The old internet still exists and you're wasting its potential

[Lemmingwiser]

Null may have fought hard to keep the site online, but it's still online. The wild west is not gone yet, it's just moved further west. The truth is that you and everyone else got addicted to the critical mass of people which is why so few people go to alternate platforms and juat load up youtube and google again.

You can start a site today. You can visit the alt tech sites. You can use this place to discuss shit.

What really did you lose from the old wild west internet that you can't do now?

 

[TheShedCollector]

I went from being active on ten to fifteen community forums, to one. And the one is only still online due to a stubborn mush mouth who absolutely refuses to quit.
In the past, pretty much anyone could start a website, or a forum and build up whatever community they wanted. Nowadays, if you fall foul of your troon overlords, good luck keeping your website online.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I went from being active on ten to fifteen community forums, to one.

Same, pretty much, but in my case it's because all those other sites turned into insular cliques years ago. THey retreated into hidden board hugboxes and let the open forums wither, then abandoned even that when discord came along.

 

[ditto]

THey retreated into hidden board hugboxes and let the open forums wither

Reddit and Discord lured many a community in. Then corporate moderation made them homogenous hugboxes.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

Same, pretty much, but in my case it's because all those other sites turned into insular cliques years ago.

Over a long enough timeline all the ones I used either died or became old guard cliques hostile to new members and differing opinions.

 

[Narutard]

Autists part easily with their neetbux, and companies take advantage of them. I’m almost glad corporate internet has become so safe and boring. There are more important things in life than F5, for example:

What really did you lose from the old wild west internet that you can't do now?

Call whoever’s reading this a retarded nigger faggot.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

Reddit and Discord lured many a community in. Then corporate moderation made them homogenous hugboxes.

Right, but at the same time there are more people online than ever. You often didn't get responses the same day. There are still sufficient people to replicate that level of engagement.

Call whoever’s reading this a retarded nigger faggot.

... but you just did.

 

[Kel1 shi1]

Right, but at the same time there are more people online than ever. You often didn't get responses the same day.

It was like checking your email once a day back then. It was only once there were enough active members that they became all day skinner boxes.

 

[Sniperwoof]

Zoomers and millennials are lazy as fuck. If your community isn't built from the ground up to be accessible by absolute retards they won't even bother hence why reddit and Discord are popular.

Communities need fresh blood to keep growing which is a shame because the new blood is retarded.

Look at Something Awful as a good example of an archaic community which never made any attempt to modernize or attract new users. It's user base is like 80% sad crossdressers in the 40-55 range.

 

[Catler]

It does exist to a degree and people rightfully gatekeep it. There's a lot of interesting small communities scattered around the net, a lot of them not even on HTTP. They don't advertise, because why would they? The difficulty in finding them is part of the entry requirement.

People will bitch that communities that still exist hide themselves, but look at the average Internet user, would you want them messing up the place where you and your friends shoot the shit? I've been chatting with the same people on IRC for almost two decades now, I think we've had like three new people join us in the last five years.

When people think of the old Internet they only think of websites, but the truth is the old Internet was a lot more broad than that.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Reddit and Discord lured many a community in. Then corporate moderation made them homogenous hugboxes.

Homogeneous Hugbox is the name of my new nerdcore rap collective.

 

[Narutard]

... but you just did.

In minecraft. If I did so honestly some nolife tranny would dox me and try to get me fired.
Old internet: srs bsns
New internet: Serious business.

 

[We Are The Witches]

... but you just did.

They did, but for most other places they're losing the capability to do so without getting banned/censored.

Your "moving further west" metaphor is what's the problem, something like this doesn't happen all at once, but gradually. You're witnessing it dying, or at least fighting for its life with all that it has left.

To give you an example, just that these threads were made:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/i-am-blocking-germany-and-austria.133737/
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/germa...nwide-raids-targeting-web-hate-speech.136899/
It's just another step towards censorship, what will be the next one?

People (undeservingly) in power with either the same level of intelligence or crooked agenda as your average Keffals follower:
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/matthew-prince-lied.128900/
That's another crack on the pillar.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

Your "moving further west" metaphor is what's the problem,

What? It worked great for the native americans.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

My favourite trope in this is some nigger attacking the little forum so it gets put behind Cloudflare. Then bid farewell to seamless Tor usage, using any WWW browser that lacks JavaScript or the latest and greatest TLS support, and so many other things. Now, of course, the main forum I use seems to require the latest and greatest TLS support anyway, sans Cloudflare.

So, blame Cloudflare, in-part. Gating websites and adding so many annoying adjustments behind a few switches has done a lot of damage.

 

[heathercho]

Right, but at the same time there are more people online than ever. You often didn't get responses the same day. There are still sufficient people to replicate that level of engagement.

There are sufficient people, but, they're stupid, by and large. The pool is large, but the catch is low quality.
The catch is low quality because what you're allowed to discuss, openly, is limited.

