Was the Web More Creative and Human 20 Years Ago? (bookforum.com)
- Reference: 0179833044
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/20/0230212/was-the-web-more-creative-and-human-20-years-ago
- Source link: https://www.bookforum.com/print/3202/i-meme-business-62381
They write that author Joanna Walsh "wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was," in the golden age of user-generated content — and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger :
> I Can Has Cheezburger ... was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In [2] Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters , Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that's good (and much that's bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school ("just as a hobby, won't be big and professional"), and even, in Walsh's account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as "Web 2.0," including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects...
>
> [U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a "user," Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, "helpless addicts." For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication... But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach...
>
> The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book's touchstones... The online spaces where amateur content creators once "created and steered online culture" have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.
[1] https://www.bookforum.com/print/3202/i-meme-business-62381
[2] https://www.versobooks.com/products/2862-amateurs
Sample bias (Score:2)
20 years ago the internet was dominated by early adopters with enough brains to actually get the internet to function properly and enough interest to invest time and money into it, even the lowest common denominator back then had to meet such a minimum threshold.
Today the internet is a requirement for 99% of people in even moderately rich countries, and has been driven down to the absolute lowest mental and monetary costs possible. Much of the previous signal has been overwhelmed by brain rot noise design
I miss websites (Score:2)
I miss finding an interesting or informative website and spending time reading through the content. Not many people go to that trouble anymore. It's all forums or social media.
Re: (Score:3)
There are barely any forums anymore. A lot of that enthusiast content has been subsumed by Discord and disconnected from the open web. It's really a sad state of affairs.
Absolutely (Score:3)
Even if you look just at /., what exist today is less civil, less insightful, and not nearly as funny as what it was, and I'd say /. weathered time better than nearly any dotcom era community. I don't even need to talk about social media, that is a cesspool of attention whoring that is beyond any redemption.
The next question is why this is happening? I think because Western Civilization is undergoing cultural collapse. People living in the West no longer have agreed-on set of shared values. Even on fundamental issues like freedom of speech or presumption of innocence you have wide disagreements.
Re:Absolutely (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd be interested to read a "Slashdot This Month 25 Years Ago" posting that featured the best postings from that month.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think cultural collapse is the issue. The issue is what usually ruins things: greed. And now of course AI garbage, which is really just greed multiplied by a factor of 10.
As more and more people tried to "monetize" the Internet, they realized there are only two business models that work: Advertising or social-media-style attention-whoring (as you called it.) And both of those things suck.
To be fair (Score:4, Interesting)
Much of the early web was an open invitation to create something cool with nary a thought as to how it was all going to be paid for.
Eventually money wins over cool, whether it be music, movies, or the web, and oh boy! in the past few hundred years have we gotten exceedingly adept at extracting every red cent from the punters.
Yes yes yes, the wonders of capitalism and all the wonders it has to lead the masses out of poverty.
But there are trade-offs, and commodification doesn't even begin to describe the hellscape of modern culture.
Social media is mostly where it's at (Score:1)
I don't know if you count Tiktok, 4-chan and similar forums, Discord's many forums and forums using similar technologies, and other web-accessible-places that are more-social-media-ish, chat-ish, or forum-ish than than-web-ish sites as "web sites" even though they can be accessed through a web browser.
But if you are looking for creativity and don't mind having few or no filters for taste, decorum, common decency, or just plain quality, look in those places. You'll see a lot of quality stuff, but you'll see
Re: (Score:2)
Problem with sites like Youtube is that the real creative and fun things tend to get buried under all the influencer junk.
Finding something like The Bearded Mechanic or bigclivedotcom is almost like winning the recommendation lottery.
Please like and subscribe (Score:2)
For sure, it's all boilerplate now. Nothing on the web today isn't cliche. I'm including social media.
Creativity has been dead a while now, nothing isn't about making money and data harvesting.
Don't think ill of me for saying there is a good article over at The Guardian about the golden age of stupidity we live in. It's about AI, not the web specifically, but it's a good read.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology
Internet without social media? (Score:1)
Short Answer: Yes
Long Answer: Hell Yes
No, it wasn't really better 20 years ago (Score:2)
20 years ago, MySpace was one of the biggest sites. And it was not very good, it was nice that people could blog about whatever on it, but tumblr is better suited for that now.
30 years ago, we had GeoCities, which was both trash and amazing and very human.
I think the big shift occurred when the commercialization of the Internet and ad revenue took over as the dominate business model at least for free user-centric websites.
Yes. And no. (Score:1)
When everyone had to make their own website, you had to want to be here and the content you made had to be worth the effort. However, that did keep a lot of really interesting and creative people from making anything because they lack the requisite skills. Today we have a lot of schlock, but we also have a lot of really amazing content that didnâ(TM)t exist before.
Re: (Score:1)
Your post subject is, word for word, what immediately went through my head on reading the title prompt. There's certainly more humanity by raw quantity invested in the general goings-on of the Internet now than before... but there's a definite element of curated-by- money in it, also. Like anything else, I guess.