I’m surprised I’ve only seen one mention of the good ol’ Stumbleupon.com, I used to spend hours alone and with friends just hopping from one random thing to another. Found some pretty cool stuff too.
LOVED stumbleupon. I even met some cool people IRL through it.
These days kagi.com/smallweb is the closest thing I've seen. It's a lot of fun to stumble around, but of course the larger internet has changed. You didn't have all of these content streaming behemoths vying for your engagement back then.
I've always said the same thing myself: I miss the Internet just there for fun. Now they try to make a living out of it; either in good faith or scamming you.
BackInMyDay.jpg we used the net for looking stuff up. Mozilla 1.0 was faster than gopher and something something altavista web crawler grey hair getOffMyLawn.gif
But it was a special time, back at the uni in 92 and using the 56k link (!!) to play muds/moos on a server in f'n Bosnia. Or read the MTG mailing list. Uh, I mean, do class work. No commercial things even on there really. Before Amazon, Google, Myspace, etc.
Life Internet was so simple back then. None with all these fancy gadgets and instantaneous loading of porn images and videos! Just living in the moment, being patient to wait for your favourite Internet material to load for 2 hours!
Yt turned from video sharing service to a shitty streaming one. Theoretically for free except you are the product.
It’s actually pretty insane that we prefer to watch some celebrity streamer talking than a movie or tv series. I think there was some brainwashing along the way or maybe it’s just a cope for loneliness
The advantage of youtube is that it's user generation and low barrier to entry allows anyone to produce creations that are targeted to niches so specific, people would be unwilling to make something that targets them due to the lack of profit, if they are even aware of the existence of said niche. It also means that said creations can be made relatable to specific groups.
Things like parasocial relationships also apply, where we watch someones videos in order to get to know them to the point you may unintentionally believe you are friends with them, Something let's players, bloggers, streamers and podcast/radio hosts all are able to effectively exploit. It probably helps that most start off being relatable to there viewers due to there similar (and often worse) economic status.
While I'll agree the internet has been overrun by shortform shit, calling internet memes uncreative is such a boomer-ass take. This guy is just nostalgia baiting for points.
Yeah, plenty of Gen Z memes still make me laugh. They're just in different forms, including some video "templates" where you just slap some captions on characters in the same scene:
Starship troopers "I'm doing my part" montage interrupted with Tim Robinson "I didn't do shit!"
Diary of a Wimpy Kid scene with kids auditioning from by singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, giving way to some kid who's actually good.
Are they really that different from some high quality gifs or deep fried memes from the late 2010's, advice animals from the early 2010's, demotivational posters or absurd flash animations from the 2000's, or joke websites from the 90's?
People will always be funny, and some internet jokes will start fresh before being run into the ground. Remember the ones you like, and then forget the ones you don't.
In my experience a lot of programming blogs still have them, but then again those are the people who are most capable of adding them and who are mostly likely to find them
As a website owner, you would just register your site with a ring and then add a bit of HTML at the bottom of your page which would display the randomly-selected banner of another site in the ring (and your banner would sometimes be displayed on another site). So visitors could just click on the banners and be taken through a circuit of interesting (sometimes) websites.
I think that's the whole point. But before, it was all just a simple Google search away, no SEO in sight. Being capable of surfing the web properly already was at the time THE test to get in, much like private forums often have some kind of interviewing process. It felt a little more nerdy, and well organized, as you actually had to be both things to contribute. As it always was.
