The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".

I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.

completely ahistorical, the Internet has had the same problems for basic its entire existence

As per examples through history, greed and profit chasing have completely ruined what once belonged to the people.

Yes and no. It's important to remember that people lied and wanted to rage: but it was annonymous and we knew everyone was full of shit so it didn't matter.

I would argue was even more the case during the earliest days of the web. It was really a open, untamed, wild west feeling, like anything was possible.

Then the corporatization of the internet happened during the dotcom bubble, and all hell broke loose, we know the rest.

It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.

I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.

Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).

I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.

Lemmy is pretty chill. Combined with a rss feed viewer, a few youtube channel (ff+extension), Nexcloud, and my internet experience is cool. I don't care about tiktok, instagram and all that shit.

Dead Internet Theory is becoming mainstream now. How long will it be until we get AI slop rants about how worthless human content is?

Facebook only barely an idea mid 2000s?

Most of my friends had ditched MySpace for Facebook shortly after highschool and I graduated in 2003.

I mean... how old is 4chan? .../b/?

I was there, even a couple years before that... and in reality not so much has changed.

What we now call "The Internet" is what BTX (in germany) was back then: A commercialised platform controlled by corporations. Trolling, hate, ragebait... all nothing new, just look at archived posts from the Usenet!

The cool thing is that we now can rebuild something that is more akin to the BBS networks of yesteryear, something like the Fido-net, something that is entirely owned by the people using it.

I remember when the internet was only for nerds.. before it was ruined by the high school cool kids and the jocks

Not sure. I still remember the Great-NetNews-AOL-Hate (aka ‘me-too’) of 1995 :)

/s, I think

It ain't years it's months ago...

nothing was monetized.

Lmao.