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

[Lemmingwiser]

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

I was joking, holy shit, being moved into tiny useless corners of what was once all yours is not things working out great.

As much as I miss some of the old stuff, I do believe it's rose tinted glasses. It's like taking an old game and replaying it. It'll be fun for the nostalgia, but if it were new, you wouldn't even be able to get into it.

I think we have changed more than the internet and though we miss some aspects, we really do like a lot of the new internet.

 

[BelUwUga]

The wild west is not gone yet, it's just moved further west.

You know the people who thought like that turned into Californians. I'll sneed eastward, thanks.

 

[doodoocaca]

Building real community right now means not letting things grow too large and being rather picky about who you let in, while rooting out people who could poz your community with political bullshit or create drama schisms. As this is predicated on having social skills and being mature, most people really just can't do this.

Unless you try and fail a few times, make real friends who will stick with you all the while, and stick with it until something sticks, that is.

I won't lie, the situation right now is frustrating. Big, open communities are how things should be. It certainly draws in subject matter experts and enough people so the 90/10 rule means you'll get a few creative, interesting people along the way. While it works, it works great, but then the poz comes. Schisms over bullshit, mostly political bullshit. Troons starting shit up, too, of course. God help you if a mod or particularly influential person troons out.

If we make small resilient communities based on real personal relationships first, and shared interests second, we can lay the groundwork for making things that last when the current shitstorm finally blows over. Time passes more easily if you can shitpost freely, too.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

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

That is because the old Internet is being slowly but surely replaced by people like this trying to kick hem out:



Only thing worse than wasted potential is the idea of thinking that something like this can be avoided when 90%+ of everything on these social media and image board sites are making the old Internet users have to conform to follow basic New Age™ Internet logic.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

There were also blogs, which were easy to get an active readership

Besides blogs still being easy to set up and I'm following a couple myself that have plemty of engagement, aren't there also at least two sites that are very much about that kind of thing like medium and that other site that lets people monetize readership? I forget what its called.

Thanks for reading my blog.

This comment I think is at the heart of losing the old spirit of the internet more than anything else. I know it's a self effacing joke. But I think it signifies something deeper. The fact that people have internalised what the internet must be, the fact that people pick irony over sincerity when they write things online.

Certain memes attain a lot of momentum and people start to think and communicate in this memes. I think at the core people letting themselves be reprogrammed is at the heart of something we're losing.

 

[Myles the Potatophile]

the fact that people pick irony over sincerity when they write things online.

I don't see sincerity online very much anymore unless it's on an imageboard. 4chan used to be mostly shitposting and 'my tastes are better than yours', but as the years passed and greentexts came into being, I started seeing a lot more openness about things. Anonymity gave people something they really needed -the ability vent. Not to say things like 'gas up the bikes and lets race now', but all those spaghetti-dropping tales. Getting to watch anons come to terms with the things that happened in their lives, feel like what they went through was real and could be overcome because others out there had also overcome. I've never seen things so honest on display, and it's hard if not impossible to find such sincerity. Some of it I'm sure could've been bullshit, but I would believe a greentext cringe post over anything on reddit any day. Even the farms here gives us bits of truth -a relief in a crazy world full of lies.

 

[Ewan McGregor]

Besides blogs still being easy to set up and I'm following a couple myself that have plemty of engagement, aren't there also at least two sites that are very much about that kind of thing like medium and that other site that lets people monetize readership? I forget what its called.

Medium and Substack, eh? Hopefully you are aware that Medium is owned by Twitter, same policies and all. Its algorithm will hide right leaning content and push left leaning content, and will identify you as a reader of right leaning content and will push left leaning content into you to deradicalise you or demoralise you.

Also, pretty much every medium article is a listicle or people trying to mimic the same writing style that is usually feature in the A&N section.

I don't know much about Substack, but still I feel it's a downgrade from the freer internet where you rely on a big company that centralises internet activity and its algorithm.

This comment I think is at the heart of losing the old spirit of the internet more than anything else. I know it's a self effacing joke. But I think it signifies something deeper. The fact that people have internalised what the internet must be, the fact that people pick irony over sincerity when they write things online.

