Most of my family have to this day never even heard of Usenet, but they all have Instagram and Facebook accounts. The scale of Usenet “popularity” isn’t even remotely in the ballpark of the modern social web/apps. There are more people on meta apps than people who even had access to the internet when Usenet was relevant.
illah
joined 2 years ago
But you gotta admit Usenet was super niche and was never ever on its way to becoming a thing usable by people from all walks of life. This is why AOL became a thing…and folks like us similarly criticized it as a commercial walled garden!
While that was true about AOL and also true about the web today, going back to clunky services only techies can use isn’t the answer, and the current state of the fediverse is pretty clunky. But I have high hopes for how this space will evolve.
This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.
True any text based thing is vulnerable I suppose. I suppose the SEO/content farming stuff tho is more what I was referring to. It was already happening with scrapers ripping off real content to get ad impressions or rein affiliate links. thats a big part of why Wikipedia and Reddit got some priority (either algo or humans adding “Reddit” to a search).
But hopefully stuff like the fediverse makes it a bit more grassroots in that a shitposting bot has less of a direct financial incentive in the way the web does.
Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.
Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!
Crazy to see my lemmy account at <1m old when my Reddit one is 15yrs 11mo…kinda bummed I’m all but resigned to moving on just short of my sweet 16.
Hope to see these federated services take off!
RIP Apollo
I had a minor debate here re: Usenet, where OP said we basically had an “easy to use” internet 30+ years ago, and AOL won by blanketing people with CDs.
I’m a techie who first got online with a 2400baud modem and I am fully aware that nothing I do can be extrapolated to the general population. Now that I work in the field, designing for “normies” is how and why services grow. The winners are the most usable services, not the most ideologically righteous ones.
(Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term, users of lemmy and mastodon are not special or smart…in this moment in time we’re primarily idealists with strong opinions on centralized tech that most people couldn’t care less about lol)