Personal nature of the wired

I see a lot of posts on here about how much better the "old wired" was. I never really experienced the old wired. By the time I had unrestricted access to the internet the old wired was already long gone. I think a lot of the reason people like the "old wired" is because of the personal touch of it. I never really experienced it, it was before my time, but the draw of sites like neocities seems to be the fact that you know there is another person on the other end, and they lovingly crafted whatever bits are coming down your wire. I have in my hands a textbook (not literally since I'm using my hands to type). I haven't yet pried open its secrets, but I have seen the cover, and the cover is embossed with "library of Raymond A. James". I don't know who Raymond A. James is, it sounds like the most generic upper-class American name in existence, but I know that this person once liked this book enough to include it properly in their library. I know that this book is at least two decades old, and it has passed through *many* hands before landing in mine. I know that the person who wrote it did so because they loved the subject, because there is very little money or prestige in it. I have in my hand physical proof that someone crafted this thing, and at least one person read it and enjoyed it. I got it for free and I will probably one day give it away for free. I will read it and cherish it, and others will read it and cherish it after me, until it crumbles into dust. Is this not how exchange of information ought to be. That is the only really novel or interesting thought I have to contribute. LET'S ALL LOVE LAIN!!!!!!!!

>>58733 You're probably right anon, I've noticed that most of the internet today is completely lacking individuality instead going for a more "professional" look (particularly embodied by whats call the Corporate Memphis style, check it out). Also personal blogs are way more rare these days, people don't use internet to create and share their own stuff nearly as much and if they do they directly use big companies tools (be it social medias, or bandcamp for music, etc)

>>58733 I came online in the 00's. There has been a sharp shift, but this place seems relatively free of taint - or at least, what characterized the "old wired" gravitates here. I feel more alone than before. This isn't good, to me. It's becoming increasingly difficult to find people that stimulate me like the friends I made back then. Facebook clearly made the web accessible to people who would otherwise not have used the web, and perhaps never deserved to.

>>58734 not to mention this corporate memphis art style completely deshumanizes people in its portrayal of human society, opting for some kind of mindless clones or robots (which may be intended)

petition to make internet 3.0 a book exchange

>>58735 Normal and/or merely stupid people were using the web before FB. If anything, FB might have had a positive effect if it only led normal people away from the rest of the internet but it sucked in a lot of interesting people as well and so lots of vibrant communities became ghost towns. The universal subtraction of personality over time is definitely real, but this idea would mystify the average person who sees their social media platforms as the place they get to shine. But it's fake, it's a public face they put on. Many users only share the high points of their day/life, never the lows, and exaggerate how well they are doing. It's so common that people with depression or who are just having a rough patch in their life report feeling worse and worse the longer they scroll, because they accept the illusion that every other person in their virtual sphere is doing better than them; it probably isn't true.

>>58733 I am the same as you, Lainon. I've always wondered things about the old wired, when you think about it, the time when it existed is so much culturally different than it is now. Politics were less divisive, People were more harsh towards punks and nerds. It was a different time.

>>58737 Originally the web was meant to serve static documents with actual information. One can still find plenty of such sites, especially those ending in .edu; moreover, 6tes that require js are more often than not just not worth visiting, and lack any information of interest or which you couldn't find elsewhere. I advocate for using a sane version of the web, using only those sites and communities like lainchan and textboards, and discovery through navigation (what 90s kids would call "surfing") instead of relying on search engines. This can all be done through links (the software) or emacs. It is truly a superior way of using the web.

It's kind of surreal how theres a common ground between those who inhabited and lived the old wired and those who aspire to revive it. Honestly, it's here right now. If you are reading this, you've already left the walled gardens of the new wired, you've set yourself apart. All that's changed is that it's entirely on us to sustain it.

>>58759 Lainchan is definitely not the old Wired. That's what I came here wanting it to be, but wasn't what I got.

>>58759 The people who built the new internet we hate so much came from the old wired too though. The people old enough to remember and lament the old wired did a piss poor job of maintaining that culture. The people not old enough who romanticize it are just feeling out of place in today's culture and idealizing something that wasn't as cool as they think it was.

>>58787 The interwebz used to be better though. Now it's utterly and outright c|amped. I would like to develop a viable mesh network to exist apart from the main internet.