Certain memes attain a lot of momentum and people start to think and communicate in this memes. I think at the core people letting themselves be reprogrammed is at the heart of something we're losing.

Don't be so dramatic, there's nothing about being sincere or insincere about my comment. I was just acknowledging that I write fucking walls of texts and this might be tiresome to some users.

 

[samarinda]

I don't see sincerity online very much anymore unless it's on an imageboard. 4chan used to be mostly shitposting and 'my tastes are better than yours', but as the years passed and greentexts came into being, I started seeing a lot more openness about things. Anonymity gave people something they really needed -the ability vent. Not to say things like 'gas up the bikes and lets race now', but all those spaghetti-dropping tales. Getting to watch anons come to terms with the things that happened in their lives, feel like what they went through was real and could be overcome because others out there had also overcome. I've never seen things so honest on display, and it's hard if not impossible to find such sincerity. Some of it I'm sure could've been bullshit, but I would believe a greentext cringe post over anything on reddit any day. Even the farms here gives us bits of truth -a relief in a crazy world full of lies.

Imageboards are still >90% reaction images, 1 line shitposts, and other kinds of worthless drivel.

The way 4chan works, in practice, works against the intent to use them as discussion forums. They're best used for sharing images or sharing the first thought that pops into your head. Why bother with "effortposts" in a thread that'll probably be dead in an hour or so? There's a lot better discourse on Fediverse imo -- by "better", I mean longer-form discussion where people don't just drive-by shitpost.

You don't need anonymity to vent, pseudonymity also works just fine. Case in point, Twitter, Discord, and Tumblr. I see people there venting all kinds of things I'd never dare admit to the internet, if I were them, even if I were anonymous.

I do agree with you that 4chan threads are more vibrant and spontaneous than the typical Reddit/Twitter thread.

Functionally, alt-chans don't really do anything a niche subreddit does aside from offering freedom from consequences and giving you permission to be politically incorrect. But the successor to *chans in their golden era isn't the *chans of today, it's fediverse. You should check it out if you haven't already.

 

[ロボ﹏§¤r﹏h¶rœ]

Imageboards are still >90% reaction images, 1 line shitposts, and other kinds of worthless drivel.

The way 4chan works, in practice, works against the intent to use them as discussion forums. They're best used for sharing images or sharing the first thought that pops into your head. Why bother with "effortposts" in a thread that'll probably be dead in an hour or so? There's a lot better discourse on Fediverse imo -- by "better", I mean longer-form discussion where people don't just drive-by shitpost.

Change the boards you visit.

 

[melty]

The old Internet isn't really dead because the old Internet is the people who want to use the old Internet. They've just been obfuscated.
Think about it, however many people were using the old Internet, those people are mostly still around. They didn't actually go anywhere, some small portion of them may have died but it's actually insignificant. The only thing that changed is that more, additional people joined and the old people for some reason think they need to do what the new people are doing. They don't.
There is still old Internet stuff out there to enjoy, you just have to look for it or make it yourself.

 

[CuzinEd]

That's what happened to the Wild West. It slowly got tamed. The Wild West lasted from 1865 to 1905. By 1905 it was pretty much dead. Were there probably some straggler elements still around refusing to accept reality? Probably. That's kind of where the internet is now.

Most of the forums online these days are dead. Reddit and I guess now Discord killed all the forums. There used to be video game forums all over the place. You go to them now and they are dead or nearly dead. Even if the forum is still up and running it really isn't that active. You can tell when you look at the boards and you see topics from weeks or months ago. It's kind of depressing. I used to use quite a few forums back in the mid and late 2000's. Even in the early 2010's you could still find some active forums.

I have used some of the alt tech sites. The problem is there isn't much content on places like Rumble Bitchute and Odysee. Most of everything I watch is still on YouTube and YouTube only in some cases. That's where all the population is. Another issue is that sites like Bitchute are full of a lot of garbage. Like the kind of Boomer tier schizo conspiritard videos you would have seen on YouTube in the mid to late 2000's. If you want to see videos about the lizard people from dimension X that control the world or chem trails then Bitchute is a good. If you want some quality content stick to YouTube or possibly Rumble and Odysee.

