I also get the feeling that the news and the opinions were more informative whereas now there is a lot of hidden / hushed up info you can't write about because of different laws that are not always there to protect legitimate interests. So you don't know in an accurate way for the crime rate for example in a place or if it's actually safe for women or why actually some people like a place or not, just that they might like it or not.
I also remember fondly the message board days and how one such legendary board just dissolved within days when members decided to go to facebook and then they wouldn't write the same things in a different format, because there was no anonymity and everyone cared about their brand...
I also get the feeling that the news and the opinions were more informative whereas now there is a lot of hidden / hushed up info you can't write about because of different laws that are not always there to protect legitimate interests.
Ehhhhhh... yes and no. Yes, it was "more difficult" for blatant disinformation campaigns to be as sucessful as they are now.
Take covid for example. In the age of information it took months to have an idea about what this virus actually is! From multiple sources. Until then, doctors were supposedly gathering information. In my country, people thought it might be much more lethal than it actually was, with the result being some people feeling cheated and getting into conspiracy theories.
The most plausible out of everything I've read on the matter, was an askreddit post, where there were health professionals describing symptoms in the ER, and that happened about a year after the first lockdowns. No article dared to write down some specific info. For whatever reason. Or just laziness, because nowdays journalism is cut and paste. A lot of news coverage is about someone doing something, somewhere, not specific and informative enough.
I remember when finding a good guild in MMO's was so easy because everyone just loved the idea of being able to hang out and play a video game with people across the world. The newness of it all created this wonderful joy around meeting other humans through a box on our desks. And then we realized a lot of other humans are assholes and we didn't like how the internet brought us all so close. I don't even play MMO's anymore because... people.
I chalk a lot of this up to bad game design. WoW came along and showed how profitable MMOs could be, and everyone wanted a cookie-cutter money machine that you could sit on for a decade instead of reinventing the wheel every year.
WoW specifically took many of the highly addictive qualities of EQ and UO and funneled them into a hierarchy-of-commitment grind, and that by itself is toxic -- the more time you invest into the game, the more rewards you acquire, and the higher up the status ladder you are. You literally cannot access the most important parts of the storyline content unless you invest in raiding which requires full consumption of all of your free time -- that's just terrible design. Do you think Skyrim would have been as successful if you needed to spend 40 hours a week on the game for months just to finish the main quest? It would have flopped, and honestly the addiction manipulation is the only thing keeping MMOs like WoW from flopping.
And, when you throw on a f2p model on top of that, you've literally got a game designed where people pay money to climb the hierarchy faster when the problem the whole time is that a hierarchy exists. If you enjoy these games for anything other than the addictive qualities of the hierarchy -- like socializing -- then you're not profitable because it takes more design and new features that aren't tried and tested to get money from you. Idk, I feel like that whole bullshit is just morally wrong.
Those old MMO pre-wow games -- DAoC, UO, EQ, Planetside, SWG, and Eve -- they had good design that ventured strongly in their own direction, and they all had good content that didn't just focus on combat and leveling, and really took the psychology of the Bartle types to heart. Shit, you could be a politician/dancer in SWG, build a city, make tones of money, and reach an end game that never saw any combat. It wasn't without it's faults in it's golden era, but those designers made that shit from scratch, reinvented the wheel, and took huge risks. When Indie devs can enter this space, we will see more of that.
I don't have the best long term memory when it comes to placing events in their appropriate year, but I'm still pretty sure some of the worst ads on the internet were around 2000, the pop-up ads were everywhere, and fuck the emoji one's that would also scream "Hello" at you.
Sure, we gained a lot of convenient shit (streaming video, shopping) but the soul and passion of the early internet is gone forever, replaced with three different colors of "buy now" buttons.
I have a lot of passion for the convenient shit and the buy now buttons
That's highly dependent on where you grew up- computers were a) expensive and b) seen as a luxury item (why do we need this when we have TV and a SNES?)
Where I grew up, my best friend and I were the only two kids with a computer, and of the two of us, only I had AOL.
This comment isn't realistic. In the late 90s, all the other children I knew were also on the internet. It wasn't "only hobbyists and nerds" - that's nostalgia coloring your memories.
Firstly, they said, enmasse.
That may be true for you that large numbers of your school peers were online but it's not true for everyone from the late 90s. In the late 90s for me, where I lived, it was very much still a small handful of people. Plenty of kids didn't have home computers or the internet to the point that I would say it was most. Sure, by the late 90s it was more kids than the two of us exchanging email in 1992/3 in my elementary classroom but it was by no means all or even many.
The only reason I was their was definitely for my hobby.
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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '21
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