@@johnynoway9127 i can count on one hand the number of sites that have actually made me unable to access the content because i had an adblocker ngl - and if you look in the right places you can download ad-free app versions of youtube, spotify etc [look up revanced]
@@johnynoway9127 And yet I've never encountered a site that was both worth using, and unusable with ad block. 9/10 it's a news site, so I'll go to a different one that has the exact same story.
@@johnynoway9127 disabling javascript w the inspect tool every time some sign like that pops up (search how to do it) basically guarantees you wont have to worry abt that
I've done content moderating for 10 years. As I finally quit, I was the only full time moderator on Finland's biggest social media site that got abt 3 million posts a day. I also answered legal emails concerning our social media and moderated two other sites on top of that. But the worst things you see in the internet are just puppies and kittens when compared to the content we see 8 hours per day. My manager talked with real crime detectives one time and the police was horrified that moderators spend more time with this material than the police do and still don't get any trauma therapy or even a good pay. Also as a moderator you have to deal with threats, people trying to harass or find out who you are. Once I opened the door even though me and my colleague were the only ones in the office and there was a strange bald man asking for the moderators and telling he wants to show them his hunting knife. Moderating took my health, my future and my ability to work. I had to leave work when I was 36. Now I'm 44 and very slowly getting myself back.
I'm truly blessed to have been so blissfully unaware of the horrid things that happen even in Finland. I was very ignorant throughout my early life and probably would have stayed as such, if the web and social media wasn't a thing. Can admit, I was a much happier person back then. Sadly, the bubble of oh so safe Finland got eventually shattered. Horrible things and people are everywhere. I am very curious though, what site you were working for, but obviously I'm not expecting an answer to that. My thanks for your work and I hope you can heal.
@@oOLareOo I worked in IRC-Galleria which had 500k users around the time Facebook opened up to anyone. We also won FB in engagement, people spent 4h on our site as FB was around 15min. We eventually had sites all over Europe and Australia but corporate greed killed all but the first one. But I got to work with Finnish police and create the first netiquette in Finland, and our site was modeled to other sites as it had so well thought rules and info pages. The other site was suomi24, which is pretty much as old and has a lot of users but mainly just text and comments. IRC-Galleria is a picture gallery originally created for IRC users and therefore it was all about pics and commenting, later on almost every teen in Finland joined IRC-Galleria at the same time. It is young people media, even though the original young people are slowly growing old. As the users were mainly young, they were very loyal and wanted to respect the rules. Suomi24 is about servicing people with questions and answers, it has an older demographic and a lot of trolls and spammers. It has every kind of person there could be. These users do not care about the rules, at least not all the time.
"thanks for your service" as if banning racist trolls and schizos sending threats was equivalent to military service or police duty! many jobs, if not almost every job that's public-facing will experience an upsetting dialogue with strangers and the community at large. Save the sob story, you were a jannie and you dealt with schizos and highly unstable people. so does anyone who works almost any job at least once, except we deal with them irl, in person... I'm sorry the work was traumatic and you faced harassment, but why on Earth do you *directly* compare your experience with uniformed police officers?? being a social media janitor "stole your future". Really??? Yes, you read more disturbing internet posts than they do and it's mentally draining. Finnish cops have been jumped, ran over, attacked with automatic firearms, come on... why are you mentioning and comparing your exposure to insane rantings on the internet with these officers' experience of exposure to traumatic material? Some of them have to look at newly-made corpses. I don't know how you're going to be able to work anywhere - almost ALL of us with some work experience can remember a dangerous and/or traumatic interaction with the public. I nearly got stabbed over a pile of Ralph Lauren polo shirts, so what? Should I be thanked for my service?
Im 30 and can proudly say. Social media was a mistake... the moment you could make money through it. Technically this also counts for streaming and video creation
Money for the makers of social media. And yeah. It's sad, when you see other sides mostly only find with love and tenacity, because somebody loves the topic.
Despite this being an in-depth critique of the terrible management of social media, the algorithm smiled upon his work. Perhaps it had a moment of self reflection, or simply made a mistake. But I'm so glad that I got to listen to this and didn't have to feel crazy anymore noticing all of these signs. Like, everything I love about the information age is being corrupted, while it only becomes more and more ingrained in our lives.
Age isn’t really the factor that causes people to be weird on the internet. Those same people were weird before they made Facebook accounts, they just didn’t know how to broadcast their essence to an audience, let alone one of millions of people. I’m 44 years old. I’ve been using the internet since about 1993. The internet from about 1993-1999 was a very different experience than the internet from about 2000 or 2001 onwards. I’m going to sound like a jerk, but the only thing that changed between 1993 and 2001 was awareness and accessibility. By “accessibility” I don’t mean availability-the internet has always been more or less diverse in my experience-what I mean is “ease of use.” The internet becoming widely known and easy to access and use began its descent into the corporate, bot-infested, social marketplace it’s become. Like with every scene that’s ever existed in the history of humanity, with mainstream awareness comes financial interest; with financial interest comes increased accessibility and an abandonment of the esoteric nuance that gave whatever scene in question the specific social character it had; with the death of character comes the injection of a newer, more marketable culture; with the injection of a market-based culture comes the death of feeling and existential sustainability; with the death of existential sustainability comes that acceptance of garbage. As gatekeepy as it always sounds, growth and popularity is what killed the “internet” and replaced it with the now bafflingly interchangeable concept of “social media.” We had profiles and places to congregate on news boards and message forums before “social media” was thrust into the scene by corporate interest. The difference was that these platforms had thousands of users, not millions or billions. The sizes of those communities kept them sincere, interpersonally relevant, and culturally sustainable. By the time social media sites like MySpace and Facebook rolled out, the internet had already been killed by commercial interest several years previous (that’s what made initiating social media sites attractive in the first place, corporate valuation and slimification).
I’ve been on the net since 1992, and am in concurrence with the content and overall sentiment of your comment. I intensely dislike every hobby/interest etc being hosted through a social media lense. I miss MUDS and MOOS, and experimenting with programming language to make things do things. I miss meeting ramdom people from all over the world that came to the net through a range of pathways. I miss telnetting, and weirdly enough, I miss muddling through html and getting things to work. I’m not saying I want to go back, you can’t go back. But I’d like us to have more say in what interfaces are available, and have some way of decoupling from corporate interfaces (ie, social media platforms/centralised platforms that have “ownership” over content and access. Lol remember “Information wants to be free” ?
@@creatrixZBDMU*s are still around! It's evolved to be a pretty reliant way to roleplay without a website screwing you over suddenly by changing things around.
I also miss the old internet 😢 it was a very weird place but often really wholesome. I miss bulletin board type forums. One of my old forums tried to migrate to reddit but reddit sucks, and it's not a community.
I'm 32, I got to live through the MySpace years in high school, and the peak years of Facebook when I was in college. Those days were the best because there was no clout game, no money to make, the only things on your feed were things you chose to follow, and everything was based on bringing you closer to real life friends. The "for you" feed that's on every single platform now prioritizes content over connections.
I missed that time period by about 11 years . . . and I feel scammed by the universe. I got a taste of these good times when I was too young to really understand what they were until it was taken away from me.
I was talking to someone about this other day . Granted I was in a more social era of my life but I remember legitimately making new friends and becoming closer friends in the early days of FB. Even the beginning of IG was really exciting now it just feels like an soulless way to sell or spread misinformation
At 42, I'm so glad I didn't have anything like 'social media' until I was at university. I first got the internet when I was 15, it was fun, all chat rooms, BBS and the very early web, felt frontier, you could do anything on there. I'd say the first year I noticed the internet beginning to become unusable was 2012, and its degraded further since then...
As someone who wrote an entire book on the history of social media, I just want to say that this video is phenomenal! All of your videos are extremely good and so creatively well edited. It’s actually insane that you don’t have loads more subscribers.
oh my god, thankyou so much! i literally have quotes FROM YOU in my research document, i only had 700 subs a few days ago so this is rattling my head hahahah
@@henryisdumbwatching this 3 months later and seeing how many subscribers you have now is so cool after reading this comment. Congratulations! Love the video, btw, excellent work! 🙂
I've gone from being introduced to it by my friends, to moving almost completely off Social Media in the span of a few years. Now we just hang around Discord and chat. And honestly, getting off social Media significantly helped my mental health. I recommend it.
