/b/ - Random

I don't miss it because we all need to go outside more anyway

>>132037
How do I cope with the fact that I'm a zoomer and never experienced this?

>>132037
Oh how i wish i could go back to late 2000's/early 2010's deviantart. I miss the sence of curiosity, I miss having a place where you can feel comfortable sharing you art. I miss finding people that are equally as autistic as me and weren't so caught up in drama all the time. I miss visiting other people's profiles and see how they express each other. I even miss stupid stamps where people would debate each other in the comments. I miss groups, I miss how doing art collabs and art trades was common. Do you remember points?? How you could comission people with deviantart points and after accumulating enough points through comissions you could treat yourself to a deviantart membership to further decorate your profile? I miss how people used to have a persona/OC for the sake of making it interact with your friends OC. I miss getting random gift art from friends and sending random gift art myself.I misss when people simply liked posting autistic art about cats and whatnot. I miss the amateurish and yet passionate anime art style doodles people would come up with.. I even miss the random "thanks for the fave!" "thanks for the watch!" comments you'd get on your profile. I even miss how you could go down deviantart rabbit holes and find the weirdest of profiles. Aww why can't i just go back. Things were much more fun it seems. I can't get into any social media, apart from tumblr but tumblr doesn't really push interaction between profiles as much as deviantart did. I just miss it so much .. …

>>132041
DeviantArt was cool because it was both for art and socialising, I talked to many cool people back in the day there. The new UI is absolutely horrible, and it seems that they're trying to kill the socialising part and just turn it into a static gallery.

It feels like there's a general trend to discourage people just talking to each other in web design in general IMO, it's all look-but-don't touch. Internet nowadys feels like a busy subway station or something, lots of people passing through but no one socialising, especially on more than a superficial level. And flat design is possibly the most superifical and soulless style there is.

>>132057
Do you remember the absolute long comment threads that you could find on deviantart of people replying over and over again to each other? it sometimes broke the page too. I miss this level of socialization on the internet

>>132058
Yes. And the forums were funny and just insane too, with different cliques, funny drama and shit. Nowadys it's just a ghost town.

>>132059
i miss the deviantart forums too, i feel like nowadays you can't recreate a platform like this

>>132063
I miss forums in general, they're relaxing, you can lead long going conversations(sometimes over years lol) and due to that deep level of conversation people there seem like actual people despite just being text based.
I remember alot of sites having forums, nowadays here's nothing or only some heavily sanitised comment sections, or maybe a discord channel, but real time chat doesn't feel as comfy and you can't lead conversations there like you can in forums.
I wonder if it's all just due to the commodification of the internet and most of it being run by a few faceless megacorporations, or if people have changed to oand just aren't interested in talking to each other as much as before.

>>132066
>due to the commodification of the internet and most of it being run by a few faceless megacorporations
i do think that's the case honestly, because the commodification of the internet encourages more consummer-like communication instead of communication that actually promote depth

>>132066
symptom of the internet being progressively more accessible and thus used by normies. now if you want to find likeminded people to chat with you'll be searching just as hard as you'd be irl.

i miss iscribble. i miss rp sites. i miss using myspace & imesh and such. i miss little browser games like gaia. i miss using dA and newgrounds. i especially miss forums in general. everything is crowded now, i agree with most of the sentiments here already expressed. the internet is bigger than ever but has never felt so hollow.

the small fragments i have left of enjoying the oldweb era and the culture then is keeping tumblr of all things (depending who you interact with and how you manage your blog) and self-hosted websites remiscent of the geocities era.

it was so easy to just talk to people and make friends online 10, 15 years ago. now even people on an MMO of all things don't want to interact with you. people were never quite as catty and irony poisoned then as the majority of people online now are. i'm very grateful i got to enjoy so many good years online and made friendships i still think about to this day.

I have this feeling with imageboards too. Picrel sort of embodies it. When I go to 4chan now it literally feels the same as going on big social medias or reddit. The only places where I can have some semblance of the older internet are alternative imageboard and even then a lot of people just want to reproduce 4channoid muh epic based retardation amiright XD vibe on any alternative imageboard they can get.

>>132229
where can one find such alternative image boards?

>>132259
consider you already are posting on one

I'm an older zoomer and I took deviantart for granted lol. I miss how you could be an amateur online, your work didn't have to be perfect. People feel very fake and disingenuous nowadays. Everyone projects an image of perfection I find it hard to do that.
Discord isn't that bad, it depends on what server you're on.
Reddit is ok just because it's huge and you can find a subreddit for anything which is cool and many subreddits love collections resources but it made many other spaces obsolete.
I don't know if the current internet will change soon, probably not since a lot of people have jobs about managing and curating the online identity of a brand. Digital marketing is such an insane job to have it depends on like 5 websites not losing significance.

