It's not the greatest photo because the stage lights are really washing them out. This is Gabriel Iglesias and Martin after the show. From the Dont Worry, Be Fluffy Tour.
Alt text: Comedian Gabriel Iglesias, wearing a patterned shirt and jeans, stands on stage waving to the crowd with a smile. Next to him is his friend Martin, holding a microphone and speaking. They are performing in front of a packed audience, with many people taking photos or videos. A large screen behind them displays a digital cityscape graphic with abstract elements. The stage is brightly lit with colorful lights.
My Lemon-Tahini Bowl from Jim Buffet's Margaritaville.
Alt text: A white bowl filled with a vibrant and colorful dish featuring crispy fried chicken strips topped with a creamy sauce and pickled red onions. Surrounding the chicken are sliced radishes, cucumber, avocado, shredded carrots, and fresh cilantro, creating a visually appealing and appetizing presentation.
My Lava Lava Shrimp appetizer from Jim Buffet's Margaritaville.
Alt text: A white bowl filled with crispy fried shrimp drizzled with a creamy, slightly orange-colored sauce, served over a bed of shredded lettuce. The dish is placed on a napkin atop a plate, with utensils and a drink visible in the background.
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Today I was reminded that old online chats offered context awareness for the people online: you knew you won't be a bother to a friend who has a smiley flower as a status; and you knew you might not be getting a quick reply from someone who's Away.
Today I don't even know if my friends are online or not. The messenger apps make the assumption that everyone is online, and if not, they will receive a push notification, and will reply to you as soon as possible. But this assumption is barely true. I bet it makes lives harder, especially for ND people
(Edited for a pixel-perfect screenshot)
This entry was edited (Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 8:04 PM)
I wonder if the decision to implement it in XMPP was conscious, or it was just a copy of what everyone else was doing at the time. XMPP just survived since the times
This entry was edited (Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 5:18 PM)
@UlrikNyman @jmhorner My ICQ number is on a scsi drive mounted in a desktop pc which hasn't booted in at least a decade. To let it pass POST you needed to plug in a keyboard via the ps2 port (since all usb ports are broken) within 200ms before the first beep. Ca 1996, started with 27 or 29....
@bertkoor @jmhorner I have a laptop lying on a shelf, that I think can still boot and that might have the number in it. But I have not gotten around to booting that machine because the USB drivers on it did not work so I would probably have to do a lot of things before getting the data or take the harddisk out and mount it in something else.
oh yeah. way back in 2001, i worked somewhere where everyone used IM by default - and if i was in a do-not-interact mood i'd wait for someone's icon to say Away before i sent them anything i didn't need an immediate response to, safe in the knowledge that i could deal with it in step time instead
@millihertz Regardless of status indication or not, I have spent much of my career desperately trying to convince people to JUST ASK THE QUESTION when using IM, chat, etc, rather than sending a "you there?" and then vanishing if you don't ACK it within 3 seconds.
I still sometimes have to send the nohello.net link
I've also just politely requested people to simply ask the question or provide info else I will assume the hello is the start of some message and just wait instead of responding.
This has had a decent success rate but if it fails I'll go with the link. Once people understand that if they want my attention they need to actually give me info, they start using async messaging as intended.
@swetland @millihertz you wasted time - people want immediacy and control over flow. I mean majority. Only small fraction lives fine or even happy with async.
@aytvill @swetland @millihertz when one needs synchronous communication, one has many vehicles for engaging in it within a professional context, the most common and powerful of which is making an appointment.
Demanding the ability to interrupt someone at will and control their time is bad behavior. Asynchronous comms are a compromise between interrupting and making an appointment; either honor that compromise or make another choice.
@LovesTha @aytvill @swetland @millihertz business has had significant asynchronous comms components since the invention of writing. They’re more efficient than they’ve ever been today, there is no excuse for refusing to use them effectively.
@calcifer @aytvill @swetland @millihertz can you imagine the seething rage at receiving a 'hello' message via horse delivered letter? It'll be weeks before you get the actual question.
It's complicated. I clearly don't mind a customer having my phone number, but I might not want to let them know I'm online at 10:30pm, thus giving them permission to ping me with something that belongs in work hours. Same with bosses, etc. Ideally you want to be able to turn that on or off for each one of your contacts, but OMG that would make the user interface too haaaaaaard! Can't have that. simple simple, just one button max. sigh.
I think this idea has potential. Consider an interface where the user can put contacts in groups and set a different status to be shown to each group. With one click, the user could appear as "ready to chat" to their close friends, while still remaining "away" to people they didn't want to chat with at that moment and who often waited for them to go online.
It would be a nice feature to implement per-contact statuses in addition to this, however, if the UX challenge of how to do so readably and obviously could be solved.
It could be argued that there are ethical issues with implementing such a feature at all, although I personally think any such argument is bunk.
This entry was edited (Friday, July 4, 2025, 9:18 AM)
@AVincentInSpace Oh God No. That would require another button or menu entry, and like... things! Can't have that, it violates the Cancer of Simple Design. I've been ranting about this for decades (link to ancient post below).
As for the ethical issues, there's usually a fix already there, which is each user can select if that information should be available at all/to connections/to the public.
See, I used to turn this off. I hate people knowing when I'm online. I always assumed the default is "not available". I think it says a lot that at some point in the mobile phone era, the default became "available."
@distinctivestatic I think setting it to "invisible" should be the default. Perhaps, G+ style, you'd want to expose your presence to one group of people but not the other. But on a sad rainy day when you really want to talk to someone, you'd set the status to "free to talk" and will enjoy a sudden reach out by an old friend, maybe. Plus, you won't need to assume things about your friends, you'd know if it's okay to message them if you feel like doing it
@distinctivestatic yeah, Google Plus circles were created exactly for this purpose, if I'm not misremembering. But Google being Google, and Facebook being Facebook, we ended up with what we have now.
I mostly consider status indicators to be useless. I message people whenever and if I'm lucky they can respond when I message them, otherwise the conversation is asynchronous
@lunacb and this is fine, too! Perhaps even a special status to indicate this mode could be useful: "I'll read your message when I can, I'll reply when I feel like it, kthx".
@ifixcoinops I always set my status as ”away” where possible, I don’t want to give the impression that I’ll reply right away so that I can check notifications when it suits me
yes! I absolutely hate the naming for "do not disturb". Makes it seem like I do not want to be bothered, when it couldn't be further from the truth. I specifically use it so people can still message me without my focus breaking from every notification sound. If I wanted to be left alone I would just go offline.
And don't even get me started on every app conflating important and urgent messages. They are not the same! A message can be one or the other, or both or neither. In discord "@silent" is my friend, I use it all the time but it feels like an afterthought.
@Blackthorn I think this is a matter of personal preference. I used "Free for chat" when I was bored and would prefer messaging over anything else; I had "Online" for situations when I had other things to do but didn't mind a distraction all that much. Sometimes I'd start with "Free for chat" but switched to "Online" after having a couple of chat windows open - to indicate that I'm not might be available for a long/deep conversation
My phone has been on "Do not disturb" for 7 years now. No notification sound ever. It is good. Bit apprehensive to see if there's any notifications when I go and pick it up though. I disabled all notifications for the more "aggressive" apps so sometimes people yell at me for not replying whithin a minute.
I totally agree. The "Focus" settings on an iPhone sort of work this way, but not like old AIM... I could reliably hold "office hours" and block messages completely when I was away.
The assumption the user is "always on" is a bad one.
I also miss this occasionally meeting some friend online. But I guess the difference is less about apps and their implementation, but about Smartphones. Back then, someone who was online, was also at home.
@santhor I've been thinking about this, and I disagree! Most of the time, I was on the move, with Jimm on J2ME and QIP on Windows CE, and so were my friends!
Nice, so even when on the move you took the time to set your online status accordingly? It would be nice to add this feature again, but I'm afraid few people would actually use it. (I never actively set the state, but it would show when I am at the computer.)
@santhor when I was online from the phone, it was showing everyone that I'm "online (mobile)" or "away (mobile)", hinting that my replies could be shorter than if I was using a computer.
I think people don't use it because there is an assumption that everyone is always, permanently, terminally, online. If we foster the habit of "getting online is an action", people will be using it!
I used to think there should be this kind of priority system in phones: You would assign a priority (say, 1 to 9) to each of your contacts and also set your own priority. Then, only calls from people who are important enough to bother you right now would get through. Of course, the system would be more useful if a caller could also choose the priority of their own call, but then you would have to punish contacts who misused the feature.
my phone is permanently on DnD, because there is no way to stop every fucking app from pinging at me all the time. Every time they update, they add a new category of notification so they can demand my attention. While there are types of notifications I might like to have, it's too much effort to selectively enforce "leave me the hell alone", so nobody gets to ping at me. Such toxic design.
I used to love gadgets and getting new ones, but now it's days/weeks to make it tolerable.
@swelljoe I used to simply turn the data off on my phone, but then I started working for Facebook, and the coworkers quickly explained to me that DnD is the only way to survive. I kept turning off the data anyway 😁
As for the gadgets: Palm OS 5 devices are as neat as they used to be when they just came out. I also am having lots of fun with my Nintendo DSi and Gameboy Micro!
@swelljoe Ever since I discovered the utility of #Android Developer USB mode (un-rooted). Which is literally a few days ago. It is basically a console. I've been thinking of using it for scripts. I wager you can get a manifest of all installed apps (confirmed) and possibly set the notification levels programmatically (unconfirmed)
… a feature that was also implemented by some early social networks. I guess that's where the name 'status update' for a post on facebook comes from. (Idk, I don't use facebook.)
@ejim that's the thing; it is a bit creepy that Steam wants to tell all my "friends" that I'm online, but at the same time I'm happy to signal to them that I won't mind playing Portal 2 or Civ V together. For chat apps specifically, I want to let people know that I'm open for a chat when I am open for a chat.
👋 sharing one thought - next text, ask the friends to disable their push notifications.
sounds wild. hear me out. 👀
this enables you to free your mind from learned behaviors designed to disrupt whatever you might be doing in real life in favor of what some other human or even algorithm decided. yes, even if it is your bestie wanting to share a cute cat video - especially if it's a designed-to-deflate news headline. nope! 🙅♀️
opt into your phone existing in your life via your personal, inalienable free will. this seems like the strongest, way to take active control of reframing one's relationship with one's devices at present. 💃
**not trying to show up as a reply guy - just offering what seems to be working well fired me and sharing if others find use in it. ✌️💙
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the only problem was that it's really hard to consistently/reliably keep that status updated..
Discord has it too. Typically people use custom status just for memes and not as actual status, and other ones are just set permanently and forgotten about, haha. But the automatic online/offline is sorta helpful occasionally (though way too often someone's "online" just because of leaving a PC running in the background haha)
@valpackett yeah, my Discord is permanently "away". But my ICQ used to switch between "Away" and "Online" depending on my usage of the app - it'd switch to Away when I was coding, but would switch back to Online when I opened the app. Discord allows me to set "Away for 1/2/4/8 hours" but won't show my actual status based on my actual activity. :<
If we don't count "Nina plays gdb" and "Atsuko plays KiCad", of course.
I feel like you needed that for ICQ though because you could search and chat up random people on that IM, if I remember correctly. I feel like used it in the late 90s, so it's a good while ago.
Hmm, I'm not speaking against those features. Although my memory of it is kinda blurry, I did like ICQ. MSN Messenger was also a rather decent IM as far as I recall. Then again, those were IMs from another era. Nowadays most messenger apps are catered towards reading your data, spamming you with ads, and being obnoxious.
It's none of my business to whom you're related to. 😀 Kidding aside, thanks for reminding me of that time. And I completly agree with you. We, I suppose, are the small portion of a generation who grew up with the internet, used it properly, and transitioned into what we have now. We sometimes forget how it was in the beginning. Better
I've said for many years (and will continue to die on that hill)
Chat services peaked at MSN Messenger 6.2!
Specifically 6.2 though. Everything after that in MSN Messenger was downhill
7.0 added "Winks" who the fuck liked using those?
7.5 added Nudge. And then people learned that nudging was controlled by the *sender* so you could spam it endlessly with a simple patch. A great way to end up slapped upside the head
8.0 onward had the "Windows Live Mesenger" gross UI rework
Honestly speaking, I don’t remember anyone using these status. What I remember is that almost everyone had the Invisible status and added only a few people to the list of those who can see through this invisibility. This eventually led to messages like “Here?” to start conversations.