@@henryisdumbneither the universe nor the multiverse exist, we are living in an elaborate simulation created by supernatural entities for the purpose of being an testing ground for intelligent life. 🧘🏻
@@Jechti307 Yeah, I can't imagine using anything else for any purpose other than PR work purposes . . . even then, when trying to learn social media for a professional setting it still feels like I'm trying to learn Eldritch magic from a version of the necronomicon written up by ChatGPT then put through Google Translate 50 times. Everything I do feels like a ritual meant to make a deal with the Elder Bots for money that won't cost all of my employer's resources.
I'm an Old, and was so excited to get online in 1995. I remember being so sad more people didn't know what I was talking about and used to wish the internet was something everyone used. I used to be on the cutting edge of tech and eagerly seek out the newest thing every time, but it's all fallen apart. I am genuinely so sad about it- the commodification of humanity itself. I don't know what the answer is other than stop using it, but it's so hard to. I loved your video, thanks for being sane.
Yes I'm withdrawing from the internet more and more. I try things out now and there's just idiots everywhere, plain old idiots, hateful idiots, narcissistic idiots. I miss the old days 😢 but i think the upside might be that social media will probably die in the end, it's a high risk business these days as different legislation comes out. And no website lasts forever, I've seen many social media sites go down over time.
I’m not old enough to have seen the world before social media so looking back and seeing peoples opinions on the internet is so cool, especially when they are predicting what it’s going to be like in 10 years.
They are old and saw a potential threat to how they did things for decades. That is insane to accept as the status quo. But you have to remember every decade is marked by something huge in history
@@goodlookinouthomie1757 Agreed. The only thing that might change this is if humans adapt to AI content and are ok with consuming content that is, essentially, not made and presented by a real person. For me, as soon as I get the inkling that a video, article, or whatever is AI generated, I click away. I have no interest in consuming content not created by a person.
@@TimothyCHenderson Yep. People are making dogshit clickbait content as fast as they can now and have been for years. AI can produce that stuff a million times faster. I think the internet will be 99.99% garbage eventually and we'll simply have to revert back to old fashioned real world ways of doing stuff.
"the only way many of you would have heard of the word moderator would be through twitch or discord" makes me feel like im officially an ancient person on the internet now lol
There's still active forums, right? I mean, I can only name a few, but surely that's just because I'm ignorant. There's no way we just abandoned all of them in favour of fucking reddit
i used to be a mod for a YT channel and their Discord, dont know why i wanted it at the time, theres no real benefits, the only thing i did enjoy was seeing all the messed up things ppl would say that were blocked, i dont get offended easily so i find most of the stuff actually kind of entertaining, regardless of how horrible it was.
This comment is criminally underrated the problem is the education system didn’t teach us how to voice our complaints without going online and quacking into the void or going out in mass groups and protesting in order to get your message across. Besides that our population is expecting to just sit idly by while these corporations ruin our futures for a profit
To paraphrase Douglas Adams -- In the beginning the Internet was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Every now and again I catch myself thinking how, if I ever had kids, I would go about allowing social media and the internet. On one hand you know damn well that whenever your parents told you not to do something, it became more intriguing to do, on the other the idea of a 3 year old of an ipad makes me die inside. How do you even begin to tell them no you can't. Its pure social suicide, all their friends would be quoting the freshest meme of the week, chatting on whatever platforms until late, recording tiktoks and playing games together while the kid would just resent you or just do it when youre not looking. We grew up in a similar relation to the internet, where it showed up in the golden age when it could have been pretty decent for kids (as long as you ignore all the shock content, god the shock content). And it was late enough that you still had 10years ish of just being a kid. I thought about the first time I used the internet and I was pretty lucky with it all, with dodgy content being avoidable to some degree. I wonder how kids feel about and are navigating the internet now with all the issues you mentioned. We moved from "opt in" social media where you would only see posts from people and pages you followed to content algorithms and bots. I miss the days of reading blog pages and checking if webcomic sites updated. At least I could genuinely go on the internet and only see the things I wanted to see, then log out after a couple hours. Now since I have to filter through slop to get some good "content," I spend so much more time, the satisfaction isn't there. The funny 20 second reel doesnt hit any more because you just scrolled past 15 ads, bots, shit you didnt care for, rinse and repeat doom scrolling until its time to finally sleep. That being said your video was the engaging, entertaining thing I wanted to watch and it was satisfying enough to want to get off my phone and stop the binge for a second so cheers :)
i know exactly what you mean, looking into all of this rocked me a bit thinking about that future. like i spent a lot of the time doing dumb stuff online as a kid but i also did dumb stuff outside, who would wanna go outside when you've got tiktok and twitch and fortnite, i would've been a proper hermit and peer pressure back when i was a bab was mental so can't imagine "opt in" social media even exists anymore, but we can't really escape it which is the worst part but thankyou, as long as i can do a tiny part to stop the doom scroll
@@henryisdumb I already was a hermit when I got access to the internet. When my family moved to a place outside the old school district of my middle school, my parents didn't want to take me out of school midway in the school year so would drop me and my sister off at my Aunt & Uncle's house. They had a computer before we did and there was this guy that rented a room that I thought was cool. He introduced me to Duke Nuke'm and showed me the basics of game design as I was a bit obsessed with RPGs and basically make my own using paper and pencil and imagined the adventures by sketching stats and battles and he was showing me how to actually make it in a program. Never got far with that. However, my sister went on to do other things. Neopets! And also Roleplay using forums. It's her to blame for me ending up getting into text-based Roleplay through forums, chatrooms and, eventually, MMOs. When we got a computer of our own I was obsessed with City of Heroes and would play that all the time in the living room after my school work was done and as long as I wasn't interrupting other people. My parents gave me some limits, of course, but if I could get the chance I'd rather play games or RP in yahoo chat, at the time, when they had custom chat rooms. Occasionally got the creeps, but I was able to easily figure them out as soon as I saw the immediate question "a/s/l?" I was there to fantasize and play, not chat with random people! But yeeeeah, nowdays, I don't know. Seems like it would be difficult to find things as I did with Avid Gamers for RP forums, chat rooms are even more difficult to get the idea of RP instead of being filled with apparent sex-pest (More than they were before) and webcomics! OMG I could find a new webcomic that was fun and interesting and now... I don't even know, now. I suppose I could find them on a giant list? The internet is so different than it was 25 years ago... (I started online at about 12, I'm 36, now...)
@@Quinz128 and now on top of all of this you have to contend with the fact that certain webcomics or things you're viewing could be stolen or straight up AI, it's a massive thing to have to try and comprehend and god completely forgot about ASL hahahahah
I guess the best you can do for your kids is to A) try and introduce them to the internet as late as possible, B) keep an eye on what they do look at, and try to lead them away from the really bad shit (preferably while being open about what you're doing) C) try to show them what scam bots look like and act like D) try to explain to them, over time, why you're being so vigilant about this and E) don't be too harsh on them for getting scammed/getting you scammed, hacked, etc., because odds are that experience is gonna traumatize them enough already . . . For as much as my generation might rag on millennial parents and gen alpha kids, there's only so much an overworked, burned-out parent can do to stop their kids from either hating them for not getting them an iPad or letting the damn iPad raise and ruin the kid.
There are tons of kids I know who grew up without phones even though most of our gen had phones at young ages. They were more sheltered, but ultimately well-raised and didn’t get bullied. I remember noting that they weren’t terminally online, but instead terminally offline, which wasn’t that bad. They may not have gotten memes, but they were usually well-adjusted enough for that not to matter. I went to an Asian immigrant high school, so it wasn’t too out of the ordinary. It might not be the case for other schools, so I’m not sure what the solution is, only that it’s possible
TH-cam on the tv is so awful for ads. My roommates and I were watching something and we got the same ad FOUR TIMES in a row. I thought I was watching Crunchyroll for a sec it was so bad. And then after that we saw it about five more times by the end of the video.
Subbed after this. The algorithm somehow brought something decent for a change. You should have far more subscribers. This is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately given I was in my 20’s in the golden age of the internet. Sad what’s happened with corporatization of social media.
