Post #1058469
2026-04-10 15:39 UTC
Replies (37)
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@denny@boing.world 2026-04-10 15:45
@KathyReid I feel like Facebook is a good marker for 'oops, too late', but I'm not as confident of what the early warning sign might have been. I usually like to follow Bill Hicks in blaming most of society's ills on 'marketing'... or more specifically, in the context of the Internet, advertising-driven surveillance capitalism. So maybe when Google Ads launched?
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@kholanda@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 15:48
@KathyReid i feel like we're going back to a new version of that when big tech collapses
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@anyGould@kind.social 2026-04-10 16:01
@KathyReid AOL - when people got it in their head that they could make the internet "profitable".
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@neptune22222@kolektiva.social 2026-04-10 16:06
@KathyReid It's still here. The neckbearded ladies are still here. It's a matter of hearing the silence.
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@geonz@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-10 16:11
@KathyReid Maybe if there are some disasters and everything slows down? I remember when you didn't put pictures on your website because the files were so big...
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@marshalla99@thx.gg 2026-04-10 16:20
@KathyReid Around the time everyone started receiving weekly AOL disks.
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@wtrabex@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 16:27
@KathyReid If there was a starting point, it was Metallica's lawsuit against Napster. If there was a watershed moment where everything started going downhill, it was Ron Paul's campaign for president in which he expressed skepticism about universities as being "liberal indoctrination centers." The war against information began there.
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@Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 2026-04-10 16:42
@KathyReid Instead of doing a 20+ year snails-pace migration to IPv6 where we ensure everything's reachable between the two versions, we could've just created a separate IPv6 "new internet" network and had that be the fun, non-monopolized version. I suppose we could always do IPv7..
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@ZippyWonderdust@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 16:44
@KathyReid September, 1993, when AOL started offering Usenet access. Ah, Eternal September, when the unwashed masses (and the advertisers that prey upon them) flooded the nascent web…
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@MartyFouts@mastodon.online 2026-04-10 16:54
@KathyReid I know that the most popular answer is “when AOL came online but to some of us it started much earlier, when the requirement that you were doing DARPA related research was relaxed to allow anyone on who was affiliated with a university that had access. Nobody realized it at the time but it started with students from certain universities who were the earliest to attempt to monetize being online.
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@PeterPractice@toot.community 2026-04-10 18:45
@KathyReid I remember the SETI on my 468 SX tower.
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@nini@oldbytes.space 2026-04-10 18:53
@KathyReid The one that was riddled with pop-ups, toolbars and viruses? The one where you couldn't find anything unless you got exceptionally lucky and went down to the fifth page of results? The potential for something better was there but much like a rosebush it still had thorns everywhere.
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@nicksilkey@hachyderm.io 2026-04-10 19:02
@KathyReid 👀 folks opining on when they lost it. For _them_ in _their_ lifetimes and specific experiences. 🤔 👋 The spirit of what made it all happen around whatever your time is, reply folks ... I think that's what OP is about. That spirit built all this, and can certainly build what is next. ✌️💙
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@lefthandmonki@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 19:03
Take a look at the Gemini project. It’s basically the web circa 1995. @KathyReid
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@cutesobri@cathode.church 2026-04-10 19:04
@KathyReid it happened when capitalism got stuck in it, and eventually we'll kick it out.
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@softproof@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 19:39
@KathyReid I often dream that dream too. And then I remember: when the internet was domesticated around 2004 the usual scare tactics played their part. But above all it actually used to take some skills to grapple with the new inter-beast, learn html, ftp, menu trees, graphics conversion etc. Guess who didn't like any of that? Slop-enshitti-net's what we got because most had better things to do than learn, apparently.
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@bms48@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 19:46
@KathyReid There was an interesting emergence, in the past 10 years at least, adjacent to the IXP market, of private companies acting as gatekeepers to peering, rather than organisations just peering at IXPs.
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@bms48@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 19:47
@KathyReid Also you're making an oblique reference to #Radia #Perlman, who, whilst she conceived of #TRILL as a successor to #spanningtree ran into issue with it essentially requiring new silicon, and it got #enshittified into a #proprietary version by #Brocade. Ivan #Pepelnjak at #ipspace.net is worth reading on these points.
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@Kylieeee@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 20:39
@KathyReid worth noting folding@home is still around doing work towards cancer (and others). For a while I was donating all my spare compute towards it.