@unconverged I suppose this is a cultural thing, isn't it? Could also be related to the era: were you _always_ online, or were you online only every now and then?
most likely this is indeed a cultural thing. I was talking about the times when you need to stay at home and have your PC turned on to be connected. By the times when mobile networks became cheap and fast enough to be widely adopted almost everyone has moved to the social networks. ICQ was mostly a remnant of the old times, not a popular thing, not to mention IRC.
when I was just starting to use the internet as a kid, it was gchat. So many good conversations happened in the panel on the left of Gmail, and the status icons made it all possible. I know that descended from a long line of other online chat systems. I was really sad when gchat was phased out, and my friends and I had to develop new communication habits together.
You make a good point about the assumption that everyone is online. The closest thing I have to statuses these days is in Slack, but those feel less trustworthy in terms of auto-updating, and since push notifications are sent anyways they don't serve much of a purpose.
By the by, I got the inspiration from reading blog.danpetrolito.xyz/i-built-… about a tool that would show "presence" in Discord. And then I found one of many papers from the olden days that actually did some research on the topic of "online presence" oppl.info/publication/oppl-200…
This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day.
@jernej__s the first image was taken from ResearchGate's render of a paper about online presence. I found the original PDF from 2004 on the author's website, and managed to extract a crispy screenshot TIFF from it!
I'm still confused by the number of people who are apologetic for not immediately answering. I keep reassuring them, I'm totally comfortable with async communication.
I leave a message, you get it when you can and unless I'm calling, texting and otherwise throwing up signal flares, that's all fine.
iMessage kind of doing that, notifying about „Do not disturb" mode or other focus modes. That's actually kind of nice UI, as you get this information when you try to write a message.
I met my wife in an online video chat room. I was living in the south and she was in Canada. We enjoyed the same things, and eventually, created our own online video chat site with internet radio stations playing in their own rooms, etc. We had our own station (still own the domain name). At one point, our little Video Chat site (FanCamTastic!) had several thousands of users and our little radio station broadcast to thousands of listeners around the world. (Radio Bijoux).
The people that tuned in to our shows were pretty much fans (I guess like folks listen to podcasts now) and would tune in just to catch up with what was going on, request tunes, make dedications to other online friends, and cut up in chat rooms. It was like a Friday night out with buddies would be the closest thing I can think of. We all looked forward to it.
@fishidwardrobe I feel like Discord has this "away" function in the same way as Steam - "hey, don't join my game for now, there's nothing yet". Plus it doesn't support automated away/present
@fishidwardrobe Slack has a similar behaviour, and I think it's kind of neat. At work, Slack custom statuses are linked with the calendar, so it perfect if you want to ruin someone's presentation by a pop-up notification.
Probably the only reason why I kinda like Discord. People don't use its status feature a lot but at least it exists. I think a more relaxed (but very opposite) default for messengers would be to treat them like e-mail: Answers will come but you have no idea when. Which also includes that e-mail kinda feels more important, reducing the amount of messenger chat messages that are never answered ("oops forgot", "your chat moved to the bottom before I replied" etc) 🙄
Just to be able to wake up in the middle of the night with insomnia and take a look to see who else is kicking around was priceless. Asynchronous conversation just doesn't cut it.
@reidrac xmpp has specifications for pretty much every feature found somewhere else (useful or not). But presence was so important that it is part of the protocol core, and even of its name! Whereas concehts like "group chats" are later extenions.
Some "modern" clie/ts don't really make the presence visible, however, or let you control it.
Teams has something similar but I have been using it for two months and not sure what the Icons mean.
Find it interesting that Signal.org that AFAIK uses the same protocol as WhatsApp allows to schedule messages. Telegram could schedule as well. Outlook emails also offer you to delay post if person is away.
But WhatsApp does not have the delay feature. Maybe because it's business model is Mata data and this removes purity from the data?
This entry was edited (Tuesday, July 1, 2025, 10:00 PM)
@mausmalone indeed. I personally decided not to install work Slack on my personal phone; it is inconvenient at times, but at least I know there's no sudden "hey, a quick question if you're still around" at 10 PM.
I never had an ICQ number. I just used AIM/Yahoo/MSN via Pidgin and Adium. That's an interesting feature.
I was one of the last holdouts on AIM, still messaging the one or two people on there in the last year it was alive. I do miss that era for sure. I still have some ancient AIM logs stored somewhere.
Why I intentionally turn off "show my activity" in every app. Also no "pop over notifications" allowed. I don't like context switching/interruptions. I've heard people argue that we should go back to calling people more often, and be more open to random phone calls, but even back in landline days there were socially accepted norms of when it was ok to call people time-wise. We successfully made that more explicit with IM statuses, then lost it again.
@MachineLordZero have you considered using a web version? I feel like the app doesn't offer all that much more functionality compared to discord.com/app
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@MachineLordZero plot twist: you can convert a website into an "app"! Chrome's "Install the page as an app" will make the page behave like an app - it'll have its own window, etc etc, but it'll share the profile with your browser. It might even use less resources than yet another Electron.
One thing I'd like would be if I could update Better Discord without having to reinstall it. Every time I've tried so far has resulted in me being back to regular Discord.
This. I remember in Poland everyone was using Gadu-Gadu and I could set whatever “status” I wanted depending on how I felt about talking to anyone at the moment. Freedom comes with choice and not with having something always on.
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@reidrac It was there from the beginning in 1999, so I guess it was largely a copy of what was there in other systems.
Ironically, I'm on DND 95% of the time because I'm putting the phone into silent mode. Implementing that sync seemed like a big thing to me back then... a decade ago. @nina_kali_nina
@argv_minus_one except it does, in a world where there is no expectation that people would reply to incoming messages immediately, being a slave to their phone
turning off read receipts is essential for any messaging app that offers it. People don't see when I "read" their message and I don't see when they read mine.
I do miss the context statuses of ICQ, MSN Messenger and the like though. Wouldn't object to seeing something like that come back somewhere
Interesting. I would usually think “if everyone is on, NO ONE is on” and that, similar to texting or email, the un-statused blindness would lead to the assumption of “if they’re there and they want to, they’ll answer, but I don’t have to expect anything.”
On ICQ I was usually perma-offline anyway. Don’t think I saw anyone really lean into the myriad of statuses; would usually think that kind of “choice fidelity” would lead to its own stress.
@cthellis I think both "they will get a notification and reply" and "idk maybe they're not online right now and I want to have a focused chat so maybe I won't message first" could happen at the current model.
Lots of people in the comments mentioned that they didn't really use any statuses beyond Online and Away, and I think it is fine too!
that’s a really interesting point. Most of the time, you can’t tell if ‘online’ means ‘happy to chat right now’ or ‘busy with something else, but still technically checking messages’ or anything else.
I used ICQ back then, and I remember those icons got pretty much meaningless over time, as people were under no obligation to keep their status up to date with reality. You could only assume other people's reply habits based on prior interactions. Just as it is now: you don't know people's notification settings, and there's no expectations of immediate replies in general.
I miss the hell out of being able to set statuses like that. I'm not a fan of Discord but they let you do this... So does VRChat. But so many other modern messengers utterly fail at this and it's infuriating
I've been using #XMPP for the last year or so, wondering if the halcyon ICQ days of yore are still to be had.
After testing it with several friends connecting to my own self-hosted #Prosody server, here's what I found:
- Yes it all works, on all XMPP clients. But MacOS/iPadOS/iOS clients are not all that mature at this time. The #Linux (#Gajim, despite no video or audio calls) and #Android (#Conversations) XMPP clients are the best, IMHO. Always favor those, I say, and they are confidently installable and reliable today. - Yes, use OMEMO encryption on personal chats. But when it comes to group chats, OMEMO is not necessarily the right move. - If you don't need privacy in an XMPP group, then don't create a private group, but rath
... Show more...
I've been using #XMPP for the last year or so, wondering if the halcyon ICQ days of yore are still to be had.
After testing it with several friends connecting to my own self-hosted #Prosody server, here's what I found:
- Yes it all works, on all XMPP clients. But MacOS/iPadOS/iOS clients are not all that mature at this time. The #Linux (#Gajim, despite no video or audio calls) and #Android (#Conversations) XMPP clients are the best, IMHO. Always favor those, I say, and they are confidently installable and reliable today. - Yes, use OMEMO encryption on personal chats. But when it comes to group chats, OMEMO is not necessarily the right move. - If you don't need privacy in an XMPP group, then don't create a private group, but rather a _public_ group (the safer choice for reliability of message delivery). No OMEMO is possible in a public group, and the messages propagating around will be reliable, even to clients who vanish and re-appear after prolonged absences. - If you really need OMEMO encryption in a group chat, create a _private_ group, not a public group. **Clients who vanish from the group for prolonged periods may miss out on some of the messages when they return (say, a few weeks later)**. - I kept a wiki with several more quirks noted, which came up, and felt confusing and frustrating to my (non-geek) friends using XMPP.
As to your Apple-ecosystem-confined friends, at this moment in time, maybe talk to them 1:1 in #Fluffychat/Matrix, which affords encryption, and is all #OpenSource, like everything above. (Groups in #Matrix have a track record of failing for everybody in them very badly every 2 or 3 years or so.)
Decentralised, can self-host if preferred, no KYC, no phone numbers, anonymous, group chats, multi platform, multi OS, synchronised accounts across devices/platforms/OS's.
Even works on TAILS OS.
I'm using it on an iPhone XS iOS 18.5, a 2015 MacBook Pro running Linux Mint and a Samsung S9 running Lineage OS, fully synchronised.
Delta Chat is a decentralized and secure messenger app 💬 Reliable instant messaging with multi-profile and multi-device support ⚡️ Sign up to secure fast chatmail servers or use classic e-mail serv...
@avoca I've tried #deltachat myself, and I'm not confident they have group chats working all that well. When you try to *leave* a group chat, you can sort of be gravitated back into it again, against your wishes. You have to keep deleting the remnant messages which keep appearing, as though you are using a plunger.
@avoca #Deltachat feels Alpha quality to me, *once you stray off the path of plain old 1:1 encrypted text messages, with possible file attachments, including voice memos* - which Deltachat is brilliant at (uniform clients on all supported platforms is greatly appreciated).
The #XMPP world is more "Beta-quality" feeling to me - is the lesser of evils for those geeky types who can manage its quirky landscape, and still feel like they're having fun.
*The devil is in the details* for all these ecosystems: XMPP, #Matrix, and Deltachat.
If you want something to "just work", I say use #Signal and refrain from complaining about its centralized nature. At least something "just works" today in this domain (end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, which is also reasonably private), which is reliable and trustworthy *for now*.
@d1 @avoca If #deltachat is "alpha quality", I wonder what Whatsapp is. No really multidevice support, changing phone is a mess.. But nonetheless, people love it. I think mostly it is not that something is better, it is just what people are used to.
@d1 I've found the same thing with #xmpp and #ios. #siskin seems good enough, though I get the impression that maybe it just shuts down after awhile in the background?
@amunizp @reidrac I don't know about Signal, but Outlook on the Web will delay delivering a message until the set time is reached (the email will hang out in your drafts folder until then). If the recipient is on a different mail server, the message will not be forwarded by your mail server until the set time. Outlook for Windows will keep the message in your outbox until the set time if you use the built-in scheduled send function, but it also supports the Exchange Server scheduled send mentioned above.
Integrating IMs into social media is still questionable practice. Ones that do (since friendster at least) treat IMs like a store front clerk chat who must be around if they're online. I missed ICQ-style availability.
it is for this that my phone is perpetually on do not disturb. A short list of less than a dozen people may make it ping me for emergencies; otherwise I look at it when I look at it.
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
@AdmiralMemo sounds like a fair evaluation of "when", but I still don't think that this is necessarily "why". Lots of people in my circle used ICQ on mobile and leveraged the status system.
Curiously, every now and then Facebook tries to bring the status back in Messenger, but I'm not sure it worked out
when the internet was a place for active enjoyment... You would actively look for people to chat, for content to read, for music to listen ("you wouldn't steal a purse" energy hehe). Being available online was an intermittent status. In my opinion, everything was more meaningful about this world. Miss those days... 🥲
my experience with ICQ was that people hardly used that though, esp. with dialup because why would you be afk and paying except when downloading. Later without metering mostly auto afk or so it would not pop up during games(if it even worked rhst way, been a while), but maybe my people were just weird. Like, useful sometimes but not daily used feature.
@wink that is true, but also consider: it means people weren't always online, there wasn't an expectation that someone would reply immediately if they're offline; but you could somewhat expect a reply if someone actually was online.
Imagine being able to login to WhatsApp once a day to check messages and chat with friends, rather than getting push notifications 200 times a day
Yeah I know, I like the feature (like the outlook calendar integration that marks you as busy in slack) - no harm in adding it for modern clients, I just remember it wasn't used so much in ICQ in my circles. Also as someone who has most notifications off and manually checks when he feels like it, it simply is not a problem for me, with the tradeoff of responding hours late :/
@vladcampos DND on a receiving side is a must, I hope more people will learn about it. But I feel there's immense value in the signal one could give to their friends "hey I'm around and available, talk to me if you want"
I was involved with Jabber (before it was called XMPP) shortly after that decision was made, so when people still remembered why.