Used to work the support for a company selling ads on search engines and 100m from me sat the folks who reviewed flagged ads. The shit they could see was horrendous. And just like me they were contractors, who earned even less. For the record, they wrecked their mental health for less pay than people telling customers how to click on buttons in the ad creation interface. This was in a European capital where the pay was about enough for a moldy, wet studio so small it’s barely legal to rent out. So they got to go home from looking at depraved nightmares to sleep in damp flats 👌
god, it's horrendous, but those stories will never get out because the bigger corporations know it'll damage their "brand image" which is why people go to the news in the first place
This was a fantastic video! Although I was surprised you didn't mention the language disparity in social media moderation. A pretty famous example is when Facebook launched in Myanmar in 2013, they had no myanma moderators and no moderators who spoke the Myanmar language. Internal Facebook files leaked in 2021 showed that they spent 87% of their moderation resources on English language content, but only 9% of Facebook's users at the time were English speakers. Content moderation in any language other than English is practically non-existent, even for huge languages like Spanish and Portugese. And fluency in a language isn't enough to properly assess the content, you also need to know the culture to understand the context in which the content is posted. I live in a small country, our language has like 100k speakers, and while Facebook did go through the effort of translating their services into our language when they launched them back in the late 00s, there are zero moderators who speak it. So if I see content in my language that clearly breaks TOS, there's nothing I can do, the report button is useless cos there's no one on the other end! I've mainly used Facebook as an example cos their international blunders are already infamous, but this is an issue across all social media sites. Like here on TH-cam so many dangerous conspiracies can spread their wings freely as long as they aren't in English.
That's really interesting to read, considering I've stumbled on a lot of really disturbing stuff here on TH-cam like animals being tortured or timelapses of human bodies decomposing, but I guess the English-speaking moderators didn't notice cause they were in obscure languages with little speakers.
As someone who was outsourced from a developing country into being a "content moderator" for a big company we shall not name, I can confirm every single bit said about moderation. Had the luxury to quit after three months due to an unexpected death in the family, the inheritance of which carried me through some time of new job searching. Most people don't. And most suffer from ptsd. Not just from content they go through but from the local management which cannot be worse. Pretty sure that, if i tried to describe what they do, i'd get flagged for inappropriate speech. So, I guess thanks for talking about this. But pretty sure nothing will change going forward.
I was a child in the 90s, obsessed with computers from first sight. I majored in CompSci, I worked as a developer in the 2010s, and I teach programming now. These days I feel like avoiding the internet and I've been spending so much time just sitting outside watching birds and other critters, planting stuff. I want time to slow down and I want to not have my attention constantly demanded. It doesn't help that computers and the internet felt so fun and exciting when they were newer, and over the decades I've watched a thing that I loved and was inspired by basically become more and more evil, more and more garbage. I think a lot of us are just so tired of the treadmill of attention bait and ads. Also thanks for covering content moderation. It's something I have my students read articles about when I'm covering ethics in tech.
Wow, cool to see you here! Your videos on C++ were a lifesaver to me back in, like, 2013. Thanks to your Allegro tutorials, I'd managed to make a whole little platformer game as a project for one of my uni classes (which honestly didn't require anywhere near this level of ambition, I was just really driven lol) - and silly as that may be, it's something I'm a little bit proud of to this day. About the fatigue - as someone who also was a child in the 90s and also was obsessed with computers since toddlerhood, wholeheartedly same. I barely use the internet anymore outside of what's strictly necessary for work, and over the last couple of years I've completely dropped all my social media - not as part of some big conscious decision, but because it's all become such a drag. It sucks to have lost some of the connections I've had on there, but all in all, I'm not going to miss it.
On the subject of TH-cam ads, I will never ever get it out of my head that there was this huge controversy about age-restricting content unfairly which meant that I couldn't watch a lot of videos I liked without providing evidence that I was over 18 to TH-cam, but only a few years before that, when I was 16-17, I was shown an ad for a sexually explicit yaoi manga on the front page. So to be clear, I can't watch a guy play a horror game rated a 16 without sending in an image of my photo ID, but I *can* be shown an ad for a self-proclaimed 18+ manga on the same site. Also when I turned off personalised advertising they just showed me gambling ads. When I was a minor still. Wonderful.
I had to subscribe bc in the for 2 mins I could see how hard it was worked on. People expect high quality content pumped out so fast. It'd ok you didn't put anything out between Feb and now. Quality over quantity. Then again There's a whole hour here.
holy crap how did i stumble across this this early--this is phenomenal. Your editing is excellent, and i really like the pacing of your jokes. Writing is 10/10 also, and plenty of insightful points (including lots of stuff i've yelled about on a soapbox while drunk haha). I'm about 20ish minutes in and was scrolling down to sub when i saw it under 1k and couldn't believe it. Excellent work, can't wait for more!!!!!!!!
(also at 46ish minutes and sweating that my way of talking sounded like that comment bot, so here's me nervously citing a specific thing from the video so you know i'm real and sincere about liking and supporting your work 😰)
@@henryisdumb Can we just appreciate the effort this youtuber puts into their replies! (thank you, your reply gave me a good laugh--i spent like 10 minutes trying to come up with a good joke implying that I couldn't get past the captcha and just gave up tho, my apologies 🥲)
this is so well-researched and edited, and i enjoyed it a lot! i'm in my late 30s and whenever i have a "things were better back when i was a kid" thought, i sit with it for awhile to make sure i'm not just being a curmudgeonly reactionary. but i really do think the current state of the internet is just incredibly bleak, largely for the reasons you've outlined so well here. it's not that these are all new problems, it's that their impact has scaled along with the uptake of the internet (the staggering difference between top 50 websites then and now blew my mind, thanks for sharing those stats!) all of this to say, great video! thank you!
That segment about content moderators touched me. I was one. Everything told here about this job is 100% true, but in reality it's even worse! My NDA got outdated last year, I'm ready to tell everything about Accenture (3rd paty company that works for Google and allegedly Meta) - even without covering my face or name. I worked in the office in Krakow, Poland - country where I am from. Thank you for this video!
I'm also interested in seeing this. Any social media platform - just like real social spaces - needs more than one designated group of "moderators" to handle every single problem. Moderation is an active process partaken in by everyone in a social environment, and while a clear chain of escalation is crucial, there's also a decent amount of self regulation that gets thrown out of the window because regular users can't punish malicious behaviour. These platforms required armies of moderators who were also regular users of the site, but the business teams behind them were unwilling to pay up. Even now, moderation is seen as a completely separate gig from the regular users engaging on the platform. When I think of how corrupted the organic social spaces on the internet have become for the profit of a few hundred CEOs, it makes me feel like I'm living in a dystopian hellscape.
Old fart elder millennial checking in. It was such a strange time to be alive. AOL used to have tons of free trial CDs at different stores. We would go to blockbuster to rent a movie and grab handfuls of them to have "ninja fights" where we threw the disks at each other 😆 Just found your channel, you are a talented and funny young man. Instantly subscribed, i cant wait to see your channel blow up, as it deserves to
Im definetly gonna remember the moderation section of the video. Its something i dont even think about but actually hearing about it its genually horrifying. Thank you for bringing it up, great video!!
I am old enough to dimly remember my folks -- school secretary + city office worker -- bringing home "memes" that were just called jokes & were photocopied or faxed & handed around, & later on, printed out ones colleagues sent over ethernet or early internet. One of the first ones I remember was a teacher doing up photocopied labels of Snowman Poop & putting them on baggies of mini marshmallows with photocopied clip art of snowmen. & that joke-sharing practice spread so fast & wide despite constantly being reprimanded by bosses as a waste of resources. I kinda think we should've known where this would go turbocharged with social media, universal devices, public wi-fi, etc. Memes accelerationists.
Hey man, I've only watched for like 30 minutes so far, but looking at the comments made me realize how slept on this video and channel is. And usually when I find a video like this I try to give some form of constructive criticism that would make the video even more palatable to an audience, but man you rocked this. The editing is intricate and entertaining. Your mic quality is great, your script is fun and energetic, your energy is engaging without being over the top and draining. The thing I think you've done the best with is the pacing. There isn't a moment my attention is fighting itself to stay engaged, the cut aways, the editing and how you've framed your dialog all has genuinely perfect pacing so far. So honestly the reason I'm telling you all this, is from my unprofessional opinion you've really got the recipie down, all thats left is for the algorithm to pick up on that. and I hope you don't get burnt out or discouraged from something you obviously have a great amount of talent, hard work and knowledge on. If you want to experiment on things, maybe try different video lengths and thumbnails and titles although personally they seemed interesting to me on my fyp, that's really the only thing I can think of as to why this video wasn't instantly blowing up. You've absolutely earned a subscriber with how great this video was. Hope you see this and it makes you feel just a bit better and more confident.
