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State of the Internet
I first got the internet in early 2001. It was a different time then, the so-called dot-com bubble was in the process of bursting, and nobody but the porn sites knew how to make any money off the internet. Websites didn't run ads, they ran seizure-inducing gifs that they thought were ads, but were actually schemes by fly-by-night scam operations. It was lawless, more chaotic then, too. Napster, the real, original, Napster was hitting its stride. Ads, such as they were, were full-frontal attacks, pop-ups, pop-unders, sites that added themselves to your Favorites. Browsing the internet wasn't an excursion, it was a war you fought with your mouse, and your eyes were the casualties, as those ads often featured the worst kinds of porn.
There were some decent websites back then. IGN had far fewer ads and much more content than it does now. I registered an account at the Something Awful forums only a few months after I got the internet, and it has gone on to serve as the cornerstone of my internet experience. Both sites have evolved since then, Something Awful is arguably better, IGN is a husk of what I remember it to be.
Now all anyone can talk about is "Web 2.0," a supposedly new, evolved internet experience built on user generated content, ease of use, and beveled edges. It's not just the site layouts that have been beveled though; the whole internet experience has lost its edge. People still used the term "information superhighway" in 2001 to describe the internet, but I could never find this information. Searching for anything was a struggle, porn, it seemed, could seep into almost any search result. Google was around back then, but I used Yahoo, like a lot of people. Anyone who complains about Wikipedia's unreliability has forgotten what it was like, or perhaps never experienced, trying to find information on the internet in 2001.
The internet has changed, but I think I've been living too far inside it to have noticed. When I first heard of Digg, I dismissed it and sites like it as simply being Slashdot and Fark clones. MySpace, it seemed to me, was just another Lavalife, but now it's one of the most visited sites on the whole of the internet. YouTube, which I started visiting even before it became extremely popular, I thought was simply going to be a LiveJournal alternative, the domain of high school girls whining about their parents. How could a place, which, as far as I can tell, started off as a reserve of people poorly lip-syncing pop songs ever become so significant.
You didn't contribute content in 2001, you started your own website. I signed up for an Angelfire account, and despite evolving that website into Shufflingdead.com, and maintaining it for over five years at this point, I have yet to develop popularity or a real community. I taught myself HTML in order to build that site. Now, anybody can sign up for some webhosting, implement a pre-built content management system, cram in as much "Web 2.0" buzzword-flavoured automation as they can find, implement Google ads, and strike it big with a lucky front page link on Digg.
It's cliché at this point to say that we are becoming the Borg, but we are. Websites are no longer digital magazines; they're pools of consciousness distilled from their users. We had blogs in 2001, we just called them personal websites. We had podcasts in 2001, we just called them mp3 files. Nobody noticed though, I wasn't Time's person of the year. I never got to be a part of the true early days of the internet, I started out on a high speed connection, and I barely know what a BBS is. Still, I used to stay up until 4am on Friday nights, cram on my headphones, fool around with my website, and get to pretend I was Neo before Morpheus discovered him. I wonder if anyone still does that.
There were some decent websites back then. IGN had far fewer ads and much more content than it does now. I registered an account at the Something Awful forums only a few months after I got the internet, and it has gone on to serve as the cornerstone of my internet experience. Both sites have evolved since then, Something Awful is arguably better, IGN is a husk of what I remember it to be.
Now all anyone can talk about is "Web 2.0," a supposedly new, evolved internet experience built on user generated content, ease of use, and beveled edges. It's not just the site layouts that have been beveled though; the whole internet experience has lost its edge. People still used the term "information superhighway" in 2001 to describe the internet, but I could never find this information. Searching for anything was a struggle, porn, it seemed, could seep into almost any search result. Google was around back then, but I used Yahoo, like a lot of people. Anyone who complains about Wikipedia's unreliability has forgotten what it was like, or perhaps never experienced, trying to find information on the internet in 2001.
The internet has changed, but I think I've been living too far inside it to have noticed. When I first heard of Digg, I dismissed it and sites like it as simply being Slashdot and Fark clones. MySpace, it seemed to me, was just another Lavalife, but now it's one of the most visited sites on the whole of the internet. YouTube, which I started visiting even before it became extremely popular, I thought was simply going to be a LiveJournal alternative, the domain of high school girls whining about their parents. How could a place, which, as far as I can tell, started off as a reserve of people poorly lip-syncing pop songs ever become so significant.
You didn't contribute content in 2001, you started your own website. I signed up for an Angelfire account, and despite evolving that website into Shufflingdead.com, and maintaining it for over five years at this point, I have yet to develop popularity or a real community. I taught myself HTML in order to build that site. Now, anybody can sign up for some webhosting, implement a pre-built content management system, cram in as much "Web 2.0" buzzword-flavoured automation as they can find, implement Google ads, and strike it big with a lucky front page link on Digg.
It's cliché at this point to say that we are becoming the Borg, but we are. Websites are no longer digital magazines; they're pools of consciousness distilled from their users. We had blogs in 2001, we just called them personal websites. We had podcasts in 2001, we just called them mp3 files. Nobody noticed though, I wasn't Time's person of the year. I never got to be a part of the true early days of the internet, I started out on a high speed connection, and I barely know what a BBS is. Still, I used to stay up until 4am on Friday nights, cram on my headphones, fool around with my website, and get to pretend I was Neo before Morpheus discovered him. I wonder if anyone still does that.