The other problem for alt tech is that most of the people who use the mainstream platforms are either moderate to apolitical. Most of the people using the mainstream sites aren't bothered by the censorship and whatever else they do on them. They watch videos about animals tutorials and cringey shit. The censorship doesn't affect them.

The internet has changed quite a bit over the past decade or so. But as far as I remember there was never any real free speech on forums. I got banned from a few forums for saying nigger faggot and so on. You were only allowed to say those things on forums that allowed it. Most of the forums I used back then allowed some vulgar language and usually politics and or religion were not allowed. Sometimes political discussion was allowed but if things turned into a huge flame war they would be locked and possibly people would get temp bans. On one forum I had a ban on sight for my willingness to evade bans with multiple accounts and changing my IP address. It was a crazy time back then.

When people say free speech, they mean the limited span of time where sites like YouTube Facebook and other sites didn't have the censorship in place. They didn't have the AI going through every post and so on. It was a pretty fun and crazy time on YouTube back then. But it wasn't because there was free speech, they just didn't have a good way to censor the site. Unlike a forum which might have a small number of daily users. Sites like YouTube even back in the early days had millions of users. Over time the user base got even bigger. It's not easy to keep up with what millions of people are posting every day. Without a really good way to moderate the site YouTube was like free for all for years. The urge to censor was always there they just didn't have a good way to do it till a few years ago. People got used to this. It's not that YouTube was once a free speech platform. They just didn't have an efficient way to moderate user content. Things definitely got worse in the late 2000's when YouTube started working with the ADL and it got really bad after the mainstream media started going after them in the early and mid 2010's.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

99% of the people complaining about internet censorship were the same ones who wouldn't shut up about private companies last decade, and would do the same thing if they were the ones in power. Too bad they couldn't stop larping as a "stronk independent libertarian who don't need no society".

 

[Chuck McGill]

You don't need anonymity to vent, pseudonymity also works just fine. Case in point, Twitter, Discord, and Tumblr. I see people there venting all kinds of things I'd never dare admit to the internet, if I were them, even if I were anonymous.

I do agree with you that 4chan threads are more vibrant and spontaneous than the typical Reddit/Twitter thread.

Functionally, alt-chans don't really do anything a niche subreddit does aside from offering freedom from consequences and giving you permission to be politically incorrect. But the successor to *chans in their golden era isn't the *chans of today, it's fediverse. You should check it out if you haven't already.

This basically. There needs to be a balance struck, and I think Kiwi Farms and its policy of "no seriously dude, pick a pseudonym and don't dox your own ass" is about as close to perfect as I can think of. On 4chan everything is gone in an hour and you dont know who youre talking to by the next thread. While this policy was instituted to prevent big names from dominating and keeping free-flowing discussion, it also works against the favor of by the space by not allowing you to attach an identity to anyone's posts, even from just their collection of posts off your shared board. Thus people will just tell you somethings great if you say it sucks, and they'll say the things you like suck are gay and stupid. Which wouldn't be bad unto itself but it would be nice if I could just say "oh it's that guy" and chuck it into the schizo bin.

Then on the other side of the tracks you have the normie sites. On Facebook, TikTok, etc you're almost always posting with some of your real identity visible to others, often with even real life acquaintances following your feed. So now you're hemmed in by the usual rules of society that you wanted to get away from on the internet. Reddit is the closest thing in the mainstream to an anonymous experience, but they have enough unemployed bluehair power users and janny trannies to come through your post history and shriek at you.

It really is a "pick your poison" game. Wanna post on a place where it's almost impossible to have a community, get recognition or make friends and everybody screams "NIGGER" 50 times a day cause they can? Or do you want to go back to the walled garden of normie internetdom that is basically now "real life but the women have dog filters on"?

 

[RACISM]

It really is a "pick your poison" game. Wanna post on a place where it's almost impossible to have a community, get recognition or make friends and everybody screams "NIGGER" 50 times a day cause they can? Or do you want to go back to the walled garden of normie internetdom that is basically now "real life but the women have dog filters on"?

It's no contest.
Nigger.

 

[Hepativore]

There is also a generational problem. As Generation Z starts to outnumber Millennials and Generation X online, more and more people will never have experienced an internet that was not a cookie cutter replacement for daytime cable programming.


