Comment on Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites
Railing5132@lemmy.world 1 month agoLike you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: “what’s the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don’t need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!” packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.
Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren’t even ads, because the ad industry didn’t know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.
The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000’s was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 month ago
But even back in the IRC and USENET days, there were plenty of asshole Nazis and petty arguments and such that it made the internet pretty unpleasant quite often if you didn’t watch where you contributed.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
That’s why kid me had a handy stack of DDoS tools. My bot and I defended DALnet’s #sailormoon and its denizens from Nazis, racists, and trolls. Yeah, I was a dork.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Which is great until they hit you back. I was lucky in that I was using my dad’s university account which was pretty immune to petty bot DDoS attacks, but I was also not a Nazi troll. I was just attacked by Nazi trolls who thought they could take my connection down.
Railing5132@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Dude! I see you everywhere! I think you’re singlehandedly feeding the fediverse content! But anyway, yes, there were nazis and trolls, but in my experience, there was a group sense of decorum that we were all in this new utopia together and those folks got flamed by the whole pretty thoroughly.