Comment by austin-cheney
2 months ago
I see this sentiment on here frequently. Yes, content delivery now sucks like it’s written by bots for consumption by bots solely with the goal of supplying mindless dribble for ad impressions.
However the technology is so much better. As a developer I can build web and media applications that you couldn’t ever imagine building 20 years ago. I am not talking about framework garbage like jquery or React. I am talking about things like WebSockets, HTML5 audio/video, Node/Deno, and more.
I agree that the technology is fine, and I also appreciate the breadth of tools I can fiddle with and how surprisingly approachable they've become for me (mdn docs are amazing to explore). But I miss the community spaces of the old internet. Different forums for the different games I played. The non-profit driven youtube / twitter. Truly the biggest pandora's box of the internet is the addition of profit incentives for posters. It was fine for a while, I liked it when video makers who put effort into their creations were compensated. But then it got gamed into becoming the worst self-fueling internet hate machine. Rewarding those who put out vapid and inflammatory content for the sake of serving ads to enraged (and engaged) viewers.