Why 2007 was the worst year for the internet - An analysis of why the internet has declined since 2007

[ToroidalBoat]

a couple of relevant articles:

This Is What It’s Like To Not Own A Smartphone In 2018

List of countries by smartphone penetration - Wikipedia

(It's surprising the fraction of users in Japan -- known for being high-tech -- is only about 1/2, while USA's is about 3/4.)

 

[Freddy Freaker]

The most interesting part of the "not having a smartphone" article

The Light Phone, which came out last year, is marketed as an “anti-smartphone.” It only sends and receives calls, can store just 10 phone numbers, and is designed to be used “as little as possible.” It’s so popular that there’s currently a waiting list to buy one.

https://www.thelightphone.com/#page1

 

[Sun Shihong]

Smartphones were a mistake.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Smartphones were a mistake.

I think the phone should've stayed landline.

 

[Quijibo69]

2007 was a strange year for me. I got stalked by some pedo I didn't know was one online IRL. I found a better job than the one I had at the time, went to shit 5 years after I started..

 

[Agent of Z.O.G.]

Hopefully Alex Jones is right about 5G and it'll fry all the smartphone users' brains.

 

[Kacchan]

2007 was a decent year for memes. It's all been downhill from there.

Harambe was the final blow to the meme honestly, and anything after that has been a bloated zombie.

You noobs don't know the internet was taken over by normies in September 1993?

Eternal September - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Oh fuck, I forgot about Eternal September. Though SJWism is nothing compared to Eternal September.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Oh fuck, I forgot about Eternal September. Though SJWism is nothing compared to Eternal September.

It's the direct result of eternal september.

 

[Syaoran Li]

2007 was a decent year for memes. It's all been downhill from there.

Harambe was the final blow to the meme honestly, and anything after that has been a bloated zombie.

There are still good memes out there, but they all get deemed "problematic" and can get you banned on Twitter. I'm not even talking about your /pol/ memes, but even stuff like "Learn To Code" is deemed anathema in the eyes of the Woke.

 

[Freddy Freaker]

There are still good memes out there, but they all get deemed "problematic" and can get you banned on Twitter. I'm not even talking about your /pol/ memes, but even stuff like "Learn To Code" is deemed anathema in the eyes of the Woke.

The ADL just published a scare article about the -pill memes that included "white girls fuck dogs". Theres also an article in A&H about how the Coomer and No Nut November are antisemitic alt-right memes. They'll find a reason to go after anything.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Another reason why 2007 was bad for the intertubes is because that was when YouTube launched that partner program thing. Now people can make a living being internet famous -- a dream of people like Kengle -- which led to much more attention whoring.

 

[Pointless Pedant]

a couple of relevant articles:

This Is What It’s Like To Not Own A Smartphone In 2018

List of countries by smartphone penetration - Wikipedia

(It's surprising the fraction of users in Japan -- known for being high-tech -- is only about 1/2, while USA's is about 3/4.)

Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.

I was expecting this thread to be a load of REEE NORMIES GET OFF MY LAWN, which is hilarious given that most of the dumb shit we see on the internet today was initially spread by older internet users. The online PC progressive movement was huge on Something Awful, and the alt-right vomited out of 4chan. Furries, weebs, troons, political extremists of all kinds, gross fetishes, lolcows, all of them stem from the pre-social media internet and were primarily propagated by the white autistic men who are now caterwauling that their special club is being used by everyone else. It's not the normal people who are screaming at video games for not being woke enough.

A lot went wrong on the internet, but blaming the "unwashed masses" is stupid when a lot of the old users stank pretty badly themselves. I see far more troons on sites like this than anywhere in real life, and a lot of them aren't here because of smartphones. It seems to me more that the seething autism of sites like Something Awful and 4chan combined with real world political polarisation to intensify the culture wars we see today.

 

[Pissmaster General]

Japan's reputation as some kind of hyper-advanced society is largely made up. A lot of their population is elderly folks, and fax machines were still common there until recently.

It'd be interesting to find out how that reputation came about. I've always figured it was due to Sony's explosive popularity in the 80's.

Japan's one of the most nationalist and conservative countries on the planet. Weed culture does not exist, and they give no fucks about homosexuals, let alone trannies. I could see your average American progressive faggot getting major culture shock there.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

This entire thread is probably already (and if it's not, it's destined to become) nothing but a self-fellating Dunning-Kreuger suckfest about how you're not one of those dumb sheeple who are ruining the internet.

 

[Safir]

This entire thread is probably already (and if it's not, it's destined to become) nothing but a self-fellating Dunning-Kreuger suckfest about how you're not one of those dumb sheeple who are ruining the internet.

Ok I'll get started on it then.

