Many, possible most, young people today have nothing to compare today's internet with.

I recently read someone here arguing that "without ads, there's no incentive for anyone to create new content!"

If you're older, you can't help but know better. The majority of the web, in its first few years, was full of "content" and there was, broadly speaking, zero financial incentive.*

* To be fair, there were banner ads and, once Netscape introduced popup windows, even ads that hijacked your screen... you'd have been nuts to take that as an incentive though. People don't write essays for $2.50 a month.

> The majority of the web, in its first few years, was full of "content" and there was, broadly speaking, zero financial incentive.*

In grand scheme of things amount of content was abysmal compared to today. And today you have way way more of free content, created without financial initiatives by people who are passionate about the subject. Why? Because human nature didn’t change, and we got many orders of magnitude more people online.

Why do they need to compare their own culture with something that's long gone? We don't live the way our ancestors did, listen to the whole other kinds of music, enjoy completely different things and speak different dialects of the languages they had.

In the grand scheme of things the lack of ads or javascript is as irrelevant now as those times when you had to go to the post office to wish someone a happy birthday halfway across the country.

Same reason we study history: those who don't, are doomed to repeat it.

We can learn from past generations, especially about large societal and cultural issues, even if those past generations didn't have things like penicillin or TikTok.

This only works on larger scales. We, as a civilization, do study history, and it is an important area of knowledge.

The civilization won't go anywhere, we're too smart now, too capable, tiktok or not.

> The civilization won't go anywhere, we're too smart now, too capable, tiktok or not.

This is an advanced level of naivete combined with arrogance I wish that I had. Unfortunately, I've studied history and I can very clearly see the parallels between now and moments in the fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing is forever, and our civilization will fall if we do nothing out of complacence.

>The civilization won't go anywhere, we're too smart now, too capable, tiktok or not.

History shows us that such hubris and complacency rarely ends well.

We're still here, chatting on the Internet from our cozy apartments using our expensive devices.

Maybe just maybe it's useful for us to compare our culture with something long gone or otherwise different so that we can think critically?

Whole popular culture became a shopping mall. And if visitors of shopping mall don't agree with what I think, so be it. I cant change the product of our generation poisoning that make them attention junkies, perfect shoppers,... they just never went some other way to see it.

If you could, what would you change?

I'll answer: for starters, I want a protocol for articles that puts the dev into a straight-jacket: no dynamic features, no control of font or font-size, no ability to position text boxes. Basically, a protocol to present text articles Medium-style.

Why? Faster loading, fewer chances to track me, less ability to show me ads, more legibility, minuscule footprint to hack me, no ability to show me share buttons.

Take a look at Gemini: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

RSS? ActivityPub?

AMP?

Gopher!

I was just thinking the other day that it must suck to have been born after the internet was taken over by a bunch of corporations. To never know what it used to be, how it was welcoming and user-centric. How there were many communities everywhere, where people could talk about everything without faceless corporate moderator oversight.

I think kids today would agree with this, it's just that no one tried to explain it to them. Engagement-driven social media is addictive because it's designed to be so, but once you've understood the difference, there's no going back to it.

Kids today spend their time in Snapchat or whatever, kids before them were into Facebook, those before who had access to forums, and before that there was TV, and radio, and Beatles. It is easy to arrive at the conclusion that things were better back in the days, but in reality there were just less things to do.

Engagement-driven kids are not dumb. They live in a different world, and it's their world now. The way we look at older people who can't figure out computers, they will soon be looking at us.

It's different things.

Engagement-driven web keeps pushing you to see content outside of your network because that's what makes them money. So, yes, it's a substitute for TV in a sense. I used to watch TV in my young teens, but now YouTube replaced it. The problem is that it effectively discourages person-to-person communication that people want and rely upon.

It's as if your phone line was free, but your calls with your friends and family would get interrupted with commercials and news broadcasts every 5 minutes.