>>132213
Normies just want to use the same spaces their friends' are on so they can also follow their friends and so they can show off their life. That's it. It's why so many use twitter, facebook, and tiktok despite. If they want to learn something then they use Youtube.

I remember either trying to explain what a meme was or a specific meme to a friend in school and she looked at me as if I was insane, this wasn't unprompted she was asking about the meaning of a meme. it's sometimes weird to see her posting memes all day long on fb.

I really miss the pre-2016 internet, it was easy to avoid political conversations and you could enjoy things in peace. I miss old fandom and art spaces the most, they were the most affected. Everything is political and it's someone's job to make sure that it's shoved in your face 24/7.

this thread made me emotional. i grew up on the internet and jesus you definitely dont realize how good things are until its gone. while there was more inconvenience with the old web everything felt much more passionate, whereas everything now is just about getting popular or making a profit. the interactions i had in youtube comment sections last longer than conversations i see on twitter its just sad. there used to be so many ways you could personalize your accounts with html, now its just your username and profile picture.

i also miss how there was much more of a culture before with unspoken rules everyone kind of knew, everything feels so uniform now. its crazy how people will just post their face and use their real name, it was so much more fun to pretend to be someone you werent. i loved being a kid and talking in spaces with older people and being treated like i was one of them because no one knew, it was all anonymous. its painful to see how everything on the internet is expected to be serious and genuine and i see so many people fall for obvious trolls when there was much more of an attitude not to take things online too seriously before.

sorry i got off topic i just think about this a lot.

>>132645
I really wish I could go back. Plus when u were insulted in the internet you wouldn't be expected to take it so serious, after all it is the internet. But now I feel like even the tiniest anonymous insult is treated as cyber bullying. I'm not saying we should go back to insulting literally everyone online but I do think this shift if mentality sorta sucks and erases the fun potential of trolling. Frankly trolling can still be done but i feel like it feels different now as opposed to how it was.

i was thinking about this the other day. obviously, it exists better in our memories, but i do miss when things weren't so centralised. i hate, when i want to look something up, trying to find the right discord server or searching "#[noun]twt". things are easier i think, but >>132057 puts it best, everywhere feels like a busy subway station where everyone is trying to get somewhere else. no one wants to talk at length anymore, even on imageboards, and i think websites like twitter, with it's very specific character count and it's blasting to the top of all social media, made this even more painstakingly obvious.

equally, and i was always going to say this, society and it's interaction with the internet are the problem too. posting yaoi xDD on deviantart or writing a long fanfiction on a specific forum were fun little things you could do, surrounded by people who like these things too, where niche content was eaten up by its niche audience. now, you make an art twitter, it has to be marketable. you write fanfiction, it needs to be a level of sophisticated, and so on, because the hidden goal with everything is profit and popularity. it comes with age partly - no one wants to feel like they spent their 20s doing pointless shit, i suppose - but i think it has a lot to do with everyone trying to sell themselves as something. and obviously megacorp profit too, like >>132066 mentions. twitter makes more money if everyone is using twitter to talk about the millions of different things they like, so they make it "easy" to just make one account. and people are lazy and will buy into it as well. who wants to log onto two dedicated, slower forums to talk about X TV show and X K-pop group, when you can ADHD-speed through every single Netflix release and K-pop debut on twitter instead? the problems that forums had are "solved" by twitter, but twitter users and their content consumption become so bloated and content with the rapid and humungous amount of tweets they can read in just five minutes, that it is inherently never going to work again with forums that are too specific. i think tiktok has injected steroids into this situation as well

i was also a little surprised to find out that younger people online do just use their names. that is insane to me. i haven't used my IRL name online ever. but i guess it all goes back to profit. and also the fact that, with tiktok and instagram being giant, giant, giant platforms right now, the idea shifting from making faceless content (think tumblr posts, and that kind of stuff) to having Your Face at the very front of everything you make. no one wants to be cringe and embarrassing when they have only ever been showing themselves, and not their secret, faceless internet alter ego. i think this is why i also got back on altchans. they are not perfect, but at least it feels a little more like they're serving the purpose i want to get out of the internet. i'm tired of reading 500 tweets, scrolling through perfectly curated (and updated daily, or hourly in stories) instagram feeds, or watching a days worth of content through 10 minute tiktok compilations, and i crave the slowness of an internet that only lives in my memory

>>132053
It is literally all presenting nowadays, more on twitter or tumblr, I guess, than da, but da also
It’s you who are not a teenager anymore

>>132711
t. never been on early 2010's deviantart

>>132037
aside from early DA, i miss when artists had their own very blogs like on blogspot or fc2, i hate how small and crowded internet has become, fuck apple

>>132701
>because the hidden goal with everything is profit and popularity.