Oh I have another idea that you could maybe take inspiration from. Something that I think would maybe help your channel is to create a "brand" or image and identity. While I enjoyed your editing a lot, there were many different styles and themes that you've included into this video and I noticed that many creators like to create a very specific image, vibe, or theme that is more consistent to their channel. This allows them to cultivate an audience that knows what to expect from your content to a minor extent and also it makes your content recognized and unique, people who enjoy these themes or channel identity will come back just for the vibes. But I'd also recommend to not be too restrictive if you decide to do something like this as you don't want to box yourself into a creative hole either.
wow, don't even know where to start with this, thank you for such in depth praise it means more than you would know. yeah i'm trying to experiment at the moment hence the crazy long video, so i'm definitely taking your advice and am going to keep trying. but truly, that does give me a boost to keep making more so thank you so much. (sorry for waffling in this response)
@henryisdumb No man, I wanted to say all this in the hopes that you would see it, and it would push you to keep trying and not give up on it. I know what it's like to have a creative endeavor flop and feel the motivation just seep away into nothing. So I'm glad you saw it, and it helped even just a bit.
While not as popular (moreso in a niche but with a dedicated community category), there actually is a modern sort of recreation of MySpace. It's called SpaceHey, and it's still very customizable and supported by devs, so give it a look if you're curious.
@@dillonwalshpvd idk if have heard of it, but spacehey is a modern-day version of myspace that allows for customization. I actually get really excited when anyone brings up anything that relates to the old web movement so ill try not to yap too much, but I’d honestly recommend looking into it and other old styled social platforms that still exist. Don’t let these dumb tech ceos make you believe the only ways you can engage with the internet is through their own platforms (so they can profit off you), there so much more!!
Commenting so that the algorithm continues promoting this video to people - this was my first time watching you, and I'm so glad I clicked on this. Keep up the good work
Sitting here watching this while on lunch and I genuinely assumed you had like 50k subscribers at LEAST. So hearing you say you didn’t even have a thousand, and seeing you only have 1.6k? Good lord you deserve so many more! This is such high quality stuff!
"This is the hardest thing I've ever done and I died legally!" My man either just framed my impression here or dropped some major dad lore. Either way. I love it and I love this video!
@@henryisdumb Bots were all I could think about during your video... there are lots of other problems than botting, of course, but while I understand the non-financial, non-political etc. incentives of making these silly automatons, just for the sake of it, its obvious effects and the cumbersome methods sites would use to "counter" them, degrading the overall experience, reminded me severly of why I can't find Runescape remotely fun at all. Anyways, good video man. If you didn't spot that I was real, there was a clue apart from the /s (no, I did not just edit that in). The "diverse group" had only one individual (you) in it from the beginning ;)
It's interesting to see such a well thought out, written, and produced perspective piece from someone so young. It genuinely made me think. Not something TH-cam content typically does these days.
that is without a doubt one of the kindest comments, thankyou so much for that, i'm struggling with the next video currently so this has helped quite a lot, thankyou
This video popped up in my recommended and I'm glad it did! Adding it to my list of long form videos to watch again and again when the paradox of choice makes watching some new anxiety inducing. More seriously, the pacing, the writing, the tone and humor are all excellent and remind me a little of hbomber's style of talking about serious topics in an engaging and fun way. Hoping to see more from you!
oh wow that's so kind of you to say! to be compared to a very very funny british person who stands in front of a green screen that means a lot, thank you so much
I have a friend that loves elon musk and is currently “impression farming” her Twitter account because she thinks it’s a long term investment into making “passive income”. She’s an average person with no fame or influence and I’m guessing she’s just piggy backing off other viral posts. I’ve desperately tried to tell them it’s not going to work out but they just laugh and tell me that “you’re funny”.
it's one of those things people have been conned into thinking it's a legit business venture, like all those FOLLOW ALONG WITH MY TIPS TO MAKE $4000 A MONTH FROM HOME things, if it's too good to be true, it always is
That's not even a social media thing. That's a fascist bootlicking thing. Throughout history people have bootlicked fascist kings, and sometimes they get rewards in exchange.
When I was in middle school (7-9th grade), I was in a special class we called the virtual class. Our studies were more media focused than our peers, including extra classes that focused on the workings of social media, understanding algorithms and so on. I think it was 7th or 8th grade, we got to watch a documentary of moderators talking about their experiences. It was brutal, hearing people talk about the very things mentioned in this video. Really opened my eyes for how insane internet and social media are, to hear people talk about constantly seeing illegal things and having to just... deal with it. Mad props to the teacher who decided we could handle watching it (if I remember correctly, you were allowed to leave if it was too much + parents were notified of course) With how much sexual content we see on youtube for example, with cartoonish content farms that are lowkey fetish content, sexual ads, just creepy innuendos (those TikTok fuckboys making thirst content for kids.... ew), it's insane we don't have more moderators. People dealing with the stuff that we don't see are heroes but it's sad how much more we are seeing of it
Hah! I was 25 in 2000, kind of ignorant of all things techy, and had to learn computers and internet from scratch in one go at design school. The feeling of having the knowledge of the world at your fingertips after the dial tone was mind-blowing. Being able to text people in other countries in realtime. 100.000 search results on my favourite band! By 2002 I knew the concept of memes and another few years later I was on FB. I quit FB in 2022, apparently within an inch of it beoming a retirement home full of hate mongers and terrible A.I.😅 I do have a TH-cam Premium Lite subscription now though. I still think TH-cam is the single best thing to have happened to audiovisual media since the Lumiere Brothers. Aaannnd I just subscribed, of course. Going to watch your A.I. video next.
that's so interesting to hear from someone who was an absolute tiny child in 2000 hahahah, it must be such an immense shock seeing where everything's gone now (also sorry for the long reply time so many came through in such a short span)
@@henryisdumb Hah not really! I have relatively little nostalgia for the Web 1.0 world. Most of its charm was doubtlessly its utter novelty 😁 Especially TH-cam, even with its current problems, is something I rely on heavily for my commentary, entertainment and education. And it _did_ take decades to change... Actually I may not be entirely representative of my generation, most of whom were a bit further along on their computer journey (ie more blasé) than I when I first heard those modem beeps. The fact that today's internet seems to be dominated by, say, two big monopolists, is of course less than ideal.
perfectly said -- we're doomed. i don't have anything much to add, so i'm just commenting for reach. i hope your channel gets big soon, you definitely deserve it :)
How are you not way more popular? This is really well written! Absolutely enjoyed having it on in the background while I drew art and played random mobile games on my phone
for any website to be profitable it requires to monopolize your time and that is antithetical to mental health and a healthy communities. as a 29 year old who remembers the tail end of wild west days, the internet wasn't great then but it was nowhere near as toxic.
thats entirely true, i don't think lockdown helped with this because these corporations realised how much time we COULD be spending on their websites and infront of their products so it's only super-charged their endless desires
This is the first video of yours I've seen. I love your style! Humorous, informative, thought provoking. Keep it up!! :) (I'm a 30yr old and knowing what the world was like before social media and then being thrown into the world of it is...exhausting. I hate it. It's like I was born in a liminal space.)
I am genuinely so happy for this video having popped up on my homepage because omg the production quality and general message are so thought out!! Instant subscribe and I hope you get the recognition you deserve :)
Been a yt premium boy for years and honestly not having adverts interrupt my whether im watching some absolute slop content (which i try to minimise) or a very long video essay and being able to lock my phone while driving and just listen has been great. Highly recommend, never used an ad blocker im just scared of downloading nefarious software
This is why I use adblockers and personally curate an audience based on my own work. It takes time but it's been rewarding and it avoids all of this slop.