2007 was when I dropped out and got a desk job. I'd got broadband at home two years earlier but used it to pirate things with eMule and play a shitty Korean MMORPG (I'd quit it by 2007), plus I wasn't the only one using the PC at home, so I'd had to be productive on my allotted computer time. At work, I didn't have to. No one cared about what I did on company time as long as I rattled off the script properly. So I was stuck in front of a screen 13 hours a day, 6 days a week (yay hourly wages!), with nothing to do but "explore" the 'net. That was the year I discovered 4chan, and ED, and Chris, and the underage cows (back then there wasn't an understanding that underage cows were victims) - I think the latter were most influential for me not becoming "one of those dumb sheeple".

The first time I heard of Facebook was when an xkcd-ripoff webcomic guy posted an author's note about his unsuccessful attempt to delete his Facebook page: he filed a request, Facebook promised to delete it but only changed his password, he requested password recovery and logged in with all his posts still there. That was when I decided I would never have a (non-throwaway) social network account, and I still don't.

The smartphone wave mostly passed me by for that reason. I got one in 2011 to have as a backup internet connection at a hostile workplace. When that boiled over, to the drawer it went. ("A monthly phone bill? Haha fuck that noise.") I never used one again until 2017, two years after my parents started to, when I had to covertly copy some info at vocation training and realized the best way was to use a digital camera, like lawyers did with court cases, and the most inconspicuous digital camera came with a phone. I use it for maps now, for taking photos of urban ephemera (think train guy but female and into snow plows), and for Telegramming my family. (A while ago, I had to cook for myself only - there's always shit to do when cooking for several people - and I played a moon rune learning game while waiting for the water to boil and such.)

So I don't really understand the modern Internet (which is over 50% mobile) - meaning, I am not confused by the parts I interact with, but I'm aware there's many more. I heard that Facebook has communities and a marketplace and that Telegram has some sort of social network and applet ecosystems. Youtube is a place for low-quality music piracy, movie clips, and less-shoopable proofpics, Tumblr is a place that hosts some Google Image results, and Twitter is an astroturf Markov chain run by pedophiles. There's news websites, online shopping, torrents, and KiwiFarms, where the sidewalk ends.

Everything that wants a cross-community identity passed me by, and I'm not even that old. I want to say social networks ruined the interwebs, but I'm not directly interacting with the ruined parts - like if a nuke fell on a city and now Amish carts need to take the long way around and the wind brings ash and cancer - and I'm not old enough to interpolate a trajectory of What Could Have Been. It's been 12 years, I'm still on a privately owned free speech forum watching people I admire react to the idiocy of the general populace. Nothing's changed.

 

[OneEyedCool]

Imagine using the internet for anything other than pirating.

Have you ever used Silk Road to get a prostitute?

Things that were better in 2006 than they are today:

- Politics, okay there was Bush Derangement Syndrome but it wasn't the autismal mess of shrieking and idpol and coordinated harassment that it is today, and SJWery was in its infancy and roundly mocked by all

Not exactly. I was on some message boards then and they didn't allow even one dissent on a very liberal community oriented thinking to put up a Bush/Cheney digital button in support for POTUS. There were crazies putting out echoes the world will end if the Repubs/Dems win Prez or House. An online store of political signage that was really cool existed and I remember this one sticker with the message "liberals are so opened minded their brains fell out" as a bumper with good cartoonist illustration.

- Scientific literacy, back then flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were unheard of and roundly mocked from all sides rather than allowed to metastasize into a glut of "warrior moms" called Karen.

Listing of traditional religious sites were kinda numerous and could be found on Yahoo! directory. Graphics on their pages were as flashy like Westboro Baptist picketing signs. Most of the time, they didn't get loads of traffic from the whole web.

- There was no Me Too movement

I used to be a big reader of political blogs of the mid 2000s period. One still exists (https://nicedoggie.net/) Their attitudes were going to be about as bad as a SJW's but it was all tightly confined in cyberspace as like some alternative imaginary quadrant. <----- On Anti-Idiotarian's blog to the right column there used to be a loooooooooonnnnggggg list of politically same blog links were you'd have to hold down your cursor on the down scroll button for like 30 seconds to see all of them. Now the count is just under 25. RSS feeds were huge before the debut of Reddit. They'd be pinging each other back forth every damn hour and it would've crashed a news room's servers in under a minute.

- We still had some civil liberties and human rights

The internet was a federal gov't project from the very beginning. It was just letting the citizenry think they were free while it sat back, listening, and only choosing to not touch the vulnerabilities.

- 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam

In 2005 on the 'Bob and Tom' show, a morning radio skit, they put out news that teachers were now using purple colored ink pens when grading a test going against the expected red so as to not hurt the kids feelings.

These days I hear about how first graders are bringing tablets home. Giving a child something that causes a distraction over learning will more than likely cause problems. Blanketing the internet over so many things-making it a generation with the most amount of information ever accessible oddly hasn't made people smarter.