A big part of it was that Jabber wanted to support lossless bridging between different IM systems. Being able to run an ICQ, MSNM, AIM, and so on bridge on your Jabber server meant users could switch immediately and retain their existing contacts. If only a subset of Jabber features worked with those contacts, that gave them an incentive to switch (and a good migration path). If only a subset of other-system features worked, that made it much harder.
The ICQ protocol had this fixed set of states. One of the other messengers had status messages as free-form text. As a result, XMPP built in both. And, because it was XML, you could also put a load of other things in (e.g. the music that you’re listening to).
I wrote a little daemon (20ish years ago) that would record status messages and push them to a microbloggin
I was involved with Jabber (before it was called XMPP) shortly after that decision was made, so when people still remembered why.
A big part of it was that Jabber wanted to support lossless bridging between different IM systems. Being able to run an ICQ, MSNM, AIM, and so on bridge on your Jabber server meant users could switch immediately and retain their existing contacts. If only a subset of Jabber features worked with those contacts, that gave them an incentive to switch (and a good migration path). If only a subset of other-system features worked, that made it much harder.
The ICQ protocol had this fixed set of states. One of the other messengers had status messages as free-form text. As a result, XMPP built in both. And, because it was XML, you could also put a load of other things in (e.g. the music that you’re listening to).
I wrote a little daemon (20ish years ago) that would record status messages and push them to a microblogging platform (back when Twitter was one among many and not a clear winner), so you could use a Jabber client to publish microblogging things in realtime to your contacts and more slowly to other people.
1/2 To be fair, I like not knowing when people are online and not, and people not knowing that of me. I also always turn off the typing and online messages when possible. I feel seeing those statusen causes anxiousness. "he read it/is online, why doesn't he reply". "he's typing, why does it take so long".
2/2 I would argue, people assume others reply asap, not the app. And that's those people's fault.
The thing I love about chats is that people can reach me when they have time, and I can reply when I have time for it in my own pace. Think about that thing you keep forgetting to ask me at midnight? Sure send a message. My phone is on DND-mode and I'll read it and reply after I wake up and have time, no rushing. (I don't do this to others unless I know they feel like this too).
This entry was edited (Wednesday, July 2, 2025, 8:34 AM)
@Cambion async comms is totally valid! I suppose people either learn about their friends' habits or, if nothing else, having a status as permanent DND is a good signal for that. Though the wording in "DND" could be improved
We have chosen this way. Look around yourself and see, how people reacts, when phone beeps - lot of them stops everything and just jump away to check the phone no matter what they were actually doing. I even noticed, that some people actually tend to remind me "your phone beeped" even though they just seen me intentionally leave it for later 😀
also like, why can't i send a message but ask for the other side to just quietly receive the message, no popup or beep-boop. The user can see the number of unread messages...
thanks for this wonderful memory of ICQ 😊 First experience of online messaging. Indeed things have changed. The assumption "always online and available " is bad indeed.
I imagine this just reflects the shift to mobile. Before then, if someone was sat at the computer you could be sure they were paying attention to it - and if they were not, the computer would be off. But with mobile it's just always there. The software can't tell if the user is free to chat, busy, or sleeping. And few users are going to manually change status twenty times a day.
@Qybat as I've mentioned elsewhere, this isn't strictly true. There was a period in time between advent of J2ME ICQ and, I suppose, popularity of WhatsApp and alike, where it wasn't a given that a person is at their computer when they're online.
I must admit I actually really like the async way modern chats use.
I can have a conversation with my friends over multiple days, no need to check if they're available or not, they'll reply when they have time. No pressure.
@me On a very surface level, yes, but not really, no. I can't send you a burst of messages with 10 seconds between each one without it being super annoying to you by email.
Also not made for rapid exchanges , like if you reply to my message while I'm writing one, I won't be able to read it without reloading the page or something
Also not sure you can jump in a call seemlessly from an email exchange, it's just not made for realtime communication
I understand, though I also feel the default assumption has shifted since ICQ days from 'chat is usually live' to 'chat is usually asynchronous'? None of my friends expect me to reply immediately, nor do I expect them to. We're even used to (non-urgent) chats pausing without further comment. When something is important+urgent enough to requires rapid responses, usually everyone unterstands that and acts accordingly (like saying "gtg for now" when they have to)
I really miss this about ICQ and the other stuff that was around in that era. Hell, even away messages are dying out. I mean Signal technically has them, but it's really more like a bio. ICQ was great at this.
You could also easily amalgamate them into a single interface instead of having a billion separate apps (and their desperate venn diagrams of contacts)
Wait, what. Trillian (for one example) still exits. 🤯
even on a site like discord which has (a massively cut down version of) this feature, i've seen plenty of people set themselves to do not disturb 24/7, so it's impossible to tell if they're online or offline or away or what
My ICQ nr. was 214402666, still remember it today 😄 I have to admit I experience problems with no status today quite often because I very rarely visit my Facebook profile, don't have Facebook nor Facebook Messenger app on my phone, only sometimes login from my PC to share some important news. And people don't understand why I reply after a week or two if they reach out there.
Alt text: A serene sunset sky filled with soft, scattered clouds glowing in warm hues of gold and orange. The silhouette of a house roof and surrounding trees frame the bottom of the image, enhancing the peaceful atmosphere.
Alt text: A serene sunset sky filled with soft, scattered clouds glowing in warm hues of gold and orange. The silhouette of a house roof and surrounding trees frame the bottom of the image, enhancing the peaceful atmosphere.
Alt text: A dramatic sky filled with a mix of dark and light clouds during sunset, with hints of orange and pink highlighting the cloud edges. Silhouettes of trees line the bottom of the image, contrasting against the vibrant sky.
Alt text: View looking up into the canopy of large oak trees at sunset, with golden sunlight illuminating the rough bark and green leaves against a blue sky.
Alt text: A serene suburban evening sky with soft, golden-orange clouds illuminated by the setting sun. The clouds are scattered across a light blue sky, creating a peaceful and picturesque atmosphere. Below, the dark silhouettes of rooftops, trees, and a stone pillar frame the bottom of the image.
Alt text: Bernie Sanders speaks at a podium labeled "FIGHT OLIGARCHY" in front of a large American flag during a rally. A crowd of attendees is visible in the foreground.
This is not my artwork. I just recently visited a local art museum in my home state to see an Ansel Adams exhibit. This is one of his photographs.
Alt text: Black-and-white photograph of Denali in Alaska, prominently featuring the snow-covered mountain reflected in a calm lake in the foreground. The framed photo is displayed on a museum wall, with a placard partially visible to the right. The image showcases dramatic lighting and sharp contrasts, highlighting the grandeur of the natural landscape.
Alt text: A young tabby kitten with large, expressive eyes and white paws is nestled in a soft, gray hammock. The kitten has a mix of brown, orange, and black fur with distinct markings on its face.
Alt text: A young tabby kitten with large, expressive eyes and white paws is nestled in a soft, gray hammock. The kitten has a mix of brown, orange, and black fur with distinct markings on its face. Nearby on the blanket are two small toy mice, one with a leopard print pattern.
While the big three empirical powers that colonized the Americas are all at fault, they are late comers compared to the Spanish. By the time the British started their first colony Desoto had ripped through appalachia, on a quest for gold, and had murdered, raped, and enslaved many natives. More importantly though, he introduced most of the tribes to old world diseases, which was apocalyptic to them.
True, that ball was already rolling when the Brits kicked it, but my point is that it didn't stop being kicked afterwards either. Or to this day, really.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 6:21 PM)
Oh yeah, the Native American genocide is still happening. These days it is mostly ignoring treaties to take their land for things like oil pipelines, but still going on.
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It's not a big deal, we've made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can't rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
Both are rights, but the normies definitely destroyed the internet culture. They invaded forums without any regard for the rules set before (remember "RTFM"?), and when capitalism arrived, they all moved to commercial sites.
It's absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of "making niches for ourselves" will save us from that.
Plus the corporate web constantly kills off our niche spaces in the effort to make them palatable for advertisers by sanitizing minorities out of their own spaces.
I used to be super active in r/traaaa before the 3rd party plugin exodus and subsequent shutdown of the forum. Now? Those people either made a new Reddit or scattered to the 4 winds, and a similar space has struggled to take off here on Lemmy. And that's just one of many instances of this sort of thing happening.
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself ... and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism
when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition
Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)
Exactly this. Shit I remember when the alt.* tree was added to USENET. The amount of the cabal talk and how the argument actually was: "No, nobody wants to pay to host your racist rants". And some of the worst stuff I see on Reddit today is light-years better than what the Internet was in plain sight back in the day before cracking down on things actually came around.
I'm glad person in the imaged post was happy with the Internet back then, but it was far from "human and genuine". This is absolutely some rose tinted nostalgia. What they miss is small niche communities and this kind of talk is exactly how "get off my lawn" elderly people get started.
I first used the internet in 1992. It was nice and quiet back then. You could send emails and poke around with a text browser and gopher. Then you could think "Welp, not much to see here" and go outside or read a book.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 4:15 PM)
90's internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.
As quiVadisHomines says, too, the ~~90's~~ '90s net was a simpler time; but I think that was because it was well-backed by schools and even then mostly unknown -- September Effect notwithstanding.
Is it capitalism or just the tribe-too-large problem? Both, where we're not united enough to socially correct the behaviour that would be knocked down sooner with a smaller group?
Anyway, I miss the enforced simplicity of no-images/rare-images Usenet, and how it highlighted the writing and the ideas.
It's beyond me to dream up a suitable Usenet replacement, but I know for sure that FB, IG, Lemmy, they're solving a different problem.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 6:16 PM)
I was playing with some old UNIX software, and in the help text the dev said they were collecting foreign currency and asked people to send postcards with foreign currency, listing their full name and personal address. It was last updated in 1995.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 6:18 PM)
A collection of games called "flying" which despite the name is a pool/billiards/curling/air hockey sim.
I had it mentioned on a Cathode Ray Dude YouTube video and wanted to try it, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. As far as I could find it never got ported to Linux? But it's still in the FreeBSD repositories. So I spun up FreeBSD on a VM but couldn't get it working because it refuses to launch on X if you have more than 8-bit color, and I was having a hell of a time launching X in that mode. So I downloaded a copy of FreeBSD 4 from around 2000 and got it to run.
I'm not that "way back when everything was better" person, but I agree.
Nothing was monetized mid-2000s? That sentence, while still an exaggeration, would have made sense 10 years earlier. Also "ragebait and attention seeking" were rampant on these "forums focused on discussion".
I remember reading through an archive of some pre Eternal September forum argument about Aliens being a shitty, overrated movie.
You know. Aliens. Uncontroversially one of the best movies ever made.
I think the difference is that nowadays it feels like this isn’t quarantined to specific forums or usenet communities. We’ve all dealt with people IRL who use Twitter in 2025 and those people are absolutely cooked beyond belief.
IMO there's "the Internet before Canter and Siegel" and "the Internet after Canter and Siegel".
On the pre C&S Internet, not only was nothing monetized, there was a sense that even having an ad for something commercial was against the culture. The downside was that the pre C&S Internet was small, slow and limited.
Overall, I think the 2025 Internet is much better than 1994. But, there were certainly things to appreciate about an Internet without ads, without algorithms trying to win the attention economy, etc.
Well my point was more that there's a bit of a rose-tint in this person's description of the "early internet"... unless they mean really early, like ARPANET early.
Plenty of rage-bait attention seeking in the mid-2000s.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 8:17 PM)
This is why I'm a big fan of Lemmy and federated social media. It removes the monetization incentive, and it's obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far). The remaining piece that is still an issue, in my opinion, is that we're still engulfed in the more modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.
I agree ... but we should develop the federated social media in whatever way we can, however it turns out or looks like or even operates ... as long as we're using it, it's a good thing.
As long as corporate control is kept at bay and away from federated social media, we'll be OK.
If any corner of the federated social media starts to get infected with corporate control, then that disease will just grow and consume the whole system .... just like every other thing it destroyed before.
Oh totally, but I was thinking less about edgy trolls and more like, rage-bait headlines and rants intended to keep you engaged with a platform because you're mad. Or, for example, floods of political posts with all the nuance of a negative daytime TV campaign ad (you know, with the deep voice, storm clouds, and spooky music).
I remember in the early days of the internet, that type of content was around, but still largely relegated to talk radio or email forwards. Now it's mainstream and some of the most popular content on every major social media site. It's disappointing and feels inauthentic, like your favorite hang-out spots have slowly filled up with solicitors handing out flyers.
