619
The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
619 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
3871 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Whatever cool stuff someone posted on a forum 10-15 years ago can be found on the Fediverse, possibly even in better quality because people know how the internet works overall more then they did back then and we're not all still using Windows XP. Now if you're talking about the era of flash games, you shouldd try html5 games.
On the Fediverse you have the desk client, and web clients. If the fediverse isn't creative you wouldn't have a Misskey next to Maastodon which is it's own thing all together not just another fork of Mastodon.
Can y make these claims make sense to me based on this logic I provided here.
My reading is that it’s not necessarily a problem with the platforms but society at large.
One example you mentioned: yes, html5 games (and just downloadable itch/steam games) exist and they fill the gap left by Flash games from a gameplay perspective maybe.
But the mainstream appeal of Flash games and animations was different to what we have now. The social phenomenon of people randomly hacking together terrible flash games isn’t the same as the current tiny indie game phenomenon. I feel like the old ones were a bigger piece of the average person’s internet usage than the new one (the average person’s internet usage being 5% LLM 5% web 5% email 25% gaming 30% video and 30% doomscrolling or something like that idk)
I’m struggling to put into words what I mean by this, my comment sounds really vague when I reread it. The specific creative outlet that Flash gave people is not equivalent to what we have now, and the specific entertainment experience of browsing and playing Flash games is different from the experience of scrolling through itch. Am I making more sense?
Like of course the different technologies are different, but it’s where it fits into our lives that it’s really different imo. Hell, we could say this about Flash itself for the last few years before it was discontinued. Just the two thoughts of Newgrounds in 2006 vs Newgrounds in 2016 and how they fit into the internet ecosystem and internet culture are enough to see the difference.