I think zoomers are generally great, but they really underestimated how much of a Wild West the Internet was back in the day, when everybody has their own Angelfire or Geocities website with bad HTML and clipart gifs and people blogged on their LiveJournal and wrote bad fan fictions on forums and all that.
You just kinda learned to be tech savvy for things like “Don’t open random links” and “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” through trial by fire or having to explain why you broke the computer, and it’s not exactly a skill that you forget. So it’s kinda weird for them to assume that they are better at tech just because they are younger.
I do like this place, gives me nostalgia of the Wild West of these early days. Needs more bad fanfictions here though.
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!
The one time it was a Pam Anderson nude was when I tried to download the music video of Linkin Park - Papercut, turned out to be the intro credits to Barb Wire on loop
I remember when Napster would let you browse the music folder of ANY computer running Napster. I have so much music still I downloaded from our universities intranet back in 1998 that way.
It was like if you were on a corporate network and everyone shared their music on the server shared folder. Was mind blowing even on 10base-T.
Nothing has come close to repeating g that aside from hoarding music on my own computer.
The early days of Napster were actually good. Things started to suck by the time it got to Limewire or Gnutella, with “hotphotoofgirl.jpg.exe” and whatever. BitTorrent improved the situation.
There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.
Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.
Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.
I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.
There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.
I’m in my 40s, a project manager at my company and half the time when I can. Tech support I have to send them the goddamn tech support article that I want them to follow.
Plus I have to train all these kids in their 20s on how to use outlook and various other software programs that I’ve been using for 20 years now.
To be fair, there might be an issue with the discoverability of these articles. Restructuring the documentation may lead to less of those issues. Though there is always someone who just opens a ticket before reading anything…
I think zoomers are generally great, but they really underestimated how much of a Wild West the Internet was back in the day, when everybody has their own Angelfire or Geocities website with bad HTML and clipart gifs and people blogged on their LiveJournal and wrote bad fan fictions on forums and all that.
You just kinda learned to be tech savvy for things like “Don’t open random links” and “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” through trial by fire or having to explain why you broke the computer, and it’s not exactly a skill that you forget. So it’s kinda weird for them to assume that they are better at tech just because they are younger.
I do like this place, gives me nostalgia of the Wild West of these early days. Needs more bad fanfictions here though.
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!
Pamela Anderson nude or horrifying decapitation? Time to roll the dice!
Don’t kid yourself, it’s always the decapitation. Or the Korean scream webcomic. But you’re gonna try anyway
The one time it was a Pam Anderson nude was when I tried to download the music video of Linkin Park - Papercut, turned out to be the intro credits to Barb Wire on loop
napster darude sandstorm
I remember when Napster would let you browse the music folder of ANY computer running Napster. I have so much music still I downloaded from our universities intranet back in 1998 that way.
It was like if you were on a corporate network and everyone shared their music on the server shared folder. Was mind blowing even on 10base-T.
Nothing has come close to repeating g that aside from hoarding music on my own computer.
The early days of Napster were actually good. Things started to suck by the time it got to Limewire or Gnutella, with “hotphotoofgirl.jpg.exe” and whatever. BitTorrent improved the situation.
There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.
Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.
Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.
I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.
There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.
Lol, that takes me back. I used to run a mIrc server for anime porn. 😅
“Margot Robbie teased Sonics longest spines.”
That’s Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
Also, I don’t think the world is quite ready for that yet.
I’m in my 40s, a project manager at my company and half the time when I can. Tech support I have to send them the goddamn tech support article that I want them to follow.
Plus I have to train all these kids in their 20s on how to use outlook and various other software programs that I’ve been using for 20 years now.
To be fair, there might be an issue with the discoverability of these articles. Restructuring the documentation may lead to less of those issues. Though there is always someone who just opens a ticket before reading anything…
I am blaming chromebooks and iPads for that.
It’s stupid that kids learn to use chromebooks when they are relatively rare in enterprise environments.
Disclaimer: I’m also very young.
For real though! Also, can anybody give me a lead as to which instance on here where I can find bad fanfic? A friend of mine was wondering.
literature.cafe could be it. Their admin, Gabe, is a pretty cool dude.
phuckin’ THIS.