the internet is awful and evil and stupid and it's just making the world worse in every way. but it wasn't always this way
early-to-mid 90s internet fags: remember when you'd stay up late interfacing with LOW BANDWIDTH information sources? how exciting it all was? all the big, grand ideas, still sparse and spartan enough that people weren't rallying around big stupid social causes and ruining everything for everybody offline as well? "going online" was still viewed as weird and suspicious.
now any random middle aged woman can effortlessly stream 1080p video of some meltdown she's having at the pet groomer. we all know what twitter and fb and leddit have become with such a surplus of useless outpourings. terabytes upon terabytes of upvoted normie sludge, dulling and polluting and banalizing everything.
literally everything that I see people being nostalgic about, has one thing in common: LOW (SOCIAL) BANDWIDTH. getting SOME information from the outside world, but not so much that it's like drinking from a firehose. remember subcultures? how can those even exist anymore? they used to survive because people had SOME idea of what was going on in other cities (usually due to those who traveled and brought their experiences with them), but not so much that it erased the local spirit and fresh possibility.
now there is very little possibility of truly geographically or psychologically independent development. how can we go back to low bandwidth possibility? back to the innocent, unknowing, CREATIVE POSSIBILITY of those times? you could watch cable television all day long in the 90s and not even come close to the amount of vision-narrowing, imagination-canceling information available at the touch of a finger through a phone today.
healthy evolution is a balance between isolation and connection, preferably closer to the former. otherwise it becomes what we have now, which is terrible: oppressive social contagion spewing out of every glowing rectangle for miles.
1. Lower bandwifth 2. Less(no) mobile internet 3. No cameras on every device 4. No instant connection
Life was better before the internet.
Gavin Roberts
>early-to-mid 90s internet fags: remember when you'd stay up late interfacing with LOW BANDWIDTH information sources? how exciting it all was? yeah I remember it, I remember the internet being completely boring and worthless nostalgia is a brain cancer I spend all day on the internet now and nobody could do that in the 90s, there wasn't anything to do
Sebastian Ward
I liked video games more before the Internet. Nowadays I just read or watch shit on the Internet instead of playing games.
Elijah Powell
I disagree. If I god forbid I got cancer, I could listen continuously literally for days to lectures, talks, and opinions about my disease from all kinds of people with all kinds of different perspectives. I could read all the oncology textbooks I wanted off of libgen. I could download allthe relevant scientific papers through sci-hub. Back in just one or two decades, if you had cancer all you could do unless you were rich was maybe buy a few textbooks and pop magazines with shitty articles written by low IQ journalists, maybe you could get access to some scientific papers if they were available in a library you had access to, but it wasn't easy. You are just a retard who hasn't realized what the (((real))) problem is that's breaking havoc all across the world and destroying the culture and wisdom that has been built over the centuries for their own benefit. Look, I'm not saying all jews are bad, but most are pretty problematic, and there are a lot of bad people from other races too in that group who's turning the world to shit for profit (not to mention the low IQ or naive people who fall for their tricks).
Jason Price
nice segway into being a complete Jow Forumstard
Lucas Davis
Aww poor little snowflake had his fweeings hurt?
Brody Roberts
that's completely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make - in fact what makes people easy prey for political pseudosolutions, is their short attention span and search for fresh dopamine hits.
similar to how people mistake information for wisdom, it seems like you're conflating "ability to technically address some hyper-specialized issue" for health. not unlike how people mistake "access to expensive medical interventions" for "a healthy society, the quality of life of which is not dramatically improved in any way by the fact that there exist some zillion-dollar cancer treatments".
you could just as easily have said, "god forbid I find myself with 1 trillion records of data that need sorting and analyzing, I could have access to the finest cloud databases to allow me to mine commodifiable insights into human behavior" - which is, incidentally, the error Zuck made long ago and continues snowballing to this day. (conflating that with actual human connection)
Tyler Johnson
bandwidth, no internet, for some
you have to remember that "back then", it wasn't that we weren't necessarily consuming less content the 20mb rmvb only took an hour to download, but it was still an hour in length too the majority of people downloading media today still spend about the same amount of time downloading the file as they do consuming, it can be nonstop
Ryder Lee
>Aggressive / bloated "analytics" scripting >15 layers of abstraction ontop of JavaScript
I personally hope that WebAssembly (ie...binary web) will fix some of this mess.
Caleb Cruz
>there wasn't anything to do how fucking lazy were you? i hosted a web forum and an irc server for development projects and after they got rolling i not only managed to fill my spare time but i also wanted to free up more time for it
Ryder Cooper
WebAssembly will make it impossible to know what's running and probably impossible to block ads and malicious scripts too.
