I was having a little cruise around Creative Speculation
And started to reply to this post by bucolic_frolic. "Is the internet dying."
https://www.democraticunderground.com/113513043
As the reply grew longer and more involved, I thought someone may enjoy it, so here it is....
The internet of today
Is very different to the one I knew in the early-mid 90s. In those ancient days, people made a website - Just Because They Could. A disproportionate number of them were subtitled, "My Little Corner of the Web and they had a page set aside to share their link collection.
Cyberspace was a new and exciting frontier. With only a telephone line and a clapped-out Win95 computer, you had this new universe at your disposal.
The thing was, after you had read the three or four pages on each website (more for some fruitcakes and CTers) that was it. Why would you go back to the site? This little germ of an idea was brewing simultaneously with a growing fancy that there must be a way to 'monetize' the web. After all, there has to be some way to lay off the expense of servers, technicians, designers.....
The biggest looming problem was the issue of content. It needed to be fresh, new, able to bring repeat visits to your website. Newspapers kind of fulfilled this need. So did porn sites. In fact, most advances in the web during the 90s were made by pornographers.
Sometime around the early 2000s (probably inspired by DIY pron) the concept of "User Created Content" became a thing. Site owners no longer had to employ writers or rack their brains for a daily new offering. You simply get the users of the website provide the new content.
Facebook, forums, youtube, and all the rest were born. Now keep this thought in your mind; 95% of the content on the internet is created by 5% of the users.
That's right; there are more lurkers than you can poke a stick at. Meanwhile, the reticent, the introverts, the socially uncomfortable, are relegated to the unwholesome category of lurker while the loud, overconfident and brash command the biggest audience (and the biggest influence).
Twenty years on from Web 2.0, it has become less of a wild wonderland and more of a scammer and profiteer's paradise. I still have a domain name and hosting; maybe I should concentrate on 'My little corner of the web'.
= new reply since forum marked as read
And
Critical!
Geeze, just tonight, I had an Amber Alert...
I'm coordinator phone banks from home but the lists are made via the internet
Also we have a zoom event tomorrow....
I don't think it's going anywhere...
Heck I've basically ditched my cookbooks, so I won't be able to cook without the internet..LOL