My first exposure to the Internet was actually the ARPANet, in 1980. The long slide from utopian promise to dystopian reality has been one of the more depressing experiences in my life.
im so glad i discovered your channel, im shocked you dont have even near 100k with this stuff man, also honestly you with glasses makes u look like a whole different person to the point that i GENUINELY thought i clicked on someone elses video by accident
hahahah yeah i get that glasses point a lot, i got some new ones the other day and look even weirder now, thankyou for the kind words though it means a lot!
I managed to stumble this video and my god this is most well written video, the fact that you have 800 subscribers really surprised me. So I had to subscribe to help you because I see potential and also you are underrated.
social media is also an amplifier for all the trauma society and the collective consciousness has gotten since the pandemic. people are hurting and then we spend so much of our time stuck in these torment nexuses, which are all actually secondary to the actual purpose of siphoning as much data and advertising dollars as possible. the dystopia arrived and nobody noticed.
I’m so happy to see how your channel is growing, Henry! You can clearly see how much effort you put into your videos, can’t wait to see how far you go xx
I turn 40 in a few months, the world was a significantly different place before the Internet... I look forward to nuclear winter. Good video kid, you earned a sub.
I was born in 90 while my brothers were born in '81. Technically we're all millenials but the world they grew up in vs the world I grew up in are even different places. Watching it form into this....blob.. is as much interesting as it is frightening.
Hell yea. The only feed I allow to suggest stuff to me is TH-cam and I’m pretty aggressive about curating it. Left both Twitter and TikTok because they kept trying to pick ragebait from people I didn’t know to show me.
Thank you for speaking facts on our behalf, this was a surprisingly comprehensive commentary video about the greed and dystopia we find ourselves stuck in I have a 10 part documentary covering a similar thing
oh wow that is super kind of you to say, so weird how many others feel the same, i did just feel like an idiot rambling, i'll absolutely check that out when i get back from work
The only time I used Facebook was to play the games 😂 cause flash sights in that era were unbearable with ads before ad blockers were a thing. But when they took them away the whole site became useless to me. Haven't used it since 2015. Almost 10 years dang
This channel is great, your hard work doesn't go unnoticed. I loved the father Ted style intro into the children's TV personality slowly having a breakdown 😂 I'm glad to see you finally start getting the recognition you deserve ❤
but it's that combined with the fact people act like they're the ones inventing the joke hahah, we all saw it and grew out of it a literal decade ago ahah
@@henryisdumb EXACTLY. Like why are we laughing like it’s the first time we’ve seen it? The one I saw today was the one like “my grandma’s password is MickeyMinniePlutoGoofyDaisyDonaldAlbany because it told her she needed 6 characters and a capital” (something like that. You know the one.) Come on, guys.
@@alisonsoller oh my days hahah that was somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, they're basically jokes you'd see on the back of chocolate bar wrappers
I remember Myspace coming out because everyone made fun of me because I was a nerd and had my own website and all that but suddenly it was cool to use the internet. Super weird how fast that spread.
I made a whole site for my friends in 8th grade. Like... dude, I learned to setup and admin phpbb so we could have our own site... ...aaaand nobody cared lol. And yet they're twice the internet addicts I could even hope to be. And still know next to nothing about how any of it works. Incuriousness is basically a disease in my mind.
One day I was a gamer geek getting shat on daily, the next day, the entire high school bought COD: MW1 and was begging me to build gaming PCs and set shit up. Hustled a lot of extra cash. Remember when being a "gamer" was social suicide?
"IT'S JUST ELON MUSK!!" 😂 This video is gold - Internet history, social media analysis, just super funny and also thought-provoking. Thanks and subscribed!
Wow! I come back now and then to check on how your channel is doing and this was amazing to see. This is an amazing step forward for your channel I can’t wait to see what’s next.
I'm so chuffed I've discovered you early on... looking forward to what you do. Great video. Oh, and I'm ancient so I was a young adult when we got the internet in the mid to late nineties. I miss those days.
Hey just wanted to say I was GENUINELY surprised that you only have a little over 6k subs! Your content is on par with someone with millions. Please keep up the good work!!!
This is fantastic, I love your delivery! And your fast editing style doesn't feel abrasive like some of the other types of essays I've seen recently. Can't believe youtube waited so long to recommend your channel. I've just started in making longer videos and I can't imagine the craft and patience to make something like this - really well done, look forward to the next one
thanks for that sort of feedback, always appreciate when people comment on the editing style, it's just a different discipline, once you get used to it it gets a lot easier (as long as you shush your brain up from time to time, that's what i have to do) and by the way, wish you all the luck on your longer vid journey!! hope it goes well
when you said you only had 1k followers my jaw dropped and i had to go check assuming you must have 10x more now- imagine my surprise seeing you under 2k! instant subscribe. amazing content
Appreciate the work you put into your long form videos. Hope you get the increase in real people subscribers because you deserve it! Loved this condensed follow along of internet history.
I quit social media back in 2018 and ive never been happier. I dont fell fomo, since quitting gave me back all that free time social media took to actually do stuff.
it feels weird watching videos about things from my childhood and teen years being reported on by people that were children as i was graduating high school LOL wow. the end is really fucked up. i already felt bad enough for people's mods on Twitch and Discord but i never thought about how awful it prolly is to be one on big platforms.
regarding internet back in the 90's, one thing that many people forget is that it was dial-up and __every minute was charged to your phone bill__ much of the internet was unsustainable due to how phone companies were making profits over phone plans. The internet in general started to get more traction as companies like AOL would have 800 numbers you can use to connect to the Internet, and phone companies started "nights and weekends free" plans. From there the cost of using the internet started to drop and being online for hours wasn't as difficult as it used to be. combine this with other things like call waiting and voicemail being offered on the phone provider side and the internet finally became usable by our aveage home owner
once again, wonderful content 🖤 please keep doing what you're doing, we need more drops of sanity in the rapidly derailing sea of garbage that is the internet
@@henryisdumb Seconded. Even if we aren't super engaging and loud about it, (even if we were, we're screaming into a void of trash), your message is being heard and there's ass-tons of us that feel the same way.
My earliest memory of the internet is joining a Radiohead mailing list and making some friends on there. We would email each other like pen pals. It was quite cool. There weren't many people at school who shared my taste in music. I guess this was around 1996 or 1997. The big shift was when Napster came along, it was the first time the internet meaningfully transformed our media consumption (and took down an industry). The insidious side of Google and social media is that the advertising revenue they generate has always existed, it would have traditionally have gone to publishers and journalists
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I'm genuinely amazed every time i realize most people don't use adblock. Everywhere on the internet is terrible without it and it's so easy to do.
eh..you cant watch or read with adblock on a lot of sites
@@johnynoway9127 i can count on one hand the number of sites that have actually made me unable to access the content because i had an adblocker ngl - and if you look in the right places you can download ad-free app versions of youtube, spotify etc [look up revanced]
@@johnynoway9127 And yet I've never encountered a site that was both worth using, and unusable with ad block. 9/10 it's a news site, so I'll go to a different one that has the exact same story.
@@johnynoway9127 That's false.
@@johnynoway9127 disabling javascript w the inspect tool every time some sign like that pops up (search how to do it) basically guarantees you wont have to worry abt that
I've done content moderating for 10 years. As I finally quit, I was the only full time moderator on Finland's biggest social media site that got abt 3 million posts a day. I also answered legal emails concerning our social media and moderated two other sites on top of that. But the worst things you see in the internet are just puppies and kittens when compared to the content we see 8 hours per day. My manager talked with real crime detectives one time and the police was horrified that moderators spend more time with this material than the police do and still don't get any trauma therapy or even a good pay. Also as a moderator you have to deal with threats, people trying to harass or find out who you are. Once I opened the door even though me and my colleague were the only ones in the office and there was a strange bald man asking for the moderators and telling he wants to show them his hunting knife.
Moderating took my health, my future and my ability to work. I had to leave work when I was 36. Now I'm 44 and very slowly getting myself back.
I'm truly blessed to have been so blissfully unaware of the horrid things that happen even in Finland. I was very ignorant throughout my early life and probably would have stayed as such, if the web and social media wasn't a thing. Can admit, I was a much happier person back then. Sadly, the bubble of oh so safe Finland got eventually shattered. Horrible things and people are everywhere.
I am very curious though, what site you were working for, but obviously I'm not expecting an answer to that. My thanks for your work and I hope you can heal.
