It’s not all black and white though. People in the 2000’s didn’t know that you can make a living off content creation, but people who have adopted this style usually can and will (or should) turn more effort into creating high quality videos.
Isn’t that exactly the point of the meme? Internet 20 years ago was about sharing mostly. Internet today is about monetization mostly. And content quality isn’t what makes you big, it’s your ability to game/abuse the system
“High quality” can come in the form of investing time into research, or creating visual aids that present information clearly. But it also often manifests as flashy title cards, pointless special effects, derivative humor (like frenzied jump cuts to movie clips and memes every few seconds), unnecessarily rambling intros, superfluous wall-to-wall music. I feel like many of these features are borrowed over from classical TV, to give the veneer of a highly produced “professional” product, when democratized internet media’s greatest strength is to actually free us from these conventions.
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
Imagine having ads in things but instead of just being there, they opened in new windows, were loud as fuck, and opened by the hundreds. That’s what the Internet was like
When I was 18 I was pretty dumb, yeah. I once totally destroyed a hard drive by corrupting a file trying to make my PC background the “Anal Destruction” website logo
Yeah, so you missed that what OP talked about was very real. We had much more of those sites based on sharing, and they were much more at the front of the internet.
There were absolutely not more websites based on sharing in the early 2000s lol
You are literally on one of the very many websites dedicated to it, today, while bemoaning it’s absence
Some of the sharing sites from the 2000s monetized themselves and that upsets you. I have no issue with that. There are many alternatives because what he said is false. Go use one of them.
Bro that’s anecdotally false, there were so many ham, electronics and random research sites I perused on angelfire and geocities.
Quality varied greatly, but lots of thought went into making posts, diagrams were sometimes done in ASCII art which was its own headache.
Point is, I don’t agree with your take, and I don’t think my similarly aged friends would agree either. Internet of late 90s/y2k wasn’t an ad-free utopia, but the point was more about conversing and sharing info.
Lemmy is an attempt to return to that original intent, modernized as it must be.
I don’t care if you agree. I care what’s correct. The Internet is many times larger than I was 20+ years ago, and all the same free networks exist. The really popular ones got big and monetized.
Hmm? Your argument and thinking processes both seem clouded.
Ham radio forums still exist, as they previously did. Did you miss the gist, that information exchange was more of a prime focus vs making money by cramming ads everywhere? Obviously yes.
Very nice, would you like a cookie? Now that your hangry has been settled, try clarifying your murky premise again.
Mine is that the ratio of websites that freely shared info vs those that did so with an underlying goal of making revenue by advertising was very large vs very small.
“Boomer humor for millennials”? I’m laughing, but not for the reason you’d hoped for.
Mine is that the ratio of websites that freely shared info vs those that did so with an underlying goal of making revenue by advertising was very large vs very small.
I don’t think you understand what we’re disagreeing on any longer, if ever. So let’s just let it be, and may I humbly suggest meditation as a way to clarify thinking.
There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol
I’m 49, dude. And the meme isn’t about “the internet”. It is literally about the difference between people sharing stuff back then and “creating content” today. Shitty internet parts have always been shitty, but at least people didn’t try to monetize even their beloved ones’ death.
Then you should remember these days more accurately.
People make social media posts instead of geocities pages these days. Content creators are more like the people who used to sell content online than they are the average chucklehead who made a geoshitty page.
People you see with lots of Twitter followers are exactly akin to people who ran pages on free hosting websites. When they link their merch, it’s exactly like how blogs and shit would sell merch.
Youre looking at this with glasses so rosy they’re completely blinding.
Then you should remember these days more accurately.
So should you. Remember when ads were just static banners? No, you don't. Don't pick a point in time that fits your bias and ignore the rest, mate. Might turn your glasses as brown as your take is shite.
as someone who was into computers and in high school in 2000, that that was not normal.
even if yo mean normal computer literate person, not even then… Most people did not run their own servers, was it more common, yeah, but it wasn’t a given.
Things were only free if you were into piracy, everything cost money though without as much marketing, but then it wasn’t a huge market…
I considered myself a pretty “normal guy” back then and paid my domain/hosting and had a hand-written HTML+js blog/website with no ads… And plenty of “normal people” used to do that, even if it was a much smaller percentage of internetizens than nowadays.
