the state of the web

[skittlesthehusky]

in my journey to find other forums and platforms to congregate on with people, more am i finding that majority of places don't feel worthy of interaction and it's kind of sad.

a lot of websites that i look for all center around areas of what's considered to be the "retro web", meaning places that are close to or behave similarly to old social media (myspace, old tumblr, xanga, livejournal, facebook, etc). the reason for this is because this was probably both the most socially efficient and, at its time, the most engaging. you could join communities and forums and have adequate conversations. it was a different time period.

unfortunately as part of modern web culture, there is a lot of focus on popularity and "looking cool/remarkable" rather than focusing on just having a good conversation. retro web revival projects often end up leaning into the 'feel' of retro without including the community aspect. they are all either half baked, clique-y, or poorly ran. it doesn't help that there seems to be this weird aestheticism around retro which harms the engagement factor even more.

often times on these websites, people settle for triggering nostalgia and behaving as if they're in the early 2000's rather than finding people to talk to. it's quite boring because it is much like modern social media where people make their interests or the aesthetic of something their personality. the difference is that with the lack of an algorithm (as they're so intentionally designed), there is no corporate touch to it.

i think all of this is less of a web problem and more of a people problem though. if you consider how today's culture carries more of a "hey, hear me first!" agenda, you are not going to find many opportunities to engage without sacrificing a significant amount of time and energy that you otherwise wouldn't have many years ago. it was never zero, but it wasn't as drastic as it is now. sadly i feel that most places that claim they're meant for communities miss this aspect entirely.

[CogsTurning]

I was around for the y2k era of the internet and don't really remember it ever being too deep. MySpace was fun for learning basic code and making a flashy custom page. The one big difference was that music artists generally ran their own pages then, so you could get responses from the actual artists. These were also the golden days of 4chan, which did nothing good for the world.

If you go further back into the early 90s, during dial up, AOL, and Prodigy, it was more focused on communication because there really wasn't much else going on. I recall there being email penpal programs, but they weren't well executed, as I was a little kid being matched with grown adults—and guess what sort of creeps were doing that. AOL message boards were also rife with insults and unhinged behavior, as well as those same afromentioned creeps looking for 12-year-olds. It was far more Wild West than it is now, which has its good and bad aspects.

Maybe my experimece would have ben different if I'd been an adult at this time, but I do think nostalgia makes this seem better than it was. The main difference now is how fake and performative social media has made people. We definitely weren't doing stuff just to take pics and put it online for clout in 2000. Forums were also prone to actual discussions.

Funny enough, Discord seems like the best option nowadays. It's simple communication without upvotes or likes, and no real need to put on a fake face.

[skittlesthehusky]

I was around for the y2k era of the internet and don't really remember it ever being too deep. MySpace was fun for learning basic code and making a flashy custom page. The one big difference was that music artists generally ran their own pages then, so you could get responses from the actual artists. These were also the golden days of 4chan, which did nothing good for the world.

If you go further back into the early 90s, during dial up, AOL, and Prodigy, it was more focused on communication because there really wasn't much else going on. I recall there being email penpal programs, but they weren't well executed, as I was a little kid being matched with grown adults—and guess what sort of creeps were doing that. AOL message boards were also rife with insults and unhinged behavior, as well as those same afromentioned creeps looking for 12-year-olds. It was far more Wild West than it is now, which has its good and bad aspects.

Maybe my experimece would have ben different if I'd been an adult at this time, but I do think nostalgia makes this seem better than it was. The main difference now is how fake and performative social media has made people. We definitely weren't doing stuff just to take pics and put it online for clout in 2000. Forums were also prone to actual discussions.

Funny enough, Discord seems like the best option nowadays. It's simple communication without upvotes or likes, and no real need to put on a fake face.

perhaps it's because i grew up in a different portion of the internet that we see it differently. the internet i remember was a lot of community forums and IRC chat rooms that had people using the internet for, at least what i recognized, what it was meant to be used for: the transmission of information and function. i was quite particular about the standards of the places i was in, even as a young kid when i was actively getting myself into trouble due to unrestricted internet access. i wasn't necessarily shielded from the foolery and bad decisions of other people (especially when censorship wasn't exactly the biggest thing back then), but i think i had the benefit of being surrounded by people who had a lot of maturity and curiosity just like i wanted to.

that sort of thing doesn't really seem to exist anymore. at least not as blatantly.

as you said, there's a lot more focus on being performative on today's internet. back in its infancy, that didn't exist nearly as much because of the fact that the internet was still something of a man-made wonder back in the day for better and for worse, and that's the aspect that i do miss that i wish retro-focused websites touched base on and so sorely lack. things were not as direct or instant, but it was much simpler and communication felt much more worthwhile than it does nowadays in the broader scheme of things.

[CogsTurning]

[

perhaps it's because i grew up in a different portion of the internet that we see it differently. the internet i remember was a lot of community forums and IRC chat rooms that had people using the internet for, at least what i recognized, what it was meant to be used for: the transmission of information and function. i was quite particular about the standards of the places i was in, even as a young kid when i was actively getting myself into trouble due to unrestricted internet access. i wasn't necessarily shielded from the foolery and bad decisions of other people (especially when censorship wasn't exactly the biggest thing back then), but i think i had the benefit of being surrounded by people who had a lot of maturity and curiosity just like i wanted to.

that sort of thing doesn't really seem to exist anymore. at least not as blatantly.

as you said, there's a lot more focus on being performative on today's internet. back in its infancy, that didn't exist nearly as much because of the fact that the internet was still something of a man-made wonder back in the day for better and for worse, and that's the aspect that i do miss that i wish retro-focused websites touched base on and so sorely lack. things were not as direct or instant, but it was much simpler and communication felt much more worthwhile than it does nowadays in the broader scheme of things.

I imagine there are places like that, likely more than ever, with how the internet is so all-encompassing now, whereas when I was younger, almost no one had personal access. It was mostly schools and libraries. I think you just have to seek out very specific interests and communities.

I was part of a critiquing group for (mostly amateur) writers and that was very nice. It was specific, isolated, communal, and very old fashioned. Even the site itself looks like it's from 2009. But you had to go a out our of your way to find it, and you had to constantly maintain a ratio of activity to be able to submit stories. So participation was mandatory. Many of the folks on their were older, like retirees trying their hand at a dream with their free time, so they were potentially less jaded and algorithm-tainted than the rest of us. The overall structure was through email too, which also felt very old fashioned. It was closer to the concept of writing physical letters than most of my online experiences.

So I'm sure there's more like that. There's just so much to dig through to find it.