I’m seeing Britney, Bill Nye, and Boy Meets World. . . Everywhere!

  • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    20 days ago

    You are conflating the data-stealing algorithms with “the internet”. You are shown content the algorithms thinks you want to see. Other people are not necessarily seeing it (I’m not for example).

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    5·
    20 days ago

    You got me excited there for a minute. I thought you meant that people were making homepages and webrings and using forums and stopped using phones.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      I was about to comment that “nothing is stopping you from making stuff like that today”, but then I remembered that I have enough hardware and bandwidth available to host an obscene amount of lightweight (by today’s standards) 90s sites and services, but I simply can’t be arsed designing anything meant for others to view.

      • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
        1·
        15 days ago

        but I simply can’t be arsed designing anything meant for others to view

        Neither did the 90s. That’s what made it awesome

  • ladybugs@lemmy.world
    4·
    20 days ago

    Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

    There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

    • DFX4509B@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      2·
      20 days ago

      That also probably drives the Fediverse’s adoption as well because people are tired of getting walled in by hostile corporations.

    • Mónica (She/Ella/Ela)@multiverse.soulism.netEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

      I can confirm this as a young person fascinated by the (so far, Apple) tech from the late 2000s and early 2010s.

      • k0e3@lemmy.ca
        1·
        20 days ago

        I thought anyone under 30 wouldn’t have had experienced any of the cool tech but I guess things were pretty fun until the early 2010s.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    3·
    20 days ago

    If it only did. Do you even know the Internet in the '90?

    No ads, no spam, no AI. At least not at the beginning of the '90.

    • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      19 days ago

      All of those existed during the 90s, unfortunately. Look up Usenet spam (1993) and for AI, the expert systems hype from the 80s.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        3·
        19 days ago

        I’ve been on USENET back then (I wrote software for it), and it was nothing like the Internet of today. The amount of spam was neglectable, and perpetraters were quickly taken care of. Spam started to be a problem with Sanford Wallace (may he fry in the deepest hell!), and that was an email issue.

        And the “expert systems” from back then were not even close to modern LLMs. They used rather sparse resources (even the big ones), they were “hand-made”, single problem oriented, and did not even try to look intelligent in any way. And nobody shoved them down your throat at every corner. A typical “expert system” of the time was an OCR system or a statistical analysis software for optimization purposes.

        • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          18 days ago

          I think you missed both my points.

          1. Spam certainly existed in the 90s. I’m baffled that you’re denying it – you were there!
          2. AI hype cycles are nothing new. Today it’s LLMs. Past cycles have included deep learning, image recognition, expert systems, neural networks, etc. going all the way back to the 50s and 60s.

          You’re wearing nostalgia goggles.

          • Treczoks@lemmy.world
            1·
            18 days ago

            I don’t deny those problems existed. But in comparison to today’s situation on the net, they were basically irrelevant.

  • ominous ocelot@leminal.space
    1·
    20 days ago

    The 90s internet would be great. Close to no tracking. Or wait: animated gifs, blinking fonts and web rings… Hmm. Maybe not.

    • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      19 days ago

      Don’t forget “designed for Netscape” and “Designed for Internet Explorer” banners on most of the pages

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      1·
      20 days ago

      Web rings would be far better than internet searching now. Give me back HotBot and Altavista (which I know are buried under Google’s evil now). Hell, give me the OG Google.

    • ki4jgt@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      20 days ago

      What sources does Google use for this? Because, if it’s web crawling, of course they aren’t going to show up.

    • BooBees@fedinsfw.appEnglish
      1·
      20 days ago

      A lot of my genx peers are finally admitting they’re old as shit and a lot of our friends and family are dying now, so it’s definitely nostalgia driven.