important in humans or that this doesn’t generalize.
Damn that analogy hits hard.
Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?
I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.
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On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)
Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.
I made a fun thing this week for nostalgia:
POST https://allthedamn.tools/api/pa/event
{"n":"pageview","v":36,"u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","d":"allthedamn.tools","r":"https://news.ycombinator.com/"}
{"n":"engagement","sd":93,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/","e":32684,"v":36}
{"n":"engagement","sd":100,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","e":2983,"v":36}
The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.
POST https://allthedamn.tools/cdn-cgi/rum?
{"resources":[],"referrer":"https://allthedamn.tools/gif-maker/","eventType":1,"firstPaint":[REDACTED],"firstContentfulPaint":[REDACTED],"startTime":[REDACTED],"versions":{"fl":"2024.11.0","js":"2026.6.0","timings":1},"pageloadId":"[REDACTED]","location":"https://allthedamn.tools/word-counter/","nt":"navigate","timingsV2":{"nextHopProtocol":"h3","transferSize":16584,"decodedBodySize":98788},"dt":"","siteToken":"[REDACTED]","st":2}
The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.
GET https://allthedamn.tools/favicon.svg
304 Not Modified
cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidatePrint designers were adapting to the web and there was a tremendous amount of technique, experience and hard work in that first batch.
Then the dictatorship of the sameness started, and we somehow ended in a world where everything kinda looks the same but is slightly different in slightly broken ways. Creativity be damned, but also other things like performance, accessibility and user-centricity are now secondary to following fashions.
Sure, you can get a website and put whatever you want there. But it simply won't get any meaningful amount of visitors. (By contrast, early-millennium web content was popular enough that real-life subcultures could bond over following the same blogs and other sites.)
Because they want their 2007 back. But there is a catch.
PS: not a user, so caveat emptor
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740
I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.
I've come to the conclusion that enshitification is simply part of Big Capitalism so the only right thing to do is use open protocols like IRC/email or avoiding social networks altogether.
Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends. instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead.
Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.
It's not an actual social network where you could find out what your friends are up to
Great for its time, but with the way the internet is, it will just turn in to another toxic echo chamber.
Next up: Toy Story 7, Andy finds a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the attic and its missing its 16kb expansion module called Chippy.