I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such. We had the Wii and other nice things. I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements. I talk about this in the second sentence.
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
The internet is different, I hesitate to say worse. Yes advertising is constant, but it's not like the old internet was free of it. We had banners and bullshit galore.
The monetary model has changed for sure but that was inevitable.
The 90s internet was slow. Stuff like IRC and email are a product of their time. Stuff was designed to work on 28 or 56k modems. The lucky few had ISDN.
I don't miss the old internet that much. I miss some of the apps and the stripped down low bandwidth UX of stuff.
What I really miss is th era of native desktop applications that had a consistent look and feel.
The problem now is not the visible aspect of advertising on the internet. It's the obsessive tracking and categorization of people to make advertising more effective that I'm upset with. There was no such apparatus in the 90s/00s. Most legitimate websites wouldn't be plastered with banner spam, but all legitimate websites now will attempt to track you.
>I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
It's definitely worse than it was, in some ways. In other ways it's better. TLS is everywhere now. uBlock origin exists. The bar for pwning web apps is much higher today because we learned collectively from our mistakes/our fun times defacing PHP-Nuke sites.
But I miss pirating warez on IRC and scoring game rips from FTP topsites, and LAN parties. Facebook and Twitter were really fun in the early years, but these days Big Social really sucks and "growth focus" in tech is exhausting.
> I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such
I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
> I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements
Me too! This shift comes every few years. The first successful mass deployment of modern AI technology was in the 1970’s when the post office started using computer vision to route mail. The shift to AI that I got to see was Google. That was amazing.
Big fan of the current LLM shift too, of course, but it feels less magical than Google did. A little because I understand it better, a little because it benefits me less personally than Google did. Feels more like a marginal improvement whereas Google felt like omg everything is different now the olds are so behind the times they can’t even comprehend!!
But I think it’s more that the big shift happens with your newfound ability to grok things, leverage information, and get shit done in your late teens / early 20’s than the actual technology available. Whatever new tech happens around that age will feel like a profound hugely impactful change in the world (but it’s actually you, not the tech).
> I just think the internet is much worse than it was
It is. And also it isn’t. Depends where you go and who you talk to.
> I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
It was very exciting. Every year that followed seemed like a massive leap forward with smartphone evolution, 4G LTE market penetration, application improvements, etc.
It was a really fun time and I have fond memories of jailbreaking early iPhones/rooting Android phones.
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.