[ HOME - BLOG - TXT - PDF - VHS - XF - APP - GAME - PIC - LZH - RSS ]

i386

lurking internet since 56k

Manifesto

tl;dr Web 2.0 sucks.

If you're into Neocities community I think you already know the answer but you may not know my answer.
Everyone that sees the Internet growin'with him can easly understand how the Internet changed in years, especially starting from early '10s when Web 2.0 has born.
I wanna be honest: Web 2.0 is not so bad as 56k Generation thinks but, imho, Web 2.0 is not what Internet was meant to be.

You already know the story of: Internet, HTTP protocol, Netscape, etcetera, etcetera... Internet started becaming popoular among home-user cause it was just...funny, you could use the computer you'd just bought without ever connecting to dial-up; computer was made to work and to play, if you wanted to access information you could buy pirate an Enciclopedia into 14 3.5 floppy disk or you could just connect your home phone to your new computer and...WALA! "Yahoo!" what you need to look for or just type that address you found on the IT megazine you've bought in the morning at kiosk.

When I started browsing the Net everything just looked...AMAZING! I was totally able to find everything I needed! I was so happy, my parents that payed phone bills were less happy. At the beginning I thought that creating a Website was something that only a CERN over-graduated computer engineer could do but I was wrong. I started discovering a lot of simple website built by guys that had, more or les, my same age where they uploaded their own DOOM WADs.

Than...I discovered Geocities and, you can just assume what happened :).

More than 20 years lasted than the moment I browse the Internet looking for new DOOM WADs, world changed, our society changed, Internet was not a nerdy niche-space anymore, where everyone built his own little home sharing the WAD they've just created or the stupid fan fiction they wrote.
People spent time browsing the Internet using a smartphone that's 100b more powerful than all the "computer" used to let human landing on the moon in '69. No one cares about discovering a new website.

The Internet is just a giant shopping centre where we can just see a couple of pictures on Instagram for free in charge of our data. Everyone has a device to browse the Net and after checking out the last football results you can jerk off deciding what in porn petabytes you like the most.

The 56k generation, the one that grew up chatting on IRC, built the Internet, we made Internet cool uploading our DOOM WADs, we wanted that our projects could reach everyone but we made Internet too much attractive, everyone wanted to join this community but they couldn't becouse they found difficoult also creating an email address using Hotmail as provider. So products like Facebook, designed to be more noob-friendly than MSN Messenger, helped everyone to join the net but you can't drive a plane if you never walked on your feet so...Internet became shit.

Web companies started making life easier for these noobs, mobile-ready CSS framework like Boostrap started becaming popoular and that's cool, of course, every website looks acceptable on mobile but at what costs? All website are the same. Every website has notifications and messagging, you can't even understand if you're checking your salary into your bank website or you're writing shits on Facebook.

Neocities is full of people that feels this, that prefers creativity over "resposivity", that knows that what noobs sent on Whatsapp are not GIF but autoplayed MP4, that miss the old internet and wanna build a website into a community that seems to be stuck into 90s and seems to be happy for this... :)

Unpopoular opinion: World would have be much better if Internet was left over a couple of nerd and IT guys. Normies are still not able to use and to understand the Internet.