3/4 here, never was interested in tamagotchis lol
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren't being harsher on criminals. Society's views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.
I think what we're seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there's basically a cultural luddite movement.
The "This machine kills fascists" sticker that John Green put on his laptop for his Crash Course World History series has not aged well at all
Grunge music being described as "wacky" is the wackiest thing here.
Also: David Bowie foresaw the internet's negative effect way back in 1999 like a god damn prophet.
There was a window where the internet was a huge positive.
That ended 10 to 15 years ago.
Kinda coinciding with social media apps.
It's almost like corporations took over the internet, monetized it, and deployed every possible tool to convert it into an addicting advertising platform without any regulations or standards, driving up social contention, misinformation and propaganda because the more rage you can instill in the population the more "engagement" everything will get.
Smartphones were a bad idea. Social Media got large swaths of the population addicted to screens, increasing insomnia and anxiety. Unhealthy fads like the "girls pushing each other into eating disorders" and the whole "men are all bad" mainly spread through social media. The benefits of communication and knowledge-gathering/-spreading could have also been achieved with stationary devices. It claims to "connect" people, but made them lonelier. The loneliness pandemic is real.
The internet and commercial computer technology should have stopped developing before 2008. Since then, it's just adding to the enshittification. The newest bloatware is AI and the claim that it could "replace human workers". What's next? When will be abandon commercial computing technology for free and open source alternatives?
I mean it has to make some money at some point and that makes it a matter of time until enshittification starts.
If your social media site does not need to make any money, it can also be unskewed in information, not sell your data not advertise etc.
No interest in keeping you engaged. That was maybe the driver algorithm that fucked up modern life.
Even moot has said it's the smartphones, internet access in your pocket is just a recipe for disaster
thats when the MBAs took over from the nerds because there was way too much money, and somehow not enough.
Remember the days when the CEO of tech/manufacturing was actually an engineer or PhD researcher. Not many companies have that nowadays.
supposedly it goes in long cycles. during boom times, sales/marketing take over to squeeze out profits and market share. during bust times, development/engineering takes over to evolve the offerings. we just had a really long boom cycle and it appears to be finally busting.
It feels like there are few things that enshitification^TM^ doesn't impact.
Oh that's right, in the Internet's early days people thought it would do what they also thought television would do in its early days. But then the Internet did the same things television did - became an advertising platform and and dumbed down its addicted users. Maybe when the next communications breakthrough comes we'll realize... lol nah of course we won't.
The technology isn't the problem. People are the problem.
One of the first people to see the potential of television in its early days was actually Adolf Hitler. He hoped that one day there would be one in every town. And now the internet is doing what he hoped television would do.
I mean, the internet went to shit when we all centralized around enormous corporate gatekeepers like Facebook and Twitter instead of the personal websites of yore, so I feel like that sentiment still tracks
Many things contributed to the downfall of internet.
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Corporations: not much to say about it. All they want is more users and all they want is more money.
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Ads: because everyone wants money. I am making a tutorial? I want people watching it to give me money. I am making a website? Money. I have free time I can watch some ads to earn money! Then corporations go in the middle: That guy is making tutorial I can put ads in it, give him a small fee and the rest for me!
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Centralization: as you said, instead of millions of forums people just go to reddit.
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Privacy: People not only don't care about it, they are willingly giving it away for free, and the big corporations profit.
The selfhosting movement is the light in the tunnel, but it's really dangerous out there and good actions can bring bad people and they can absolutely ruin your setup.
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The Internet was incredible until the corporations colonized it
The internet is a great example of the capitalism to fascism pipeline.
Giga Pets > Tamagotchi
I’ll die on this hill.
As someone from 90s, we were told not to trust the internet.
Yea, I remember when everyone thought putting your personal info on the internet would get you murdered. Then MySpace came out and everyone quickly forgot all that.
myspace still used aliases. facebook was the actual shit stack
Yeah the internet was actually a tool developed by the US to spread ~~propaganda and brain-wash people abroad~~ democracy and freedom of expression (slight /s)
Yeah the internet was actually a tool developed by the US defece agencies to speed up communications
FTFY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
The internet felt like the beginings for a star trek utopia. All the worlds knowledge for all to access. Never really thought about it being sectioned off and limited for anything of quality and then being loaded with crap to sift through. Never thought that it could be filled with propoganda and be used to control whole sections of the populace.
My mom almost bought me a tamagachi in the 90s. I say almost because what she actually bought me was a cheap knock off.
What I remember most about it was my friend showed me their tamagachi, and it's born as an egg.
Then I remember what mine was born as.
Imagine seeing this pixel art gorilla, and then he sees a second pixel art gorilla wearing a skirt. Then you see the closeup of the male gorillas face, and he wiggles his eyebrows exitedly.
The next thing you see is a pixel art of a sperm attacking an egg. In a knockoff tamagachi meant for children. I was 13, so I was old enough to know what I was seeing, but it definately had some real WTF vibes. Let's put it this way. I'm 41. I remember nothing else about that tamagachi besides seeing pixel art gorilla sperm.
That's all. I just wanted more people to know about chinese knockoff tamagachi with gorilla sperm.
Now tamagochis have evolved to smart watches where you are the tamagochi it seems
Sounds like you got a better Tamagotchi.
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The Internet was so much better in the 90s.
It was slower, the graphics were basic, and we could get knocked offline by someone picking up a telephone. But damn, it really felt like reaching out and touching the world for the first time. It took so long for my mom to understand that yes, I can be chatting with friends online at 2am. She would always ask, "Why aren't they asleep?" and I'd have to remind her that other time zones exist.
It turned out that gatekeepers were the only ones keeping the hoard of idiots and rubes off the Internet. RIP quality free content.
I find quality free content everywhere. I mean, maybe not this post, but most things I see are free from quality.
We thought the internet would change the world. It did, but the world changed the internet, too.
The internet in its original concept was great. Unfortunately it wasn't shaped around profit, so it was quickly remodelled.
I remember watching a TV news report in the mid 90s, before Amazon, Netflix, Google even. AOL was a big thing and people with personal computers at home were mostly just messing around. There wasn't a lot of e-commerce. The news anchor was lamenting that all these people playing on their computers were just a wasting their time "browsing," as if no activity has value unless it can be monetized.
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Yep, the world would be so much better if we got all our news from cable TV.
In parts, yes. TV does not have the same ability to respond to your actions. It can't change the program for you specifically to cater to your individual habits. It can't create the same feedback loop that social media algorithms have that push people further and further into extremist views.
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Now when I see someone saying 'gatekeepers are the problem', I assume they were kicked out of somewhere for being a bigot.
Depends on who the gatekeeper is. Would you assume the same about someone being kicked out of twitter/x?
Nah, I was just grousing about it yesterday on a cooking discord where somebody was trying to gatekeep the protein used in tacos. Using chicken in your taco isn't "incorrect" and they can fight me.
Using chicken in your taco isn't "incorrect"
Show them this lol
Right???
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