RockWolf
ℹ️❤️🖥 aka Compy-chanSums up my experience growing up
Courier drone - 5276 ☿@ilovecomputers yeah
Josh@ilovecomputers @JoshuaACNewman I see you, Gen X. I am one of us.
Violet Madder
Jack Yan (甄爵恩)@ilovecomputers Iʼm old school. Our content is still content. Screw “SEO”, Big Tech, and the surveillance economy. I saw the peak and refused to downgrade. We even took off tracked ads.
Tired Sponge@jackyan @ilovecomputers SEO was the beginning of the death of the usable web.
Proud to say that in all my web-based endeavors over the years I have never once used SEO. It's fucking evil.
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:
https://jackyan.com/blog/2024/02/read-all-about-the-seo-algorithm-that-i-developed-for-google/
Read all about the SEO algorithm that I developed for Google
P.P.PS., May 31, 2024: Since this post keeps getting linked by people posting disinformation, and seemingly by those using LLMs and are illiterate themselves, let me make things very clear to those who can read: there is no such thing as a Jackyan algorithm. The whole point of the title was to take the mickey
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I sometimes send this to the idiots who enquire about “SEO” with us, even though we say we donʼt do guest posts or “outreach” on our contact pages:
https://jackyan.com/blog/2025/02/we-do-not-do-paid-or-guest-posts-and-heres-why/
We do not do paid or guest posts—here’s why
I don’t know how much more abundantly clear we can make things on our sites when we say, for instance, at Lucire: ‘We receive multiple enquiries from SEO or “outreach” companies about paid or guest posts each day, and if you fall into this category, please do not contact us: it’s going to be no.’
Space@ilovecomputers I feel for you.
In my case it was CB radio. Elitist rebels at first then regulated and finally destroyed from within by wilful, selfish people.
In my case it was CB radio. Elitist rebels at first then regulated and finally destroyed from within by wilful, selfish people.
Mike Torr@original_peterm @ilovecomputers I remember that very well. I was briefly a CB user (Bristol, 1970s) and this perfectly summarises what happened. Before regulation it was possible to deal with the selfish people via "direct action" (ahem). After legalisation, the troublemakers had the law on their side and got free rein. It's not a bad analogy for what happened to the internet. The anarchy was at least self-regulating...
TheNovemberFella ✊🏳️🌈 🇺🇦☸️🛰️🚀
Nigel@ilovecomputers thank you for both saying this out loud, and also making me extra sad.
mirabilos@ilovecomputers yeah, totally the late-GenX experience :/
@mirabilos 90s kids like me too. So I’d say up to early Gen Z
@ilovecomputers depends on the region, I suppose
and how literal you take “grow up without the internet” (I pretty much did, only got access at school near the very end of schooling (with floppies to carry data to and fro, mind you), and only at where I lived once adult)
@mirabilos I could be wrong, but the 2010s is when the internet became so normalized in the US that you had to be in abject poverty to not have it. Like I had a friend who wasn’t online until he was in high school in the 2000s
@ilovecomputers I’m not in america
Jargoggles@ilovecomputers
Watching this vast, beautiful thing you could explore turn into like 4 websites has been really sad.
Watching this vast, beautiful thing you could explore turn into like 4 websites has been really sad.
The best glimpses of what it COULD become seemed so possible.
@ilovecomputers Spot on 😭
Andrew Wooldridge ⛰️@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
B Archer@triptych @ilovecomputers Yes. It's back to DIY and user created content, like at first.
mutkittaAny recommendations? :)
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
hackillu@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
Sara Joy 
@hackillu There are fediverse versions of forum-like interfaces that look a little like reddit, or discord, or other things. They can interoperate with your mastodon accounts - you may have to set up new accounts to use them, but the interoperability is still there AFAIK. I haven't (yet) tried them out.
Petra van Cronenburg@hackillu We have something like #groups https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/ but it feels more like RSS than a forum. It's just boosting everything for the group.
Unfortunately, the very vibrant gup.pe groups are destroyed and the new ones are only slowly taking traction.
Everyone can set up such a group with @hello
@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
@mutkitta Re forums, I miss them too. Many groups that would have been on forums are now on Reddit, in Discord servers, or Facebook Groups.
@triptych Yes, it's up there but more and more hidden by AI Slop.
And people don't dig the mud, they are tired.
For a normal, simple professional search, I nowadays need more than 3 times longer: to find "something", to fact-check, to find traces for more. I work with a bunch of internal databases/platforms but it's crazy to get results inside the fog. Often I don't get these results anymore. I'm not very optimistic.
@ilovecomputers I'm 63 and yes to all of this
Ramon de la Fuente@ilovecomputers but but but Confetti! (Le Sigh)
Albert ARIBAUD ✎This close to discovering that the real problem is, and always has been, capitalism (and, beyond it, greed).
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@ilovecomputers Same. Born 1952.
@ilovecomputers 🎯 I remember a #search machine developped by an university in the early 1990s (?), before #Google came up. They found the best content, even for very complicated scientific searches, they found the smallest private website on any island in the Pacific, or in Asia, Africa. The world outside the USA was still connected.
They were destroyed by Google and the users prefering the #convenience of the biggest, believing their hollow promises. The biggest got the money for development.
George BI was actually talking to my cousins about this the other day, a lot of people in our generation (Millennials but also Gen X and older Gen Z) were using the Internet before all of the really bad dark patterns were added in so we got them at a trickle rate and could develop defenses for some of them as they got more refined
How can we replicate that slow creep for kids now so that they can also build up their defenses instead of getting hit hard while unprepared?
Dunwich Type Founders@ilovecomputers we had Stileproject and EfNet was cool. Today…not so much.
Creatures 
@ilovecomputers every good library eventually must burn
Vakaris Blackwood@ilovecomputers we should've seen the signs when it got harder to filter chronologically, and then outright impossible. they told you algo knows better what to give you. when's the last time, outside Masto, you've seen a post with zero likes, fresh out of the poster's mind?... because I can't find any (unless among follows, sometimes) on any other damn social media.
tl;dr #yeah
SueDiOh@ilovecomputers Don't buy the pulp. Your clicks are like dollars; don't give them away for nothing.
We all need to spend time away from the machines, myself included.
We all need to spend time away from the machines, myself included.
Becca@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...
you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.
Truth Or Consequences ✅ 🇺🇦It is really an old story. Money doesn't just talk it dictates.
Using the propaganda model...news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail — and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media)
Ari Sovijärvi@ilovecomputers This hits home hard, as I for with almost anything, from programming to learning Linux and all, there was very little resources in the early 90s. After learning the first steps of Linux from a booklet that came with the Walnut Creek CDROMs, it was almost insane that 5 years later you could just use Altavista to find help for your problems and discover someone's Geocities site on how to put Linux in a certain laptop and have all the devices working.
My distaste for the current state of the Internet is very hard to put in words without it being mostly swearing. I also mourn the death of actual web sites and how all the nuggets of information are nowdays social media posts, that do not get archived the same way as bare web sites were. SEO gives me the most unadulterated feelings of rage as it makes web search completely pointless chore.
If things weren't bad enough, the LLM generated web sites may start as a promising lead on something, but need to be quickly scanned through first so they don't end up just being pointless suggestions that end with "if things won't work for you, buy our Wonder Repair product".