Generation X and Millennials have probably started to age out of caring, as the latter is reaching middle age, and their middle fingers of defiance have probably long ago been ground down by their deadend jobs, children, and general bleak existence.

Anyway, people will not miss what they never had, and for many people, the Corponet is what they have always known in their young lives and so that is how it will always be, now. There are a few holdouts here and there like us, but our days are probably numbered with the passive acceptance of censorship from most of the population.

 

[Otterly]

The problem is getting swamped by destructive (and deliberate) infiltration crap. Here’s how it goes from my very small experience, taking a very dull niche hobby that should be zero drama.
Knitting! Yes I know. So dull. Whatever. We used to meet down the pub. Even had an older bloke with us (lot of men used to knit during the war and some of their sons still do.) Then knitting got popular with celebrities and the Young joined in. That’s when the trouble started. The group now had to be Inclusive. Not that we weren’t, we had a man and everything but it ended up being full of drama queen twenty somethings and Drama and Woke so we stopped going to the pub.
Then we started a little forum that one of the women started. That worked for about six months until some of the drama from the pub found us. Then we got bombarded with the woke instagram crowd who called us all racist, transphobic and every name under the sun - we just wanted to swap knitting patterns and have a cup of tea down the pub or in each others homes, no one gives a shiny shit what colour anyone is but we’re all old and our generation isn’t as brown as theirs. The forum was deemed ‘boomerish’ (it was, that was the point) and modernised and then completely taken over by drama and woke.
The worst bit really was that they weren’t even good at knitting nor were they amateurs wanting to learn. They just wanted to destroy this group. They succeeded.
So we all left them to it, the forum is dead, the pub group is gone and we all just do our thing at home.
I don’t know how any internet groups survive these days. If you’re anything to do with women you get ramraided by trannies, and all the women pushed out until it’s just trannies at the top and their handmaidens offering apologies to them. Maybe model railways are harder to crack, I certainly hope they are.

 

[X Prime]

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.

This touches on the problem. Social media destroyed true communities.

The reason for this is that social media is too easy. If you wanted to create a splinter community before Discord, you had to buy webspace, set up the website, and so on. That required a modicum of intelligence. Now it's as simple as clicking Leave Server, make new server, PM a bunch of people, et cetera.

That barrier to splintering gave an incentive on places like medium-and-large webforums, such as fan communities, to tolerate opinions they didn't necessarily agree with.

Nowadays, it is simply too easy to filter things you don't like, to become more and more insular. There's more bullshit like fujoshis gathering on a small Discord to coordinate near-literal gayops. That was just simply not a thing back when webforums were growing.

In other words, as the technology got better, the Internet got worse. It's depressing.

 

[DYLAN ‘DIELAWN’ VOLK]

Old Internet was different because employers were too old or busy to fuck with social media so you didn't have to pretend to be someone you're not 24/7 and were able to retain some of your actual personality online and IRL without being punished or threatened.

People didn't give a fuck about what you did because it was "just the Internet lol" and crybullies had no one to cry to. No way to threaten you and your family or friend's livelihood because everyone saw that as PSYCHO back then. By back then I mean like up to 2009 or something. Now it's SOCIAL JUSTICE which is just vigilante justice but without the justice part and for some reason legal and encouraged.

What have we gained, bros? What's better?

 

[CuzinEd]

99% of the people complaining about internet censorship were the same ones who wouldn't shut up about private companies last decade, and would do the same thing if they were the ones in power. Too bad they couldn't stop larping as a "stronk independent libertarian who don't need no society".

No one likes Libertarians which is why they never win any elections.

This basically. There needs to be a balance struck, and I think Kiwi Farms and its policy of "no seriously dude, pick a pseudonym and don't dox your own ass" is about as close to perfect as I can think of. On 4chan everything is gone in an hour and you dont know who youre talking to by the next thread. While this policy was instituted to prevent big names from dominating and keeping free-flowing discussion, it also works against the favor of by the space by not allowing you to attach an identity to anyone's posts, even from just their collection of posts off your shared board. Thus people will just tell you somethings great if you say it sucks, and they'll say the things you like suck are gay and stupid. Which wouldn't be bad unto itself but it would be nice if I could just say "oh it's that guy" and chuck it into the schizo bin.