People have had the will beaten out of them, because of all the threats, so replication of the wild west is really hard, that spirit isnt there.

 

[Stoner Metal]

For help finding a lot of the "old web" https://wiby.me/ is a search engine for smaller less popular websites. There are a lot of self hosted websites to be found with it, stuff like old self coded Geocities looking train enthusiast websites created by autistics, etc.

What? It worked great for the native americans.

As a booby prize the government gave them their own little ethnostates on American soil that they can (mostly) administer as they see fit.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

The ability to passively consume the internet fed to you via algorithm is another problem I think.

Let me ask this question: if Twitter and TikTok existed back in the day, do you think there ever would've been a Chris Chan, and thus this website?
He wouldn't have been uploading weird shit to youtube and finding all these other bizarre outlets, going on forums, etc. He probably wouldn't even have bothered writing comics. He would've been another in a sea of retards sitting all day tweeting at animators and watching an endless stream of oversexualized TikToks.

It's the test of plenty. All throughout history there has been a fair portion of the population who only exist above the level of cattle because they're forced to; given the option to let their brain slide out their ears as they're drip-fed a steady stream of petty distractions, they'll take it. That's increasingly become an option online.

I feel like that's left a fairly small middle portion of people who are willing to invest themselves in the internet, but not so much that they fall down a rabbit hole of degenerate slop. Add the depressant effect of censorship discouraging that middle section, and you have a recipe for a dying internet.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

For help finding a lot of the "old web" https://wiby.me/ is a search engine for smaller less popular websites.

Wiby's long in the tooth by now. There's a new search engine making the waves now: https://search.marginalia.nu

 

[Ewan McGregor]

I went from being active on ten to fifteen community forums, to one. And the one is only still online due to a stubborn mush mouth who absolutely refuses to quit.

This.

Null was spot on when he said that there won't be anymore Mark Zuckerbergs or Elon Musks.

Back in the day anybody could open an online community about whatever and it would be active. There would be forums of about 15-30 persons but they were very active. Then there were huge forums. Then there were lots and lots of platforms. There was the golden age of webcomics, which gave us lots of beloved lolcows. There was DeviantArt, which also had high lolcow quotient but was a decent place to share art. And there was, huh, Tumblr, near the beginning of the end.

There were also blogs, which were easy to get an active readership. There were lots of opportunities for the average person to create on the internet and be found and have positive or negative engagement. And in a way it is a bit of sad the only thing left of that era is this forum which is a repository of people back then who created negative engagement, starting with Chris Chan himself.

How this happened is been described many times. Tumblr and Reddit centralised lots of activity that was previously covered by the above described while Facebook basically killed MSN Messenger, usurping Skype as its apparent successor, and places like Myspace, which were somewhere in between Geocities and Facebook in terms of the History of Internet Narcissism. Eventually Facebook lost people to Twitter for the sperging and Instagram for the social posturing.

Tumblr cracked down on degeneracy and they all moved to Twitter, where they intermingled with journalists and celebrities and became a huge influence on normies and politics, and now we now Twitter actively encouraged this. Instagram lost narcissists to TikTok and is now basically a catalog for expensive prostitutes.

And THEN, the crackdown on anything else happened. We're left now with an internet that, for most of the population, needs to be accessed either by TikTok, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Meta or Media Outlets. And any sort of community you will want to form there needs to conform to nothing but extreme and performative loyalty to the party line. They're transparently using this power for social engineering in league with traditional media and normies are being routinely gaslighted and manipulated in those sites by an assorted combination of algorithm, bots, paid shills (promoted talking heads like Contrapoints or Jordan Peterson) and selective interactions (where you're only allowed to see targeted content and your content is prevented to reach anybody if not the right content, but they will give you bots to believe you're talking to people).

Null would probably rather have this forum to still be focused on lolcows. And he would probably rather not have a lot of those lolcows to be LGBT, not that he cares about lolcows being or not being LGTB, but that the protected class of Ts has made discussion of these lolcows almost inherently political and has attracted lots of attention both from big powers and for political dissidents who are against these big powers and care not about lolcows but about spaces where they can write shit like this post I'm writing right now.

I get he's frustrated that this forum attracts lots of refugees, and that the off-topic and autistic thunderdome sections have grown much larger than they should (Old Internet forums would have just ONE off topic section, or two, one for general off topic and another for politics, unless the forum was really, really big and not particularly focused). This makes difficult to keep the boat floating on the current waters, I guess, since KiwiFarms and its culture, as it stands, cannot sustain the whole of old Internet much more than the United Kingdom can sustain the whole of Africa and South Asia to immigrate to it.

But that's just how things are standing right now and it looks like it's going to be worse. The Internet has effectively been privatized and we lost this war even if Null is on the forest with lots of guns and bombs stored, setting booby traps and ambushes to anyone venturing into his turf.

Thanks for reading my blog.