Was the Web More Creative and Human 20 Years Ago? (bookforum.com) 77
Readers in 2025 "may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free..." argues a new review at Bookforum. "The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what's literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots."
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 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.
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 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.
Yes. And no. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yes. And no. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but making your own website seemed so much less effort back then. You got webspace with your ISP or you could easily self-host. Plus there were simple HTML editors.
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I never used an ISP that would provide webhosting, but what changed about self-hosting?
I have a public IP like I had 20 years ago. The only change is that I now have native IPv6 and don't need tunnelling.
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Well webhosting used to be one of the standard features of ISPs till about the mid 2000s, just like E-Mail. (at least in Germany)
Some newer ISPs no longer provide public IPv4, some still don't provide IPv6. In many areas of the world, you are now behind several layers of NA(P)T.
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Windows 98 came with Frontpage Express that allowed anyone with some basic idea of design to mash together a website in a fairly reasonable amount of time. Would it be superduper professional with all the things? Of course not. Would it do the trick? Absolutely.
Now everything has to look the same. The same layouts, the same color schemes, the same pictures.
aesthetics substance (Score:3)
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At my non-automotiv
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I know I probably overused some effects when I used it to create a geocities page for my band.
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everyone had to make their own website
Not true. https://i.postimg.cc/RFZqZv3w/... [postimg.cc]
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There were communities back then that didn't needed you to make your own webpage.
The main difference was that the context of the internet was different, it was basically a bunch of people trying to create something, but then facebook came and changed the context of the internet for a place where you just post your boring real life instead.
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Also, seems like back then people made content just based on their passion for it. These days, everything seems like it is all about monetization.
Skill barriers are good, storage ones aren't (Score:2)
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.
The internet went to shit due to social media making it easy for the stupidest people you've ever met to effortlessly present their "hot takes" about current events....even worse, find a community of people just as bad and worse. And by "hot takes," I mean all their shitty thoughts so disgusting and basic that even the Daily Stormer wouldn't touch it with a 20 foot pole.
YouTube was a massive improvement in our lives because it removed the barriers for motivated people to share content. That's the key p
Nostalgia (Score:1)
...is a helluva drug!
Sample bias (Score:5, Informative)
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 designed to take advantage of such people.
"dominated by early adopters with enough brains" (Score:3)
lowest common denominator
That's today after years of "making things
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No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.
Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.
That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet sub
I miss websites (Score:5, Informative)
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:I miss websites (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Which in turn makes it impossible to find for the newly started. At least with Reddit some searches will lead you to a community of like minds, but on Discord you're not even going to realize a community exists unless you know exactly what to search for in advance.
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Yes, it's fun to have secret clubs with your like-minded friends, but you now see stuff like technical documentation for open-source software requiring a Discord account to view. It's simpler for community maintainers to post this kind of content in Discord than bother with forums, but the downside is that it's cloistered from the public and much less accessible.
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websites (Score:2)
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Discord is only the latest and least of the problems in that regard - Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest locked all of that content up first.
They are still out there! (Score:2)
However its harder to find them.
Try looking on hackaday.com for certain personal websites within the articles.
Absolutely (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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https://news.slashdot.org/story/00/02/24/0954216/slashdots-10000th-story
Seriously though, I remember /. from before user accounts. You optionally could write your name under a post, or be anonymous. Due to privacy concerns I held off creating an account for a long time, and I lost my 1st login so I'm on my second account now. I've wasted a lot of time on this site and occasionally return.
The discussions back then were a lot more interesting
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You can enable the "this day on Slashdot" sidebar. It's not quite what you asked for, but it does show older posts. The oldest today is Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days [slashdot.org] from 2003.
Ah, remember when people used to buy music? In a nasty DRMed format too.
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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.
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Just a factor of 10?
Re: Absolutely (Score:3)
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Yeah I miss the GNAA trolls... not.
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Yeah I miss the GNAA trolls... not.
This.
/. is a less civil environment than 20 years ago clearly wasn't on /. 20 years ago. GNAA trolls, NAMBLA trolls, attentioin switcheur trolls, frequent links to goatse or 2girls1cup... Even the rampant fanboyism and cliques have mellowed these days.
Anyone who thinks
It was just an excuse to trot out the old "western civilisation is dying" trope, forgetting that the US is not the sum of all western civilisation (and the demise of the US is entirely it's own doing).
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Even if you look just at /., what exist today is less civil, less insightful, and not nearly as funny as what it was
What a load of bs. Go back to articles in the late 90s and early 00s on this very site, then scroll down to the comments. They're no different than today. Well, maybe the addition of AI slop rants. And the CIA spooks took a liking to this site at some point, so they're probably here running their games screwing with people and politics. https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/... [wikileaks.org]
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.
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The whole idea of *monetizing* the web, and the later idea that people shouldn't put anything up on the web unless they were getting paid was bonkers, and really a bad idea. It encouraged anyone with nothing to say to feel entitled to create pointless content farms plastered with ads, on th
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I disagree. The early web didn't have the problem of how it was going to be paid for. You simply bought a domain name, fired up your home computer, shared something you owned, ran your own mail server and that was that.
Somebody has to pay for the Internet connection. If you have a popular Web site, that can get expensive fast.
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The web already had a solution to that problem: decentralization. The costs of a popular website grow exponentially due to its opposite: centralization, ie the idea that the publisher keeps tight control of the content.