The first rules of 1990s internet was that children could not join an online community until age 13 legally. It was also an expectation that you don't use it until you were a teen.

Smartphones were a mistake.

I liked the Personal Data Assistants of early 2000s. They were to exist for only their specific purpose and nobody would expect it to go into all other areas of life. The smartphone has bloated everyone's narcissism.





My thoughts...

It is with a little difficulty to now believe that DeviantART was a respectable art community that you'd want to be a part of in its early days if you were an emerging teen artist as I was. I think that is because the average age of the typical user in 2003 was a Gen Xer born in the 1960s years because their Silent parents beat enough sense into them and they had some physical struggle with life. They were just beginning to have babies under 3 years old which is when today's SJWs began to exist. You couldn't make a dumb art group in their Groups category on the dumbest idea possible. But there was the same level of PC level censorship in their chat rooms. I got banned from one when I said that gorillas were just Schwarzenegger-build bamboo eating hippies.

There wasn't much info about autism or a whole political cause for it. You did have info on gov't owned sites like NIH and university dept.s, but I don't remember anybody going out and putting up a personal website to draw in Macy's day parade level traffic to pay attention to someone like Chris Chan.

I loved the directories. I used Yahoo!'s the longest, then I discovered Google had one too in 2007 itself. The Google one helped me find the most reliable weather forecaster ever, UNISYS. (https://www.unisys.com/industries/government/unisys-federal/unisys-weather) With personal webpages, I used Yahoo!s to read the sites of those who'd actually use a small portion of their paycheck to build an 'Anti' spoof thingy wherein they hated something so much it was considered a 'rant' and it deserved some time of their day like video games. Here is gem example. (https://web.archive.org/web/20010124063800/http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Artists/By_Genre/Rock_and_Pop/Hanson/Anti_Hanson/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20001206203100/http://xoutmbop.tripod.com/hanson.html) There were some cool names like 'Usenet - alt.fan.hanson.die.die.die', 'We Hate Hanson Girls', 'Totally Assassinate Hanson', 'Things That Go Bop In The Night', 'Raven's Hanson Hate Page', 'People For A Hanson-Less America (PHLA)', 'Humans against Hanson [HaH!]', 'Hanson Haters Fan Club Newsletter', 'Citizens for a Hanson Free America', and 'Anti-Hansonite Paradise'. Yes, these really were full time running and daily updated websites and it was not too good to be true. (I'll add in these: Anti-Britney Spears: 'Britney Spears Ate My Balls' (https://web.archive.org/web/20001017164624/http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Video/6887/britney.html), 'Alex's Britney Spears Bashing Page', 'Can We Hit Her One More Time?', 'Mr. T vs. Britney Spears', and 'Piss on Bitchney One More Time'

I put off chat rooms and IM software for a long time until 2003 because I was only age 9 when I first went online in 1995 and in 1998 I heard news of someone having a close encounter with a live axe murderer who claimed to be someone else. I was a good little puppy in not publishing personal info into cybespace and still much the same today (well I did make a bunch of fake accounts in 2009 on forums for trolling but I've forgotten all those email addys) I never thought YouTube would tempt people to create their own MTV Real World series on a rented timeshare digital channel and NORMAL people have done so in droves. Oh my.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

I think the phone should've stayed landline.

flip-phones were just about right.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

flip-phones were just about right.

But even then there were still people yapping away for hours and you could overhear all they were saying, annoying ringtones, and people always interrupting in-person conversations for phone.

 

[Feline Supremacist]

That Anonymous report is some real heady shit though.

Whatever happened to Goronchev? Did he disappear once everyone get tired of trolling him?

I used to be a big reader of political blogs of the mid 2000s period. One still exists (https://nicedoggie.net/) Their attitudes were going to be about as bad as a SJW's but it was all tightly confined in cyberspace as like some alternative imaginary quadrant. <----- On Anti-Idiotarian's blog to the right column there used to be a loooooooooonnnnggggg list of politically same blog links were you'd have to hold down your cursor on the down scroll button for like 30 seconds to see all of them. Now the count is just under 25. RSS feeds were huge before the debut of Reddit. They'd be pinging each other back forth every damn hour and it would've crashed a news room's servers in under a minute.

I looked up Anti-Idiotarian not long ago, surprised he's still around.

The smartphone killed the internet. Every idiot I come across is always whipping out their phone to show me ten year old memes they just discovered. The best internet was in the late 90s-early 2000s. Before that it was mostly usenet although that era had its lolcows as well,

 

[A Welsh Cake]

People who are bad "because" of the internet or smartphones were probably not the best in the first place anyway. I don't think we need to sit around and unironically speak in newspaper comics.