Evan Moore
outside of chatting to your friends or your sub-community there was nothing to do on the web 1.0 99% of webpages were trashy homepages of interest to no-one, all forums before Something Awful were so slow you only needed 5 minutes a day to check them
Jace Allen
but what were they watching, though? movies, tv shows, things that took a lot of time and effort to produce. they all lagged behind the social edge by some amount of time. took time to watch, appreciate, process. all things with low social information content.
whereas I'm talking about up-to-the-second social information, things that tell you how the world is / should be / etc. what's possible and desirable. like the advertising of yore, but distilled and refined in realtime, being voluntarily pushed out into the noosphere by average nobodies (and people with more insidious agendas, too, of course)
people can now GENERATE content as fast as it can be consumed, across the world. that was never the case before, no matter how long you sat in front of your computer. you were just downloading and collecting somewhat-aged artifacts. the content of those artifacts might connect you with the general era you were living in, but there was still plenty of room for your own independent interpretation and development. the lead time on sitcoms was months at best.
but now, because of bandwidth in everybody's hand, we're now marching more in lockstep than ever before, everybody's on the same page regardless of how angry that page makes them.
Mason Cruz
>all forums before Something Awful were so slow you only needed 5 minutes a day to check them that's what I'm talking about! the kind of lag that lets you be with your own world, your own thoughts and reality most of the time, but connecting periodically to some outside source OCCASIONALLY for fresh insights and directions.
but now it's inverted and we're more online than off, and the immediacy of life outside of the internet noosphere has atrophied greatly.
my whole point is that that slowness is what breeds real richness and variety, and is why the original internet was so delightfully unstructured and weird. now just a handful of sites are responsible for all the internet traffic, and they coerce people (by their very structure and interface) into behaving certain ways, only thinking in certain ways.
reduction of possibility through ubiquity.
Caleb Brown
for binary files sure, but there was an unreadable amount of text content "generated" through blogs, usenet, bbs, irc, etc
Anthony Morgan
you said internet, not web sure web was pretty limited still, but at that point it was mostly meant to provide simple information that you either dont want to keep on your hard drive or information that needs to change periodically it wasnt supposed to do stuff, it was supposed to tell you where to go to do stuff and how to do those things web was just one small part of the 90's internet it was a useful one, but not a very interactive one if you just sat on the web all day you were using the internet wrong
Brandon Ortiz
>you said internet, not web whats the difference?
Kayden Allen
If it wasn't for the information from the Internet I'd probably be fat and on antidepressants and cardiac medication. I believe it's had an impact on my personal help and it can be just that in anyone's lives at one point or another. It's not some hyper-specialized issue. I picked cancer because it's the most urgent, but unless something has literally no solution, if there's information on how to solve it you can probably find it online. Sure, it will take years of research about all kinds of stuff to get a sense of generally what things do actually work for each issue, but it's better than literally almost no info at all except dumbed down almost useless shit unless you're willing to dedicate your life to a field and get a degree on it. >similar to how people mistake information for wisdom Information is not wisdom, but it can make gaining wisdom orders of magnitude faster because you have a base to work with instead of starting from scratch. >that's completely orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make - in fact what makes people easy prey for political pseudosolutions, is their short attention span and search for fresh dopamine hits. It's not orthogonal to anything. Most people are inherently conformant and dumb. If you feed them a culture that's based on morality, critical thought, self-restraint, gentleness and so on, they become decent human beings. If you feed them a culture of entitlement, hedonism, anti-intellectualism, violence, narcissism, etc., they both get taken advantage of and harm other people. They begin recording their sperg-outs and whoring themselves out on Instagram. They begin spending their whole day smoking weed and playing Fortnite. Buying loot boxes and paying for attention from cam whores. And so on. If we had a decent culture where people were willing to learn things for anything else than social status and have worthy intellectual discussions then the bigger data pipes would only make the Internet more valuable.
web is simply html pages transmitted via http internet is all of the interconnected computers in the entire world, and includes things like irc, usenet, bbs systems. in more modern times you have voip, instant messaging programs, multiplayer video games, etc
Justin Powell
Not true, even in the days before internet "forums" where loaded, there was fidonet and then later on most of the shit moved to usenet.
You would connect with the modem, dl all new messages in one big compressed blob, make new posts in offline mode and then ul everything again as compressed blob.
Even in my shitty slav country there was enough content generated every day that you could wast most of the day just going through it. Usenet alone globally was probably 50x the size of Jow Forums today so imagine going through all that everyday.