>>58789 Sure, things were better. I may have gone overboard there. I believe chans were better once too, and there has been a debate whether that was a renaissance of the old wired or its final gasp, or even something only slightly related. When enough people got annoyed with 4chan's admins or the retards who hung out there, the examples of 7 and 420 showed that it was possible to do your own thing. There were dozens of cool, niche imageboards for a while after that. A lot of pointless ones too that had the same board topics as 4chan but about a ten thousandth of the posts. Almost all of these are gone now. Walling off from the main internet won't create another renaissance. It's already being tried. All it does really is highlight how few people are left with the old spirit, once you weed out the bots, people sharing photos of their breakfast, 14 year olds showing their synchronized dances, and all the brainwashed /lol/itics children.

>>58742 sadly there's a lot of good websites with unique info on certain topics (ex. programming languages) that require js these days; i find it every time harder to progress on my learning path only using a terminal web broser (w3m in my case) :( I think it would be cool to have more websites closer to the old wired ways, that are as active as lainchan (because let's face it, you can surf the entire lainchan webring in under an hour given the little amount of contents those websites provide at the moment), and that provide not only discussion channels for certain topics but content to help Lainons develop their skills without having to fear if the next website will throw a js trashpile at their faces

>>58787 >The people who built the new internet we hate so much came from the old wired too though thats plain wrong. The new internet is rooted in living corpses in government that have secretaries print out webpages for them so they can make policies about it. The modern internet was thereby shaped by people who dont use it although you could argue it happened at the behest of corporations seeking to commercialize the web but those arent your typical internet users either. And this is why >>58790 is hard to do, you cannot replicate 1999 simply because it got outlawed. Now you need to flee to a small section of countries who still offer same freedoms your grandpa enjoyed at home.

>>58793 the engineers who built the Web were all denizens of the Old Wired.

>>58793 Congratulations, I wrote both of those posts. Maybe you should slow down a little there, Tex.

>>58796 those people didnt create the "new internet". The change occurred on top of the layer they created.

The seeds were there when things like MSN and AOL were there to sprout into the stupid soykaf we have today. The idea of making the web corporate was there when it came out. Technology and the adoption of the web finally came far enough to reap what has been sown decades ago. Look into the old web services and you'll start to notice some similarities.

>>58792 >let's face it, you can surf the entire lainchan webring in under an hour given the little amount of contents those websites provide at the moment Uh... which version of the webring are you using? There's about three or four fragmented ones. I know the content on both my sites (I have two on the webring) takes an hour MINIMUM for the average reader to get through, plus the books...

We don't longer have that speed that fuelled the 90s and 00s. The great thing about the web 1.0 is that everyone had their own personal website. Even normal people. And that's what the great thing. It's impossible to replicate a real web 1.0 for the sole reason that everyone who's trying to replicate it sold their soul for the idea of the web 1.0. Now most people are only in mainstream social media (and the fediverse isn't much better) and don't think on starting their own website because it isn't really necessary, before it was, but it isn't needed to be present in the internet anymore. So they won't bother. Now "web designer" is seen as a wage-slave technique rather than as an art. >>58918 https://youtube.com/watch?v=d9DUqjNMZ60

>>59338 > a YouTube video that says "kill yourself" Not exactly sure what I did to warrant this response. Lainchan being typical Lainchan? I asked an honest question. What version of the webring are you using? When was the last time you checked? It definitely takes /more/ than an hour to get through everything.

>>59342 What I meant is that nobody cares about your books

>>58792 >sadly there's a lot of good websites with unique info on certain topics (ex. programming languages) that require js these days; i find it every time harder to progress on my learning path only using a terminal web broser (w3m in my case) :( I believe the entire WWW to be rotten. Look into Gopher. There's some nice stuff available over it, and it's still suited to tiny clients. It's trivial to use. >(because let's face it, you can surf the entire lainchan webring in under an hour given the little amount of contents those websites provide at the moment) My website isn't on the webring, because I agree the general quality of it is low.

>>58742 you reminded me of this. here's a collection of old text files from the internet that I found on a lain neocities fan site. https://textfiles.com/

Well more personal, yes, but also less corporate and less centralized and catered more to communities while today it's about catering to maximum profits and exploitation of users.

