URGENT EDIT: My daughter, who looked at this post for a grand total of SEVEN EARTH SECONDS, said that I write like everyone else on the internet, she has seen 10 posts exactly like this one. So for her I say "Fingle, blork, burgle SNARGLEPUSS."
It's so common, everyone who is on the internet who is about my age, give or take a decade, all say that the internet used to be SO MUCH BETTER in the 90s.
It's so tempting to say "oh yes it was" and leave it at that, but let's think about why. I personally I think we all think that for the following reasons:
- We weren't online all of the time. You went out, you lived your life, you came back to the computer, did some school work, and then sometimes you hopped on the internet to check things out.
Today I have notifications interrupting every damn thing I am doing, any time something horrible happens in the world. Back in the 90s if something annoyed me on the internet, I got up and walked out of the house, or even picked up a book and read it for a while. - People hand wrote their own web pages. So when you were browsing you were not only reading their words, but you were seeing everything about them coming through the page. Today everything on a social media page is kind of run through the digital potato ricer of sameness.
It also meant when you were writing, you had to figure out and find all of the links to put in the post. Today when I make a Mastodon post, I just dump a link into the text box and it automatically makes a link and my Mastodon client fetches a page preview, and I, the post author, do not have to figure out what the link text says or where to put the link in the post or anything. - We didn't have any social media back then. But we had SOCIAL media. We all had blogs. We commented on each others blogs. Before blogs we just hand wrote web pages and commented on other people's shit only on our own pages.
- Before search engines, you started on a page, and clicked links until you ran out of things to read. After a couple of weeks you had read everything there was to read on the internet that was interesting.
When search engines came out, you could do a search and you'd get maybe 10 or so relevant results. You could visit each one, and visit each link in turn, and so, after 45 minutes or so, you would have read everything there was on the internet to read about flamethrowers. One page even had a teeny, 160x80 pixel, 20 second video of the author shooting fire out of a flamethrower they had made. It was pretty fucking cool.
And then you were done! Nothing else to read, time to go outside and get lunch.
Contrast with today. I don't know about you, but everything I do online is "social media". Mastodon is where I find out what my friends are up to, YouTube is where I watch videos, Reddit is where I mindlessly fill time and scroll, and HackerNews is where I go hoping to find more of those sweet, sweet, deep dives into assembly language on weird computing platforms.
- All of those platforms (except Mastodon) have an algorithmic feed that is trying to feed you crap to make you spend more time on the platform. I can feel the algorithm pushing me around while I am using the webpage and it's a constant, low grade source of stress for me. Do a bit too much black and white film research on YouTube and suddenly EVERY video is about film photography. And I don't know about you, but I start to forget about the other fun things I used to see on YouTube as YouTube shoves more film photography videos at me, wrongingly thinking I don't want to see any videos from any other creators ever again.
- The feeds are endless. ENDLESS. With no signposts, waypoints, or markers for how long you've been scrolling or how much scrolling there is left to do.
- There is no escape. I am two taps away from any social media on my phone, and I need my phone to live my life since so much of life is tied to the phone.
- The digital potato ricer of sameness just mushes all content into the same kind of chunks. Every video has the same structure, YouTube only shows you the popular stuff, anything that is by a new creator, or has flaws, or makes you feel uncomfortable, never gets surfaced.
- Nobody is earnest anymore or willing to make things that are flawed.
Here's the real point - the old internet that we had in the 90s is not the same thing as social media. It runs on the same roads but it's not the same car! I liked my old car. This new one I do not like.
I liked connecting to people and being able to say what I wanted on my own page and have other people read it. I have been noticing a lot of people talking about how great the old internet was, and hey, I agree. The thing I keep thinking in my head is "the only way we are getting that internet back is if we, by hand, write some web pages and share them with each other".
We aren't getting there by trying to go "viral". Or by playing popularity games on social media. Or by SEO or algorithms or anything else. Make a web page. Put stuff on it. More stuff. MORE. Tell folks about it.
The thing today, that started this whole post was thinking about discovery. Hey, we used to not have search engines. No, really. You went to Yahoo which was a big list of links. Or even, stay with me here, some people published physical, paper books, with website links in them.
Now, I'm not going to go that far. But I did just spend OVER AN HOUR making a new page that has links on it. The page has, as of right now, THREE websites. Because it took me a while to figure out how to structure the page and how I wanted it to be, and I spent at least 20 minutes reading about the Dewey Decimal System and another 10 minutes looking at screenshots of Yahoo from the 1990s.
Go! Make cool shit! Put it on the internet, plug your socials, sure, but also, write about it on a web page that you write and control. Your webpage is going to be more memorable to this old fart than just reading another instagram post that looks exactly like every other instagram post.
(My apologies for not including more links in this post. I feel bad but I already spent an hour making the link page and then another hour on this post and now I'm hungry.)