Social Media Was Good For A While

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Yeah, I’m writing about something I’ve written about a few times now, but it echoes my feelings of getting older, and wishing we could take at least parts of the world back twenty five years or so. But, why? Would I, or anyone else, really actually enjoy interacting with an internet where they can’t just immediately connect with a thousand people and get some likes and shares? Am I being uncharitable in assuming this is all people care about anymore?

I feel like there was a turning point in the early 2000s, where we were kind of forced to say goodbye to everything that was good about the internet, and introduced to a monster. But, we didn’t know it was a monster. We went along with it, because it was new, and if you grew up in the 90s, new things were happening constantly. And you rolled with it.

Post by @hhardy01@mastodon.social

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I’m talking about Facebook, and what would eventually become Meta. Google had its share in destroying the internet, too, but Facebook and Meta is where I believe the greatest evil lives. Albeit, at least Meta never had a “Don’t be evil” sign that they eventually took down, so that they could … be evil?

Never-the-less …

If you were on the internet in the 90s, you were already kind of a nerd. A digital tinkerer. A websurfer. So, you probably had some sort of website. Maybe something on Geocities, like we all know and love, and wish was still around. Thank garsh we have Neocities as some form of continued interest in giving people a place to be themselves online.

But, it totally wasn’t exclusive to nerds. I very much remember a girl I had a crush on showing me her AOL instant messenger bio when I went to her place once, and then her Geocities that was plastered with her made-up Star Wars Twi’lek character.

… uh, alright, maybe she was a nerd.

But, the question: Would people actually be able to tolerate returning to an internet that was just websites?

I think so, if you ease them into it.

Back in the 90s, the only real way to “post” to people were through bulletin boards. You’d join an online community site full of topics of your interest, and post threads in order to speak to other people who shared your interests. It wasn’t like posting on Twitter. You had to wait, or, sometimes, never get a reply to things you were talking about. Which, sure, a lot of people can probably relate to that by today’s standards, like when you talk into the void on social media and nobody pays you any mind.

It wasn’t hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, though. It was like fifty people, or a hundred people. That’s it. There were many of these bulletin boards, and they were all over the place. Some exist today, even still, and people definitely still use them (I highly recommend melonland for getting a sense of what it was like).

But, that wasn’t the only way that you could connect with people.

If you had a Geocities, you could “join” communities, and put a webring on your site in order for visitors to travel around through sites with similar topics (you can see some new-age webrings right here on my own website). Sometimes, maybe you’d spark interest in getting to know someone who was running a site in the same “neighborhood” as you, so you’d jump into a Yahoo chatroom with twenty other people and have a real-time chat. Or, better yet, you’d simply add them on an instant messaging app (like AOL Instant Messenger), and talk! Like … back and forth, personally!

This is what made the early internet so exciting.

You didn’t have immediate access to everyone, at all times.

Sometimes you would log on to mess with your site, and surf the net for a new desktop wallpaper, idling away time to see if some of your buddies logged on, and sometimes they wouldn’t!

But when they would, you had so much more to talk about, because you weren’t socially exhausting them, and yourself, by just always being in-touch.

It was … awesome.

Now, I know some of us might ask, “Okay, but what about people who have material need for fundraising? How would a return to the early internet accommodate something like that?”

To be honest, and completely frank, I never saw this on the early internet. But, that may be because, back in the 90s, the internet wasn’t really this place that people would log on and be like, “I need help, this is where I can get it.” People just didn’t make, or get a whole lot of money, at all, online, because that was an idea that had yet to take any shape.

Paypal didn’t exist.

Setting up some kind of internet store wasn’t really something many people … could do.

I would imagine, though, you would probably want to post something like that on a personal website, and send it to your friends, and people who share your interests on forums (bulletin boards), and it’d probably have the same effect as blasting it out on Mastodon, or Bluesky.

Speaking of, does this mean I think we should be rid of Mastodon and Bluesky?

Not entirely, no. I think Mastodon is great, and Bluesky is … okay. It could be better. But neither of them have algorithms, and Facebook is to blame for the algorithmic hell that much of the internet is, today. Without algorithms, you kind of are just talking, which … in a way, does mirror the old net.

But, we need more of that. And now.

I’m not just talking about this as something we need immediately just because AI has fucked everything up. But, because, people, as a whole, have got to unlearn the antisocial ideals that Twitter and Facebook spent over a decade hammering into us.

And by that, I mean, eschewing all social sensibilities in interacting and connecting with people, in order to to post bait. Something that will get you more likes, more follows, more fame, etc, etc. It is an addiction, a sickness, and if you spend enough time surrounded by it, you might start thinking a majority of people don’t care about anyone but themselves and their own instant gratification.

This extends to Tik Tok, too. Where this behavior is so egregious, that people engineer videos just to waste your time, because pissing people off does huge numbers!

No.

We have to deconstruct all of that. We must return to something that encouraged discovery, and connection. Maybe even for the sake of the world, actually. I don’t know.

I just wish everything about being online didn’t seem so bad, all of the time.

But that’s why I have this website.