/lounge/ - sushi social

I arrived at the tail end of the 90s. At that time I mostly explored fan sites and those chat sites that yahoo and others hosted. Many of those were just web clients for an IRC channel.

The diversity of fan and chat communities were nice back then. Spread out among several services, and sometimes self hosted. I think people still make fan pages, but it doesn't seem as widespread anymore. Maybe they never really became uncommon, just drowned out by the sheer volume of new internet users that arrived during the 00s.

I loved trawling geocities pages and seeing all the neat sites people would make.

>>12685
That's always been my idea. Those fan sites still exist, they just aren't the focus of attention anymore. And honestly, I'm kind of glad? I've seen people try to emulate "old net" style and the for me the word that comes to mind is necrophilic.

I miss when things were slower and quieter. Nowadays everything moves at a mile a minute and everyone's always talking about some dumb drama that nobody should care about.

I never spent much time on the old internet. I mainly used the internet for purchases and sales on early eBay. Didn't branch out into the communities until the late 00s, and though it seems nicer than today's net, I'm not sure that isn't just nostalgia. Sat around on chans for a while, but the closest thing to "old" culture was the first two months of 8ch

>>12680
i got my first laptop with internet access in 2006, when I was 17. I remember staying up late browsing /b/, uncyclopedia, and other stupid sites, just crying laughing at all the stupid stuff on there.
I rarely laugh at stuff on the internet anymore. Or maybe the stuff that's around these days is just not funny anymore.

>what are some nice memories of yours from the early days of the internet.
I'm very young for this site, so most of my early memories are in the later internet age of 2010-2016. I mostly spent my time on deviant art forums and /ic/ to learn art. Later on I did expand to other boards likes /ck/ and /lit/, but never popular ones like /r9k/, /b/, /a/, etc. I know I'll get dunked on for this, but I used reddit. Finally I read bad webcomic wiki. To be honest I don't have that many ~amazing~ memories. Most of the fun moments were childish antics I look back and cringe on.
I did like /ic/ because they introduced me to so many resources and kicked my ass into actually grinding. If it wasn't for them I'd still be following 'top ten beginner mistakes' videos and drawing once a month. They're negative long-term, but as a beginner they wake you up to how serious art is.
Reddit has to my favorite because I enjoy location based forums. I hated everything on that site except my state, city, and college subs. Sharing a meme about a hobby is nice, but a meme about a location you visit daily? It just hits differently. I did like a few joke subreddits, but now they post the same stuff or they got banned.
>Hell, what are some bad memories you have?
The only reason I joined those sites were to improve my hobbies. I spent all my time shitposting there instead of studying, so I'm disappointed in myself for that. I had all the resources, but for like 2-3 years I just posted online instead of grinding art. I regret this because I had a whole lot more free time back then than I do now and I feel it was wasted. it doesn't bother me now as I'm trying to quit social media to focus on my hobbies, I only plan to use this site and bus-stop.net.
Looking back a lot of the people on the deviantart forums were sad. One was this guy going to an overpriced online college who posted the worse are ever. Another was this girl who dropped out of law school(!) to draw crappy fan art. Another was this bitter mom. It was a sad bunch. I have never seen a good artist active on that forum.
Finally reddit just made me a worse person overall. Browsing depression memes and narcissist parent forums aren't a good way to deal with your issues as a teen. When I became less sad and had actually people to talk to it lost its appeal. Looking back now a lot of the users are crabs in a bucket and it depresses me to read their life stories. Even the people on the site who mock them seem sad. Like one time I accidentally clicked their profile and I saw all of a users recent posts were their life falling apart, "Do ugly people need surgery?", "I'm single at 40, is that OK?", and "I'm moving to japan!" were all in the same account. Any flaw the users had they could make an excuse for.

ironically my best memories of the internet are 2018+. Thats when I kicked my 4chan habit and cut down on reddit and used more obscure sites. As of now my favorite sites online are music blogs that post obscure music and niche news sites.

