Is this forum nostalgic over everything or is the modern world really that bad?

[Sylvian]

For me, it's 50/50. I'm older now so I look back on how the web used to be with rose colored glasses. But also, the modern web really does suck. You have very little control over self expression, everything is owned and operated by a few international conglomerates, censorship is everywhere, everyone hates eachother, etc. The trend seems to be to lobotomize tech and reduce the awesome computing power we now have to 30 second videos of nonsense.

I think the question isn't whether the modern web sucks, but whether the old web was actually any good (or if I'm just being nostalgic)

[JINSBEK]

I think the question isn't whether the modern web sucks, but whether the old web was actually any good (or if I'm just being nostalgic)

Oh my god I nearly died when he mentioned browsing on Gopher. What a blast to the past that was. That was well before my time (by the late 1990s gopher:// lost all relevancy to http://), but it still was enough to send me back into some dark computer room lit only by the bluish glow of a CRT monitor. Amazing video. But on to your point... Did a lot of people really complain about the state of the Internet back in the 1990s and early 2000s? I know people made jokes about Eternal September, but I can't tell how seriously bothered people were by this, or if it was largely just an annoyance and then tongue-in-cheek. Did people just take the negatives of the Internet for granted, e.g. "That's what anonymity does to people", and, "This is what happens when you let unruly teenagers loose without consequences"? People were ripe medlars in that era, but perhaps that's not so different now: except that now, they're really everywhere on "social media" (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and it's almost impossible to avoid without some highly intentional browsing on those platforms. I feel like back then, it was easier to escape that kind of jerkishness by simply not going onto the offending website, and blocking the person if you do maintain an account on the community. But with platforms like X and Facebook, it feels like you have to block swathes of people, instead of just one or two every now and then.

I think it's an interesting question of what you're exposed to and where you go, and how deliberate your Internet usage. Most people seem to have horrible experiences with YouTube now, especially the much-vaunted YouTube Creator milieu, but. Back in my day, we didn't have YouTube Creators. It was really just everyone posting whatever short videos they had made for fun and that was it. Tell me 18 years ago that people would be making a living off of YouTube and I'd go, "What, the Numa Numa guy?" I think the problem is that a lot of people are reliant on the Internet in one way or another for their revenue streams now, and now that ecosystem is very hard to actually make a sustainable living off of. I don't watch a hundred TV channels; I could subscribe to hundreds of YouTube channels, but even if I wanted to, how many of those videos do you think I could actually watch? I do feel incredibly... moderately severely displeased with major online platforms as they are now, but also, I have enough online and offline alternatives that frankly, that sort of thing doesn't bother me anymore. I'm having too much fun on the Internet (or outside, touching grass--when it's not snowing) to really care about the BS on Reddit or whatever.

Does this mean I have a more parochial view of the modern world? Well, I want to remind people that "back in my day, we had Jerry Springer." (For those who don't know, I've linked to the Wikipedia article on trash TV.) And, people read books. Absolutely there has been a qualitative change given how many people are absorbing the worst from these online platform apps, and a frighteningly rapid rate, and I see what happens when people raise their children on phones and tablets instead of actually parenting them, but at the same time, I don't know if it's the Internet that's gotten bad or if people have just gotten lazy and complacent[. I can't really blame a piece of technology in isolation. Convenience, convenience, convenience is what our current systems prioritise, and that's going to continue until something breaks. And we're starting to see in pockets, people reaching that pivotal point and just doing something else with their lives. I don't think it's just nostalgia. People just... want to not be stressed, zoned out, and miserable for so many waking hours anymore.

Also. This has been very interesting, looking back at this thread. (Thank you, Vague Similar Topics!) A focus on crafting 3D worlds! I didn't know that was the original intent of MelonLand, and it's fascinating to see how all that has grown...

[NoxidKin]

Nostalgia is pretty low on the list for me.  I miss the old internet but I've got no love for old technology or physical media.

I'm here for the community of unique people, mostly.

My personal page kinda resembles the old web, but it's an idealised version of how I remember it.  I'm more excited about the future than the past.

