Why does the internet feel less special and interesting now than it did in the mid 00s

[Rick Pratt]

I think it's mainly because of Nostalgia, Age, drama, Corporations taking over certain sites or some sites being removed completely, the fact the internet is everywhere now compared to back then when it was all new to us and maybe Aesthetics too,

in the early Myspace/Youtube days there was more customization for the users until the layouts changed, nowadays barely anyone uses myspace and nowadays they go for facebook or other sites instead.

there's more corporate stuff than there is quality content when it comes to videos on the internet, there was all the sjw/skeptic/"gate" drama going on, Blip.tv is dead and not every youtube "network" works for everyone.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I think it's mainly because of Nostalgia, Age, drama, Corporations taking over certain sites or some sites being removed completely, the fact the internet is everywhere now compared to back then when it was all new to us and maybe Aesthetics too,

in the early Myspace/Youtube days there was more customization for the users until the layouts changed, nowadays barely anyone uses myspace and nowadays they go for facebook or other sites instead.

there's more corporate stuff than there is quality content when it comes to videos on the internet, there was all the sjw/skeptic/"gate" drama going on, Blip.tv is dead and not every youtube "network" works for everyone.

This, absolutely this.

I thought I'd do a little graphical thing to express how the internet has changed over time in terms of its congeniality in general.

 

[Maxliam]

You would sorta stumble on to stuff. I don't remember how I got on newgrounds when they had the assassin section but after columbine they blew up because of the news coverage. The net grew up and became more than am obscure nerd place to where Chad can use his phone to bang bitches.

I avoid Facebook like the plague it is. The Web to me is better if you don't worry about the dumb shit you don't like. Just like irl. Getting worked up about shit like that will make you hate life.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

People don't show up to interact and share common interests anymore, they build their own social media portfolios catered to whichever master sites they end up on.

 

[JM 590]

everyone apparently wants Bland Boring Modern Designs and Sodas that focus more on calling it “Zero Sugar” rather than actual Great Taste, Naturally Websites while pleasing to the Next Generation Lack Quirkiness and Differentiation mostly Reserving to Flat bland Boring hues of White or Black.

Oh fuck me running I could complain about modern designs and the complete lack of talent within until I've written a novel.

I don't think people actually like modern designs. They're boring and generic. Look at this garbage:

Newer Apple products use the "San Francisco" font, because apparently fucking Helvetica is too stylized. Congratulations, Apple, you've made the most generic looking operating system ever made. It goes along great with all of my other generic goods:

And considering how so many things follow Apple design cues in bigger or smaller ways, I blame them for the whole lack of style we've been seeing for years and years. Minimalism is lazy and pretentious. I want shit to look more like it belongs in Pee Wee's Playhouse rather than yet another glossy black/white/silver thing. It's about time for retarded, gaudy designs to come back.

 

[Crichax]

Oh fuck me running I could complain about modern designs and the complete lack of talent within until I've written a novel.

I don't think people actually like modern designs. They're boring and generic. Look at this garbage:

View attachment 758892

Newer Apple products use the "San Francisco" font, because apparently fucking Helvetica is too stylized. Congratulations, Apple, you've made the most generic looking operating system ever made. It goes along great with all of my other generic goods:

View attachment 758894

And considering how so many things follow Apple design cues in bigger or smaller ways, I blame them for the whole lack of style we've been seeing for years and years. Minimalism is lazy and pretentious. I want shit to look more like it belongs in Pee Wee's Playhouse rather than yet another glossy black/white/silver thing. It's about time for exceptional, gaudy designs to come back.

DA Eclipse (new DeviantArt redesign) also looks BAD. I like the old site better, TBH. At least it's not just BLACK and MINIMALISTIC oooh.

 

[Monsieur Guillotine]

People don't show up to interact and share common interests anymore, they build their own social media portfolios catered to whichever master sites they end up on.

This is the correct answer.

