zlacker

I can't speak for anyone else, but I miss the early Web mainly because I was young, had my life ahead of me, and everything was an unknown frontier to be explored.

Do you remember how f'in hard it was to find stuff online back when a) there was less stuff online and b) you had to use a metasearch engine like Metafind or Dogpile to aggregate the terrible results from multiple engines into something remotely useful? Remember surfing because actively searching fog data was next to impossible? Remember 300ms-per-hop latency and being impressed by 6KB/sec downloads, taking a week to download a Linux distro and rarely upgrading your packages because it took forever? Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared? I do. I won't go back. I have a few PDP-8s and a PDP-11/03 and various 8-bit micros and some Teletypes and 80s-90s UNIX systems and Winboxen if I want to go back to the old days. They're not dead, they're still here and they still do exactly what little they did in the past. I don't love how dystopian tech has become, but it's a ton more useful to me and most other people than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago.

>>theodr+(OP)
Home, and the internet I remember, are both not only a place but a specific period in time. As I get older the phrase "You can never go home" has really started to resonate with me.

>>theodr+(OP)
> Remember that day in 1998 when the world changed because some Stanford project called 'Google' appeared?

You may want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...

>>theodr+(OP)
I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net. Even if I did have to download the the matrix as a multi part rar file in tiny resolution, or leave Napster running all night on a noisy desktop to get that Radiohead album mp3s.. it's better than bugging a parent for credit card like an addict to buy some cosmetic skin for a game.. skins used to be free and fan made mods! https://ut99.org/viewtopic.php?t=3471

>>theodr+(OP)
There's no need to go back, and every reason to go forward. Just because a lot of tech has gotten very good is no reason we have to passively accept that it can't get any better or friendlier or safer.

To abuse a metaphor, we're not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that bathwater still _has to go._

>>totets+E3
> I kind of wish the next generation of my family wasn't having thier young minds and perception of tech shaped by the corporate dystopia net.

My approach here is just stay off the internet. Go outside. Play board games. Imagine there was a world before computers and people entertained themselves just fine

>>rockwo+Hp
Computers are not the internet: you can have a lot of fun with computers and also programming them without the internet. Probably not if you need to make money from it, but as a hobby it is very much possible. There are a lot of environments that have docs included (game dev mostly, like pico8 etc), but languages like C, Go, lisp you can program on a deserted island far away from comm networks if you need to because they are small enough and have enough that can be carried with you. People had a lot of fun with computers before the internet. But yes going outside is a good plan anyway.

>>tluybe+ZA
The internet isn't the corporate dystopia net either: you can also still have fun with running a server for an obscure game or setting up a blog without having your attention tracked and exploited for profit.

>>theodr+(OP)
That stanford project is very different from the behemoth today. I think thats the point.