• @[email protected]
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    19219 days ago

    Nowadays its all about monetization :/

    Lemmy is kinda refreshing and reminds me a lot of the early internet/reddit.

      • @[email protected]
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        5019 days ago

        Feeling sad from the debt you’ve racked up paying for digital clothes for your avatar in what can barely be described as a ‘game’?

        Welcome to Better Help, where you can pay us money to rapidly* connect you with a qualified* therapist who definitely won’t leak all of your sensitive health information so that online ads can drain you of even more money and mental stability!

        • @FractalsInfinite
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          Tired of having your data stolen in ways that can be used by both corporations and governments to manipulate you? We at incogni can help you against both*. By utilizing the few remaining laws on data protection, you can pay us to send emails to hidden legal departments to express your wishes for them to follow your desire to not be targeted by invasive advertisers. While you can do that process yourself, goodluck finding the email address. Unfortunately you won’t know if they complied until they get hacked by teens showing off and leak your data in the process.

          Incogni, sometimes preventing both incels or gay internet catboys(for more information look up SeigedSec telegram") from uploading your personal data.

          *governments can still determine every site you visit due to the default settings in DNS records leaking that data to your government controlled and logging ISP. If you are a US citizen they will also pay google for your data with your tax dollars . Please change your DNS resolver to Cloudflare or Quad9, it might even speed up your loading time.

          • @[email protected]
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            217 days ago

            First off, lol, but secondly and in fairness:

            If you use something like incogni or … aura? Aurora? Theres some second one now thats being widely promoted…

            If you used one of these things to sort of mop up whatever data you have out there that private brokers have, and then followed your very good advice and used a different DNS system, along with an actual no log, obfuscated payment VPN…

            That might actually result in what apparently we olds have known as basic online privacy.

      • @[email protected]
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        218 days ago

        Do you have trouble watching your favourite racist shows without the Imperials eavesdropping on - and occasionally executing - you? You need Nord VPN. Because Skyrim belongs to the Nords!


        Internet in Skyrim… Skynet? Interim?

    • @[email protected]
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      3119 days ago

      Yeah me too.

      If you liked this comment make sure to annihilate that up vote button, follow my account and subscribe to my patreon so you can get access to comments like these 24 hours early and get a cool role on my personal discord!

      • @[email protected]
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        18 days ago

        I’m sorry, I think I annihilated that upvote button so hard I had an integer overflow

        Enjoy your technical downvote

    • @[email protected]
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      2419 days ago

      As the cycle continues the more niche places will continue to have that feel. Always vigilant for the nuttos but comes with it being a non mainstream community. Good and bad.

    • @[email protected]
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      1819 days ago

      Thats the crux of it all. The a lot of the funniest videos 15+ years ago were just random videos on random accounts. There was no monetary incentive, so a lot accounts were just people who luckily captured something funny and uploaded it. Creative stuff felt authentic too, they were not chasing a trend, they were just trying to show off their original skills. I still love a lot of what we have today, but it is getting buried by trend chasers.

    • themeatbridge
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      1719 days ago

      Nowadays…

      If there is one eternal constant in human history, it’s that every generation inaccurately believes that the problems they face are new.

      Human creates thing.

      Thing is cool.

      Humans exploit thing.

      Thing is no longer cool.

      Humans reminisce about how cool the thing used to be, and lament the loss of cool.

      If Lemmy gets popular enough, it too will be monetized and we’ll al have to find somewhere else to go.

    • M137
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      618 days ago

      I don’t think there will ever be a place like the old web again. Lemmy is better than reddit, but lots of the crap from there is just as common here, stuff that really wasn’t as common before. I’m absolutely certain a disturbing amount of people say dumb shit, make spelling mistakes and stuff like that simply to get “interraction”.

      • @[email protected]
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        618 days ago

        Culture changes. The best we can do is keep influencing it for the better, just wherever we’re able.

      • @explodicle
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        217 days ago

        I can’t speak for everyone, but I post more frequently here than I did on reddit because we gotta get those numbers up.

    • Андрей Быдло
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      119 days ago

      I was to comment that this realization came to me when I’ve found an antique but active forum about gore, that I can’t access it anymore, and I’m stuck thinking if it’s for the better.