Yeah, corporations getting involved to monetize those things for engagement is new. Before it was for the sheer joy of arguing with/pissing off people. That still exists as well, of course.
And because we aren't chasing profit, mass adoption, or clout here, we can get increasingly local and granular with our instances, and increasingly rigorous about who we let in. Since what we're chasing is real community, we have nothing to sell out for. And even if some instances do flip over to corpos, we can just defederate and welcome the inevitable influx of departing users.
The thing you really have to look out for in the future is "premium" instances or forks of Lemmy which are paywalled, and eventually locked down to a single instance. It just becomes the next Twitter. It's unlikely, but something to be wary of once the rest of the open internet is picked clean.
Shame that capital is without a doubt mining our genuine public communications for their wage depressing plagiarism machines, because it's not like you can get that from the old place anymore.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 8:53 PM)
…it's obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far).
This is what concerns me. If the fediverse ever catches on to the point where it's worth it for bad actors to be running bots, not only will instances have to restrict signups, but also defederate from those that don't (kinda like how beehaw does it).
No, 1990s internet just hadn't actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don't realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple's website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn't use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to ad
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No, 1990s internet just hadn't actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.
Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don't realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple's website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.
Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.
And good luck getting plugins if you didn't use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
People's identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn't just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000's. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn't ruin everything.
You don't remember NetZero, do you? A free dial up ISP that gave free Internet connections under the condition that you give up like 25% of your screen to animated banner ads while you're online.
Or BonziBuddy? Literal spyware.
What about all the MSIE toolbars, some of which had spyware, and many of which had ads?
Or just plain old email spam in the days before more sophisticated filters came out?
C'mon, you're looking at the 1990s through rose tinted glasses. I'd argue that the typical web user saw more ads in 1998 than in 2008.
I remember that if you feared everything and only used programs and visited websites your friends recommended, you'd be much better than now. If you were careless, you had a bunch of banners and a porn blocker at the end of the day.
I used NetZero dialup and played shooters online. I'd get killed a LOT with the lag. Also I uninstalled that damned ape buddy from dozens of peoples machines.
Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
If the web today didn't consist of "5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4", that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
That's a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.
That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endl
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Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.
If the web today didn't consist of "5 websites each with screenshots from the other 4", that could be even more competitive now when search engines have figured out how to monetize bullshit.
Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn’t just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).
That's a feature of the POP3 protocol, not mandatory, though usually used. Now people usually use IMAP and web frontends, and sometimes Exchange.
That was the normal way, yes, because disk space is not endless.
User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page.
Maybe that's how it should have been still.
Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.
That's a fact. Well, at the same time popular knowledge that nothing is secure leads, paradoxically, to more security. People knowing everything they say is unprotected will be more responsible. That's one thing that has sort of become better technically, but worse socially.
Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn’t ruin everything.
I think I agree, except more like 2004-2011 for me.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 9:19 PM)
"The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization..."
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
Ah yes, the halceon days of non-stop pop-up ads and malware taskbars. /s
Not to mention that everything they mentioned was absolutely started to become what it is today. Nothing changed, they just progressed their plans over 20 years. Pretending it was all started with benevolent intentions is naive at best.
Lemmy is pretty chill. Combined with a rss feed viewer, a few youtube channel (ff+extension), Nexcloud, and my internet experience is cool. I don't care about tiktok, instagram and all that shit.
I recently started collecting feeds for my RSS reader, and it is so refreshing. I haven't added any Lemmy feeds to it yet, since I'm on here a lot anyway, but it's nice for blogs and websites that I'm not going to remember to check regularly otherwise.
RSS Guard. I tried a few, then decided that what I really wanted was just a simple app that would run locally, doesn't run in browser, doesn't rely on me creating an account to sync with some external server, and doesn't have limits to the number of feeds I can add.
It was pretty painless to set up. The only downside is that if I ever want to transfer my feed list to a reader on my phone or another PC, I would have to export the list and then import it, but that's not hard.
Rest assured, I'm very much a normie with tech stuff too. It wasn't bad to set up. It's been a few months, but I'm sure I just downloaded it from the link on their site and followed the installation prompts.
The hardest part is finding websites that support RSS. But for an example, say you wanted to receive reports about outbreaks from the FDA, here's their RSS feed: fda.gov/about-fda/contact-fda/…
You would just go to "add feed" in the RSS reader, and paste the URL, and you're done! You can customize how often you want it to check your feeds for new updates (I have mine check every couple of hours), and when they show up, you can view them within your reader similar to email.
Obviously Ublock origin, the graal of extensions. Otherwise, the only way I can use youtube these days is with the following extensions: "Hide shorts for youtube", "Youtube search fixer", "Replace youtube's home with subscription". Also "return youtube dislike" and "blocktube" (to block stupid channels youtube keeps recommanding" are cool.
One more general level: I still dont care about cookies, darkreader, bitwarden (password manager), detrumpify (replace trump with a random insult), google sign-in pop-up blocker, flagfox, and many more lol.
This entry was edited (Friday, June 6, 2025, 12:52 PM)
There was always a tacit understanding you were coming into someone's house. Sometimes quite literally. The server for a forum I used for 20+ years was in various apartment closets most of that time. House rules, so to speak, weren't controversial.
Now everyone's used to using centralized commercial servers for rent, with things like ads and liability insurance. Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn't.
It was, but... this morning I pulled out my pocket computer that also can make calls, started streaming the Disco Elysium soundtrack, and proceeded to drive across two cities. There were no pauses or hiccups in the stream.
I remember reading comments on Slashdot circa 2005 "explaining" why video streaming would never replace physical media. I totally bought it at the time.
This was a moment in time when Netflix existed, but it only sent DVDs through the mail. Only took a few years before their streaming service took off. Also, YouTube showed up around that time (and then Google bought it).
and netflix wasn't even the first one to do streaming, years before them some startup bought one physical disk for each stream and if they ran out of copies you had to wait for someone else to finish watching the movie, it was like a digital library. they did it to avoid copyright issues but they got sued into the ground and died. then netflix happened and now we have another cable tv subscription instead of an internet
Man, I gotta finish the game. I think we left off around the point where we've figured out that a sniper shot the victim and we've figured out that it must have come from one of three locations or so. Last thing I remember is the church and those party-goers in the tent - not sure where we're supposed to go next
It was for sure toxic af, but a lot less commercial. Actually the early internet was incredibly hostile to corps, but then the banner ads came, and the eyeballs, and the ads started actually making more money than just server costs, and it was all over.
I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the tag finally fell out of fashion.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 8:30 PM)
Yeah I think this is definitely a case of rose colored glasses. I absolutely miss the way the internet was 25 years ago but I also do not miss randomly browsing and running across child pornography, I don't miss every kilobyte being measured to make sure I don't over use the network, I don't miss having to have multiple browsers just because a website was written for Netscape and not Explorer, or pop-up adds, viruses, and everything else you mentioned.
Oh, yeah, the browser wars. As a designer during that time, having to learn 5 or more versions of css and JavaScript (which were sometimes competing and broke one another) before code pages were a thing was a nightmare.
And getting kicked off dial-up because someone decided to make a phone call when a large game download was at 97% complete after 5 hours before file caching was really a thing was infuriating.
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Do you mean these?
They were part of a continuity ritual we performed before they installed cupholders in computers. You’d have to feed them to your pc one at a time when requested, often whilst entering an incantation in the command prompt. The meaning may have been lost to time, but we still use their icon to honour that ritual.
e: I can’t believe I found these so quickly. They were still on the same closet shelf where I put them in 2002.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:04 PM)
Came across a bunch that have old backups of someone's data. Also some 5 1/4". Not sure if magnets or a hammer/scissors is the best security destruction 😆
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 11:37 PM)
It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn't fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.
I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It's like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.
I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn't conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or "like native", ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.
You didn’t have to be looking for porn – it was super common to run across CP or beheading videos in random niche interest forums posted by trolls. So many times I saw something I did not want to see when clicking for a knitting pattern.
e: I have psychological scars from that Dan Pearl video – for a while in the mid-aughts, it was literally unavoidable unless you stopped using the internet entirely.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:23 PM)
I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
What, you don't want to punch the monkey and also have 50,000 pop-up and pop-under windows spawn because you picked the wrong link? Also, accidentally discovering that python[.]com was NOT where one went to download the scripting language back around 2006, while trying to help a student get her laptop setup. It's still not, but that's not how I wanted to learn that fact.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 9:52 PM)
I agree about popups and executables (what an absolutely moronic decision to include that crap in browsers), but all the JavaScript BS and "please let us track you" cookie banners in modern websites is a thousand times worse than any use of or could ever be.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:31 PM)
It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.
I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.
Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).
I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 8:44 PM)
I'm not clear on what you mean by "a life wasted" — can you elaborate? I'm getting the sense that you're quite jaded from the early internet dying, but I don't understand why you consider this to be a waste (or what you mean by being a cautionary tale).
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that I am probably similar levels of nerdy as you, but I am somewhat younger than you . This means my early experience of the internet is quite different, and I am endlessly fascinated by what came before — in an odd way, it feels like learning about my own "cultural heritage", so to speak.
My career has been in building infrastructure for internet services. I got into this line of work because I felt like it was democratizing knowledge and bringing people together. The way it’s instead gone, I regret being part of it, and I wish I would have gone into another line of work.
I miss old YouTube so much it hurts omg. i miss how it wasn't about engagement, branding, money or camera quality, it was about broadcasting yourself and having fun. now it's become a bland corporate shell of what it used to be and half of my recommendations are AI slop lol
source: I'm so old I remember when YouTube vids were rated with stars and everyone had neon channels with funky text
I listen to lots of music on youtube, just random playlists in the background. Unfortunately, there is a TON of AI music on there now, and it's really hard to tell the difference these days.
I guess it comes and goes now since I only ran into it once recently, but the entirety of RATMs discog will appear as labelled with that content warning that you need to manually confirm and it can make playing music let alone an album from them a chore, reuploaded a copy of their discog onto the private library to get around it but sometimes I'll forget, queue an official upload and be like "oh yeah they still haven't fixed this" when everything pauses. Other than that YTM is endgame music streaming, the YT community as the backend for streaming music, the actual proper releases and the ability to manage a private library is just perfect.
Do people generally just watch YouTube recommendations? Literally my entire usage of YouTube has been looking for something in particular (how tos or whatever) or I have a large amount of channels I'm subscribed to that I go look at their channel specifically for any new content I want to watch.
I have a roommate that watches YouTube like that. He was out of work for a long time and basically watched YouTube all day. I saw him finish videos and click on a recommended one.
Naturally he'll say the craziest shit sometimes but most people around us are the same. It really sucks and I can't wait to move out of this living situation.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:41 PM)
I only ever go straight to the Subscriptions page. I've got enough good quality channels to keep me entertained for long enough. I'll occasionally check out a new channel form the suggestions on the sidebar, and I've found enough good new ones that way to keep me doing it, but it's not a frequent occurrence. The thing I like about these services is that you can curate whatever experience you like by being sufficiently selective with what you click on, and the more you click on good quality stuff, the more stuff like that it'll show you.
This entry was edited (Thursday, June 5, 2025, 11:32 AM)
I miss being able to tell at a glance whether an instructional video was trash. I have the "return youtube dislikes" extension but it doesn't work as well for a multitude of reasons.
It's so interesting. My partner is still on Reddit and she was complaining to me about the massive amount of bots, trolls and general negativity. My response was basically, yeah, that's why I left and don't miss it one bit. I found a much better place that has actual discussion and nowhere near that level of toxicity. I asked her if she wanted to know about it and her answer was just "No". LOL. She's also a fan of super drama filled reality TV so I guess if you like one you like the other.
As in talking shit about reddit or ripping off content from reddit?
I know what you typed but autocorrect could have changed your "on" to "off". I see a lot of reddit bashing here (to be expected in my opinion) but I don't go to Reddit anymore so I don't know if most stuff here are just reposts
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:45 PM)
I'm low-key glad for the Reddit API debacle that caused me to migrate over here. Although it seems that Reddit has become especially awful nowadays, Lemmy made me realise that this degradation had been happening for years.
Part of what masked it is that my favourite parts of Reddit were the niche communities that still had quality discourse in them. I especially liked the craft subreddits, which were full of vibrant users and useful resources. In hindsight, by the time I left Reddit, I was spending most of my time in these small communities, rather than the defaults.
To some extent, Reddit's front page and default subs have always been a bit of a cess-pool of toxicity, but it wasn't always as bad as it was when I left. It seems like it's even worse now though. I wonder how much of that is because people who care about quality discussion migrated to platforms like this. Given how much I enjoy the vibe of Lemmy, my gut says that surely must have had a significant impact. However, my brain says that I'm probably overestimating the significance of our little pocket here.
