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I've seen a growing sentiment lately that the old internet was, like, some mystical place where everything was just ontologically better than it is today. While things have definitely changed (for better and for worse), I think people have forgotten that the internet used to be regarded as a place for weirdos to congregate, both by people who used to actively use it and those who weren't in The Know. We should be trying to create new spaces outside of the super centralized social media sphere (Insta, Twitter, Tiktok, etc), and Spacehey is a step in the right direction. Kind of. It's still wearing the corpse of Teh Old Webz, but maybe I can't complain because that's the entire draw of the platform. Oh well. We ball regardless.
Valorization Of The Old Web
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Alpha
A few thoughts on this:
-I think sometimes when people say they miss the old web, especially younger people who weren't really on the "old" web beyond maybe playing a flash game or two, what they really mean is they miss life before social media. I go on instagram and twitter every day, and every now and then I find myself longing for places where I don't feel I need to worry about the things that social media has persuaded me to care about, like numbers, trends, and having a following. Social media is such a big force these days that I think people fall into it by default because it seems to be where everyone else is (which I am guilty of) and don't realize there's still plenty of places that aren't Like That, you just have to look around a little.
-I get that you're talking mostly socially here, but as for actual functionality, I can't really deny that ads are all over the place and at times intrusive, unnecessary bloat is being put into apps and sites and browsers, and something as ubiquitous as Google is eager to give the average user straight up garbage these days.
-Coming back to my first point about younger people longing for something "before", I see a lot of teens on this site wishing to have the old web back or to straight up be back in the early 2000's because they like the popular styles then (this is about emo, yes), without realizing it wasn't really even popular then. Amongst the "unpopular" crowd it was popular in its own way, sure, but it was absolutely something people were getting bullied for, not to mention a lot of these teens are LGBTQ+, which was definitely not as tolerated 20 years ago as it is now. I say to just embrace it now if you like the style and the music, while not worrying too much about being in the wrong generation or whatever (and about being "fake" for that matter). If you yearn for a bygone time period because it seemed more popular and better then: instead of moping about how things were so much cooler in the past, focus on keeping this thing you like alive. Keep something timeless by appreciating and celebrating the thing for what the thing is (specific and has permanence), and not putting so much weight on a a time period that it existed in (unspecific, broad, not permanent, is the container of the thing and not the thing itself).
I could probably say some of this stuff better but whatever
ivorykoi
Definitely have to agree with you that the old web wasn't as glamorous as newer generations make it out to be. (If time travel were real, I'm sure it'd 100% be considered distasteful or some kind of "dark web" (scary, oooooh) compared to how relatively moderate it is now, though that's a whole subjective can of worms on its own considering it was also way less centralized back then). I've been convinced for a while that we find the old net so attractive nowadays (and sites like this serving as mimics) is because people "forgot" how to express themselves, and we're subconsciously yearning for the kinds of connections we could make (or did make nostalgia-wise) in the past online.
If I had to bring up examples: A lot of profiles you see these days paradoxically have a lot of information (usually too much) about someone that some random on the internet definitely shouldn't know, especially if they're a minor. (90's internet safety tips, anyone? They STILL work, believe it or not!)
+ Combine that with the whole "walled-garden" model in a lot of sites/apps...
+ ... And algorithms grouping similar people together, making it harder to find anyone who's from a different community unless you go spelunking in the digital wilderness to find them yourselves. (This doesn't really seem like a problem at first, but if you've seen that one episode of Spongebob with the whole town of Squidwards, you know what I'm talking about.)
+ That, AND meeting new people is always a bit uncomfortable. Go figure that people don't really do it that often (not excusing myself on this either, I like my alone time).
But with all that considered, I guess it's not so much "forgetting" how to express ourselves so much as expressing ourselves genuinely. It's really easy to get dogpiled these days, and I wouldn't blame people for being nervous and copying whatever they see to the right (or left). It just sucks for building genuine connections unless you make sure it doesn't mess up your quote-unquote "brand".
Don't know how to add onto this but you took the words right out of my brain. However I wanna focus, like, specifically on the oversharing part. People really do NOT know how to keep themselves safe and anonymous on the web and it's kind of scary. We've gone from "Don't share your real name!" to "Sharing your first name is fine, it's whatever." to "If you don't have your entire medical history on your profile, you are less than dirt."
I get wanting to meet like-minded people, but the cardds or profiles with paragraphs and paragraphs of identifying information beyond what's reasonable & is hard to trace to You, the Flesh-Man, is extremely scary to me. People already doxx each other for breathing wrong, so why on god's green earth would you go telling everybody stuff they can use to track you? It's ludicrous. I don't know where specifically this whole trend started from, but I think a possible origin point could be circa 2020 when the Quarantine and the advent of Tiktok coalesced into this maelstrom of internet sludge (meaningless "fandom discourse", extreme political upheavel for the new generation, Tiktok's surgical design to keep people hooked, etc), and now we've just been left to deal with the consequences of it.
Detox yourselves. Surf with sentience again.
by 🌐 H∃ΔLER 🌐; ; Report
Marshmallow_Fluff
I just liked to visit the creative sites instead of the modern, form-fitting look. Blogs documenting baseball card collections in bombastic fonts, lists of bands and their personalized pages complete with wacky animations, or someone merely celebrating their new discovery of fishing in humble html.
But, like everything in this world, it comes at a price.