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@TheStoneDonkey@beige.party 2026-04-10 21:10
@KathyReid dibs!
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@KeithWM@mastodon.social 2026-04-10 22:11
@KathyReid I'd say we're doing a pretty good job at getting that old vibe back here on Mastodon. Not that I was around for those real early days.
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@lispi314@udongein.xyz 2026-04-10 22:52
@KathyReid At which fork or trunk or change did the current slop-enshitti-net emerge? When corporations, lawyers and governments got access to it (so arguably from the very start, but it was a lot less obvious because they lacked the influence & infrastructure to maximize their harms and their users knew enough that the power imbalance was much less dramatic). The information issues were always present from its purposeful structural rot but things started going to shit a lot faster when capitalism and petty authoritarians got involved. With the current state of things, the raw non-corporatized net is now available mostly in anonymizing overlay networks (which crucially do not replicate the hierarchical structure of the Internet and its intentional chokepoints).
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@subm3rge@infosec.exchange 2026-04-10 23:55
@KathyReid Started when the first .com came online; that, and finalised by the Endless September.
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@SamuraiSakura@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-04-10 23:57
@KathyReid It’s called gopher / gemini now 😉
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@robertpostill@mastodon.social 2026-04-11 00:37
@KathyReid as an older nerd I feel this deeply. I feel betrayed by what we now have.
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@imalcolm@mastodon.social 2026-04-11 00:43
@KathyReid It's kind of why I'm on here and a couple of old phpBB forums that somehow manage to survive. 😉 There's no going back, for better or worse, but maybe enough of us can go forward in a better way...
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@sumisu3@mastodon.nz 2026-04-11 01:05
@KathyReid Doug Engelbart showed us “a future” with his mother of all demos. Sometime in the later half of the 90s when it complete changed from connecting people to communicate to connecting people to monetize them seems to have been the final throw of the switch with no return.
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@arthfach@arthfach.com 2026-04-11 01:53
@KathyReid This is exactly what I am trying to do, at least in my own little corner for people willing to give it a shot with me.
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@cascheranno@hachyderm.io 2026-04-11 04:10
@KathyReid@aus.social where a stack of floppies or several megs was an entire Operating System, not the size of many *common* home pages we browse to.
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@prefec2@norden.social 2026-04-11 09:19
@KathyReid@aus.social well then we have to overcome capitalism in its current form.
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@casandro@f-ckendehoelle.de 2026-04-11 09:56
@KathyReid@aus.social Well I think that still exists, it's just not as visible as before. However there are some things that feel harder than before. Web standards are one example. We seem to have lost the idea of separating content from design, so browsers no longer just render HTML nicely by default. There also no longer seem to be simple HTML editors around. One point is of course the IPv4 exhaustion which means that it's harder to host your own webserver at home.
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@0ptimist@troet.cafe 2026-04-11 10:37
@KathyReid@aus.social 😏
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@HootenHaller@mastodon.social 2026-04-11 10:49
@KathyReid@aus.social Here’s a funlinks starter kit… https://pointerpointer.com/ https://www.si.edu/openaccess https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ https://neal.fun/
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@distrowatch@mastodon.social 2026-04-11 23:37
@KathyReid@aus.social I think it started going downhill around the same time people started saying "Web 2.0" unironically.
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@graydon@canada.masto.host 2026-04-12 01:34
@KathyReid@aus.social As soon as you can make money with it, this happens. At which point it's either public (which moves the making money part) or we go hard for limitarianism or, well, this. We've all lived through a one time thing, like the invention of the wheel or gunpowder or steam engines. Kinda hard to notice at the time.
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@trivial@mathstodon.xyz 2026-04-12 05:06
@KathyReid@aus.social I remember when I was in undergrad, I had a physhics masters friend who couldn't find a memory leak in his GEANT code so he just requested 800GB of RAM from the uni HPC....it was quite funny when he began his defense with "I finally fixed the memory leak!"
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@tempusfelix@wehavecookies.social 2026-04-12 09:00
@KathyReid@aus.social 2 initiator points 1) the appearance of the smartphone lowering the intellectual cost of entry. 2) the rise of Facebook and google following the ease of entry leading to the realisation that profit could be made. When you had to put in effort to connect to something, you tended to value and try to understand it. When it becomes seamless and pervasive, the value is lowered and it becomes a tool for profit. So about 2010.