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I'm low-key glad for the Reddit API debacle that caused me to migrate over here. Although it seems that Reddit has become especially awful nowadays, Lemmy made me realise that this degradation had been happening for years.
Part of what masked it is that my favourite parts of Reddit were the niche communities that still had quality discourse in them. I especially liked the craft subreddits, which were full of vibrant users and useful resources. In hindsight, by the time I left Reddit, I was spending most of my time in these small communities, rather than the defaults.
To some extent, Reddit's front page and default subs have always been a bit of a cess-pool of toxicity, but it wasn't always as bad as it was when I left. It seems like it's even worse now though. I wonder how much of that is because people who care about quality discussion migrated to platforms like this. Given how much I enjoy the vibe of Lemmy, my gut says that surely must have had a significant impact. However, my brain says that I'm probably overestimating the significance of our little pocket here.
Regardless, I'm glad to be here, and I'm glad you are here too. I hope that people like your partner will eventually find their own pockets of enjoyable psuedonymous community, whether on Lemmy or elsewhere — I'm not a drama enjoyer myself, but it'd be nice if people who like that could have a place where they can indulge in that without the unpleasantness you describe. I sympathise with people who feel overwhelmed by the fediverse, and I sometimes have to try not to evangelise too hard.
Was on a thread that caught onto the post history of one user going from being a teacher, to 18, to a girl with period issues, to a guy with a "child from an ex he just found out about"
The user had a post history going back like a decade and it seemed to be just a chain of made up identities, but no political stuff so not necessarily a psyop etc
You think your internet addiction is rough? You kids these days with your just 1 personality that is addicted to the Internet... Back in my day if you had multiple personalities they all had different interests and did different things. They didn't communicate and often didn't even know each other existed. Now they all just sit around on the internet and argue with each other. They can't even be bothered to make their own accounts.
It feels unsustainable, right? Like the value of of this tsunami of advertising has to be inflated, especially with bots/agents taking over traffic. People’s tolerance for junk isn’t infinite. At some point the illusion has to crack, and the advertising bubble will pop and burn the internet/app ecosystems down, hopefully…
Yeah, there has to be a point when they're going to realize that they're hosting bots to advertise to bots, and nobody is going to want to pay for that.
Yeah, there has to be a point when they’re going to realize that they’re hosting bots to advertise to bots, and nobody is going to want to pay for that.
I think you're underestimating the level of intelligence that world-wide corpos have. they do have statisticians and mathematicians, and i guarantee you they do the calculations about these things already.
What I already see around me is more and more people moving their files and identities offline into home NAS and filesharing setups, like Nextcloud. Their conversations are moving to Signal, Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud Talk, or just plain text. For now its the more technically savvy, but even non professionals with low levels of admin experience are reaching out and asking now, and non technical people are looking for access to those private resources.
The snowball isn't big yet, but it is rolling. How far it goes and how big it gets, we'll see.
However what surprises me is that this did not happen sooner and due to ads, but rather it is AI and the complete uphill battle it is becoming to keep your private data out of the multitude of inbound AI vectors that is finally pushing people down the hill.
The people sucking each other's farts in the marketing industry have no shame. They market themselves first, your product 2nd, and for some reason these cold calculating corporations throw obscene money at them.
I think it must be some good old boy network where the people at the top invest in certain marketing agencies and they use them to leech money out of the companies they work for with little risk of being caught for embezzlement.
GTA 6, one if the top known franchises in the industry, will be spending $500 million+ on marketing.
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn't just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech invol
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The people sucking each other's farts in the marketing industry have no shame. They market themselves first, your product 2nd, and for some reason these cold calculating corporations throw obscene money at them.
I think it must be some good old boy network where the people at the top invest in certain marketing agencies and they use them to leech money out of the companies they work for with little risk of being caught for embezzlement.
GTA 6, one if the top known franchises in the industry, will be spending $500 million+ on marketing.
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn't just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech involved with making GTA6 not create enough hype? Does there even need to be additional hype created?
I just dont buy it. These penny pinching losers that run our world don't just give away half a billion dollars for a couple trailers and some ads plastered all over the internet and IRL. Marketing looks like shit, smells like shit, tastes like shit. It's fucking shit. Why buy a $500 million dollar turd unless you were somehow getting a cut?
The budget for marketing has doubled the cost of the entire previous game. Does anyone need ads for GTA6? Wouldn’t just having the devs do livestreams of them playing the game and discussing the tech involved with making GTA6 not create enough hype? Does there even need to be additional hype created?
There is a bit of an "arms race," where other games/entertainment could steal GTA's engagement. Eyeball time is finite, and to quote a paper, "attention is all you need."
You aren't wrong though. Spending so much seems insane when "guerrilla marketing" for such a famous IP would go a long way. I guess part of it is "the line must go up" mentality, where sales must increase dramatically next quarter even if that costs a boatload of marketing to achieve.
Google search is so stupid now, and I mean that in the intelligence sense. I used to get result suggestions based of i guess algorithms and now it’s ai, so all my suggestions are moronic, just words slapped together that don’t make sense
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If anyone wasn't aware, Google has apparently learned that because they are so dominant, they can intentionally tank the quality of search without losing users, forcing people to remain on their site longer and view more ads.
Soon you'll be able to have AI just run your social media. AI will learn what you post, how you respond and what you respond too. Then just run it on auto pilot with updates everyday on events. Imagine that? AI just talking to each other but just with your code.
What will you do with the extra time you're not on social media? Maybe AI saves us from social media cancer?
Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn’t.
Like when people claim their right to free speech was denied because a privately-owned website banned them. They seem to think that if a platform allows them to speak publically, it's the same as saying something out in a public street.
In reality, it's more like being in a venue with an open mic - it's a private (and likely commercial) space by default. If you go up on stage and say something the owners or managers don't like, you absolutely can be kicked out for it. Private websites, including social media, are the same way.
This entry was edited (Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 10:31 PM)
Yes and no. It's important to remember that people lied and wanted to rage: but it was annonymous and we knew everyone was full of shit so it didn't matter.
I'm reminded of some business-person(?) saying that people often forget that "store this on the cloud" is basically saying "store this on someone else's computer". I have used this reframing a few times to help ground discussions around data infrastructure.
actually, in a few years, maybe the young people won't spend their time on instagram, because it's all bots anyways. maybe then the young people will enjoy living outside of their screen-devices again, and physical life could get a revival.
I feel extremely sorry for you of there's actually zero green space around you other than shopping. Heck, even if you're in NYC you're not that far from a park.
I dunno, I live in suburbia and our kids manage to spend a lot of time outside with neighborhood kids. It's a nice change of pace over the same neighborhood 10 years ago. The neighborhood is starting to turn over generationally and there are a lot more people outside now.
I don't think so. We've all been happily having discussions with bots online for a long time now. People just don't notice that the person they are writing to isn't a human.
We went from talking in person to talking via computer and no talking with a computer. It's not getting better.
My feeling is that genAI and capitalism are destroying themselves. Now, all web content that is scraped to feed genAI is poisoned by other genAI. So the quality will get worse, and then people will find other ways to use teh tubes of noise. And then the funding for shit genAI websites will dry up, and some of the remaining web content will still be there, because the rest of us aren't capitalists.
The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.
I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.
The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who'd give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.
And now there's the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can't even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.
For a while you could trust reviews, but that
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The problem is that people just accept a continuous drop in quality.
I once had a conversation with an old woman who told me that it would be unheard off for someone with some level of status or self respect to wear ill-fitting off-the-shelf clothing back in the 50s, and nowadays even TV news anchors are wearing cheap off-the-shelf suits.
The same thing applies for everything. When I was a kid, the transition from small, independently owned shops with qualified stuff who'd give you proper consultation to chain stores in malls was just under way. Old people would complain all day that the staff in chain stores had no clue about the stuff they were selling. And yet everyone went to the chain stores in the mall because they had a bigger selection and were cheaper.
And now there's the same thing happening with the chain stores in malls getting replaced by online shopping, and now not only is there no one to consult you on your purchase, you can't even trust the product listings because they are riddled with errors.
For a while you could trust reviews, but that time is long gone, but still everyone just happily shops and consumes away, because online shopping is cheaper, there's a bigger selection and it's more convenient.
The same process is happening all the time everywhere. Stuff just gets gradually shittier, but we just accept it, because we get used to it.
When I was a teen, way before the internet, if the outside didn't hold much appeal (usually because it was raining) staying in my room and reading sci-fi and listening to music and stand-up comedy on cassette was a viable option. I'm ok with going back to that. My ebooks directory runneth over.
Yeah I miss those days, I remember as a teen I had internet at home and when I told people I just stayed home all holidays on the internet they all made fun of me, those same people live their entire lives out on Facebook now, I was just out there shitposting like you're supposed to.
I would argue was even more the case during the earliest days of the web. It was really a open, untamed, wild west feeling, like anything was possible.
Then the corporatization of the internet happened during the dotcom bubble, and all hell broke loose, we know the rest.
There was no better internet than going to college in the late '90s. You go from a 56Kbps modem with hundreds of milliseconds of latency being a GOOD setup, to being directly on a 10Mbps LAN with everybody else in your class. It was right before Napster started and people were sharing entire discographies of MP3s via network file share from their own machines.
Had the same experience. You could share tlyour collection, but it had to be password protected. But you also put a text note named password.txr in the parent directory and you in. If you shared without protection, you'd get your network privileges suspended.
Well... the type of stuff we long for are still around, it's just that we don't visit it as much anymore. Lemmy is a perfect example of this - it's around, it's better, but people still default to Reddit instead.
Old habits die hard. Plus reddit has a long-lasting reputation of hosting a lot of really awesome communities and discussion. It's a trove of knowledge lost in enshittification
The old forums are often still up, and there are still actual humans there, sometimes. But nobody goes there, because nothing's happening there.
There was this programming forum (blitzforum.de) that I loved when I was a teenager. I spent so much time there and learned so much. I actually attribute a lot of my career to getting an early start there. But the forum is mostly dead nowadays. People still open the page every once in a while, but nobody posts there.
It's a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.
These days it's entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it's still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.
Between SEO and Googles own bullshit finding information online feels like trying to find the milk in a supermarket or the exit in a casino, designed to make you pass through as much bullshit that's completely unrelated to what you actually want as possible.
Oh, that's what the old Facepunch forum evolved into, right? Yeah, that was a really nice place when I last visited, but that was years ago. I just felt like I had grown out of it.
Advertise here, right? Build small communities. How many readers do you even want? I mean that seriously, too. Maybe you would be happy with 100 people who subscribe to your RSS feed, depending on your goals.
On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I'd made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun...
That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.
Yeah, I remember when I first got access to the internet in the 90s and it was mostly forums and whatnot run by hobbyists. Finding stuff was a bit tricky, but Yahoo was largely usable to find stuff. Wikipedia didn't exist, but encyclopedia brittanica or whatever was a thing and worked somewhat okay online. Pictures bigger than a thumbnail loaded like a slideshow on dialup, but text was responsive, and text-based online games were becoming more and more common.
The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".
There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. It seems like a worthwhile effort that I support, even if it is also a lot of work involved and it might take some time before it reaches the state …
I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.
Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube's reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I'm not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn't profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).
There were also "no girls on the Internet". Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop's petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.
Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fedive
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Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You'll find some if you poke around the small web enough.
A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren't the default Internet experience, they're hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it's very inspiring and comforting.
Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I'm not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.
Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.
As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it's much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It's even easier to be part of a "community as a service" like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making pos
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Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.
As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it's much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It's even easier to be part of a "community as a service" like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don't even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.
Don't get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.
This entry was edited (Friday, June 6, 2025, 3:08 PM)
Would you say all of that is true for communities outside in the real world? Ive a theory that groups can become so large the negatives nearly always outweigh the positives but I haven't really had time to think it through entirely.
I do think the real world has some differences that make it more difficult. Mostly that whoever is coordinating the larger groups is very likely to have access to more power and resources and therefore is corruptible. And then that's one of the systems that brings about that Pareto distribution sort of imbalance among people. Some inequality in terms of power is not destructive, but too much is almost guaranteed to end badly. But online, the sort of power and resources that are accrued are ultimately just less likely to eventually reach a point of being able to exert full control over the smaller layers of the community. I mean sure, someone could start acting despotic with their own "fiefdom" as another commenter aptly put it, like has sometimes happened with open source repositories or forums, but it's hard for someone's website to get so popular that they're somehow able to directly force changes upon your website (not impossible, I know).