Back in the day, if you were interested in a topic, you'd find a community somewhere with a shitty socket-based chatroom and a guestbook and a gallery and shit like that. It was modest but you'd find maybe 10-15 cool people that you talked to every day. Now everything is streamlined; you go to the big social media site like Reddit or Facebook or w/e and just find the topic of your choice, then just "react" to whatever shitpost appears in front of you. It's very generic and you don't get that same sense of community.

Even if you didn't give a shit about chatrooms or forums, there were still lots of interesting sites for every little thing, and having your own site was the shit. Now you just visit the same 7 or 8 sites for whatever, and people who would aspire to be webmasters will just create a subreddit or Facebook group instead.

 

[Hikikomori-Yume]

From my perspective it was more like this

 

[Stardust]

Others have said it well, so I'll just say... damn, I miss Angelfire. Making shitty webpages was great.

 

[Coleslaw]

Web 1.0 was more A E S T H E T I C. Now everything is white with another color and tons of wasted space. Every site has the same "minimalist" aesthetic with the rounded avatars and gray on gray on gray. Web 1.0 was uglier from a design perspective but it had more charm. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for gif-ridden angelfire sites with marble backgrounds.

Corporations coming in and neutering the web was a huge part of the decline, too. Instead of having a lively forum where people have their own opinions and post highly compressed JPEGS why not have a proprietary comments section with no images that you can control and prune as your heart desires. No more of those pesky unsavory opinions, no more dissent, no meanies using the N word, of the F word, or the Q, D, or H word. A place where even your grandparents feel safe.

What I really miss are old forums where everyone signed off like they were writing a letter after each post

Gimme the loot,
-BiggieSmall'sTaint

Some people still do that.
Sauce: AlternateHistory.com user (not with this username though.)

 

[LordofTendons]

The internet was better when poor people couldn't afford computers or the hourly rate to get on it.

 

[hambeerlyingnreed]

Same reason internet in the mid 00s felt different than internet in the mid 90s. More normies.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

DA Eclipse (new DeviantArt redesign) also looks BAD. I like the old site better, TBH. At least it's not just BLACK and MINIMALISTIC oooh.

They should just accept that dA will never be taken seriously.

 

[Tron: Deadly Dicks]

They should just accept that dA will never be taken seriously.

In all fairness deviantart has looked like shit since 2006. Their obsession with gray-ish puke green tones really made the site look boring.

For me the web is less interesting now because minimalism and its offshoots (especially material design) have made the internet ugly and boring. "oOoOoh look at me I put parallax scrolling in my page, gaze at my light grey 1930s inspired font text on a stark white background while shit scrolls in the opposite direction WOOOOO"

@Piss has it right, it's apple's fault and I'd add it's also that of everyone else who decided to try and ape what apple was doing.

 

[Cool kitties club]

The internet has just been normalized with age. If you really think about it the internet is still pretty crazy, if only in concept, a separate layer of cultural data propagated by waves and radiation and cables cross crossing around the country, like a complex set of of veins. It’s just that after 20 years you don’t think about it like that anymore. Same with the tv and tons of other inventions.

 

[Guts Gets Some]

I haven't really noticed, apart from the fact there are a lot less poorly designed geocities fandom pages.

 

[Shiversblood]

Because a lot of men have turned homosexual and transsexual in the recent few years

 

[TenMilesWide]

I was reading some old vidya forums and found a post that really highlighted (for me at least, idunno) the change the internet has undergone. I forget what the main part of the post was but it was prefaced with something like "I'm new here, so if I step out of line feel free to beat my ass,"

In a lot of online communities nowadays it's "I'm new here, if I step out of line please forgive me." and half the comments/subsequent posts are congratulating them for managing the tremendous undertaking of signing up and typing words in a box. Even if they got something wrong, it's a gentle suggestion of a correction at best, but mostly just asspats.

Basically there used to be an expectation that the average person was an asshole, and people welcomed that. Those assholes were the beating heart of the community. But now a lot of places have driven out all the colorful assholes, because either weak users needed protecting or some corporate overlords bought the site and don't want anything unsightly going on, and now all that's left is a bland husk of a community.