Then on the other side of the tracks you have the normie sites. On Facebook, TikTok, etc you're almost always posting with some of your real identity visible to others, often with even real life acquaintances following your feed. So now you're hemmed in by the usual rules of society that you wanted to get away from on the internet. Reddit is the closest thing in the mainstream to an anonymous experience, but they have enough unemployed bluehair power users and janny trannies to come through your post history and shriek at you.

It really is a "pick your poison" game. Wanna post on a place where it's almost impossible to have a community, get recognition or make friends and everybody screams "NIGGER" 50 times a day cause they can? Or do you want to go back to the walled garden of normie internetdom that is basically now "real life but the women have dog filters on"?

I can count on one hand the number of times I used 4chan. I never cared for it. I don't mind the anonymity of it or what goes on there. It's the format I didn't like it. I prefer forums. I remember when I first used 4chan back in the late 2000's I was actually looking for a way to make an account like on a forum. I just don't like it. I think that was before /pol/ became a really big thing.

There is also a generational problem. As Generation Z starts to outnumber Millennials and Generation X online, more and more people will never have experienced an internet that was not a cookie cutter replacement for daytime cable programming.


Generation X and Millennials have probably started to age out of caring, as the latter is reaching middle age, and their middle fingers of defiance have probably long ago been ground down by their deadend jobs, children, and general bleak existence.

Anyway, people will not miss what they never had, and for many people, the Corponet is what they have always known in their young lives and so that is how it will always be, now. There are a few holdouts here and there like us, but our days are probably numbered with the passive acceptance of censorship from most of the population.

The problem isn't the passive acceptance of censorship. The vast majority of the population doesn't do anything or say anything that controversial. At least not enough to get the attention of the people running the sites or certain groups. Most people don't have an interest in a crusade against trannies fags or want to sit around talking about niggers and Kikes. But considering how crazy the left has become with their censorship it's starting to impact normies though not in large numbers.

Old Internet was different because employers were too old or busy to fuck with social media so you didn't have to pretend to be someone you're not 24/7 and were able to retain some of your actual personality online and IRL without being punished or threatened.

People didn't give a fuck about what you did because it was "just the Internet lol" and crybullies had no one to cry to. No way to threaten you and your family or friend's livelihood because everyone saw that as PSYCHO back then. By back then I mean like up to 2009 or something. Now it's SOCIAL JUSTICE which is just vigilante justice but without the justice part and for some reason legal and encouraged.

What have we gained, bros? What's better?

I have three Facebook accounts and none of my personal information is on them. Not even a picture. No pictures really. It was normies who fell for the fad of posting all your personal information online and pictures of themselves. Posting what they were doing what they were eating and so on. Basically, posting their whole personal life online. You always saw the leftist complaining that if people couldn't be anonymous on the internet, they wouldn't say certain things or act certain ways. They want some form of internet ID like a driver's license but for the internet. They didn't have to whine for big daddy government to make internet ID's a reality because normies willingly did it. They jumped onto social media and started posting their faces and names everywhere. The funny thing is they still wanted to engage in the crazy internet behavior. They still wanted to speak freely and say whatever they want. Never thinking that maybe it's not a good idea to do that if people can find out who you are.

It seems to be a popular thing with people of all generations. But I am always a bit surprised to see Boomers and Gen X that are capable of using computers engaging in the fad. You would think these people would know better. But they don't.

People are moving away from social media these days. Facebook will probably end up like Myspace. Young people started leaving Facebook in the early and mid 2010's. They were moving over to other social media platforms because older people started using it. Which is why some call Facebook Boomerbook now. Alternatives to mainstream social media sites and other tech platforms often have low user populations. Gab has about 100,000 daily users globally. Twitter was headed towards being a dying platform like Facebook till Elon Musk bought it. Gen Z/Zoomers use other social media platforms like Tik Tok. We all know what kind of cringey shit happens on Tik Tok. Social media needs to just go away.

 

[DYLAN ‘DIELAWN’ VOLK]

Myspace was my fave internet thing ever. I could say the vilest shit ever right next to a real picture of myself and get complimented for both. It was sick and also hella.