>If you feed them a culture that's based on morality, critical thought, self-restraint, gentleness and so on, they become decent human beings.
so if we had that in the past, what caused it to get away from us? how can you explain that without sounding like the "we wuz kangz" crowd who claim blacks were technologically advanced and then somehow got themselves enslaved?
part of what I'm talking about is the worship of data and information, which is the new religion of man, who has completely devalued his inner subjective/mythic state, the state that the originally-"decent" ancients (from your perspective) were so deeply in touch with.
I can't express this articulately right now, but there is a causal connection between the kind of disconnected, dissecting, hyper-objective view of reality - the pursuit of the factual, scientific - and the hedonistic, socially-decayed hellhole of a reality we're inhabiting right now. being rational and upright and being good Christians somehow LED to this state of affairs. (if merely lack of discipline, then what could possibly keep it from reoccurring?) people saw it coming miles away, decades ago, hundreds of years ago, but nothing could stop it. why?
I see no point to re-establishing a decent culture if it's just going to degrade again. referencing your earlier post, how did jews even come to power, if not for the inner jewishness of the whites who allowed it to happen, time and again? how do you fix THAT?
Lincoln Edwards
>then Manually created websites by humans, with shit they manually had to learn and put onto the page. You'd put shitty flashing gifs of skeletons dancing, but you made it. Something YOU did. >now NPC twitter v.929383 #popular_hashtag_1 #popular_hashtag_2 Please give me a like.
>then IBM PCs with the business feel, emachines with the cheap feel, GPUs had fucking dragons on them and were called shit like voodoo and every time a few years passed you'd suddenly see a huge jump in new stuff, going from 2d to 3d, adding new types of audio, from bleep bloop to actual music. >now GTX 770, GTX 970, 1070.. nothing new each generation, yet the price increases and the performance is slightly better, but nothing "new" to look forward to except dumb memes like VR and ray tracing which are all useless gimmicks.
>then You'd get a choice of a few games and like it, and it would be up to the players to come up with creative ways to play, you'd have thousands of mods for games like WC3 and be forced to make friends and have fun with them. Voice chat was a thing, actually speaking in game and making friends was a thing. Exploring was a thing (no min/max guides on youtube)
>now Join game. Queue game. Nobody talks. Easily win because the game is just a grind-fest to the next point where you re-subscribe or purchase micro-transactions. Repeat. No new friends, nobody talks, at best you can go out of your way to force interactions in social groups, but never naturally through games.
>then Compare yourself with people in your social area, maybe you know 1/2 "rich kids" who had rich parents, but 99% of people were just normal and had typical lives just like the rest of us.
>now Everyone is trying to be a fucking e-celeb, every twitter, snapchat, instagram is just a highlight of their fucking life constantly, everyone is always getting good shit and never has a bad day. Having to browse through this shit and compare lives to fake information is disgusting.
Landon Scott
yeah, I remember how exciting the first 3D games were.
staying up all night playing Descent over the modem with a friend, long phone conversations after finishing. using BBSes to meet people and ACTUALLY HANG OUT WITH THEM.
Eli Rodriguez
>all the big, grand ideas, still sparse That's because Internet was dominated by nerds. Now your average Internet user is a normie who has no clue how computers work and doesn't even care. Every retard can create a social media account and shout his "wisdom" to the world. Back then you had to learn at least basic HTML to create your website, which by itself disqualifies 95% people.
Jaxson Hughes
Ray tracing is not a useless gimmick. It's literally the holy grail of graphics.
You can't simultaneously complain about a lack of innovation and shit on ray tracing. Ray tracing is exactly what we would have expected to get if we continued at 90's pace.
Kayden Adams
The government subsidizing motherhood, which caused a population explosion of low IQ populations. And going further back, the jews had just created the FED and other central banks around the world, so they weren't as rich as they are now, and they hadn't so much money to pump into propaganda. Even up until relatively modern times, the gold standard wasn't completely abolished until 1971, which put a limit in how much money they could afford to print out of thin air. But as now that every country trades in dollars and they have shut down any effort by other countries to trade between them in other currencies, they can afford to print almost as much as they want without devaluating the currency, because the rest of the world just gobbles up those dollars like they were made of sugar. It's calling exporting inflation. >I see no point to re-establishing a decent culture if it's just going to degrade again. Well, we can't re-establish a decent culture, so whether or not we should is a moot point. The simple fact is we common people just can't do anything about it. That's a game for the billionaires and propagandists to play. Our purpose is just to live as well as we can in the conditions we were born into.
