zlacker

>>bewal4+(OP)
A little bit tangent, and I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses... but been playing with it for the 30 minutes, and most of the videos look so real? Like when you go on TikTok / Instagram nowadays, there are obviously unlimited amount of content. But there's this sense of everything being edited multiple times, people trying to create their own "brand", nothing looking real. It's a shame how we over-financialized everything and sucked out the fun. Or maybe I just got old.

Side note, I'll also recommend people to look up "X city in 1990s / 2000s" on YouTube. San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, London and etc. have cool slice of life content from people who were very into camcorders.

>>tokioy+W4
I was on tiktok in 2019/2020 and for a brief period it was just ordinary users messing around and posting whatever they felt like. No tiktok shop, very few ads or thinkpieces, nobody was trying to build an audience. A lot weirder and a lot more fun

>>mprast+Ql
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.

I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.

>>abixb+Ap
I'm old enough to have seen multiple golden ages / phases of the internet and was thinking about pointing out every era has one based on your age.

But then again, I kinda suspect there's some deeper truth going on where your mentioned golden age might be one of the last though?

>>antod+Rq
Yeah, the ubiquity of smartphones and the rise of Facebook and Instagram (post-acquisition) as an open platform for advertisers versus mostly for early adopters/enthusiasts really killed the "fun" of the internet.

Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.

>>abixb+Ar
> really killed the "fun" of the internet.

The original eternal September[1] predates my entry to the internet by a couple of years, but the cycle repeats eternally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

>>eCa+xw
Yeah, I'm of the same vintage. Never really felt eternal september impacted the newsgroups I frequented as they didn't appeal to AOLers, and felt it was exaggerated. But it feels real now with engagement metric following content creators and influencers, and the way platforms enable it now.