Sums up my experience growing up

[nebula@beach.city]

@ilovecomputers yeah

[josh@hactivedirectory.com]

@ilovecomputers @JoshuaACNewman I see you, Gen X. I am one of us.

[jackyan@mastodon.social]

@ilovecomputers Iʼm old school. Our content is still content. Screw “SEO”, Big Tech, and the surveillance economy. I saw the peak and refused to downgrade. We even took off tracked ads.

[original_peterm@mastodon.social]

@ilovecomputers I feel for you.
In my case it was CB radio. Elitist rebels at first then regulated and finally destroyed from within by wilful, selfish people.

[thenovemberman@bookstodon.com]

@ilovecomputers

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@ilovecomputers yeah, totally the late-GenX experience

[ilovecomputers@xoxo.zone]

@mirabilos 90s kids like me too. So I’d say up to early Gen Z

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@ilovecomputers depends on the region, I suppose

and how literal you take “grow up without the internet” (I pretty much did, only got access at school near the very end of schooling (with floppies to carry data to and fro, mind you), and only at where I lived once adult)

[ilovecomputers@xoxo.zone]

@mirabilos I could be wrong, but the 2010s is when the internet became so normalized in the US that you had to be in abject poverty to not have it. Like I had a friend who wasn’t online until he was in high school in the 2000s

[retrosponge@kind.social]

@ilovecomputers Spot on

[retrosponge@kind.social]

@jackyan @ilovecomputers SEO was the beginning of the death of the usable web.

Proud to say that in all my web-based endeavors over the years I have never once used SEO. It's fucking evil.

[triptych@social.lol]

@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@ilovecomputers I’m not in america

[b_archer@tech.lgbt]

@ilovecomputers I'm 63 and yes to all of this

[b_archer@tech.lgbt]

@triptych @ilovecomputers Yes. It's back to DIY and user created content, like at first.

[jackyan@mastodon.social]

@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:

Read all about the SEO algorithm that I developed for Google

P.P.PS., May 31, 2024: Since this post keeps getting linked by people posting disinformation, and seemingly by those using LLMs and are illiterate themselves, let me make things...

Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog (jackyan.com)

[jackyan@mastodon.social]

@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I sometimes send this to the idiots who enquire about “SEO” with us, even though we say we donʼt do guest posts or “outreach” on our contact pages:

We do not do paid or guest posts—here’s why

Once again, we don't do paid posts from “outreach” or “SEO” companies. Here's why.

Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog (jackyan.com)

[mutkitta@mastodontti.fi]

@triptych @ilovecomputers

Any recommendations?

I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.

What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.

I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.

[f_u_e_n_t_e@mastodon.social]

@ilovecomputers but but but Confetti! (Le Sigh)

[hackillu@mas.to]

@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?