IIRC on deviantart a lot of artists would complain if they didn't get comments. "stop liking my art and comment instead!", tumblr had the same mentality of "reblogging helps the artist more". Popularity was always lurking in the background but maybe we didn't notice it that much.

It's kind of funny because art communities lean heavily to the left and never shut up about "smash capitalism, fuck profit, stop monetizing your hobbies" while constantly transforming the art landscape into what it is today. None of them break away from the big centralized website they all chase after the big popular platforms even if it doesn't make sense to post your art there (eg tiktok).
>>132728
I don't mind the internet being crowded, more and more people around the world have access to the internet. The internet being crowded and centralized is what sucks. Everyone hangs out on the same websites and no one wants to venture outside because that's WEIRD and CRINGE

>>132712
Bich, you should've seen my herd of llamas

>>132805
i had 1000+ llamas, fight me

>>132037
i miss autisming around with other people who were like me on here a decade ago and being passionate and genuine over our likings (i still am passionate over the things i like), its not the same anymore in this era

>>132701
I wonder if it also has to do with everyone needing a "side hustle". There's this idea that you NEED to monetize anything you can. Everyone makes so little and everyone is struggling, so why have hobbies when you could use any free time to make more money? It's a toxic mindset to have. The notion that the only way to be successful and get the life you want is to work as much as possible and burn yourself out. Anything you enjoy in your free time needs to be profitable or else you are wasting time and effort. You aren't doing as much as you could and therefore you are never going to be financial comfortable. It's bullshit that the rich push onto poor people to make it sound like it's lazy to want to just enjoy yourself and have fun. All built on the lie that if you hustle enough, or maybe even get internet famous, you too can get rich and finally be happy, finally have your bills taken care of, finally buy a house, finally rest. I hate it. I hate it so much.

I made the decision to leave Twitter a year or so ago and I don't follow anybody on Tumblr but use it to occasionally post stuff I make. Well, okay, I still technically use the sites to look for fanart/fanfics but only when I'm not logged in by finagling with ublock origin and blocking site cookies to stop annoying pop-ups forcing me to sign up/log in. It works for the most part. It's been incredibly good for my mental health but it's also been unbelievably bad for my social skills (which sucked anyway). Overall I'd say it's worth it to not use social media anymore. Even as a teenager, using social media was incredibly hard for me because I was so shy. I hated drawing attention to myself when I followed anybody since they'd obviously get a notification about it, and I didn't like retweeting or liking things that already had a ton of RTs/Likes already because that would also draw attention to me. It was difficult for me to find blogs I liked too, since I didn't really know what to look for. Ended up following a lot of people I didn't like and keeping them on my timelines because I would feel bad for unfollowing (especially if they noticed) which didn't exactly help improve my experience any. I also pretty much gave up on ever finding any accounts that didn't post about horseshit I didn't want to see because even innocent gimmick accounts would feel the need to voice their opinions because their followers wouldn't stop fucking asking if they ~supported so-and-so movement~ and pressuring them to say something. In a way it felt very volatile, like walking on eggshells, make one wrong move and suddenly you get dogpiled. It was the ultimate reason for me to bail out of social media because it was horrible for my anxiety and I was at my limit.

It was a little off-topic, but I mostly wanted to share my story for people who are wondering if they should quit social media or not: if you have nothing to lose, you should just leave. I didn't have a lot of followers, had very few friends/mutuals I talked to enough to miss, so I didn't lose much. I don't have to deal with doomscrolling and mentally ill teens making shit up for validation/brownie points anymore, which is great. Though if there's one thing I do regret: not having a support group to fall back on. I don't talk to anybody now (except my fiance) and find that making friends is especially difficult both as an adult and as someone who detests a solid 90% of people on the internet in the spaces I frequent. I keep ending up in places that eventually get dominated by transgender furries or some shit like that and I genuinely don't know what I should do anymore. If I had a more stable friend group, I'd probably be a little bit better off. Even in a situation where I might meet someone I do like talking to, I'm at the point where I would chicken out anyways because I'm not wholesome enough for "tumblr" friends and I'm not edgy enough for "4chan" friends, I'm a strange in-between that's hard to describe. I also partake in copious amounts of cringe which could make or break some friendships.

