People need to bring back cheesy personal websites, banners and forum signatures…
There are still some corners online where you can find and make those, even if you don’t have the money, time or knowledge to host one yourself. For example:
Neocities (yes it’s like Geocities)
I am obsessed with those sites. It’s like the internet back in the day when I was a teen. I hope the social media and content creator sludge never overcomes it…
Shut up old man.
“Normal guy in 2000”
as someone who was into computers and in high school in 2000, that that was not normal.
even if yo mean normal computer literate person, not even then… Most people did not run their own servers, was it more common, yeah, but it wasn’t a given.
Things were only free if you were into piracy, everything cost money though without as much marketing, but then it wasn’t a huge market…
Also ads were everywhere and worse…
Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn’t start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to “save us” with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of ‘ethical ads’, which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.
What are you talking about, ads were far worse back in the 90s /2000. Were you even using the Internet back then? Couldn’t block them and things like infinite pop ups were rampant, if you didn’t have a firewall setup and anti virus, your entire Windows 98 setup could be wrecked in minutes just being online
Again, the meme is not about the internet in 2000s. It is just about people sharing out of fun vs. “creators” wanting to monetize every little shit.
It’s just such a common misconception that there was no ads in the ‘old Internet’, that’s all I was pointing out. There seems to be a nostalgic false memory that Internet back then didn’t have ads which is hilarious if you were there to see what it was like
Ads are not the same thing as insanely granular data harvesting.
Yeah, because if anything is better than granular data harvesting, it was ActiveX scripts wreaking havoc on your machine just by opening a webpage, disguised as ads.
It’s not all black and white though. People in the 2000’s didn’t know that you can make a living off content creation, but people who have adopted this style usually can and will (or should) turn more effort into creating high quality videos.
Isn’t that exactly the point of the meme? Internet 20 years ago was about sharing mostly. Internet today is about monetization mostly. And content quality isn’t what makes you big, it’s your ability to game/abuse the system
The point of the meme is “How dare creators expect any sort of compensation for their work!? No ads! No subscriptions! Give it to us for the ‘exposure’!”
