Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
@bstix everyone wants to be a movie star
@bstix @Provider God yes. I recently bought a bottle of rum that has a ridiculous ball valve built into the neck so my first attempt to pour it yielded nothing. Googled it & a YT video came up—something ridiculous like 7 minutes or longer—that could have been handled by a single sentence on the label. (Or better yet, not using a ball valve)
@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don’t need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I’d have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.The worst are the videos that are little more than a Windows desktop and a syntesized voice of a tutorial that could be written. Additional negative points for instructions writen on Notepad on the screen on that video.
@bstix couldn’t agree more!
Most of my students preferred video, even if with very few exceptions slides + text was better for them (for the stuff we did).
Also *good* video takes forever to make, good text+image tutorials slightly less forever but the search is much easier!
You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.
@bstix @Provider @gvwilson writing is as hard as it ever was, but monetization of ad-hoc tutorial content is far easier and more lucrative on youtube. People are literally being paid to pollute your search results with video.
I’m actually optimistic; I think eventually youtube will face too much flak for this kind of garbage, it’ll start affecting viewership, they’ll tweak the algorithm or the partner program to punish bad tutorials and there’ll be a renaissance of the written stuff.
OMFG this so much. Especially since most tutorials are ponderously slow and tedious. At the other extreme, are the ones with no subtitles and no sound where you are expected to follow a cursor flying around the screen clicking on things and are supposed to understand what happens. Those in particular should die in a fire.
@bstix best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04
@Provider I miss how people have lost the art of self-curation. Those of us who remember took to the fediverse like a duck to water. People who don’t have that skill hate it here.
I remember:
- CompuServe chat rooms
- Playing Neverwinter Nights, the “original MMO” some say, on CompuServe
- Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
- Usenet and FTP
- mIRC
- Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
- Penny-Arcade
- Something Awful
- New grounds
- stickdeath.com
- Rotten.com
- Ogrish
- all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
- Fark
- Digg
Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.
expired
@Provider It’s the "Just call!’ of the internet. Somehow, people think that having an extended interaction is peoples’ preference.
I would kill for a transcript.
@Provider I miss the freedom of the old Internet. It truly was INTERnet as everything was connected to everything. Geoblocks, censorship, blacklists, etc were almost non-existent. It felt like an open global world where everyone was welcome and everyone was free to decide who they wanted to talk to.
I kept thinking “wow, this is what the future is like” and naively expected the offline world to eventually follow. I guess it was very naive.
So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.
Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”
Good grief I’m old.
I mean, what do you want? People to talk about dialing into bulletin boards?
@Dubious_Fart Technically not the internet, most of them… but YES!
Now where did I put that list of FidoNet nodes…