It's not exactly old internet, or at least the dregs of it, but i have plenty of memories of reading webcomics, blogs and open-source/hacker writings in the 2000s until maybe like 2013. I loved a lot of it and a lot of it had serious impacts on the path i went down in terms of artistic tastes, interests, politics, and even career but i never really engaged with any community around them except for sometimes talking about some with people i knew IRL.

I think that's one thing that was different for me than a lot of people who were maybe engaging with that stuff a few years earlier or at a more independent age - for me it was much more about seeing this cool stuff and maybe longing for a community around it, than actually being in one. I didn't get into socializing online myself until late in highschool. I definitely miss that kind of thing, but i don't really know to what extent sites today have lost their mystery and edge (except for hyper-politicized edge) and to what extent i have lost my affinity for it

>>12703
Not many people on imageboards admit they like (or liked) reddit. And honestly? I kind of liked it, too. The smaller subreddits are the best. You start to remember people's names, inside jokes and unsaid rules. This is just my opinion, but I think people don't want to admit most forums/social media sites are very similar to one another, the good and the bad. Large sites like those specialize in mostly the bad, though. I wouldn't limit the "crabs in a bucket" mentality to people like that 40 year old guy or those deviantart people. It's everywhere. Mentally stable and emotionally mature people just aren't the type to post on the internet for hours everyday. And if that kind of behaviour is off putting and you want to avoid it, I think that's a good sign.

i really liked the old internet. It seemed better to me because it was less corporate and more on creativity than vanity like the modern social media encourages now.

>>12745
People say the modern net is too vain, but is it? IMO it's actually the opposite; people fade into the background too much these days.

For example, take the decline of personal sites. In the 90s and early 2000s, you made your own site and hosted it on something like geocities or anglefire. Since you were building it from the ground up, it was 100% yours and you could do whatever you wanted with it.

By the mid-2000s, most people used blogging services like livejournal and blogspot. They were a bit more restrictive in terms of design since the baseline functionality had already been decided for you, and they had more emphasis on user to user interaction, but the things hosted on them could still effectively be considered their own sites.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, people were on tumblr. Tumblr still gave a ton of customization; moreso than even some of the blogging services that inspired it. But it was clear that the focus wasn't really on the individual user anymore. It made a big deal out of sharing and responding to other people's content, and there were lots of users who did nothing but that. It was less about you and more about your place in the culture surrounding you.

Fast forward to today, and everyone's on twitter, which is like tumblr but even more limited. There's next to no customization, and you're restricted to 256 characters per post. Twitter accounts are completely interchangeable, and their content is highly ephemeral.

Individual users aren't important anymore, which sucks because that's what it used to be all about.

Outside of imageboards, I was a regular on the Myspace religion and philosophy subforum from 2005 to 2008. The 'R&P' was a very fun place. You could have serious, technical philosophical discussions on the philosophy board where there were a lot of philosophy students, then go troll people and start huge flamewars on the more chaotic religion board. The forum had several high-profile trolls, who usually had multiple alts and who would spam or exploit Myspace's code to hijack and kill threads. One of these guys even made a wiki, which is the only thing left of the R&P except for distant memories:
https://myspace.fandom.com/wiki/Religion_and_Philosophy
I don't remember half of the stuff in the wiki, except for the anti-wall of text copy pasta we'd throw at people who wrote too much. It's a bittersweet memory for me because I met my best and only online friend for over a decade through the R&P but she hasn't answered my emails in three years.

On a related note, younger people will never understand just how dominant these 'atheism vs. religion' flamewars were on the internet and I honestly miss them, even though I'd never join in them now. The discourse back then was completely different compared to today. You had people on both sides carefully cataloguing and analysing claims made by the other side, and it was very important to explain logic and methodology to people. The end result was that if you took everything with a pillar of salt (pardon the Biblical pun), you could learn a lot. There was also a sense of distance. The subject was never too serious that you couldn't have a bit of fun and mess around with people, or just walk away from the computer, and I had plenty of perfectly friendly interactions with 'the other side'. In the early 2010s, this discourse was completely displaced by a new set of concerns that are always presented in the most stark, apocalyptic terms imaginable, and that careful cataloguing is practically non-existent.