    • @DoctorWhookah
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      19 days ago

      Where you can do anything! I love that this still exists.

  • DarkGamer
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    19 days ago

    Back in my day the Internet was better, no video, we had to connect with 56k moderns, the hardware cost a fortune, most people were in AOL, we had to upload both ways in the snow, had to wait for titty pics to load one line at a time, and we liked it that way…

    You kids today with your tikky Tok and your faces-book don’t understand

    • @[email protected]
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      I remember trying to pirate Doom at some point in the 90s over a 56k modem. It was a 10mb download. I got shouted at by my parents for tying up the phone line the whole evening but I persisted. Turns out it was just the demo for Doom so I didn’t even pirate it really.

      Good times.

      • @[email protected]
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        1918 days ago

        I downloaded dude where’s my car over 56k. I’d connect it at the start of the day before leaving for school and then pause the download when I got home so I could play StarCraft online. Took a week to get it, and then it wouldn’t play.

        Figuring the file just got corrupted during the download, I wrote a program that would break the file up into segments of n bytes and generate a checksum for each segment into another file, then you could take that file and run it against another copy of the original file and find any segments that were different and generate a patch file.

        Surprisingly, the guy hosting the file on IRC was willing to run the executable a random user on IRC asked him to (probably noticed me taking that week to download the movie lol), but then his copy and mine were exact matches. Then, he taught me about codecs and I was watching that shitty quality 500MB movie just a little while later.

        • @[email protected]
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          First movie I ever pirated was Spider Man 1 (the Tobey McGuire one). Over dial up. Similar situation, it took days to finish with intermittent downloading. The quality was so shitty it was basically unwatchable, even back then when I hadn’t yet seen 1080p let alone 4k.

          • @[email protected]
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            718 days ago

            800x600 was a respectable screen resolution in those days and people with decent computers ran at 1024x768, which is more vertical pixels than 720p, though 4:3 ratio. That’s not something I’m nostalgic about lol. Winamp could only fit like 30 songs on the screen even if you expanded your playlist to the bottom of the screen (and I have a feeling I might be overestimating it here).

            I think the second movie I downloaded was captured by a camcorder in the theatre, including people blocking the view as they walked to and from their seats. Scary Movie iirc.

    • @[email protected]
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      2818 days ago

      had to wait for titty pics to load one line at a time, and we liked it that way…

      We really did not like that.

    • @[email protected]
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      -1019 days ago

      Didn’t be a dipshit. You can’t understand their point?

      They’re not talking about technology. They’re talking about creative quality of content.

  • @[email protected]
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    6819 days ago

    It’s a cycle we all go through. My “when the internet was good” was when long-form text content ruled, before memes and videos took over. The kids of today will fondly remember the deep fried memes and TikToks from before the human race became functionally extinct.

  • @[email protected]
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    6719 days ago

    ITT: anon realizes the world doesn’t stop changing for everyone, what once was will soon cease to be

    You’ll be alright OP

      • @[email protected]
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        1219 days ago

        Technically change isn’t a constant. Eventually everything will stop changing, because all of the atoms will have drifted too far apart to react to each other, and the universe will just be a thin soup of everything that will never touch anything ever again. Tomorrow is Wednesday, though, so only a few more days until the weekend!

        • @[email protected]
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          1119 days ago

          We don’t know that for fact, we can’t even agree on the age of the universe. Maybe there’s a big crunch

          • Zagorath
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            I don’t think it’s been ruled out for certain, but I believe the data is looking incredibly bad for big crunch enthusiasts, since the discovery of dark energy.

            Edit: from the Big Crunch Wikipedia page:

            The vast majority of evidence indicates that this hypothesis is not correct. Instead, astronomical observations show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than being slowed by gravity, suggesting that a Big Chill is more likely. However, some physicists have proposed that a “Big Crunch-style” event could result from a dark energy fluctuation.

              • @[email protected]
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                319 days ago

                I take issue with discovery. To say there’s a mysterious inexplicable expansion of the universe hardly qualifies as such. It sounds more like a failure to understand our physical laws than to posit the presence of mysterious and otherwise undetectable entity.