Well-- the bad news is that I now know why the vibes were off yesterday. I'm sick. Good news--it's not Covid. Hopefully it's just my seasonal allergies going absolutely haywire.
Alt text: A tabby cat with light brown and gray stripes is peacefully resting with its eyes closed, leaning against a colorful pillow decorated with stylized cat illustrations in various costumes and hairstyles.
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Alt text: A loaded seafood and sausage dish served on a foil-lined tray, featuring grilled shrimp, sliced sausage, curly fries, chopped green onions, melted cheese, and a drizzle of creamy sauce.
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Right but the point being made is that all jobs are skilled and the ones that people get with no degree and no apprenticeship and no career path to speak of, are the people holding society together. Grocery workers, postal workers, service industry workers, etc. Society is fine if every single private equity firm disappeared over night, it's absolutely not fine without the grocerers, and truck drivers and everyone else doing the "unskilled" labor.
I think you might be making an assumption that I wasn’t. Personally I would consider the examples you gave as similar to an apprenticeship, at least in the context of what I was trying to say in my original comment.
I rememebe when they were called them heroes during covid, but received no increase in pay and were treated like shit again the moment the vaccine existed.
Yeah, it's also interesting that we almost never say "skilled work". It's just work vs. 'Unskilled'. Might as well just stop with the division (which is only useful to billionaires and people in finance). Divide and conquer, I guess...
I'm afraid it would become another marketing/HR term. We call you Core Contributors, which makes it seem like we're being nice to you, behind which curtain we can mess you around and take more of your output for ourselves.
To be honest I rather have people be nice to my face and screw me over behind my back, over them treating me like shit and also screw me over. 'At least they're being honest' is overrated.
Don’t worry. Republicans have a plan. Forcing births of unwanted children with no resources to house, feed, or educate them while relaxing child labor laws should fix that right up.
"In fact, not only does the market assessment of the value of different forms of work not correspond to popular conceptions of what they actually contribute to society, but there actually seems to be an inverse relation: with few exceptions, the principle seems to be, the more one's work is seen as socially useful, the more it is recognized as helping others, the less one is likely to be paid for it." - David Graeber
Unskilled labour refers to those in the precarious and more easily replaced position of workers. It is used by labour advocates to identify those with a greater need for union representation.
It isn't an insult. And the never-ending euphemism treadmill only serves to divide generations and make a handful of people feel important.
This knee-jerk reaction to the term "unskilled labour" reminds me of the one that replaced the term "ebonics" with "AAVE", implying that the black men that came up with the term were offensive.
As I recall, it was renamed due to the conservative controversy created around Ebonics in education, specifically for testing materials, and AAVE was chosen to specifically link to the impact slavery had in the USA in the creation of it, addressing both the need to "market" the idea a different way to avoid the backlash caused by conservatives and provide a more accurate and impactful definition.
I believe the only ones who ever claimed it was derogatory were the ones fighting against its accepted use in formal testing.
Ive taken many economic courses, none of which talk about "skilled" or "unskilled labour". They do, however, brainwash the fuck out of you into believing the post-scarcity capilist need for ever increasing profits not only makes sense, but is a necessary facet of society.
It's derogatory and innacurate description, workers aren't a commodity. Having a college degree doesn't mean you're a specialist. You don't have to have a certification or degree to be skilled. Economist isn't a skilled job because you can't predict the future, it's a self fullfilling prophecy when you apply your own perceptions into descision making. Not everything is a predictable pattern.
Mate, this is very meta with the OP in a bad way. Dismissing someone this way really goes against the values here. Not everyone had the chance to take higher education courses. And not having that chance does not invalidate immediately their views.
I feel like that’s actually pretty logical. “Skilled labor” involves skills that not everyone must have. The things that (nearly) everyone needs to be at least okay at are the things that come up in people’s lives most frequently (things like basic cleaning, socializing, and administrative/organization tasks). Without people to do the things that come up most often, society is going to fall apart.
I’m split on the name though. I understand what it means and don’t take offense (I currently work at a bakery, but I’ve also been a waitress and worked in a call center, all unskilled jobs- I’ve also worked in litigation management for an insurance company and I currently teach German classes too, which are skilled jobs, fwiw), but I get how it rubs some people the wrong way.
Maybe unskilled workas can call each other that, if they don't use the hard 'r'?
Okay, okay, "labour isn't as bad as slavery" and it's "inappropriate to joke about that on the internet."
But yes, maybe the term is demeaning; and maybe it doesn't need to be. I suppose in the end the point is we should value those labourers and their work, even though economically they're easier to mistreat and belittle.
Just because it's a term you learned in school doesn't mean it's not used to hold people back. The term is used to imply that people who aren't skilled don't deserve a living wage and lots of voters fall for it and push the narrative that if you flip burgers you don't deserve to pay rent on time and go to the movies on the same month.
There definitely are jobs that are truly unskilled.
Hauling bags of cement on a construction site
Mucking out animal pens on a farm
Digging ditches with a shovel
Carrying and stacking firewood
These are jobs any able-bodied person can do without any training. Then you have very low skilled jobs such as being part of a moving crew for moving companies. For that one you need to be careful moving heavy and/or fragile objects without breaking them or damaging surroundings. But that’s really more about paying attention to what you’re doing than a skill you would receive training to do.
People take offense to the "unskilled" part, and it's just a stupid nitpick. Unskilled doesn't mean that it's an unimportant doofus jobs, it means it's a job that almost anyone can do. That doesn't make it unimportant.
Everyone can help haul stuff at a construction site. Everyone can collect garbage bags around the city. Everyone can deliver mail and packages. These jobs require no special education, you can literally get hired and start tomorrow without any training. But that does not make the job unimportant.
This post just feels like the person looks for another wording to be mad about.
Usually people use the term "unskilled labor" as justification that those working said jobs don't have any skills and therefore shouldn't earn a living wage.
The anger isn't in the denotation of the term, but the connotation.
Yeah you have to remember to look at it through the conservative lens where humanity is inherently hierarchical and social darwinism means the lesser tiers of society do not deserve your attention.
Not exactly. Unskilled labor simply refers to jobs that do not require a formal certification. There are many economically unskilled jobs that require a high amount of expertise. One such example is often a chef (specifically, the ones which don't have formal culinary education).
Chefs need to have a deep understanding of food preparation techniques, flavor profiles, food safety, menu planning, and the ability to work quickly and efficiently in a high-pressure environment. It is a demanding job that few people can do. Yet, according to economics, these people would be unskilled.
Personally, part of me believes that people shouldn't nitpick the percieved inaccuracy of jargon based upon the usage of words in common parlance.
The other part of me wishes that the experts would have chosen a less polarizing term with more neutral connotations.
This entry was edited (Friday, April 4, 2025, 10:29 PM)
While I agree with your point, Chef is definitely a skilled labour job. Literally need qualifications in food safety, if you don't in whatever country you're from that is more horrifying than it not being classed as skilled tbh.
By this uncommon and misinterpreted definition a master sword maker would also be unskilled. Which is not how common literature, speech, nor economics applies it.
This isn’t true. Watch some POV videos of people working fast food jobs. No one is saying that McDonald’s and vascular surgery require the same amount of skill and training, but that’s not the point. We need to recognize that what’s considered menial is quite complex. Look at how long it’s taking to replace people doing basic jobs with machines.
Yes, in a company of a million employees some are extra fast and make a show if it to get Youtube views. Watch people at McDonald's WITHOUT YouTube (scary, I know) and you'll see that it's just some dudes flipping burgers. Like anyone does on a weekend.
Yes, a monkey couldn't do it, but that's not the definition of skilled vs unskilled.
Yes, there's a number of skills that go into putting your clothes in the morning as well. But any able-bodied human can do the job with a day of training.
There's nothing special required to open a restaurant in Sweden, which I think most would agree is a developed country. You need a business license and a food license (unsure how to translate), neither of which requires an education or training, and you need a proper location for preparing and serving food. Employees can be literally anyone off the street. You have to pass health inspections, but the inspectors don't care much about details if nothing dangerous is going on.
I personally appreciate your example of chef and had to delete the rest of what I had to say because it got way too emotional. It's a frustrating situation when you're making people happy by providing a service and still not being rewarded because capitalism.
I feel like this is falling down the same trap though. Ex. Someone who's picked strawberries for 5 years is going to be FAST.
They are effectively a skilled laborer even though the job itself is "unskilled". Yes anyone "can" do it but there are those who have effectively been doing it for years who are great at it and are skilled at it.
We started calling them "essential workers" when we needed them and now they're back to "unskilled labor". The language a society uses says a lot about their values.
The oldest jobs, which are the most important, are in some sense paid what they were when the job was created, so mothers are paid nothing, while farm workers, cooks, homemakers are paid next to nothing.
Traditionally, mothers are 'paid' in the sense that they receive the fruits of the family's labour. So, if Daddy back in 2032 BC worked his arse off to get an iPhone, Mummy gets to play on it too. Or food or something idk
Right but this argument is due to a conflict between economics jargon and everyday language. The people opposed to the term “unskilled labour” are unhappy about the negative connotations of the word “unskilled.”
It's an emotional response to point out how a word has been used to keep people from being paid what they're worth? I think it's an emotional response to cling so hard to a word that could very easily be changed and hurt no one.
I disagree. This is a term which exists simultaneously in economics and in everyday speech. The everyday meaning has negative connotations whereas the economics term does not. People are responding to this conflict by trying to get economists to change their term in order to avoid the negative connotations.
I, personally, don’t agree with this approach to language in any case. Linguistic prescriptivism of this sort is authoritarian and highly susceptible to backlash. It’s vulnerable to the mistaken belief that if someone accedes to an authority’s demands, they now agree with the authority.
Everyday speech in an economic context but not by economists. That’s the difference. Two surgeons discussing an appendectomy over lunch is different from two random people in a bar discussing an appendectomy.
They’re both using a term from a technical context but their understanding of the technical meaning of the term is different and the connotations are different.
No, why do you think that is the case? Most wages are paid out based on what the market fr that job pays not based on whether it is skilled or unskilled. My brother makes more in sales (unskilled) than my buddy who is a neurosurgeon.
Because I've heard people use it as an excuse for why minimum wage shouldn't cover bills and they vote accordingly. Language matters.
It’s scientific jargon. If you are having an emotional response to it that’s not the fault if the field.
Scientific jargon can and has changed to better represent what they're talking about no reason this can't either unless that makes some people too... emotional.
You are having a purely emotional response to scientific jargon.
We're humans who have emotional responses to things, and we should be cognizant of that when choosing our words. We should also be aware of how bad actors may use our words to manipulate public opinion via those emotions.
We don't use things like mongoloid or crippled anymore even though they were once considered perfectly acceptable medical terms. Unskilled is inherently derogatory, and the thesaurus is offering alternatives such as fundamental, foundational, or generalized. I like generalized labor the best so far, because it contrasts perfectly with specialized.
What a wild comment. You confirm that the phrase itself isn't the issue, but rather how some people are misusing it for their own gain, and yet you manage to put the blame on the phrase itself.
What would you expect to happen if the phrase changed to something else? That people wouldn't twist and change its meaning to fit their needs? Is your plan to keep changing the phrase each time it gets misused, eventually leading to a scenario where the phrase and its meaning are completely separate?
In scenarios such as this, its better to spread the word about the original intention of the phrase, rather than blaming it.
Because nuanced discussion often requires context where colloquialisms typically don't. You could absolutely say "jobs that require no specialized training at the outset", but if you're writing a paper or having a technical discussion in a labor field, that is really cumbersome. It's easier to pick a context-appropriate one or two word solution. This is generally called a term of art.
It's worth looking up "term of art" for a few more examples if my description didnt do it for you.
The answer here being that unskilled labor is not derived from everyday language, and people who can't conceive of that being the case are angry about it. And, by probability, are more likely to work jobs classified as "unskilled labor". 🤷
That's no accident. A job is considered "unskilled" (or "unspecialized" as I like to call it) if any adult who's gone through the education system and is reasonably healthy can do. Since society would collapse without these jobs, we want to do everything we can to make sure we always have people who can do them. How do you make that happen? By designing the education system to teach everyone the skills to do them and making it mandatory to complete your schooling. As a result, nearly everyone is capable of doing some of the most important jobs for our society.
Good point. But not just from planned education, I think. Most jobs can be done with a body and mind in moderate working order - our bodies and minds are amazing things! Picking fruit does not require a school education, nor does laying bricks require a gym routine. Though laying them straight needs training, reading instructions needs literacy and reporting results needs numeracy. Education helps.
When you start really thinking about it, often unskilled jobs are nearly all the necessary jobs for humanity to survive. No one is going to suffer if your PhD army can no longer update twitter, I'm afraid to name the percentage, but most skilled jobs are useless in the sense that they're not really making anything of value.