Anyways, a little more on topic: I've got a neocities now since it's slowly becoming a thing for people who want to get away from social media, so I have something to do but I'm really bad at web design so it's kinda hard for me to actually figure out how to pull off certain things. I also don't really know what actually use it for sometimes, so I often find myself at a loss about that as well. It's fun making it look cute and pastel but I often feel lost trying to build it. I recommend it for anybody who wants their own little space like back in the day. Otherwise, I basically just spend most of my time watching videos on YouTube and listening to podcasts on Spotify while I work on personal projects.

Ah and for a last thought on the whole "climate of the internet" thing now: It's both a mix of not being young fresh-faced bright-eyed teens anymore and the fact that the environment of the internet as a whole is extremely different. People really are more touchy these days because of excessive internet useage causing a special kind of cerebral decay and I very firmly believe that it's not just imagined. It's hard to find others to talk to when the people you want to talk to are hiding from the vocal ones that you don't even want to interact with.

>>132037
This thread is giving me ideas. I've got some basic webdev skills under my belt and I've been thinking of starting a website, and I might just pull the trigger now.

Would anyone be interested in a new DA? With a better interface than the awful modern one, messaging, likes and all that. Is there something I can already host?

>>132963
Yes please do. I'll be happy to see your idea in action. Do you have tumblr?

is there any hope for the internet becoming a bit more like how it was in 2000-2010? I see lots of people making a neocities, and there's that new myspace clone called spacehey that seems to be popular with gen z and millennials
also I've seen more people being interested in places like livejournal, dreamwidth, and forums
I just can't stop feeling nostalgic for the 2000s internet and reading through old sites and consuming media that was popular or new back then

>>132963
People have already made art gallery sites though, what's the point of adding to the list?
It's not like people who want a community can't use those already, and unsurprisingly there is no semblance of "community" in any new indie sites that spring up
People just don't talk to each other anymore. I find CC cozy but even on imageboards people hardly make actual conversation or content.
sorry to be pessimistic though. It's just that your idea isn't unique

>>133001
Yeah I do that too (the last sentence). Most people wouldn't want to go back to DMs over IMs on websites I think, not to mention that literacy and attention spans are decreasing by the year, so those more meaningful conversations that happened on older sites are rarer. The only way that kind of internet could even remotely return is if a) the culture is de-retarded (unlikely) and/or b) a subset of people make a new website and gatekeep it mercilessly (also relatively unlikely but hey, some of the folks in this thread seem into the idea and I'd like it too in theory).

Keep the faith tho, and don't give in. You must resist the entropy when feasible.

>>133031
literacy and attention spans decreasing is because of social media usage? if so it's creating a negative feedback loop - the more you use mainstream social media the dumber you get and the dumber you get the harder it is to use anything that isn't mainstream social media
in some of the more niche hobby communities I'm in some people are pretty gatekeepy and they kinda remind me of how things were with genuine discussion happening, so I have hope of things being similar to how they were when the younger gens inevitability get fed up with big tech/corpos controlling everything online

i miss old art spaces, i miss old fandom spaces, i truly believe we are in the middle of a technological dystopia and it's only gonna get worse from here. nowadays you can't enjoy doing things for the sake of doing them, it all has to be wrapped up in some woke virtue signaling. everyone in art communities acts like their cartoons are the antifascist resistance, god forbid you want to like or dislike a show without attaching a laundry list of reasons its problematic. think a celebrity is hot? ummm thats a parasocial relationship, sweaty. im so tired anons.

>>132963
Would be lovely. But please inform yourself about formulating a proper TOS, site and content rules, and site management in general. There's already been a couple attempts at creating dA alternatives which usually failed because the people running them had no fucking idea how to run a website.

>>132701
>it comes with age partly - no one wants to feel like they spent their 20s doing pointless shit
I think you unintentionally captured a really important part of the problem. The fact that something isn't profitable makes it worthless in the eyes of most. People wrote these things and remained proud of it because they were labors of love and not because they made money. Now our culture deems something valuable only if it is able to make money.

>>133123
yeah it's weird, back in the day you did have some level of moralfaggotry and people arguing over if liking this or that was bad…. but nowadays i feel like it's blown out of proportion and you're not even allowed to be a fan of a specific franchise if the creator is even deemed slightly problematic. I'm thinking about stuff like Harry Potter, Genshin Impact or even Omori. I see people harrassing each other simply for liking these even if they don't care about the creator (JK is based tho).