>>12747
there is a recreation of myspace called spacehey

>>12752
Recreating an old platform doesn't recreate the culture that was on it. It helps: a platform like myspace definitely cultivates a different kind of interaction than, say, twitter. But it's only part of the equation.

I'd much rather take twitter with the userbase of sheezyart than sheezyart with the userbase of twitter.

Did anyone else use StumbleUpon in the late 2000's? I just remembered spending hours on there between 07-2011 and finding loads of fun small sites with it. Tried to revisit it recently but found out that it's dead and turned into a social media site called Mix, which made me a little sad for some reason.

>>12795
i remember stumbleupon there is a few remakes of the site that fans did that are ok but i like original stumble upon better

>>12747
Cool, I didn't know that niche.
When I was 16 I went full fedora mode (over half a decade before it became a meme) and had an atheist blog on blogspot. I would follow other such blogs and wrote my own edgy anti-religion posts, and it got a growing audence, until I myself grew out of it and just stopped writing.

>>12795
I did too.
I founda site called high existence which was initially about self improvement. But the owner also encouraged the use of physchedelic drugs to "open your mind" or whatever, and when I went back for a visit after a couple years the whole site was all about drugs, drugs, drugs.
I called them out and mentioned that was not what "high existence" originally meant, and got flamed out of the place.
Good times.

Has anyone noticed mental health discussion online has changed? The discussion had changed from people working through their problems themselves, self improvement, self reflection, etc, to transferring authority to doctor, I need therapy and I can only be fixed by drugs. I find less issues with the therapy part, but more with how the 'drug' part sounds exactly like a pharmaceutical company. Like a random internet user 'helping' people by raising awareness for adhd and how you need meds for it sounds exactly like "Against health"'s essay called "pharmaceutical propaganda" and "drugs for life" which go over how drug companies cast wide nets so everyone get diagnosed with a disease. Along with this the rise of seeing depression through a fully biomedical lense, it's just brain chemicals bro, though that argument is still controversial is also weird. The biomedical lense always implies you can only be fixed by drugs.
I just find it weird how all current mental health discussion online sounds exactly like what would help a drug company make money

>>12814
That's not some pharmaceutical conspiracy, it's the direction clinical psychology has been moving to since the 90's. In terms of efficacy medication is the quickest and most cost-effective treatment for severe mental illness. Obviously with such a shotgun approach issues will arise like misdiagnosing kids with ADHD or people who just have shitty lives but the statistics on outcomes don't lie.

Psychotherapy like CBT isn't completely dead but most burgers can't afford multiple-session treatment.

>>12817
There are a lot of cases where that's true, but there are also a lot where at best we're medicalizing societal or group dynamic problems into problems with individuals' reactions to those situations. I don't think that the whole mental health discourse is driven by pharma, though i'm sure they do do their best, but there's definitely an atomizing trend in a lot of it which sees fixing the individual as the ideal when for a lot of people, it's only one part of the problem

Some of that is defensive, trying to claims scientific legitimacy against cultures that accept physical medical problems but not mental ones, but it's still an issue and one which a lot of the pro-therapy and self-improvement discourses fall into too

>>12818
>we're medicalizing societal or group dynamic problems into problems with individuals' reactions to those situations
That framework of thinking has already materialized into CBT which predates overzealous self-diagnosing social media users by several decades. Research has transitioned into focusing on individual outcomes first which is an inevitable process if any kind of clinical psychology is to be taken seriously. Any discourse beyond the individual lands on theorists like Adler and Fromm who bleed more into sociology and Marxism.