I think SEO jobs are good example of this.
This entry was edited (Saturday, April 5, 2025, 12:05 AM)
Putting skills in the right place does help. Your postdoc in agricultural sustainability will help all the "unskilled" agricultural labourers. Without you, they produce less in the long run. But without them, you get nothing at all.
Most peoples jobs in society are necessary I think. Doesnt matter if youre a construction worker or a programmer, we rely on all of it to eek out a better standard of living. How many people do you know have a job that isnt benefiting society in some way?
This entry was edited (Saturday, April 5, 2025, 1:03 AM)
Me! I worked most of my life with 3D and Photoshop. Some stuff i did might have increased some sales, some might have been fun, but all were useless and mostly advertisement. I always wondered, if everyone working in ads died, what effect would it have on humanity? Rich people would be worse, but humanity as a whole would be better.
That's just my field. I can think of quite a few areas that are just harmful and exists mostly to make rich richer.
I disagree. Without Frtiz Haber inventing nitrogen fertilizer there wouldn't even be people to do unskilled labor.
This class battle has to stop. All economic fields are productive given that the market is valuing it. What's not productive is corruption and hoarding and middle manager fiddling. We have science to determine all that so we don't even need to gut feel this out.
Someone researching "transgender mice" can low key add more value than thousands or millions of "unskilled laborers". We need to diversify and value all avenues of our collective production and growth because thats just a smart thing to do. Except for billionaires and hoarders which clearly are a net negative.
This entry was edited (Saturday, April 5, 2025, 1:36 AM)
This spawned a long comment-chain argument, which I ran out of headspace to properly read and analyse, but I just want to say thank you to you both for arguing in (what looks like) good faith with citations and well expressed logic. It's a credit to the community.
This entry was edited (Saturday, April 5, 2025, 12:59 AM)
Only because society won't let prisons pay their prisoners 10¢ an hour to flip hamburgers at McDonald's. That's the next step to avoid collapse of the average standard of living.
No labor is unskilled it's classist bullshit to make us think we're better than each other. Farm work especially so since there are weird local tricks for local planting styles and crops.
Anyone who has worked "unskilled" positions can tell you that every job has a learning curve and experience counts for a lot.
This is particularly true in jobs that require a degree of physical endurance and manual dexterity. Picking a vegetable is easy. Picking a thousand vegetables an hour (without bruising the produce or ruining the plant) for eight hours a day is quite difficult. And skilled workers are far more lucrative to the farm owner than clumsy neophytes.
What often defines a service worker as "unskilled" isn't the work, but the degree to which automated capital and real estate ownership are integrated into the workflow. The more leverage the employer can exert over the hiring market, the more easily they classify labor as "unskilled"' and downgrade the pay.
I know I am posting in a very random way. Crab cigars that I got along with the Viva Las Vegas sushi roll as a part of my lunch on Thursday. It was so good!
Alt text: A plate of crispy, golden-brown cheese sticks filled with a creamy crab and cheese mixture, served with a small cup of sweet and sour dipping sauce. The dish is set on a marble table alongside a green plate with utensils wrapped in a napkin, a glass of soda, and condiments like hot sauce and pepper in the background.
From waiting for the "Three Musketeers" ballet to start on Sunday afternoon at a local performing arts center.
Alt text: A photo taken from the audience of a theater before a performance. The stage curtain is down, displaying a vintage-style map of the English Channel with "England" on the left and "France" on the right. The theater is filled with people waiting for the show to begin, and an orchestra is seated in the pit below the stage. The foreground shows the backs of several audience members, including women with styled hair and floral or patterned clothing
Alt text: A close-up photo of an artfully arranged sushi roll on a black rectangular plate. The roll features a variety of colorful toppings including slices of raw fish, avocado, and different types of fish roe in green, orange, and black. Inside the roll, ingredients like tempura shrimp, tuna, and cucumber are visible. The background shows a modern restaurant setting with pink chairs and blurred decor.
See, I exchanged my 100% S&P500 401k to SPAXX in December, waiting for the crash. I've made 10%~ doing nothing! It took me a while to realize, but I'm finally going to buy the dip.
For the folks slow on the uptake, my ape brain has seen enough crashes to finally realize what was coming, and I got out at peak and going to jump back in after it dips to a certain threshold.
Unlike wealth, losses usually trickle down. When companies go bankrupt their employees loose their jobs. Millionaires actually love recessions, Jack Welch said:
Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.
The 2002 recession was not as global and universal as later ones. The dot com bubble mostly affected tech companies, and the internet was not as common as nowadays. I asked my parents once how they felt that recession, when I first read about it later, I was in school in 2002. They said they didnt even know there was a recession that time, in eastern europe it wasnt noticably worse than the chaos of the 90s
There is a simpsons episode about the bubble, s13e18, aired in 2002:
Didn't that pay off so well. How many American soldiers were killed, injured, or traumatized? How many innocent Afghani and Iraqi civilians were murdered? And for what? ISIS and the Taliban now have complete control over that entire region.
And to the people saying how much better Bush was than Trump as well as the dumb as fuck democrats embracing that fucking war criminal Cheney, I say you all need to get your god damned head examined. Trump's election denialism was born out of the Brooks Bros riot in Florida during the 2000 election and Trump is absolutely hoping for some terrorists to kill Americans so he can declare martial law and suspend elections in order to remain president indefinitely. Bush and Cheney lead to this. This was every republican's goal.
Worth remembering that Trump didn’t recreate the Republican Party, he just embraced the manipulative aspects of republicans and made that his entire thing. Would I rather have Bush or Trump? It’s honestly a tough one. I could see Trump killing our democracy. Maybe that’s worse than the Iraq and Afghanistan war war.
I'm actually an elder millennial, but I guess I can hold off on any further investment until you get your Classified Fowl Arbitration cert reinstated 🤷
Don't worry tho, because although everyone's broke as shit, the houses you bought in the 90s when you were a young child are worth like 10 times as much now!
Pffft, I used money from delivering the morning papers to buy my first house. When I was 11, ELEVEN!! However it was the delivering of milk that really helped me afford my first yacht! Every morning for months I got at 4am to deliver it. That was a hard 3 and a half months I can tell you!
You guys should just pull yourselves up by the avocados, and stop eating so many bootstraps!!
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You didn't know to sell one of your beanie babies to pay for a house? That's like wu tangs #1 rule: diversify. Going all in on beanie babies is all fun and games until your divorce has you fighting over the most precious things in your life.
Ill give a small example here how I know we are fucked. I leased a vehicle for 1900 a month back in 2022, the lease is up in October. I just bought a new 100,000 dollar truck today, I'm over 200,000 in debt already with barely enough to cover my monthly payments. They should not have given me this truck. But I'm a business, they give me anything. Sure I'll make 2 mill this year but they never once asked anything once I said a company was buying it. I'm personally saving money on this transaction but the fact that the financial system allowed this to happen worrying to say the least.
After skimming @Nemean_lion@lemmy.ca post history I didn't notice anything about working in tech nor having it snow where they live, but I did notice a lot of posts about killing their neighbors, which was concerning to say the least
Could need a pickup with the tool boxes and shit built in, or maybe a hydraulic lift. My family owned a construction company for decades, and we always had one of those in the driveway, and while I don't know how much they were, they were definitely more expensive.
I work in environmental reclamation, I haul things a lot. And travel down rough roads a lot. I'm actually downsizing to this truck because the other ones are too damn expensive.
I know there have been people predicting they live in the "end times" for all of humanity. But I can't help but feel like our generation isn't crying wolf like the others.
It’s almost like granting a supreme veto to a single, wholly imaginary ideology, and positioning it as a monoculture for how society values activities and production, is problematic.
We apparently did away with it once before through the separation of church and state, maybe it’s time to force the separation of bank and state.
Though it reminds me of a conversation you can over hear in one of the Divine Divinity ~~Baldurs Gate~~ games between two skeletons, who talk themselves into how they shouldn't function, and then promptly fall to the floor in a pile.
Edit: corrected the game
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 7:34 PM)
You start noticing this pattern after some decades. Always accompanied by "we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations". The period before is sold as a great economic time, despite that they called it a crisis back then and also 'needed' austerity measures to get back to the prosperity of the previous period. The western standard of living has been destroyed bit by bit since the post WW2 period with this tactic, not for the multinationals, banks, stock folks OC, that's where the stolen money goes to. The ones in power telling us in their paid press how great 'the econonomy' is doing bcs stock line go up and BS GDP up. In reality that means more billions in the pockets of a few oligarchs while income equality is growing.
To make matters worse, well, for my generation here in Denmark, 1983 is the smallest generation alive. That means we have the least voting power. Between us and larger voter pools, it's pretty clear who politicians will cater to.
It never really felt to me like the tech bubble crash was that big a deal to many people outside of a group of greedy rich assholes. There's always collateral damage of course, but the only change I really witnessed was a stop to people getting paid 20x the median salary after spending a few weeks with a Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours book.
Capitalism works when it's allowed to work, and part of that is strong social safety nets... For the people, not the companies.
If we'd let banks and businesses fail in 2008 it, it would have been devastating at the time, but we wouldn't be in this hot mess today. Because the government is so friendly to failed businesses, models that play fast and loose can make huge profits, squirrel away that cash, fail, and then get bailed out by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, slower and more stable institutions get outcompeted in the short term, and don't get bailed out when they withstand the failing economy events.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
Oh, and we need actual monopoly laws. No way in hell Amazon isn't a monopoly.
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 5:01 PM)
If it hasn't yet it's about to. 1-5% daily drops across the stock market for the past month pretty much and now with a 10%+ minimum tariff on all imports means everything is going to get way more expensive. I'll chew a brick if we're not in a recession by the end of the year
Just keep contributing the same amount if you can. Best case scenario you are buying low and it will go up a lot in the future, worst case is money is not worth anything so it doesn't matter anyway. Unless you are retiring in like, 5 years, then you might be fucked.
Yeah, this is pretty much where I am right now. And no, I've still got 2-3 more 'once in a lifetime recessions' to live through before I retire, which is why I'm ignoring it. That's future spooky's problem.
That brick might be your only source of essential minerals and nutrients by the end of this year. You'll need to learn how to go without, and make that single brick last until 2028. Also, you'll need to work 80hrs a week to afford it.
Don't forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
Many of us are ambivalent. We are overwhelmed by the terrible things happening around us. We can stick our heads in the sand, but we can't help fix things if we don't know what is happening. I take breaks from Trump/Musk news, but I can't stay away forever if I want to fight for my family, and maybe my country.
By all means everyone should take breaks from the media and not doomscroll constantly. But if you disengage completely you will have given the people making the world like this everything they want. They want you to be apathetic and disengaged. They want you to stay home on every election day. They want you to ignore everything they are doing, because criminals can work better when there's no one watching what they are doing.
So, for your mental well being please do take regular time off from the 24hr news cycle but also, look into how you can help to turn back the tide. See where you can volunteer if you have the time, join your PTA and keep an eye on your local library (these have been major targets of right wing nut jobs looking to undermine progress), or if you are too busy then just simply repost the positive messaging from those few in our government who are doing all they can to hold the line against this regime. Challenge the thoughts of those you know who are either giving in to apathy or voted for Trump but are even slightly doubting his actions. Every crack can be
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By all means everyone should take breaks from the media and not doomscroll constantly. But if you disengage completely you will have given the people making the world like this everything they want. They want you to be apathetic and disengaged. They want you to stay home on every election day. They want you to ignore everything they are doing, because criminals can work better when there's no one watching what they are doing.
So, for your mental well being please do take regular time off from the 24hr news cycle but also, look into how you can help to turn back the tide. See where you can volunteer if you have the time, join your PTA and keep an eye on your local library (these have been major targets of right wing nut jobs looking to undermine progress), or if you are too busy then just simply repost the positive messaging from those few in our government who are doing all they can to hold the line against this regime. Challenge the thoughts of those you know who are either giving in to apathy or voted for Trump but are even slightly doubting his actions. Every crack can be a door. And, most importantly, VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.
The economic crisis's have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it's just that they're not accidental, they're not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined... they're engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say "I just gotta save up enough so I can..."
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of "young, energetic pioneers." (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and str
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This is the truth.
The economic crisis's have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it's just that they're not accidental, they're not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined... they're engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say "I just gotta save up enough so I can..."
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of "young, energetic pioneers." (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone's pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don't own.
I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
But it's looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights... we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It's such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We're facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies a
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we could be a generation that takes power back
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights... we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It's such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We're facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn't work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
This is a message the media owners want us all to accept.
In my experience, very few people want to die or commit violence for some billionaire's agenda.