[cynderthekitsune]

i mean, i suppose some people are here because of that. but not all!

i for example only came because social media burns me out too much. but i was kinda considering going back to Mastodon or BlueSky if i can manage to get a healthy routine of detoxxing and all that.
i don't ever want to go back to Reddit, and i don't want to go into several Discord servers hoping it'll be better but it's just another flavour of echo chamber. from my personal experience anyways.

though, i don't think the modern net is all bad! i like some things that wouldn't be here without it, like VTubing i like for example.
but there are definitely things i try to avoid when the overall feeling of being in the community is too pressuring, too harsh, unstable, etc. like Project SEKAI for example - most modern Vocaloid in general is a bit too different from what i like, and i've just generally felt like PJSK is a pressure cooker, and since i have different opinions... then yea i've been lashed out at because of it.

i don't think it's because a platform is literally all bad, because not very many platforms are like that, and even then 'bad' is subjective.
even if i say something about a platform or game etc, like that one from above, it doesn't mean i hate it as a whole! it's just what i wanted to mention given the context of it.

this is just my perspective on it (^_^)

[KiwiMeowo]

While there are people here who enjoy nostalgia, I don't focus a lot about old technology. It isn't something I care about a lot, I wasn't very interested in technology stuff when I was a kid.

My major reason of joining this forum is to find other people who makes indie websites, just like me. I noticed that a lot of people who used Neocities despised the current state of social media and the Internet, and wishes to rebuild the spirit similar to the old Internet. While I agree with their stance, I don't have the nostalgia towards Geocities and old indie sites because I never seen one as a kid, and I only learnt people can just upload their websites and have others see them in 2023 (The time I started my own website).

I actually felt kinda bad seeing everyone feeling nostalgic about the old web when I don't have that shared feeling. While I don't really know how the old web is like, one thing I'm sure is that everyone should try making a website of their own. It's really fun!!! I feel like that's an opinion we all share here.

[cindy]

For me it's a strong mix of both, though I'd say the modern world has gotten even worse since this thread was started in 2022. Though it still wasn't great then.

The nostalgia factor absolutely does play a role for me though. I miss being a kid, and so I like things that remind me of being a kid. At least, the positive parts and vibes from it. So exploring the early internet, or sites that resemble it, and web forums, as well as old games and web videos and Nintendo DS music and this sort of mid-late 2000s web aesthetic. I've been playing a lot of old Pokemon games lately because their worlds have this simple, childlike whimsy to them. Very much a world viewed through the lens of a kid. So yeah, definitely a nostalgic appeal to all this.

But that nostalgic appeal is in large part so tantalizing for me right now as escapism from the modern world. Everything I once enjoyed does feel worse for me, personally. I'm going to put each thing under a spoiler section because hoo boy this is a long post.

Games

Spoiler

Games used to feel more like it was the love for the craft, and not quite as much the cynical cash grabs they are today. There are exceptions today, but they're pretty rare at least as far as the main industry goes. (keep being cool indies.) I'm so tired of deluxe editions, season passes, microtransactions, and especially battle passes. I just want to buy a game and enjoy it. Games are so expensive now though. As someone who couldn't afford brand new games before and mainly bought Used, the move to digital and selling content peacemeal has ruined a lot of it for me. So many decisions feel explicitly designed to manipulate players into spending more money rather than make an enjoyable and compelling experience. As a kid I wanted to grow up to make the games like I played on PS2. But as I watched the products so many were made to work on, even in the 2010s you had developers shutting down and getting absorbed into the COD machine, my passion sort of dissolved. The horror stories of the abuses developers have faced in the industry that these companies are hardly ever held accountable for did not help matters either. I also feel like the AAA industry has put such a heavy focus on realistic graphics and cinematic storytelling to the point of being a detriment. Both in that yeah I kinda wish we had more polished, colorful video gamey video games (that weren't free to play mtx shop mobile games), but also I'm just not thrilled about how prohibitively expensive it is to run games that only look about 5% better than the games you could absolutely crush 10 years ago.

[close]

Television and Media

Spoiler

Network television was also something I enjoyed. If nothing else it was nice to throw on a channel and just have it play a curated selection of stuff and I can watch it or flip through em or I can do other things and have it for background noise. We could all sit together for dinner and watch prime time sitcoms. TV was a fairly enjoyable experience, but since the domination of streaming, TV is a broken shell of its former self. Most channels, whether through free IPTV services like Pluto or the actual genuine payed for cable TV channels, have been playing endless marathons of their old greatest hits. It feels like I might as well just pull up the same show on Netflix or whatever and have it autoplay the episodes. Except here it gets to be littered with ads and I can't skip anything I don't want to watch! Having a well thought out, curated network schedule is a fairy tale anymore.

