#web 1.5

[kontextmaschine]

Going back to 1997 to tell them that Wal*Mart isn't that relevant now and the 800-pound gorilla of American mass-market retail is Amazon

They mostly have questions about eBay

[f0restpunk]

Somewhere In Mexico, 1988

[whumpster-fire]

I miss the Good Old Days when every website had a “location” field in their profiles and almost everybody used it to shitpost and entered things like “Directly behind you” and “Fell between the couch cushions” and “Hell if I know,” except for places like boating forums and model train enthusiast forums where the entire website consisted of old people who didn’t give a fuck because half the community had met each other IRL and knew where they lived anyway

[kontextmaschine]

hey man. remember cracked.com. remember when the cracked.com writers used to crowdplease by pretending they were gay for each other. what was that all about

No, actually, that was a step in the development of the Internet I missed, by the time it showed up my hopper of amusing & regularly updated novel content was already satisfactorily full

[kontextmaschine]

Are there any books, blogs or articles you'd recommend for learning more about the online culture of Web 1.5 + what factors were driving the transformation over the 2010s into what we have now? I was online while it was happening and still don't really understand it beyond Facebook causing a bunch of websites like CollegeHumor to kill their self hosted sites due to taking views and clicks.

Hm I can't think of sources but in terms of themes I'd look at Buzzfeed and clickbait, Gawker and the stable of feed "verticals" as a business model, and the professionalization of "feminist blogging" into identity media

[kontextmaschine]

It was good that humanity used the capabilities of the internet at that point to make GameFAQs

[kontextmaschine]

Thinking through the significance that Slashdot is not a particularly significant site now and has not been for some time

In the mid-to-late 90s, the fact that it was possibly the only significant website that offered any new content in the 15 minutes since you last checked, its alignment with IT-nerd culture (who then represented a significant share of people on the web during work hours), and the comment (and user moderation and metamoderation as a sort of jury duty) system that offered discussion under each individual news item made it possibly the most significant site on the web, the medium in which user culture (suddenly learning about this new novelty site, hoping it had solid enough hosting that the sudden attention didn't see it "Slashdotted" and overtaxed to the point of falling offline) lived

I still use it to test my internet connection because from this era they made a point of keeping it on a reliable connection and very light and quick to load

[kontextmaschine]

Back in the blog era I had ideas/memes (in the Dawkins sense) I originated in comment sections show up in the New York Times Opinion section twice, which I think actually left me with a pretty accurate sense of my potential