Jason Moore
t. neopuritan zoomer kys
Ryan Walker
>I can't express this articulately right now, but there is a causal connection between the kind of disconnected, dissecting, hyper-objective view of reality - the pursuit of the factual, scientific - and the hedonistic, socially-decayed hellhole of a reality we're inhabiting right now. being rational and upright and being good Christians somehow LED to this state of affairs. It is true that a lot of cruelty has been committed in the supposed pursuit of science, and 90% of the science out there is junk, and 99% of the science journalism is junk. But multiple exponents more bloodshed has occurred by dumb people who clap every time some politician riles them up enough to not get mad when their hard earned dollars are spent on fighter jets and tanks to nuke some remote place in the opposite side of the world for some vague alleged geopolitical or national security reasons that change multiple times after the fact anyway. Passionately dwelling about muh feelingz like some liberal arts student while ignoring evidence about the real world is what they want you to do. It is what they brainwashed people to do through post-modern art and philosophy, where everything's subjective, nothing has meaning, and trying to understand objective facts about the world is racist. Maybe you're just brainwashed by them. Maybe they've used religion as a scapegoat by planting false prophet who go on about being their greatest ally and bombing the hell out of people they don't like when that's almost the opposite of what Jesus would have liked.
Carter Rogers
I think the gamers just don't appreciate it because it really doesn't add much to their games ... for now.
but for people who appreciate graphics and 3D rendering, it's pretty crazy to see that real-time raytracers are now commodity hardware. I'm old enough to remember when very, very simple scenes would take HOURS to raytrace in software, to say nothing of when they started to look even remotely realistic (with global illumination and caustics and depth of field)
I don't care for modern games but I can appreciate how far the tech has come.
Jaxon Gutierrez
The only times I have even seen it is when it's being used to make puddles or reflections nicer, which is useless. It's like hairworks, but for puddles. "Oh wow, look how pretty the puddles are!" - nobody, ever.
People will just turn it off to get higher FPS, just like with hairworks.
Aaron Myers
I was on dialup until 2008.
Then highspeed from onwards.
A few years ago I moved and was without internet for a month or so while I set everything up, ended up having a blast just doing stupid shit with a SNES emulator and playing Besieged. All because I had no intertubes and forced myself to get into something.
Ian Evans
Anyway, the point was I had more fun in a month without internet going oldschool and just dicking about on the computer, as I would've when I had 3kb/s downstream than I did with infinite dataz!11
Isaiah Carter
sounds nice. I'm seriously considering figuring out how I can somehow ration my internet access, without losing access to programming documentation and stuff that would waste too much time figuring out on my own with offline docs.
Brody Green
Rasterization will never get to photorealism, and every year we'll have to hack the same effects as ray tracing which requires increasingly more effort.
If we could just run ray trace everything we would not just have better looking games but developers would save time and resources developing them.
Owen Sanders
High bandwidth is responsible for a lot of things plaguing technology at the moment. It's why "rolling beta" software riddled with bugs but the idea that "we'll patch it later" when people report them rather than properly testing the software and having it be written to a professional standard.
No other industry would be allowed to get away with such bullshit.
Chase Martin
i'm 33 if you want to relive the 90s so bad turn off your computer and go skateboarding
Anthony Powell
>t for people who appreciate graphics and 3D rendering, it's pretty crazy to see that real-time raytracers are now commodity hardware doom was raytraced
Noah Rivera
>segway
Liam Smith
The problem isn't speed, the problem is money. Of course you always had shops online and other things but money didn't run everything. The internet used to be mostly enthusiasts or small groups of people organizing into forums and so on. Take out (((money))) and you lose social media, data harvesting, and all the things that made the internet cancer. The Normies will leave, and it will be ours again.
Dominic Anderson
If you want to pull the echoquotes bullshit then you'll have to leave the internet entirely since it was created by the government in the first place. You'll want to go back to BBSs and FidoNet if you want to avoid your bogeyman.
I remember spending far less time online but accomplishing so much more, despite the far slower transfer speeds. Of course this was back when things were a mixture of text files and plain HTML, meaning a simple CTRL-S would pull the whole thing down and you could read it at your leisure. This totally changed the tone of the information being spread (remember when people would repost files rather than just link them? I 'member).
Lucas Martinez
>live in the soviet union >only housing is commie blocks >>the government constructed those buildings you know? if you're so much of a libertarian then maybe you should go live under a bridge
John Myers
The government isn't half as Jewish as the corporations are. Corporate influence is the true cancer. That's what I meant by jews.
Angel Rodriguez
The more fitting analogy would be living in a town rather than a city commie block.