And my favorite genre of television, the network sitcom, has been neutered by the streaming era. It's not "prestige" enough, what gets made is often a revival of an old series that was successful 20 years ago with the magic long lost. Even when I give them a chance and enjoy them, everything gets cancelled after a season or two anyway. The old days of being able to enjoy a long running cast of characters for nearly 10 years of 26 episode seasons is just gone.

As is the communal aspect of network television. Back in the day you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in my neighborhood who doesn't watch That 70s Show or Malcolm in the Middle. I certainly can't say the same today for Shrinking or even Abbot Elementary.

And not just TV, heck, media in general feels stagnant. IP is big business, and companies have found it more profitable to wring it for all they're worth. In general I just feel like there's less creativity allowed to flourish in professional industries, especially games or movies, because the people running the show are not creatives. They're businessmen, and they only have the goal of finding what will rake in the most profits. If that means Marvel Movie #37, then so be it.

[close]

Food?

Spoiler

Food tastes worse I've noticed? Fast food, anyway. Prices have skyrocketed at the same time as many efforts have been made over the years to cut costs. Portions (of the good, more expensive ingredients) are smaller, ingredients are lower quality, and I've found a lot of the food tastes blander than it used to, as well as often drier and overcooked. Fast food restaurants, in my area anyway, are often horrendously understaffed as one or two employees are rushing to single-handedly operate the entire kitchen, register, and drive thru. It often feels like it's held together by shoe string and duct tape. And I thought it was just me, growing up or being depressed or something and just not enjoying it as much anymore, but I've watched youtube videos going over the histories of a lot of these fast food outlets, also including the ways they've cut back costs in an attempt to compete with rising prices and the competition.

[close]

Technology

Spoiler

As a kid, I was captivated by technology. I was a regular viewer of shows like Attack of the Show, at least when I could be. I was mystified by new gaming hardware, new phones, PDAs, laptops... it felt like things really tried to be tangibly different and creative in the 2000s, and I loved dreaming about all the ways it would get better. I only thought of technology as something that could improve our lives, and the idea that it could make things worse felt silly to me. Phone designs used to be fun, and every cellphone was unique and different. And easy to customize with phone charms adding our own special touch to them. This is half nostalgia for sure, but also I genuinely miss the color and whimsy some old tech had. I miss when there was something new around every corner. Now, everything is a black rectangle. Our phones are black rectangles, tablets are just bigger black rectangles, TVs of course are black rectangles now also loaded with apps (and in many cases want to monitor your usage and sell that data), even Nintendo's handhelds are black rectangles. Maybe this shouldn't be that big of a deal but I'm bored and find it pretty depressing.

And then, actual new technology isn't really made for the consumer anymore. Venture capitalism has lead to this tech industry hype cycle to really blow up stuff most of us don't want. NFTs were pretty resoundingly hated by most in tune enough to even understand what they were, but companies were absolutely dedicated to trying to find a way to make money off them.... until AI took off, and everyone dropped it like a hot rock because we all knew it wasn't useful to us. AI hardly works to do any of the things they claim it will and often does more harm than good but that doesn't stop companies from forcing it into EVERY application they can dream of because again, they're absolutely dedicated to trying to find a way to make this profitable, whether we want it or not, or whether it's even any better or WORSE than the tech it's being used to replace. And so the internet is flooded with machine generated art and photos and misinformation and it's very difficult to escape. 5 years ago, I could google art, and safely assume each and every image that came up was crafted by human hands. That concept is dead, forever.

[close]

The Internet

Spoiler

And then, of course, the internet. I love the indie web, and I'm so grateful for its existence. But it's not quite the same as when this was the whole internet. We know we are in the recesses of the web where many dare not enter and where we're more difficult to find, for better or worse. But the bulk of internet activity is owned by a small handful of companies, and some of those companies are ones that we were able to rely on back in the day who have distorted beyond comprehension now. Early YouTube was useful, and fun, and generally made up of a community of independent artists passionate for the craft of web video, or just sharing goofy nonsense. Early Google was useful, being the best means of searching an earlier, more labyrinthine web for whatever you want to see. Even early Facebook had its charms, when I was a teen and used it to keep in touch with my friends in high school and to share memes and "remember" each other's birthdays. But all of these things don't resemble what they once were in the slightest anymore.