>>58733 some things never change though, I grabbed a lot of soundfonts available on the net very recently and the sites looked like how they were (and how sites looked like) ~15 years ago. you can see examples on the links that follow from this site http://www.synthfont.com/links_to_soundfonts.html other examples are sites that focus on research, archive of old maps/paintings, essentially anything focusing on arts and sciences. most of my experience was with mobile browsing and back when phones had about 2MiB storage so mobileweb bloatware was a no-go. a third of the sites are pure index of / sites hosting warez or content (direct access/download sites) since it's easier to get a domain than it is to learn html+css back then. used to download a lot of stuff in midi most of which is classical music, some sites I cannot browse but I figured out a way of using gprs dial up over infrared with my new phone over a business laptop that had one and was able to browse the internet faster (since mobile browsers are slow and lack the memory). a few years passed and phones specs were a little bit better, I managed to nab a lot of s40 games (and a few s60 games which I installed on another phone that wasn't mine). I was able to access some part of geocities, yup lots of gif, there's even sites that play midi on background but IDK how that worked back in early 2010s but I couldn't make it work on pc, some xhtml magic I guess. now it's almost impossible to find all these xhtml magic when they all switched to html4 and eventually html5 (and killing off flash). modern web is simply locked and has protections that prevent one from grabbing contents let alone even bringing up context menu! this is absurd. back then you can just save the page to save the web youtube video without needing the all popular ytdownloader.exe at all or even simply going in about:cache to fetch all the content. I had downloaded a lot of swf/swx games (that were not meant to be downloaded) simply by accessing web page source code, hacked jar files directly from gameloft.com, etc. reading the "js" file on mobile to get the index(root) location of all the booty all while phreaking my dial up connection. not meant to brag the phreaking 5ki11z but internet access was kinda expensive and we weren't privileged (country's prices were absurd) so I just did whatever I can to experience most of the interwebs. my internet access was either something I paid for on rentals or out of hax (there's also a lot of helpful hacking forums too all over the mobile web and some ISP bugs from another continent somewhat works on another local ISP, there was plenty of sharing and exchange of such methods and a large community that somewhat still exists today, eventually all the stuff got patched and now have to bypass all ISP DPI throttling and blocking which is a sad case for the newbies that were just like me, it's all so complicated now). hacking communities are also thinning out, or I think they're just harder to find. the hacking or in general internet communities I grew up with had long been shutdown but is rebooting soon (but it will never be as great as it used to be). these days there's information overload with a lot of big tech and user-generated content sites, but most things you "really like" are hidden and tucked away with all the noise or memes. the new internet has a low SNR not to mention the GPT bots destroying "old-esque" text/imageboard we all know (4chan) so some rando's AI project will adorn their github resume, most of the web today are just noise and ads, it's like tv 2.0 now - actually it really is one now (though that depends on your browsing bubble, there's a few "channels" that are still great) seeing 60% of a web page's screen to be filled with ads or some 4-clicks-to-opt-out cookie law/agreement+overlay is the norm and having 4gb ram and a powerful armv7 quad core mobile device is barely enough for the html5 web when it used to be possible to browse a web page with gif animations, lots of marquee, font shadows/glows, and midi playing back on a 1MiB RAM j2me device with 200mhz single core with xhtml. what changed? well it's not just the web, even games. the same device stated above can run plethora (about 100,000) of pixel or 3d java games which I actually prefer over PSP or even PC games. I guess the more technological advancement and ultra-dumbified abstraction on programming (and more powerful the device targets), the worse and more cyberhumped it gets and also attracts less creativity. tl;dr, internet used to be some easy place you can just get into when you're 12 years young, be anything you want, find interesting stuff, do some hax and phreak into the dial up, now it's just tv 2.0 with a lot of locks, ads, and subscription paywalling and even "accountwalling" (requires your phone number and app btw to access), or be unlucky enough to be trapped in few of bigtech's "personalized internet bubble" in which case you will never tune into the channels you would want to see and yup, search engines are much worse and widely useless today than it used to, do something suspicious like accidentally browse site:portnumber and get a fraud ticket and your IP blacklisted from automated blacklists across all cloud cdns, try to bring up context menu "you will need to send us your government id to login again", or just literally browse anything and have 20 third party companies snoop on you and do machine and font fingerprinting etc. etc. it's just stressful to browse the web even as someone who knows all these little details.

>>58736 yup, it's intentional. the style guides call it non-representational and it's a feature, not a bug.