>>12819
While that makes sense from a certain perspective, there is also a lot of value in traditions coming from therapy relating to relationships especially (and a lot of it is as empirically supported as CBT, just takes longer, which is as you mentioned an issue of resources); and there are certainly a lot of issues that i see people looking to individual solutions to (whether that's medication, psychotherapy, meditation, not cumming, the right media or whatever else) where they have a lot of trouble affecting the root issues

When I was playing Habbo for the first time I meet 2 girls who were really nice to me. I was 8 years old or so and therefore really naive. We were talking for a whole day nonestop, I thought I made 2 good friends. Then I had to leave my computer because my IRL friends were waiting for me. When I came back to Habbo a few hours later, these 2 girls were all like: "Who are you? Why are you talking to us? Go away (real name)". This was kinda scary for me for some reason. My legs were shaking and even my brother asked me what happened.
I know this sounds dumb but for a little kid with 0 experience on the internet this was kinda spooky.
I learned a lot from Habbo and all the things I went throught there. When I grew up I meet this girl there who happened to be into girls. We were good friends but then one day she told me someone she meet there was trying to catfish her. Since I was into doxxing back then I managed to track her catfish down. "Sarah" wasn't a middle schooler from Argentina but a man named Alan from República Dominicana. My friend and I spooked him out, harassed him and his weird friends and she wasn't catfished anymore.
It's been a long time…

Apparently Lowtax from SomethingAwful is dead…

Have you guys ever checked out alternative internet protocols such as gopher and gemini? They're basically more lightweight protocols than http, although they don't explicitely aim to recreate the old internet, they do have a side effect of creating a similar environment, just due to being more limited (no javascript for example) meaning no trackers, ads, etc. Personally I am a big fan of the more minimalist idea, serving static documents rather than all this overcomplicated modern websites, although I have nothing against http itself, it is quite possible to make good websites (see http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/, https://bestmotherfucking.website/), i would still recomend taking a look at gopher and gemini just for interest. Lack of inline images is pretty annoying though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

>>12864
I generally hate 'lets just go back' ideas because it ignores the context that caused the downfall. The internets downfall was caused by greedy corporations and the new user base encouraged by said corporations, people who maximize their time online, aka seeing adverts, at the cost of everything else. If the internet adopted germeni sites would just switch to FLoC instead of cookies, ads would be text and not video, the net would evolve to ruin gemeni instead of devolve away from it.
Also I think people forget how many benefits the new internet brought. Gopher and gemini make streaming videos and pictures basically impossible, like you said. I highly doubt "fuck the modern internet" lainchan users will last long in a gopher only world once they realize they can't stream their favorite vTuber or have instant access to their fan art. This is an exaggeration of course, but you get the gist. It fee;s way to limited and at the same time so broad a big site can exploit it for cash.
Its high quality isn't due to its nature so far, but more due to the fact no one famous uses it. Its just used by comfy people

>>12867
Was it though? I think it's more of a people problem. We all flock to the biggest sites because we want the attention (and/or money), creating a vicious cycle where the big guys get bigger and the small guys get smaller. There's nothing stopping people from quitting sites like twitter and facebook and going elsewhere. I don't use any of those sites and I get by fine. The only reason people stay is that they crave the audience a big website brings.

I also don't think it's a demographic shift. Most of the people I knew from the 90s and 2000s are now on big social media sites posting the same dumb shit as the new generation they hate so much.


>Its high quality isn't due to its nature so far, but more due to the fact no one famous uses it. Its just used by comfy people
I'm going to contest the "high quality" and especially the "used by comfy people" bits.

>>12867
Yeah, this. I still like the communities on gopher and Gemini. I don't think we need to justify their existence with "going back to text-only will 'fix' our internet experience"– fun things are fun, and I think it's great that good communities are forming around unique ways to explore the internet. So, even though it might not be the solution, it's still a great thing to explore.

There are similar movements in the HTTP world that emphasize "going back to basics" too- webrings for website under a certain download size, webrings without JS, etc. But again, our personal websites won't save the internet. Somehow we need to escape corporations on the internet. I still always build my own websites like this because they are fun to explore and read, but yeah, I'm not exactly changing the world with my web diary.

On the modern web as a whole, I naively thought that we had hit our lowest, maybe, but suddenly tech conglomerates and social media outlets are buzzing about integrating cryptocurrency in their platforms. Of course it can get worse! Lowtax dying in the middle of a press storm about the so-called "web 3.0" is somehow a little bit poetic.