Also what shiversblood said, homos and trannies.

 

[The_wandering_nibler]

occasional lurker first time poster here. I think some of the minor reasons like age and experience have already mentioned. I'll focus on the two major though.

One is the normal fags. That's no meme. I've been thinking about this myself and I'm glad you posted. The internet was full of intelligent eccentrics in the past. Of interesting people essentially. I remember playing a little mmorpg and becoming good friends with a gangsters,a geek, a habitual liar that traveled a lot and a fascist. But all of them were interesting people. Forums and websites and games were full of people who had a passion for something or wanted to discuss things that could not be freely talked about elsewhere. Whether this was being an astronomer and talking with fellow astronomers, an unusual teen interested in the macabre or just your ordinary tech wiz talking about their new invention, people had a spark in them online.
A lot of us also wanted to escape normal reality where you have to keep yourself on guard, watch your status and mind your hierarchies. We wanted to collaborate and cooperate and share and have fun.

The internet had a lot more interesting stuff because it was a wild west of small operators, personal websites and communities all unique.

___________

The second part the old internet lacked was frankly people like most of you here and those you mock.
Man in the places I hung out, the telnet hacking groups, Totse.com, some urban exploring groups etc, we talked about highly illegal and fucked up shit. But we were nice to each other. People sometimes got trolled or engaged in flame wars and at worse in some hacking attacks but that was it. People were cool, precisely because we weren't normalfags nor , well what ever you and 4channers are nor lolcows and the sort.

I remember most communities that didn't dabble in the highly illegal often had sections about real life pictures, meetups and what not. People got friends for life from their "anonymous" online personas. Now people either keep it as hidden as possible or in the case of social networks advertise false, photoshopped versions of themselves. The goal of the internet now is to improve or boost your real life persona or to use your anonymity to express your worst qualities in an echo chamber.

It's no longer used as a space outside of real life to connect with people across the world whom you otherwise would never have been able to talk to about the things you love. Everything is in a sense a popularity context. Social networks, Reddit and other places now have visibility based on how popular or upvoted something is. Webrings and links that were previously the primary way of finding new content, requiring community interaction, have been replaced by algorithms that depend again on a type of popularity contest. A process that is now automated and manipulated.

And this popularity contest is also what drives the new profit stage of the internets. Corporations didn't care if you talked about warez, niggers or how to make bombs before when the internet and the real world were two different things and ads just ads. But now since it's about improving or destroying reputations in real life, those ads are connected to the real life image of corporations and the very liberty that enabled the old open net is now destroying it.

______



TLDR:

The lack of Normies, lolcows and the anons that mock them.

Used to be a nice place of cool peeps that cared for neither of these three things.

_____


Ofcs everyone see things differently. Depending on when you joined and how old you are. I'm talking about like 1995-2005 and in retrospect even earlier from what I've read. I think the internet from what I now know was best from about 1991-1999, just when the bubble burst. Also as someone said, back then stuff required some passion and dedication to get going anywhere, which weeded out some people.

I think that SomethingAwful (compare SA to say Newgrounds, totally different despite being as "underground" or dark) was the start of the dark side of the web turning personally nasty while Digg and even Myspace to a degree brought in the normalfag.s

 

[Shaved Kiwis]

The internet was better when poor people couldn't afford computers or the hourly rate to get on it.

Dunno how it is nowadays, but back in the internet 1.0 days my poor ass would hang out at the library so I could use the computer to go online. The real problem is the proliferation of smartphones and other idiot proof tech lowering the barrier to entry to the point that even the most braindead invalid can post videos and share his opinions with the world. The internet is too fucking mainstream. Remember all those giddy engineers trying to sell everybody on the idea? How it would revolutionize the world and all that shit. Now that everybody uses it corporate interests have taken over and they are shitting the net up in order to cater to the lowest common denominator mongoloids and all the people that where there already become more and more alienated.