                • Zagorath
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                  218 days ago

                  The use of the word “discovery” in this case was carefully considered. The discovery of “dark energy” refers to the effect: the unexpected acceleration of the expansion of space. The fact that the expansion is accelerating was a discovery, and dark energy is just the name given to “whatever causes that”.

        • @thetreesaysbark
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          219 days ago

          If the atoms continue drifting, then that in itself is still change.

        • @SuddenDownpour
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          118 days ago

          But by that point, cognition itself will be a physical impossibility, so is the the lack of change even real if there’s nothing to conceptualize its truth, and thus capable of declaring: “Nothing will ever change anymore”?

          • @[email protected]
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            318 days ago

            You are mixing philosophy and fact. It doesn’t matter what can or can’t be perceived. If you blindfold yourself, the world doesn’t go away.

    • @[email protected]
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      1719 days ago

      I met a traveller from an antique land,
      Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
      Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
      Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
      And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
      Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
      Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
      The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
      And on the pedestal, these words appear:
      My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
      Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
      Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
      Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
      The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

      - Percy Shelley

  • @[email protected]
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    5218 days ago

    While I’ll agree the internet has been overrun by shortform shit, calling internet memes uncreative is such a boomer-ass take. This guy is just nostalgia baiting for points.

    • @booly
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      518 days ago

      Yeah, plenty of Gen Z memes still make me laugh. They’re just in different forms, including some video “templates” where you just slap some captions on characters in the same scene:

      • Starship troopers “I’m doing my part” montage interrupted with Tim Robinson “I didn’t do shit!”
      • Diary of a Wimpy Kid scene with kids auditioning from by singing Total Eclipse of the Heart, giving way to some kid who’s actually good.

      Are they really that different from some high quality gifs or deep fried memes from the late 2010’s, advice animals from the early 2010’s, demotivational posters or absurd flash animations from the 2000’s, or joke websites from the 90’s?

      People will always be funny, and some internet jokes will start fresh before being run into the ground. Remember the ones you like, and then forget the ones you don’t.

  • @[email protected]
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    I’ve been using Protoweb on my 98 computer for some time now. Protoweb is a proxy for a old internet, mainly for old computers. (Not very secure, because http, but it is worth the time travel)

    Anyway, it has WarpStream on it. It is basically a Old YouTube recreation, using unusual means to play videos (Flash, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player.) It has what this guy is looking for. Also it has new videos, but mainly from retro computer YouTube channels.

    https://protoweb.org/2023/12/10/warpstream-net-video-streaming-for-retro-pcs/

  • KillingTimeItself
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    2218 days ago

    the darkweb is literally just the old internet, plus or minus some racism.

    It’s great fun.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        918 days ago

        it depends on where you go.

        And where you go on the clear net.

        There’s tons of racism on the clear net, and theres tons of racism on the darknet.

        But there’s also shit like cookbooks on the darknet.

    • @[email protected]
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      I think that’s the whole point. But before, it was all just a simple Google search away, no SEO in sight. Being capable of surfing the web properly already was at the time THE test to get in, much like private forums often have some kind of interviewing process. It felt a little more nerdy, and well organized, as you actually had to be both things to contribute. As it always was.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        718 days ago

        it’s so much more visceral, in the sense that it’s just fucking html 90% of the time. And it’s incredible.

  • @[email protected]
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    2218 days ago

    I’ve always said the same thing myself: I miss the Internet just there for fun. Now they try to make a living out of it; either in good faith or scamming you.

    • @[email protected]
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      BackInMyDay.jpg we used the net for looking stuff up. Mozilla 1.0 was faster than gopher and something something altavista web crawler grey hair getOffMyLawn.gif

      But it was a special time, back at the uni in 92 and using the 56k link (!!) to play muds/moos on a server in f’n Bosnia. Or read the MTG mailing list. Uh, I mean, do class work. No commercial things even on there really. Before Amazon, Google, Myspace, etc.

      • @[email protected]
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        217 days ago

        Life Internet was so simple back then. None with all these fancy gadgets and instantaneous loading of porn images and videos! Just living in the moment, being patient to wait for your favourite Internet material to load for 2 hours!

    • @[email protected]
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      317 days ago

      I remember being excited when people on the television or “irl” would mention anything to do with computers or even the internet.

      Like wow mainstream culture is talking about the niche nerd thing that I love!

      Now the internet is the mainstream culture.