Aiden Perez
Speaking of Fidonet I remember Tom Jennings warning everyone that moving the internet (which requires large unknown corporations at every step of the way) would eventually lead to a limiting on freedom.
Also Fidonet's program fit inside a 64kb .COM file. I'd love to see someone try something like that these days.
As time has passed, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
I am amused at the number of people in this thread who say there were less things to do in the web 1.0 days or that it was boring. Quite the contrary. You only reveal either that you are a shill or a complete dimwit.
Andrew Ramirez
they arent gems they were all shit
Grayson Wood
>is bandwidth responsible for the internet (and life) not being fun anymore? no - social media is don't blend my megabit with your iTards
Charles Reed
Best of all, there were fewer people like you perusing the early web. If you found it to be shit, chances are you didn't spend much time there, so we didn't have to interact like we do now.
Gavin White
I did spend much time there, that's how I know, you nostalgic fucks are ridiculous, peoples geocities webpages had nothing of value, the early web promised the world and delivered fuck-all
Ryan King
I would say your fundamentally wrong. I could find everything I wanted on the early web minus all the commercial bullshit and mobile users. And I had broadband in the 90's. It was glorious.
Aaron Garcia
>I could find everything I wanted if you wanted anything that was on the web in the 90s you probably have low-functioning autism like maybe you enjoy seeing gifs of dancing babies, under construction signs and signing peoples guestbooks
Nicholas Walker
Why are you fixated on Geocities? That was just one small corner of the old web. The web was huge and vast back then also.
Luke Jackson
Bandwidth isn't the problem, the problem is information overload. There is simply too much useless information out there, and people waste their time on it. Hell, even me posting in this thread qualifies. But I have nothing better to do, so here you go.
I am going to tell you right now: I am a biased person. I do not use social media. I've always felt that social media is cancer. That said, there is nothing inherently wrong with instant communication. Just think about it, we did just fine with telephones. The problem is when everyone is posting things publicly and anyone can see those things and comment about them. Social media is teaching kids that they should be posting their innermost thoughts for everyone to see, and that they are a bad person if their thoughts don't align with the majority. This is completely fucking unethical and absolutely disgusting.
Meanwhile, pseudo-anonymous posting provides the best environment. For example: forums, reddit, chat programs (that use nicknames), etc. Somewhere that you can create an identity, other people can recognize that identity, but it is not directly connected with you as a person. You can comfortably share your opinions, without it directly reflecting on you as a person or being attacked by people who disagree with you.
Total anonymous posting like Jow Forums, is great for just random banter, but has the downside of encouraging trolls and samefagging; you can never get a true picture of everyone's thoughts, because you don't know who is bullshitting and who is being honest. IMO board should use the unique ID system except /b/.
Julian Myers
Because personal homepages were pretty much all that existed There were some bigger, more informative sites which have now all been replaced with wikipedia with nothing really lost in the process, so it sounds like you're just complaining about not being able to visit peoples shitty homepages
Jeremiah Cooper
its not. its much more simplier. you are given chance and opportunity for all this information, but you take no responsibility. And there is your mistake. Take responsibility and search and look for info that only benefits you. Everything else is useless and can damage you.
Liam Lewis
The only thing that has improved since then is video streaming. That is it. That is the only improvement I can say is tangibly better. Oh... and flat computer monitors.
Jose Jackson
>oppressive nigga you pay for your internet, no one is forcing you kys
David Foster
Jow Forums is better than forums hell reddit is better than forums
Grayson Foster
sorry i meant boomer with the mindset of a teenager. sounds like you're just not good with technology
Hunter Barnes
how can anyone be "not good with technology" using the internet isnt hard you brainlet
Jacob Jones
Jow Forums isn't exactly some great web2.0 invention. Could have easily existed in the web 1.0 days.
And, I forgot, one other major tangible improvement is places like Amazon that seem to have really figured out online shipping.
David Morales
it's a web 1.0 site with a web 2.0 community if it were the 90s there'd be 5 posts a day
Adrian Wilson
don't be silly. While I wasn't active in forums in the 90s, I started joining forums around 2000, 2001, still the web 1.0 days, that had thousands of posts per day. Like skyscraperpage and skyscrapercity.
Nathaniel Rodriguez
an exception doesnt prove a rule, thousands of posts a day is rare even now
Nathan Powell
IF YOU DO NOT REMEMBER THE FOLLOWING WEBSTES FLIPCODE.COM DOGPILE.COM PHOTOSHOPCAFE.COM NEODELIGHT.COM MOFUNZONE.COM
IF YOU DO NOT REMEMBER BROWSING FORUMS TO ADVERTISE YOUR WEBSITE