@@oOLareOo I worked in IRC-Galleria which had 500k users around the time Facebook opened up to anyone. We also won FB in engagement, people spent 4h on our site as FB was around 15min. We eventually had sites all over Europe and Australia but corporate greed killed all but the first one. But I got to work with Finnish police and create the first netiquette in Finland, and our site was modeled to other sites as it had so well thought rules and info pages. The other site was suomi24, which is pretty much as old and has a lot of users but mainly just text and comments. IRC-Galleria is a picture gallery originally created for IRC users and therefore it was all about pics and commenting, later on almost every teen in Finland joined IRC-Galleria at the same time. It is young people media, even though the original young people are slowly growing old. As the users were mainly young, they were very loyal and wanted to respect the rules.
Suomi24 is about servicing people with questions and answers, it has an older demographic and a lot of trolls and spammers. It has every kind of person there could be. These users do not care about the rules, at least not all the time.
I'm so sorry. Thank you for your service. Good luck on your recovery.
Thank you for your service and I hope things get better. I'm sorry that you had to see all those things and I hope you have a good day
"thanks for your service" as if banning racist trolls and schizos sending threats was equivalent to military service or police duty! many jobs, if not almost every job that's public-facing will experience an upsetting dialogue with strangers and the community at large. Save the sob story, you were a jannie and you dealt with schizos and highly unstable people. so does anyone who works almost any job at least once, except we deal with them irl, in person...
I'm sorry the work was traumatic and you faced harassment, but why on Earth do you *directly* compare your experience with uniformed police officers?? being a social media janitor "stole your future". Really???
Yes, you read more disturbing internet posts than they do and it's mentally draining. Finnish cops have been jumped, ran over, attacked with automatic firearms, come on... why are you mentioning and comparing your exposure to insane rantings on the internet with these officers' experience of exposure to traumatic material? Some of them have to look at newly-made corpses.
I don't know how you're going to be able to work anywhere - almost ALL of us with some work experience can remember a dangerous and/or traumatic interaction with the public. I nearly got stabbed over a pile of Ralph Lauren polo shirts, so what? Should I be thanked for my service?
Im 30 and can proudly say.
Social media was a mistake... the moment you could make money through it.
Technically this also counts for streaming and video creation
Not always but the majority of the time
yeah i know what you mean, people would always look for the easiest way to get as much money as they could, it's human nature
It was all good until vine (I loved vine but it was the start of our attention spans adapting to shorter form content)
@@henryisdumb Humans haven't evolved to be capitalist. Greediness is inherent but our obsession with money isn't in our nature
Money for the makers of social media.
And yeah.
It's sad, when you see other sides mostly only find with love and tenacity, because somebody loves the topic.
Congrats on the almighty algorithm spreading this video to a bunch of people's home pages
hahahah it's mental, this time yesterday it had 67 views
Despite this being an in-depth critique of the terrible management of social media, the algorithm smiled upon his work. Perhaps it had a moment of self reflection, or simply made a mistake.
But I'm so glad that I got to listen to this and didn't have to feel crazy anymore noticing all of these signs. Like, everything I love about the information age is being corrupted, while it only becomes more and more ingrained in our lives.
Here cuz the algorithm said... Clicky Clicky.
@@lilpetz500 Skynet knows humanity loves watching their own descent into depravity.
@@henryisdumb and 1000 subscribers? almost doubled in a week! bravo!
Age isn’t really the factor that causes people to be weird on the internet. Those same people were weird before they made Facebook accounts, they just didn’t know how to broadcast their essence to an audience, let alone one of millions of people.
I’m 44 years old. I’ve been using the internet since about 1993. The internet from about 1993-1999 was a very different experience than the internet from about 2000 or 2001 onwards.
I’m going to sound like a jerk, but the only thing that changed between 1993 and 2001 was awareness and accessibility. By “accessibility” I don’t mean availability-the internet has always been more or less diverse in my experience-what I mean is “ease of use.” The internet becoming widely known and easy to access and use began its descent into the corporate, bot-infested, social marketplace it’s become.
Like with every scene that’s ever existed in the history of humanity, with mainstream awareness comes financial interest; with financial interest comes increased accessibility and an abandonment of the esoteric nuance that gave whatever scene in question the specific social character it had; with the death of character comes the injection of a newer, more marketable culture; with the injection of a market-based culture comes the death of feeling and existential sustainability; with the death of existential sustainability comes that acceptance of garbage. As gatekeepy as it always sounds, growth and popularity is what killed the “internet” and replaced it with the now bafflingly interchangeable concept of “social media.”
We had profiles and places to congregate on news boards and message forums before “social media” was thrust into the scene by corporate interest. The difference was that these platforms had thousands of users, not millions or billions. The sizes of those communities kept them sincere, interpersonally relevant, and culturally sustainable.
By the time social media sites like MySpace and Facebook rolled out, the internet had already been killed by commercial interest several years previous (that’s what made initiating social media sites attractive in the first place, corporate valuation and slimification).
I’ve been on the net since 1992, and am in concurrence with the content and overall sentiment of your comment. I intensely dislike every hobby/interest etc being hosted through a social media lense. I miss MUDS and MOOS, and experimenting with programming language to make things do things. I miss meeting ramdom people from all over the world that came to the net through a range of pathways. I miss telnetting, and weirdly enough, I miss muddling through html and getting things to work.
I’m not saying I want to go back, you can’t go back. But I’d like us to have more say in what interfaces are available, and have some way of decoupling from corporate interfaces (ie, social media platforms/centralised platforms that have “ownership” over content and access.
Lol remember “Information wants to be free” ?
A lot of boomers were just not ready to handle the power of the algorithm and what it even is.
@@creatrixZBDMU*s are still around! It's evolved to be a pretty reliant way to roleplay without a website screwing you over suddenly by changing things around.
I also miss the old internet 😢 it was a very weird place but often really wholesome. I miss bulletin board type forums. One of my old forums tried to migrate to reddit but reddit sucks, and it's not a community.
@@matildarose that’s cool to know tysm :)
I'm 32, I got to live through the MySpace years in high school, and the peak years of Facebook when I was in college. Those days were the best because there was no clout game, no money to make, the only things on your feed were things you chose to follow, and everything was based on bringing you closer to real life friends.
The "for you" feed that's on every single platform now prioritizes content over connections.
I missed that time period by about 11 years . . . and I feel scammed by the universe. I got a taste of these good times when I was too young to really understand what they were until it was taken away from me.
I was talking to someone about this other day
. Granted I was in a more social era of my life but I remember legitimately making new friends and becoming closer friends in the early days of FB. Even the beginning of IG was really exciting now it just feels like an soulless way to sell or spread misinformation
It is one giant 24/7 ad. It’s all about $$$$$$$
At 42, I'm so glad I didn't have anything like 'social media' until I was at university. I first got the internet when I was 15, it was fun, all chat rooms, BBS and the very early web, felt frontier, you could do anything on there. I'd say the first year I noticed the internet beginning to become unusable was 2012, and its degraded further since then...
I'm 38. I remember when you got porn by finding it under a bush in a park and you could avoid people from school. God I miss those days
10:08 That random clip of a guy stating "then I realized I don't actually want to be in touch with them anymore" killed me 🤣 those were simple times.
As someone who wrote an entire book on the history of social media, I just want to say that this video is phenomenal! All of your videos are extremely good and so creatively well edited. It’s actually insane that you don’t have loads more subscribers.
oh my god, thankyou so much! i literally have quotes FROM YOU in my research document, i only had 700 subs a few days ago so this is rattling my head hahahah
What is the book titled?
@@henryisdumbwatching this 3 months later and seeing how many subscribers you have now is so cool after reading this comment. Congratulations! Love the video, btw, excellent work! 🙂
@@Bald_FredExtremely Online :)
I've gone from being introduced to it by my friends, to moving almost completely off Social Media in the span of a few years. Now we just hang around Discord and chat. And honestly, getting off social Media significantly helped my mental health. I recommend it.
i get that completely, i feel like people need to try it, even if it's just for a few days a week
Same, All I have is discord and YT now.
It's been great for my anger levels.
