Re:The Web Runs on Tolerance
by echelon on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @12:15AM
(#46201490)
> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant
Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.
The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.
This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.
Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.
Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.
It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.
Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.
The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.
This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.
Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.
Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.
It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.