In actual fact, when costs for a popular site rise, the best practice if cost is a concern is to give up control of the content, let people copy the site for free in its entirety and pay their share to host it. When you have two copies of your content around the world, the bandwidth cost is
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
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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)
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:2)
Short Answer: Yes
Long Answer: Hell Yes
No, it wasn't really better 20 years ago (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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It's downfall was that it had horrendous security and could be exploited by nearly anyone with a few brain cells. It _had_ to be superseded by something better. Microsoft tried with SilverLight (also a security nightmare), and I think an open standard like HTML5 is better than a big corp standard.
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I suspect Steve Jobs refusing to let Flash on iPhones and iPad was a bigger stumbling block for most people than all the security concerns (although he too cited abysmal security). The loss of a huge chunk of the mobile market made Flash untenable.
Steve Jobs' thoughts on Flash:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No (Score:1)
Fisrt sign was the stupid clips (Score:2)
I remember the first time I saw someone interrupt their video to show a short clip of something vaguely relevant that was much better than anything they did.
I was so pissed. I hate those things. It is the ultimate admission of your own stupidity - trying to do an in joke with strangers. Strangers! Worse, often they do it so poorly. OK, some people may like this crap, but not me.
Now AI is basically the same principal but worse - copying funny people because you think it makes you funny. No. real comed
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This is just the modern equivalent of those shitty "funny" emails that were forwarded around by at least one person in every office in the 90s. It's just become easier, more accessible and the tools more powerful.
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real comedy requires timing and so much more, and AI does not have it. I hope it never does.
We interrupt your regularly-scheduled programming for this important bulletin: one of my favorite come-back lines ever. Brooke Gladstone of the radio program "On the Media" is interviewing Joel Warner, co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, about a US Department of Defense (!) program to develop a joke-telling AI. ... who wouldn't want a GPS device that, after you ignore it for the 20th time, it somehow sarcastically rolled its eyes at you?
WARNER:
BROOKE: [LAUGHS] I wou
The internet is now all advertising (Score:3)
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No sane person goes online without an ad blocker.
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By this definition at least half of America (if not the world) is insane.
https://old.reddit.com/r/marke... [reddit.com]
Also keep in mind that a lot of ads are now being served through sources other than web browsers, even if the backend is sending and receiving data over https. You'd have to implement DNS based filtering of ad traffic, if not outright MITM deep packet inspection to block traffic served via apps.
With that said, having recently fired up a browser that had not yet been configured with adblocking when prov
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"By this definition at least half of America [...] is insane."
Well - look who they voted into the white house... not quite the counterargument you think it is.
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The internet became "all ads" the instant someone realized people would see those ads. If anything, I'd say it's gotten better. There used to be so many popup ads that it would crash computers. And then there were the actively malicious ads that would change your browser settings and desktop background. There aren't any fewer ads, but they aren't as horrible.
\o/ (Score:1)
> Was the Web More Creative and Human 20 Years Ago
Of course but it's not a criticism of big business - no-one could have sucked the life out of the internet in the few years of mainstream popularity - give them a break.
The important thing is they got the job done eventually and we're in the dystopian nightmare everyone was waiting for :-)
A big shout goes out to TwitterX - such a concentration of misinformation and hate-speech is not an easy thing to maintain, so super-props!
For some yes... (Score:2)
...for others no.
I write original thoughts, post photos of the work I've done and make videos that show how to do machine work, woodwork and glasswork.
I aggressively avoid pop culture, memes and sharing stuff I didn't make myself.
It's not the tool, it's how you use it.
Profit Motive = Endless Low Effort (Score:2)
People cloning posts, videos, and sites, and claiming it as their own work in order to frontrun/hijack social recognition and monetization.
SEO optimization which started out as hiring english majors to ghostwrite "articles" on topics in order to boost your business site (plumbing, roofing, auto repair) in the rankings, which now replaces the first two pages of search results on anything DIY.
Big corporations monetizing and then later discarding communities, and all of the information and relationships in the
Probably, but also IE6 and Flash Player (Score:1)
20 years ago, the internet was more white and male (Score:3)
Today, white males are a tiny minority on the net.
Everything that you experience about it, might be a result of that.
And half of all Indians are still offline, remember that.
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20 years ago, the internet was more white and male
You say it like it's a bad thing. Is being white and male a bad thing? Is that what you were taught?
Keep playing identity politics. Observe were we are now. All of this unrest lies at the feet of identity politics, which makes people talk and write like the real racists they are.
NO! (Score:2)
It would violate Betteridge's law of headlines with a question mark.
The answer is always NO.
Yes, obviously (Score:2)
Virtually all websites are cookie cutter now.
There are benefits from that, of course - you know where the menu will be, the search box (if any), etc. But at least there was some creativity when we had mystery meat navigation.
Life is full of tradeoffs I guess ...
Now and then? I'll Take Google for 1000 Alex. (Score:2)
No .. but (Score:2)
The pendulum swings (Score:2)
We went from walled gardens like AOL CompuServe, the WELL, Delphi, etc., to open authorship of websites, and now we are back to a lot of walled gardens, we just call them social media - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all with their own revenue generating enclosures.
I was teaching undergrad and graduate level teachers in 1998 through 2000, and they would almost universally come in demanding that they know how to make a webpage and write HTML. I also had to make sure that they knew what a student exper
Yes. (Score:2)
... Absolutely.We live now in a dystopian decade.
Peter Pan's Home Page... still 'flying' :-) (Score:1)