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by twelfthnight 846 days ago
Sometimes I wonder if back when the Internet was "good", how many people were using it and much stuff was on it? Has the proportion of good stuff changed all the much, or is it just not in the same places it used to be, and aging millennials (proud cardholder) just haven't moved on to these new places?
1 comments
RyanOD 846 days ago
I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.
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OkayPhysicist 846 days ago
I think Facebook opening up to the general populace in 2006 or the release of the iPhone in 2007 are pretty good places to call the end of the golden age, or at least the beginning of the end. They represent pretty significant milestones in a trend away from "a subset of the population willing to traverse moderate technical challenges in order to communicate with others in mostly anonymous, highly customizable ways" towards "everyone on earth communicating through highly sanitized, advertiser-friendly platforms".

The modern internet undoubtedly started in the mid-00's. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, all were founded between 2005 and 2007.

The start of the Internet's golden age is a little harder to pin down, but the mid-nineties public release of PHP in '95, or the launch of GeoCities in '94, or the release of CSS in '96 is probably a fair estimate. That gives a good decade of prime World Wide Web.

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tivert 846 days ago
> I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.

The period of time where friction and barriers to entry were high enough to filter out much of the chaff, and the parasites had not yet adapted to exploit everything.

Also I think the internet community itself may be parasitic on other institutions that it is simultaneously destroying. Specifically I'm thinking things like traditional journalism, which is being killed off even though the internet needs it for stuff like Wikipedia.

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joquarky 846 days ago
Prince prognosticated the year we would peak.
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