Unfortunately many of us need it for jobs
@@henryisdumbneither the universe nor the multiverse exist, we are living in an elaborate simulation created by supernatural entities for the purpose of being an testing ground for intelligent life. 🧘🏻
@@Jechti307 Yeah, I can't imagine using anything else for any purpose other than PR work purposes . . . even then, when trying to learn social media for a professional setting it still feels like I'm trying to learn Eldritch magic from a version of the necronomicon written up by ChatGPT then put through Google Translate 50 times. Everything I do feels like a ritual meant to make a deal with the Elder Bots for money that won't cost all of my employer's resources.
I'm an Old, and was so excited to get online in 1995. I remember being so sad more people didn't know what I was talking about and used to wish the internet was something everyone used. I used to be on the cutting edge of tech and eagerly seek out the newest thing every time, but it's all fallen apart. I am genuinely so sad about it- the commodification of humanity itself. I don't know what the answer is other than stop using it, but it's so hard to. I loved your video, thanks for being sane.
*The monkey's paw has curled a finger.*
Yes I'm withdrawing from the internet more and more. I try things out now and there's just idiots everywhere, plain old idiots, hateful idiots, narcissistic idiots. I miss the old days 😢 but i think the upside might be that social media will probably die in the end, it's a high risk business these days as different legislation comes out. And no website lasts forever, I've seen many social media sites go down over time.
I’m not old enough to have seen the world before social media so looking back and seeing peoples opinions on the internet is so cool, especially when they are predicting what it’s going to be like in 10 years.
that makes me feel like an absolute pensioner hahah, yeah it was weird hearing how wrong they all were
They are old and saw a potential threat to how they did things for decades. That is insane to accept as the status quo. But you have to remember every decade is marked by something huge in history
Well it will soon be over. I predict AI rendering the internet functionally unusable in the next few years.
@@goodlookinouthomie1757 Agreed. The only thing that might change this is if humans adapt to AI content and are ok with consuming content that is, essentially, not made and presented by a real person. For me, as soon as I get the inkling that a video, article, or whatever is AI generated, I click away. I have no interest in consuming content not created by a person.
@@TimothyCHenderson Yep. People are making dogshit clickbait content as fast as they can now and have been for years. AI can produce that stuff a million times faster. I think the internet will be 99.99% garbage eventually and we'll simply have to revert back to old fashioned real world ways of doing stuff.
My husband grew up in a small village in south of France and "i basically grew up in black & white" is so accurate 😂
hahahah when you're surrounded by only trees and sheep it does start to feel like that
"the only way many of you would have heard of the word moderator would be through twitch or discord" makes me feel like im officially an ancient person on the internet now lol
i genuinely expected that sentence to end in "forums"
i'm not even old but that threw me right off
I first encountered the word moderator with "graphite" in front of it. Why yes, I am middle-aged why do you ask??
There's still active forums, right? I mean, I can only name a few, but surely that's just because I'm ignorant. There's no way we just abandoned all of them in favour of fucking reddit
@@plebisMaximus there are, but they are disappearing every day. And I think it's not Reddit, it's Discord.
i used to be a mod for a YT channel and their Discord, dont know why i wanted it at the time, theres no real benefits, the only thing i did enjoy was seeing all the messed up things ppl would say that were blocked, i dont get offended easily so i find most of the stuff actually kind of entertaining, regardless of how horrible it was.
Mega corporations are a problem that we have to solve as a society.
This comment is criminally underrated the problem is the education system didn’t teach us how to voice our complaints without going online and quacking into the void or going out in mass groups and protesting in order to get your message across. Besides that our population is expecting to just sit idly by while these corporations ruin our futures for a profit
To paraphrase Douglas Adams -- In the beginning the Internet was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
Considering it may well have ended the world by now, I'd say so.
Every now and again I catch myself thinking how, if I ever had kids, I would go about allowing social media and the internet. On one hand you know damn well that whenever your parents told you not to do something, it became more intriguing to do, on the other the idea of a 3 year old of an ipad makes me die inside.
How do you even begin to tell them no you can't. Its pure social suicide, all their friends would be quoting the freshest meme of the week, chatting on whatever platforms until late, recording tiktoks and playing games together while the kid would just resent you or just do it when youre not looking.
We grew up in a similar relation to the internet, where it showed up in the golden age when it could have been pretty decent for kids (as long as you ignore all the shock content, god the shock content). And it was late enough that you still had 10years ish of just being a kid.
I thought about the first time I used the internet and I was pretty lucky with it all, with dodgy content being avoidable to some degree.
I wonder how kids feel about and are navigating the internet now with all the issues you mentioned. We moved from "opt in" social media where you would only see posts from people and pages you followed to content algorithms and bots.
I miss the days of reading blog pages and checking if webcomic sites updated. At least I could genuinely go on the internet and only see the things I wanted to see, then log out after a couple hours. Now since I have to filter through slop to get some good "content," I spend so much more time, the satisfaction isn't there. The funny 20 second reel doesnt hit any more because you just scrolled past 15 ads, bots, shit you didnt care for, rinse and repeat doom scrolling until its time to finally sleep.
That being said your video was the engaging, entertaining thing I wanted to watch and it was satisfying enough to want to get off my phone and stop the binge for a second so cheers :)
i know exactly what you mean, looking into all of this rocked me a bit thinking about that future. like i spent a lot of the time doing dumb stuff online as a kid but i also did dumb stuff outside, who would wanna go outside when you've got tiktok and twitch and fortnite, i would've been a proper hermit
and peer pressure back when i was a bab was mental so can't imagine "opt in" social media even exists anymore, but we can't really escape it which is the worst part
but thankyou, as long as i can do a tiny part to stop the doom scroll
@@henryisdumb I already was a hermit when I got access to the internet. When my family moved to a place outside the old school district of my middle school, my parents didn't want to take me out of school midway in the school year so would drop me and my sister off at my Aunt & Uncle's house. They had a computer before we did and there was this guy that rented a room that I thought was cool. He introduced me to Duke Nuke'm and showed me the basics of game design as I was a bit obsessed with RPGs and basically make my own using paper and pencil and imagined the adventures by sketching stats and battles and he was showing me how to actually make it in a program. Never got far with that.
However, my sister went on to do other things. Neopets! And also Roleplay using forums. It's her to blame for me ending up getting into text-based Roleplay through forums, chatrooms and, eventually, MMOs. When we got a computer of our own I was obsessed with City of Heroes and would play that all the time in the living room after my school work was done and as long as I wasn't interrupting other people. My parents gave me some limits, of course, but if I could get the chance I'd rather play games or RP in yahoo chat, at the time, when they had custom chat rooms. Occasionally got the creeps, but I was able to easily figure them out as soon as I saw the immediate question "a/s/l?" I was there to fantasize and play, not chat with random people!
But yeeeeah, nowdays, I don't know. Seems like it would be difficult to find things as I did with Avid Gamers for RP forums, chat rooms are even more difficult to get the idea of RP instead of being filled with apparent sex-pest (More than they were before) and webcomics! OMG I could find a new webcomic that was fun and interesting and now... I don't even know, now. I suppose I could find them on a giant list?
The internet is so different than it was 25 years ago... (I started online at about 12, I'm 36, now...)
@@Quinz128 and now on top of all of this you have to contend with the fact that certain webcomics or things you're viewing could be stolen or straight up AI, it's a massive thing to have to try and comprehend
and god completely forgot about ASL hahahahah
I guess the best you can do for your kids is to A) try and introduce them to the internet as late as possible, B) keep an eye on what they do look at, and try to lead them away from the really bad shit (preferably while being open about what you're doing) C) try to show them what scam bots look like and act like D) try to explain to them, over time, why you're being so vigilant about this and E) don't be too harsh on them for getting scammed/getting you scammed, hacked, etc., because odds are that experience is gonna traumatize them enough already . . . For as much as my generation might rag on millennial parents and gen alpha kids, there's only so much an overworked, burned-out parent can do to stop their kids from either hating them for not getting them an iPad or letting the damn iPad raise and ruin the kid.
There are tons of kids I know who grew up without phones even though most of our gen had phones at young ages. They were more sheltered, but ultimately well-raised and didn’t get bullied. I remember noting that they weren’t terminally online, but instead terminally offline, which wasn’t that bad. They may not have gotten memes, but they were usually well-adjusted enough for that not to matter.