>>12875
> The only reason people stay is that they crave the audience a big website brings.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. Social media has gamed our brains into craving likes and interaction, but the majority of people on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are not creators.

But yeah, most people online are just shooting the shit and absorbing other people's stuff. IMO there's nothing holding the common person back from jumping ship to less incorporated stuff like Mastodon *other* than the fact that these platforms are now so ubiquitous that people feel that they are dependent on them. None of my non-tech person friends want to join Mastodon, even though they like the community feel there, because their favorite content is already on Twitter. For people to really break from big companies, there's going to have to be a big cultural shift that hasn't hit yet. And, honestly, I don't know what it'll be. Facebook does the most crazy-ass shit on a regular basis and people don't bat an eye.

>>12877
As a rule of thumb, big changes in society come from big shifts in technology. Weapons decide how we wage war. Vehicles decide how and where we travel. And in this case, communications technologies decide what information gets to spread. There's exceptions to be sure, but that's generally how it works. Big social media sites stick around because that's what technology supports right now. In order to move beyond it, we need to move forward technologically.

Federation has potential, but nobody's found a way to make it marketable yet. Most of the stuff that's around right now is federated copies of centralized social media sites, which is a mistake. What reason does your average Joe have to use Mastodon above Twitter? The answer is none. Federation unto itself is not a selling point for most people. You need to carve out your own niche; have some sort of gimmick that sets your platform apart besides "x but with y".

Acessability also matters a lot. Joining an instance of a platform in order to interact with users on other instances is inherently less intuitive than just signing up for the platform itself, which puts federation at an inherent disadvantage. It's going to be a very difficult obstacle to overcome, but it's extremely important that we do.

Finally, like it or not, we need to focus more on phones. They're the primary way people interact with social media now, especially zoomers, so if you want to get people on your platform, you need to design it to work well in that kind of environment.

These are a weird mix between old and new internet, but what about app only social media like Whisper and Yikyak?
Both apps a relativity new compared to the internet, but they have had a giant impact online. Whisper is completely forgotten, but if you browse enough ironic meme pages you can see people still re-posting their best hits having no idea the image came from whisper, you can tell it's from whisper from the font type and how it's overlayed badly on an image. The early bizarre whispers were somehwhat of a precursors to todays degenerate deeply ironic memes.
YikYak was super popular in its main demographic, but practically unheard of elsewhere. If you went to college in the 2000's yik yak was most likely a big part of the experience

>>12878
Phones are a cancerous plague upon this earth.
Both google and apple stores will censor your app, just like they did with, parler, gab, etc.
It's not just federation, it's censorship which is the real issue here.

>>12965
Everything mainstream will be censored. This isn't a bad thing per se because it allows normalfags to have their own space. If you want something with little to no censorship either make it yourself or use something obscure like this website.

>>12968
A person may be predisposed to social conformity or to independent thought.
However the information environment always reigns supreme.
Input determines the output, no matter what the personality or flavor of the algorithm is.
You can have "normal people" burning witches and participating in genocide.
No single way of being is inherently repugnant to people if they haven't known anything else.


If you control the information environment nearly everyone will follow suit.
Censorship is the means by which this occurs.

So no, censorship or any other sort of mental blinders are never a good thing for anyone.

>>12968
With the internet, we have a great chance of having a truly censorship free mainstream discourse and media.
The monetization of the internet beyond simple trade of goods needs to be stopped.

>>12971
Every way of being I've ever known has been repugnant to me sushi famalampai I don't know if I should wish for harmony with what I feel disharmonious with. I want to find a way of being I don't have to change myself to fit in with. Ehhh… it's not how things are meant to be is it…

In any way, yin and yang the two sides of the one motion. Focus on one thing by ignoring another. Any focus is a mental blunder for another focus I mean, and we really don't have that much time for focus anyway.

>>12976
Blunder -> blinder
Sorry for the blinder.

