I’m seeing Britney, Bill Nye, and Boy Meets World. . . Everywhere!

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    83·
    4 days ago

    You got me excited there for a minute. I thought you meant that people were making homepages and webrings and using forums and stopped using phones.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      I was about to comment that “nothing is stopping you from making stuff like that today”, but then I remembered that I have enough hardware and bandwidth available to host an obscene amount of lightweight (by today’s standards) 90s sites and services, but I simply can’t be arsed designing anything meant for others to view.

    • ki4jgt@feddit.orgOP
      5·
      4 days ago

      That’s actually all true too. There’s a webring and gopher revival. Along with a modern luddite movement sweeping college campuses.

  • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
    17·
    3 days ago

    You are conflating the data-stealing algorithms with “the internet”. You are shown content the algorithms thinks you want to see. Other people are not necessarily seeing it (I’m not for example).

  • ladybugs@lemmy.world
    27·
    4 days ago

    Even the young people are nostalgic for a time when new technology was actually cool rather than mostly being a way to more effectively use everyone’s data against them.

    There’s also that 30-year cycle phenomenon where things from 3 decades ago become trendy again, like how 80s stuff got more popular again in the 2010s.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    15·
    3 days ago

    If it only did. Do you even know the Internet in the '90?

    No ads, no spam, no AI. At least not at the beginning of the '90.

    • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      All of those existed during the 90s, unfortunately. Look up Usenet spam (1993) and for AI, the expert systems hype from the 80s.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 days ago

        I’ve been on USENET back then (I wrote software for it), and it was nothing like the Internet of today. The amount of spam was neglectable, and perpetraters were quickly taken care of. Spam started to be a problem with Sanford Wallace (may he fry in the deepest hell!), and that was an email issue.

        And the “expert systems” from back then were not even close to modern LLMs. They used rather sparse resources (even the big ones), they were “hand-made”, single problem oriented, and did not even try to look intelligent in any way. And nobody shoved them down your throat at every corner. A typical “expert system” of the time was an OCR system or a statistical analysis software for optimization purposes.

        • elephantium@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          I think you missed both my points.

          1. Spam certainly existed in the 90s. I’m baffled that you’re denying it – you were there!
          2. AI hype cycles are nothing new. Today it’s LLMs. Past cycles have included deep learning, image recognition, expert systems, neural networks, etc. going all the way back to the 50s and 60s.

          You’re wearing nostalgia goggles.

          • Treczoks@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            I don’t deny those problems existed. But in comparison to today’s situation on the net, they were basically irrelevant.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    i think that is your algorithm.

    check the dates when the things were uploaded. if it is algorithm: likely not recent.

    • ki4jgt@feddit.orgOP
      1·
      4 days ago

      What sources does Google use for this? Because, if it’s web crawling, of course they aren’t going to show up.

  • HuudaHarkiten@piefed.socialEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    I’ve been hanging out in a self hosted IRC network, we get like 2-5 new people per month coming in and almost all of them say similar things. Either they are returning to IRC after a 15-20 year absence because they got fed up with the current state of discord, facebook, reddit, whatever. Or, they heard about IRC from a friend or a youtube video and got interested because they got fed up with the current state of discord, facebook, reddit, whatever.

    I think its a mix of nostalgia and seeking refuge from the bullshit that is the modern internet.

    (If anyone is interested in the network I mentioned, check https://inthemansion.com/ the website has all the info you need and also a webchat, if you don’t want commit to a IRC client just yet, or have problems setting one up, we are happy to answer to any questions.)

  • justdaveisfine@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    I hate to say it like this, but people are cashing in on nostalgia.

    This isn’t a new thing. Pretty sure this happens every decade.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
    3·
    3 days ago

    as far as forums go yes, things like reddit, meta, google is become super walled in and datamining. so people maybe recreating forum experiences.

  • sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    4 days ago

    Crypt Hauntology resulting from the loss of our ability to imagine better futures for civilization and our culture. This site is mainly millennials and gen-x so the nostalgia we fall back on is going to be 80’s and 90’s coded.

    There’s also the frequency illusion but I’m discounting it because hauntology of the 90’s been slowly building for around the last 10 years