This site has the vaporwave neon and the intentionally shitty gifs (like the Under Construction one that used to be the landing page). The website for r/SubredditDrama is intentionally disastrous (it’s rdrama.net, but be warned it’s even more full of brainworms than the subreddit). A lot of sites will use chan or PhpBb boards. Even the plug-and-play Reddit alternatives have universally opted for the “old” Reddit style combined with whatever nightmarishly boomer custom CSS their ancestor community used to have.
Maybe this point seems obvious, but I think there’s probably more to it than “current Internet sucks and the old internet looks good by comparison”
It's weird to me even though web 2.0 had a huge push to put a name and a face to a username in social media like facebook and twitter, the internet of today feels way less personalized than it used to back in the age of homepages and guestbooks.
Maybe that’s a form of atomization. They wanted names and faces on accounts to make spamming alts more difficult. We see that without an authority on identity, one of the greatest forms of force multiplication online is the ability to make a small group of people look like a large group of people. So deanonymizing people was much more about accountability than about socialization.
Take your example of guestbooks. They give a nice easy way to personalize a message, but offer little to no help in terms of pinpointing individual users. They’re exactly the opposite of what corporate social media needed. Similarly, social media has amazing potential in an IoT age to be more social, but of course that potential will be squandered and manipulated to create more elaborate surveillance networks.
Similarly, social media has amazing potential in an IoT age to be more social, but of course that potential will be squandered and manipulated to create more elaborate surveillance networks.
Preach it. Social media has been a boon to surveillance.
It’s its primary function. Social media monopolies exist in a symbiotic relationship with intelligence agencies worldwide. I’m pretty sure that if this wasn’t the case, their contradictions would have heightened already and they would have been heavily regulated
Elder tech folks had such high hopes for the internet. It was established dogma until very recently that the internet would topple all the authorit*rian reg*mes around the world. A return to old aesthetics is perhaps an attempt to revive this hope.
Everything sucks now so people like the aesthetics of the past, which sucked less
People who create new designs don't give a shit if the designs are better. They just make change for the sake of change.
Because what would happen if things were OK the way they were? They'd be out of a job, that's what.
If you ever wondered why your favorite app that worked just fine suddenly got changed into unusable garbage, that's why.