>>12977
Blinder -> blunder
Wow, Its like I'm not even seeing these typos for some reason!

I think that I'm a bit too young to have experienced the "old" internet. The first time I was on the internet was shortly before 9/11 happened, but back then I was a child and would only use the internet to look at firetrucks and play Lego flash? games.

A distinct memory I have is the mid to late 2000s, when it was a trend to have a website hosted on an awfully bad German service.

Every website looked the same, as there were only a handful of themes to choose one. I had four or five webpages, each having to do with gaming and one with ufology research. I'm especially happy the ufo page has vanished over the years, looking back I'm a bit ashamed of my teenage self.

>>12971
>>12965
People like you use "censorship" in a way that renders it meaningless. Censorship is governments blocking websites and sending people to jail over posts on social media. That shit happens all the time, and is a huge, increasingly urgent problem.

But Apple's privately owned service deciding not to platform certain apps is not that. Neither is Twitter banning you for posting racial slurs.

To be clear, that these companies have so much control over what the average Joe gets to see is definitely an issue. But it's not necessarily the same issue. The problem with the corporations isn't that they're unfairly deciding what people get to hear, it's that they have enough power to do that to begin with. It shouldn't matter what these companies do and don't allow because they shouldn't be big enough for that to matter.

In an ideal free-market system, if a good/service stinks, someone makes an alternative that improves on it. The people behind the original then either improve their product to retain their customers, or go out of business because nobody likes their products.

But when a company becomes too powerful, it gets too hard for potential competitors to bridge the gap, and leads to a situation where a corporation ends up with government-like power. The solution here is not to treat the corporation like it's the government and expect it to take care of your rights. The solution is to have the real government step in and put regulations in place to preserve competition.

>>13014
>In an ideal free-market system
>But when a company becomes too powerful
the inevitable end of a free-market system is monopoly or duopoly and all the shitty results that come with it. when companies compete clear winners emerge and eventually they have enough power to leverage the government and media against opposition to protect their power.

even though communism might sound cool on paper, it inevitably ends in dictatorship by a privileged academic or military class.
in the same way, free market capitalism will result in dictatorship by economic monopoly.

>>13014
>real government step in and put regulations in place to preserve competition.
I agree the government should be involved, but I think 'competition' with these sorts of things is misguided. Social media platforms are more like public infrustructure than like a product you buy. It might make sense to have companies competing to provide roads, but we certainly don't need competing roads… if that metaphor makes sense… it's all one thing is what I mean, and trying to break it apart, or treat it like it's not only harms it.

>>13014
>Censorship is governments blocking websites and sending people to jail over posts on social media.
I actually agree with you generally about monopolies and there being a role for government here. But you have a strange definition of "censorship" if you think only the government can be engaged in it. There's this weird idea I see online sometimes that there's nothing conceptually or morally wrong with censorship as long as the government isn't doing it, which I definitely don't agree with. I think if people took a minute to think about why it's a good thing the government can't decide what you can say, they would agree that it's probably good for private entities to err on the side of not doing the same.
>Apple's privately owned service deciding not to platform certain apps is not that. Neither is Twitter banning you for posting racial slurs.
Those are both definitely still censorship. The question is how much is an acceptable or socially useful amount. I think that many times it's perfectly reasonable to be banning foul language, pornography, outright lies, etc. But people nowadays are a little too gung-ho about restricting things as a way to solve problems.
>>13023
>Social media platforms are more like public infrustructure than like a product you buy.
I'm actually coming around to this argument. It's silly to pretend like these platforms are "just another private service" when it's effectively impossible to run a business or a political campaign without the use of Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.

>>13023
>>13024
You're missing the larger issue.

Even in the statistically impossible best-case scenario where government a) decides to step in and regulate things, b) manages to not royally fuck up the rest of the web in doing so, and c) doesn't use it as an opportunity to censor everything to an even greater degree than the companies do on their own, we'd still be reliant on a small handful of giant monolithic platforms to house all our information.

The past is a different country you can't return to…