>>132037
I miss deviantart, I mean it's still there but it's shit now. I don't understand the REASON, websites feel the need to keep changing their designs when it was already PERFECT. Is it just web designers trying to keep themselves employed? Old deviantart was peak comfy.

>>133123
People who still enjoy things for the sake of enjoying them though are a priceless gift to this earth. Fuck it and make your own "problematic" art as long as it's genuine.

I feel like the AI shit put the final nail into the dA coffin. Lots of people left over it(alot I followed left earlier because of other fuckups), since there's absolutely no flooding protection AI art floods the site and buries anything else, there's users now with thousands of submissions weeks after registering.
I left it for newgrounds, which still has a bit of that 2000s feel left. At least the place has is well moderated and the filters work so I don't have to see coomer shit, and it has a BBS, I need forums in my art communities.

>>220643
I hardly see any ai art on da.
Yes it's full of bots..
But ai art is nothing but a 5 minute novelty. Ultimately it's easy to get bored with it because it feels so much like crass or cheesy HDR photography. Limited. You cant achieve anything you really want with ai art.. Unless you're going to go and write code with it I guess, Now that would be useful.

Ai art is really cheap looking compared to real art which is still downright everywhere. All over linktree, Instagram, twitter, etc. You can't find artists portals with ai art unless you're looking really hard.

Same with tumblr and pixiv. EVEN Pinterest filters 90% of it out of my feed.

YES I miss this so much

>>132037
I definitely miss old DeviantArt, but I also miss Gaia more. I remember I made some really incredible friendships on there back in the day, and I always looked forward to log in and play zOMG or read the latest webcomic. Or posting on the forums.

I get kind of frustrated and melancholic when I think about it, because I was slightly too young at the time to really be able to take advantage of older social sites/forums/etc so I feel like I missed out sort of. I was always lying about my age and trying to act older to cover it up back when those sites were at their heyday.

>>220651
>ai art is nothing but a 5 minute novelty.
Oh how I wish this will be true.

I started using computers and the Internet very early, which is why I still caught a glimpse of the old Internet despite technically being a zoomer.
There used to be a somewhat popular website about Animal Crossing Wild World made by an Austrian girl. It had a chatroom, a forum, and most importantly, the best collection of information about the game within the German-speaking Internet at that time. This Animal Crossing website was the focal point of a wider network of personal homepages, usually about Nintendo games, all made by random German or Austrian girls using the same WYSIWYG website builder. I had my own website, my friends at school had theirs, and so did many others we never knew personally. This little community was my first experience with the Internet beyond browser games for children. It was not always wholesome, there was the occasional drama about people copying each other, but it was also weirdly innocent and free from the perils of the modern web. It was a place for 11 y/o girls to engage with things they cared about without the prying eyes of outsiders, something that only a handful of people knew about, far from today's giant social media platforms.
Sadly most of the websites that came out of this community are now lost to time, including my own. The original Animal Crossing website is still available on the Wayback Machine though, and I sometimes come back to look at it just for the nostalgia.

>>132037
I miss old DeviantArt amd I miss old neopets.
I try to use buzzly.art because its site made me reminisce about old DeviantArt, it had the same feel to me. (I hear theres drama with the creators, but I dont really know the drama and I dont care.) It isnt as good of a stand in as I hoped for, its kind of clunky.

>>221337
>buzzly
I used to be there when it started out as a site kinda like original deviantArt, focusing on nonerotic art with actual pornography being banned. From what I could tell there was constant infighting between staff members wanting to keep the site free of hardcore pornography and others wanting to turn it into a furry porn site where anything goes, resulting in constant drama. There was one incident where one of the staff went rogue, posted a sleazy poll to "let the community decide site direction" thinly veiled pushing for allowing pornography then basically took over the site locking out the rest of the staff resulting in the majority of people who were here for normal art not wanting to look at drawn dog dicks leaving and the site becoming a ghost town.
It's one of many cases of coomers ruining everything

Back in 2015 I used to frequent an anime website and had a blast on it. It was kind of like facebook but full of weebs and it was a small community, but it was like a second home to me. I still have friends that I met on there today but the website is gone, and before it went down I saw that hardly anyone was on there anymore. There was an active members list and it was always just one person now, when back then it used to be about 100+. I miss websites like this so much, and I still actively seek them out and also starting up my own blog.