Web forums were larger, with more active communities, because it was the best way to socialize at the time, especially in regards to nerdy hobbies and interests. The early indie game scene flourished with Flash and to a lesser extent, Yoyogames (Game Maker) and BYOND. A kid had a billion places to access free, goofy lil games and talk about our favorites with our friends. Hell— A kid had a billion places to be a kid. The internet's really not doing so hot in that department these days. (This also extends past the internet, with the death of "third places" and killing a lot of kid-friendly establishments, arcades especially.)

[close]

Social Media and Society

Spoiler

And social media... oh how bleak. It is... incredibly exhausting. Something cool about the news back in the day is that if you didn't want to watch the news... you'd just, not watch the news. Don't go to the news channel. Chill out for the day. Nowadays, via Twitter or Bluesky or YouTube or Reddit or even Discord often times for me, the news WILL find you, and you WILL know about every atrocity that happens day after day. To take a break from it is often to actively shut yourself out from your communities. I want to know what my online friends are doing, or what my favorite content creators are up to, but there's no avoiding all the ways the world sucks right now or how many people hate you for existing. I'm not going to go too much into politics— it's obviously a huge elephant in the room that is a tremendous contributor to the world being worse today— but I will say a couple of things about it. 1. Politics or otherwise tbh, people are so much meaner, hateful and spiteful than I have ever seen them in my lifetime. There's always been some bad eggs, especially online, but the sheer prevalence and number in recent years I feel like completely dwarfs anything I'd ever experienced before and that's speaking as someone who was the kid to target and bully throughout my school years. And 2. As a trans person, things are way worse. Yeah, there were awful stereotypes about us 10 - 15 years ago and most people didn't really care about or understand us, but that worked in our favor at times too. People generally didn't have any firmly held preconceived notions about us. If I came out to someone as trans, I generally was able to explain it to them on my own terms and the worst I'd get is "idk that's weird but alright". Now, everyone has an idea of how they feel about us and are locked in on it, and we're at the center of this massive culture war, and I'm constantly exposed to seeing people absolutely frothing at the mouth at our existence. Frankly, it's dangerous.

[close]

Aesthetics?

Spoiler

And it feels weird to stick this at the end there after that big mess, but aesthetics? Are boring? I know this is a lot more subjective, but personally speaking I find myself pretty depressed by the loss of vibrancy and charm in a lot of aspects of our lives. I've already mentioned technology being reduced to black rectangles, and there's other things too like flat interfaces and the... boxification of architecture? Whimsy feels dead.

There's been a lot of people nostalgic lately for old aesthetics and others who have pushed back against it, saying things like the love for frutiger aero is kind of a historical revisionism, that people were tired of these flashy graphics and more interested in minimalism and function over form. That people wanted the change and so it happened, people's tastes changed. And maybe that's true, but certainly not in my circles. We watched in the early 2010s as everything was getting flatter and simplified and we hated it. We were pretty vocal on social media about how we hated it. How everything was growing more boring and losing its charm. We never accepted this, it just felt like something we were forced to put up with because its the trend companies wanted to do. I can surely believe brands wanted the change. But I know I didn't.

[close]

There's so much more I could go into about all of these topics and more, especially if I wanted to really sound like an old curmudgeon or a preachy activist. But while yes, I am absolutely nostalgic for the old days and definitely with a thick pair of rose-tinted glasses, I do think there's a legitimate argument to be made that many things, some even objectively speaking, have gotten materially worse over the past 10 - 20 years. And it's not just my generation feeling this way, as I'm finding a lot of Gen Z online coming to the same conclusion despite not experiencing the way things used to be firsthand.

On the bright side, a couple of modern things I'm pretty happy with: We've got easy access to like the entire history of video games for free, although we're not really supposed to, and basically everything gets ported to PC nowadays so its probably the best time to own one.
And while I miss the nostalgia and aesthetics of old messaging apps, Discord genuinely does offer a lot of great features for a free program and despite my annoyance at many of the changes they've made over the years, I'd argue it's still the most useful mainstream messaging service we've had. For now, at least.

Edit: Wow, no way. Literally later that day we get the news that the Discord CEO is being replaced by the Candy Crush moneymaker guy. No bad vibes here, modern tech is very cool and functional.