I do when its posted to something like Lemmy or Hacker News, if the things you’re posting would interest those kinds of communities you’d at least have a small audience
What are you talking about, ads were far worse back in the 90s /2000. Were you even using the Internet back then? Couldn’t block them and things like infinite pop ups were rampant, if you didn’t have a firewall setup and anti virus, your entire Windows 98 setup could be wrecked in minutes just being online
It’s just such a common misconception that there was no ads in the ‘old Internet’, that’s all I was pointing out. There seems to be a nostalgic false memory that Internet back then didn’t have ads which is hilarious if you were there to see what it was like
Yeah, because if anything is better than granular data harvesting, it was ActiveX scripts wreaking havoc on your machine just by opening a webpage, disguised as ads.
People seem to forget that before YouTube partnered with content creators people just kinda… uploaded stuff that they were passionate about. They didn’t do it for a living and they did not expect payment but might have asked for donations if their channel was costly to run. Sure, the production value and editing quality was a lot lower, but the core experience was still the same.
This is why I flatly reject the notion that me blocking ads on YouTube hurts content creators in any meaningful way, especially now that almost all of them are partnered with some kind of sponsor embedded in the video.
The core experience was definitely not the same, what are you talking about? Yeah sure if you just wanted entertainment maybe, but educational content for example requires so much research and double checking that it wouldn’t be possible without ad money.
I’m not saying that blocking ads makes you a bad person (I did it too before I could afford premium), but it does have a measurable effect and pretending it doesn’t is stupid.
Yeah sure if you just wanted entertainment maybe, but educational content for example requires so much research and double checking that it wouldn’t be possible without ad money.
Research did not begin when YouTube started paying people to upload to their platform. It was already being done. It might be more accessible to people who only do YouTube and do not get grant money for their research, but saying research wouldn’t be possible without ad money is nonsense.
Also, adding a financial incentive to upload as many videos as possible to get as many clicks and views as possible doesn’t sound like the way you encourage truthful, factual, and well-researched educational content to get shared. If anything, it would encourage a lot of low effort clickbait, misleading titles and thumbnails, opinion pieces, “edutainment” and poorly sourced material mass produced for a wide audience. Not saying that’s what happened, I’m sure there are plenty of channels that exist now thanks in part to ad revenue helping them get started and/or continue posting at regular upload intervals, but the Cobra Effect is real and people will always be finding ways to take the path of least resistance to getting their payout.
I still use it that way. Any time ive had a problem that wasn’t adequately explained by youtube or elsewhere, if I solved it myself, Id make a simple YT tutorial for it and upload it.
Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn’t start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to “save us” with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of ‘ethical ads’, which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.
People need to bring back cheesy personal websites, banners and forum signatures…
There are still some corners online where you can find and make those, even if you don’t have the money, time or knowledge to host one yourself. For example:
I am obsessed with those sites. It’s like the internet back in the day when I was a teen. I hope the social media and content creator sludge never overcomes it…
In the year 2000, an internet friend gave me FTP credentials to a directory on his domain so I could host images and post them on the forum we were friends on.
He provided this service to all the forum users because we were all like :woah: when he started posting images that weren’t just leeched from another domain.
Eventually he did ask users throw him a few bucks, and then he made a tutorial on how to get your own domain and do it yourself.
Which tells me I’ve been using filezilla for about 2/3 of my life.
I rented a web server with FTP in college, with my own domain that used my real name. I used it to transfer files to and from school computers. My classmates would sometimes forget their USB drives and think they just wasted a whole 3 hour lab session, and I would just quickly create some credentials for them and let them use my server. Everyone thought I was a god lol. These days, services like Google Drive have replaced the need for that (mostly), and everyone just takes it for granted. I think it’s funny that people are starting to see value in FTP again now that services like Google Drive and Discord are restricting the ability to use them for free hosting to post files onto external sites.
And that’s why I avoid YouTube like the plague. 10 minutes of BS for 2 minutes of content. Fuck google for tying adspace (video length) to search returns and suggested video priorities. More BS = more adspace = puts your garbage video at the top of the list.
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