Most people just want to live their lives and maybe live to see the assholes in charge have to pretend to care what the rest of us think.
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 6:54 PM)
Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it's a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it's only getting worse? I've seen my best years by now
It’s the same crisis, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 6:06 PM)
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
It's already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
That's why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don't even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don't care. What matters is that the wealth isn't pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.
Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you're forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.
Trump45 term benefitted signifciantly from QE based suppressed low rates that inflated financial assets, and so made rich people richer without creating inflation as wages and jobs were flat (until way down from covid mismanagement). He/sycophantic media could boast about economy without improving people's lives.
this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
This is probably true for industries like fashion, but I disagree with this point applying in general. There is only so much food, gasoline, and paper products an individual is willing to buy, no matter how rich.
The restaurant industry, for example, would collapse as we know it if most non-wealthy people suddenly don't have any extra income to spend on prepared food. They need velocity in orders just to remain open at all. I doubt most places could remain open off of a few rich people buying a lot.
This isn't to say that they won't stop extracting more from the lower earners. Many of them would be fine killing off industry if it makes themselves richer. I personally think all of it's a short-sighted cash grab that's gonna keep poisoning the economy until something changes.
For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
You've gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
The top 10% arent spending 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It's actually quite the opposite.
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 7:38 PM)
I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s a symptom of the concentration of wealth.
But if you’re a politician and want a quick, popular, short-term solution you get quicker effects giving the big spenders more money. It would be better to lift everyone, but that takes a lot more work.
Which is what’s been happening for decades, and has gotten us into this mess. We’ve been kicking a lot of cans and we’re running out of road.
Except that isn't true at all. The COVID stimulus checks were a huge boon to the economy and cost about 800 billion dollars, meanwhile just the first round of trump tax cuts are projected to cost the US 1.5trillion. Dollar for dollar, providing spending power to the lower income earners generates more economic stimulus. Talk to someone making less that 200k a year, and there is a laundry list of items they need or want to purchase. Ask a billionaire what they are waiting for the money to buy, and it's nothing. When you have an unlimited check book, why would you wait?
The whole reason why the top 10% spend 50% of the economy, is because they have 99% of the disposable income. The idea that the poorer 90% of us are hoarding money more than the freaking multi-million/billionaires is laughably out of touch.
Exactly. The only real problem with the covid stimulus was that they were implemented quickly, and that they occurred simultaneously with covid-related supply chain disruptions. That's why so much inflation happened. You could make that level of stimulus permanent without any inflationary effect as long as you slowly ramped up the stimulus over a decade or so. You wouldn't want to implement a $20k/year UBI overnight. That would cause huge inflation. But if you slowly ramped it up, that would give time for the production system to slowly expand to meet the need.
This part I'm not on board with, because the majority volume is going to be doing that either way. Anyone who would see this advice would just be ruining themselves to make some vague statement if they followed it.
Fair, it's too general to say. More specifically, pulling out because the market is down can just as easily lock those losses in when you'll recover them by simply waiting. Sure if you can cut your loss then do so, especially with stop loss. But if you're just using index funds there's less (or worse) of a point in reacting to the market. So it doesn't really apply to people who are more hands on.
Sure because "buying the dip" in regards to a recession is totally about someone buying half a share and not corporations vacuuming assets out of the economy.
A percentage is a percentage, regardless of how much money you have. Your reply was that ~~investing~~having 'the money' made me 'the problem' as if only wealthy people could buy stocks. I satirized that, because it takes very little money to invest in the stock market. Whether you have other reasons to choose not to do so is a different matter.
This entry was edited (Thursday, April 3, 2025, 5:38 PM)
Nope, participation in a system that's forced on you isn't consent. But you can choose to do something to change the system. Get active, march, vote, organize.
Not really. In today's world, a couple having assets of up to a few million is the equivalent of someone 50 years ago having a paid off house and a pension. That's the kind of assets you need if you want to finance a basic middle class retirement.
That's usually a house. But yeah if they have a million in a 401k then they're part of the problem. Those funds are sitting in investment companies like Blackrock fueling the primacy of Wall Street over everything.
Having a million in a 401k today is like having a pension 50 years ago. If you want to actually retire in this capitalist hellscape, that's what you need to have. A million in a 401k is like $40k/year of retirement income. And it's not like pension funds don't invest their savings in Wall Street either.
The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there's nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.
Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.
The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free ma
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The only way to really make capitalism work in the long term is if you pair it with sufficient social spending to provide a substantial redistributive effect. A free market, if you can maintain it, is a wonderful thing. Competition breeds innovation and efficiency. The problem is that there's nothing capitalists hate more than a free market. As soon as any company gets big enough, or any capitalist gets wealthy enough, they start directing their wealth to buying public policy that will give them an unfair advantage in the market. And as soon as any company gets enough market share, they start engaging in uncompetitive business practices if not heavily regulated.
Marx was fundamentally right. Capitalism is an unstable system. Even if you could magically start a society with a perfectly free market, it would inevitably collapse into oligarchy. And when the oligarchs push things far enough that enough people are desperate enough, oligarchy collapses into fascism.
The free market has a lot of merit to it. But ironically, the only way you can maintain even a vaguely free market is by heavy handed government intervention. You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets. Free markets require heavy government intervention in order to persist long term.
You need a large redistributive mechanism to prevent wealth accumulation at the top, and you need strict regulation on the size of businesses to prevent them from dominating markets.
We had those things, and we can bring them back. If we survive the next four years, I suspect most Americans will be less opposed to a wealth tax and an FTC/DOJ that can actually do its job.
Take heart, in 10 years the worst of the boomers in power today will be dead. In 20 years there will be almost no boomers left. Hopefully there will be enough of a country left to fix once they're all dead.
In about 25 years most countries will be warzones and anyone that cant afford whatever the elite are charging for the few freshwater sources left on the planet will be dead or enslaved. anyone within twenty degrees of the equator will have fled or be dead, and anyone living above ground anywhere else will live in nonpermanent shelters due to the yearly storms that destroy standing structure.
boomers will be taking the worlds habitable range with them, and leaving us with a nightmare.
They grew up in a for the most part prosperous time, middle class had 2 cars in the driveway, jobs were easier to obtain, it's no wonder alot of them think the way they do.
Think about it this way: They were literally the most spoiled highest quality-of-life group of humans to ever exist on Earth in any timeline.
Ubiquitous access to healthcare and vaccinations for longer life.
Access to pensions and retirement options no longer available where the employer did all the legwork to ensure they had a future post-work so they didn't have to learn a thing about investing or retirement savings.
Infrastructure that was borne from the Great Depression, so they had roads, bridges, dams all built up to last their lifetime with no care about maintenance, as they figure, "oh it was always there, it will always be there," so no money was committed to maintenance we are now having to do, freeing that money up to live like kings and queens in the short-term.
Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that "walk in and hand them a resume" trope they love to perpetuate.
The most modern travel technology and geopolitical climate to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on the p
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Think about it this way: They were literally the most spoiled highest quality-of-life group of humans to ever exist on Earth in any timeline.
Ubiquitous access to healthcare and vaccinations for longer life.
Access to pensions and retirement options no longer available where the employer did all the legwork to ensure they had a future post-work so they didn't have to learn a thing about investing or retirement savings.
Infrastructure that was borne from the Great Depression, so they had roads, bridges, dams all built up to last their lifetime with no care about maintenance, as they figure, "oh it was always there, it will always be there," so no money was committed to maintenance we are now having to do, freeing that money up to live like kings and queens in the short-term.
Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that "walk in and hand them a resume" trope they love to perpetuate.
The most modern travel technology and geopolitical climate to go on vacation pretty much anywhere on the planet, and access to time to have vacation.
Relatively calm planetary climate so they didn't have to worry about things like today's weather weirding with tornadoes where they shouldn't be, hurricanes going inland, hail everywhere, and on and on, all the while driving their 5 MPG giant SUVs all over the country while tossing their food wrappers on the side of the road.
Cheap (during the majority of their lives) to relocate anywhere in the US or abroad if they wanted to work or live somewhere else, or be "snowbirds" when they're too wimpy to tolerate the winter in their home states.
The same geopolitical climate prevented them having to grow up in war-torn anywhere.
Access to any kind of entertainment imaginable any time anywhere.
Artificially post-world-war inflated US economy that took some decades to spin down (that "Great Again" they fap to) - which only happened because the US joined so late and had few losses ourselves. The war never happened at home, so we got out for minimal effort/casualties/infrastructure loss.
And they got to adult in an age of computer technology that enables them as olds to not have to drive their car, pick up food, or do any errands they don't want to do themselves, all without having to learn any technical skills because the tech was designed for idiots.
No human generation before or after them got to, or likely will ever, experience such a prosperous story-arc. They should consider themselves damn lucky and act like it, while supporting future generations to have a sliver of what their spoiled asses were able to enjoy.
But do they? No? Why? Because the are spoiled rotten. When Boomers were young, the weren’t called Boomers. The were called the „Me-Generation“. And rightfully so, cause most of them only think about personal short term gains.
Modern technology like cell phones, computers, medicines and treatments have upended how things work. Imagine how hard it would be to go to a college or university and not have access to google or reddit. Or how hard it would be to have to type up multiple copies of everything instead of just sending an email with multiple recipients.
MMR vaccines starting with measles in 63, mumps in 67 and rubella in 69, Polio in 55-61ish, Haemophilus influenzae type b '85. Anyone who is a boomer lived in a period where these things were still a problem in day to day lives.
Their car crashes resulted in fatalities. Ours are generally minor injuries in comparison. The way cars are designed have changed.
They had one or two power outlets per room, if any at all. They didn't have much insulation, let alone sound proofing.
They had to pay a commission to a travel agent to go on vacation, they couldn't just look things up for themselves and had to rely on friends or the agent as to how it is.
If you wanted to look something
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I just disagree that they had it so good.
Modern technology like cell phones, computers, medicines and treatments have upended how things work. Imagine how hard it would be to go to a college or university and not have access to google or reddit. Or how hard it would be to have to type up multiple copies of everything instead of just sending an email with multiple recipients.
MMR vaccines starting with measles in 63, mumps in 67 and rubella in 69, Polio in 55-61ish, Haemophilus influenzae type b '85. Anyone who is a boomer lived in a period where these things were still a problem in day to day lives.
Their car crashes resulted in fatalities. Ours are generally minor injuries in comparison. The way cars are designed have changed.
They had one or two power outlets per room, if any at all. They didn't have much insulation, let alone sound proofing.
They had to pay a commission to a travel agent to go on vacation, they couldn't just look things up for themselves and had to rely on friends or the agent as to how it is.
If you wanted to look something up you had to go to a library.
Few actually owned multiple cars. Growing up in a middle class household in the 80s we had a single car and our family vacation was camping.
There was a constant threat of nuclear war.
Air travel for a long, long time was exclusively reserved for the wealthy and those in business.
Labor laws, as few as we have today, were even worse.
By the time computers came around they were too old to actually partake by and large. My boomer grandparents (because that's the actual boomer age now in their 80s) are dying or are dead and they've never had a cell phone.
Easy to access jobs, homes, boats, cars with little to no education or financial acumen. Just that “walk in and hand them a resume” trope they love to perpetuate.
It's never been that easy! It's always been easy to find a job that pays for a room, but much more is a luxury for so many. There's obviously exceptions but I see loads of people making >200k today without advanced degrees. Anybody who got into programming ~4+ years ago is living like a king today by comparison to most of the 'middle class' in the 50s, 60s, 70s or 80s.
Boomers grew up in a world with a 91% top-tier income tax rate that drove businesses to spend their excess income on products and services, which became their parents' paychecks.
What is so fucked is that many people who experienced ww1 also lived to see ww2 and the build up to it. If there was one thing that the 90s promised was that the future was gonna be a cool and better place. I mean the internet has given me the gift of being able to acquire all the knowledge I want, but the downsides have been massive.
I don't know who came up with this "once a generation" bullshit, but you can see that economic crises were more often than once a decade in 20th century en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o…
well new time iwth gen z, people dont want to work for the richest people for minium salary and opputinity, meanwhile boomer generation just work to work and earn some money, and get some children to fight for even more spare jobs......... AI days coming sooner or later yep yep. still respect them for building our country. but honestly idk why your life should be the job your working on, when the job treats you like bad fish that when you do something to get any attention, your fired.
This tracks as generation’s are getting increasingly closer together now. I’m supposedly the same “generation” as people who graduated from school before I was born. Last few years there’s a new generation every few months - zoomers, generation alpha, beta cucks, etc.
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in reply to Ken • •Whoa... not sure if it's my dark green background contrasting and making this illusion, but they look like they are moving slowly to the left, to me.
I come to Friendica and find I no longer need drugs. Nice.
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