I went to an Asian immigrant high school, so it wasn’t too out of the ordinary. It might not be the case for other schools, so I’m not sure what the solution is, only that it’s possible
TH-cam on the tv is so awful for ads. My roommates and I were watching something and we got the same ad FOUR TIMES in a row. I thought I was watching Crunchyroll for a sec it was so bad. And then after that we saw it about five more times by the end of the video.
or how it even plays the same ad directly after that ad finishing or after you skipped it
I think there are ways to have an adblocker installed directly onto a router and i think you might be able to install youtube revanced onto a smart tv
Subbed after this. The algorithm somehow brought something decent for a change. You should have far more subscribers. This is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately given I was in my 20’s in the golden age of the internet. Sad what’s happened with corporatization of social media.
that's kind of you to say, it was wild going back to look at the early days of the internet seeing how different it was to what we have now
Used to work the support for a company selling ads on search engines and 100m from me sat the folks who reviewed flagged ads. The shit they could see was horrendous. And just like me they were contractors, who earned even less. For the record, they wrecked their mental health for less pay than people telling customers how to click on buttons in the ad creation interface.
This was in a European capital where the pay was about enough for a moldy, wet studio so small it’s barely legal to rent out. So they got to go home from looking at depraved nightmares to sleep in damp flats 👌
god, it's horrendous, but those stories will never get out because the bigger corporations know it'll damage their "brand image" which is why people go to the news in the first place
My arm literally tensed up to hit "skip ad" at the 26:02 mark. They have us conditioned like Pavlov's dogs
i'm sorry about that hahah
This was a fantastic video! Although I was surprised you didn't mention the language disparity in social media moderation. A pretty famous example is when Facebook launched in Myanmar in 2013, they had no myanma moderators and no moderators who spoke the Myanmar language. Internal Facebook files leaked in 2021 showed that they spent 87% of their moderation resources on English language content, but only 9% of Facebook's users at the time were English speakers. Content moderation in any language other than English is practically non-existent, even for huge languages like Spanish and Portugese. And fluency in a language isn't enough to properly assess the content, you also need to know the culture to understand the context in which the content is posted.
I live in a small country, our language has like 100k speakers, and while Facebook did go through the effort of translating their services into our language when they launched them back in the late 00s, there are zero moderators who speak it. So if I see content in my language that clearly breaks TOS, there's nothing I can do, the report button is useless cos there's no one on the other end!
I've mainly used Facebook as an example cos their international blunders are already infamous, but this is an issue across all social media sites. Like here on TH-cam so many dangerous conspiracies can spread their wings freely as long as they aren't in English.
wow that's so interesting, thanks for letting me know! i didn't know anything about that and i'm immediately going to look into this further
That's really interesting to read, considering I've stumbled on a lot of really disturbing stuff here on TH-cam like animals being tortured or timelapses of human bodies decomposing, but I guess the English-speaking moderators didn't notice cause they were in obscure languages with little speakers.
I never go into social media, it just seemed like a bad idea.
"Do you want to write a diary, but let other people read it?"
"...no?"
You can’t even google anything anymore. The internet is useless and it’s why I only use Instagram to keep up with bands and musicians
Just use a better search engine.
@@xhbn2157 What do you use?
As someone who was outsourced from a developing country into being a "content moderator" for a big company we shall not name, I can confirm every single bit said about moderation.
Had the luxury to quit after three months due to an unexpected death in the family, the inheritance of which carried me through some time of new job searching. Most people don't. And most suffer from ptsd. Not just from content they go through but from the local management which cannot be worse. Pretty sure that, if i tried to describe what they do, i'd get flagged for inappropriate speech.
So, I guess thanks for talking about this. But pretty sure nothing will change going forward.
I was a child in the 90s, obsessed with computers from first sight. I majored in CompSci, I worked as a developer in the 2010s, and I teach programming now.
These days I feel like avoiding the internet and I've been spending so much time just sitting outside watching birds and other critters, planting stuff. I want time to slow down and I want to not have my attention constantly demanded.
It doesn't help that computers and the internet felt so fun and exciting when they were newer, and over the decades I've watched a thing that I loved and was inspired by basically become more and more evil, more and more garbage.
I think a lot of us are just so tired of the treadmill of attention bait and ads.
Also thanks for covering content moderation. It's something I have my students read articles about when I'm covering ethics in tech.
Wow, cool to see you here!
Your videos on C++ were a lifesaver to me back in, like, 2013. Thanks to your Allegro tutorials, I'd managed to make a whole little platformer game as a project for one of my uni classes (which honestly didn't require anywhere near this level of ambition, I was just really driven lol) - and silly as that may be, it's something I'm a little bit proud of to this day.
About the fatigue - as someone who also was a child in the 90s and also was obsessed with computers since toddlerhood, wholeheartedly same. I barely use the internet anymore outside of what's strictly necessary for work, and over the last couple of years I've completely dropped all my social media - not as part of some big conscious decision, but because it's all become such a drag. It sucks to have lost some of the connections I've had on there, but all in all, I'm not going to miss it.
This channel is so underappreciated, I can see a lot of effort goes into these videos
i appreciate that, it's very kind of you to say
"The internet used to be a bigger place."
"The internet is still the same, there's just less in it..."
On the subject of TH-cam ads, I will never ever get it out of my head that there was this huge controversy about age-restricting content unfairly which meant that I couldn't watch a lot of videos I liked without providing evidence that I was over 18 to TH-cam, but only a few years before that, when I was 16-17, I was shown an ad for a sexually explicit yaoi manga on the front page. So to be clear, I can't watch a guy play a horror game rated a 16 without sending in an image of my photo ID, but I *can* be shown an ad for a self-proclaimed 18+ manga on the same site. Also when I turned off personalised advertising they just showed me gambling ads. When I was a minor still. Wonderful.
I had to subscribe bc in the for 2 mins I could see how hard it was worked on.
People expect high quality content pumped out so fast. It'd ok you didn't put anything out between Feb and now. Quality over quantity. Then again There's a whole hour here.
thank you for that, i've been debating between long and short videos for ages now so this helps to hear
holy crap how did i stumble across this this early--this is phenomenal. Your editing is excellent, and i really like the pacing of your jokes. Writing is 10/10 also, and plenty of insightful points (including lots of stuff i've yelled about on a soapbox while drunk haha).
I'm about 20ish minutes in and was scrolling down to sub when i saw it under 1k and couldn't believe it. Excellent work, can't wait for more!!!!!!!!
(also at 46ish minutes and sweating that my way of talking sounded like that comment bot, so here's me nervously citing a specific thing from the video so you know i'm real and sincere about liking and supporting your work 😰)
that's exactly what a comment bot would say to trick me
that is incredibly kind of you to say! i'm glad i'm not the only one who rants about this stuff hahah
Old man yells at cloud and the state of the modern internet
@@henryisdumb Can we just appreciate the effort this youtuber puts into their replies!
(thank you, your reply gave me a good laugh--i spent like 10 minutes trying to come up with a good joke implying that I couldn't get past the captcha and just gave up tho, my apologies 🥲)
this is so well-researched and edited, and i enjoyed it a lot! i'm in my late 30s and whenever i have a "things were better back when i was a kid" thought, i sit with it for awhile to make sure i'm not just being a curmudgeonly reactionary. but i really do think the current state of the internet is just incredibly bleak, largely for the reasons you've outlined so well here. it's not that these are all new problems, it's that their impact has scaled along with the uptake of the internet (the staggering difference between top 50 websites then and now blew my mind, thanks for sharing those stats!)
all of this to say, great video! thank you!
wow that’s so kind of you to say, yeah the stats did absolutely boggle my brain
That segment about content moderators touched me. I was one. Everything told here about this job is 100% true, but in reality it's even worse! My NDA got outdated last year, I'm ready to tell everything about Accenture (3rd paty company that works for Google and allegedly Meta) - even without covering my face or name. I worked in the office in Krakow, Poland - country where I am from.
Thank you for this video!
Omfg. What a gem. I’m very interested in this - are or where are you planning on posting/self publishing this?
I'm also interested in seeing this. Any social media platform - just like real social spaces - needs more than one designated group of "moderators" to handle every single problem. Moderation is an active process partaken in by everyone in a social environment, and while a clear chain of escalation is crucial, there's also a decent amount of self regulation that gets thrown out of the window because regular users can't punish malicious behaviour. These platforms required armies of moderators who were also regular users of the site, but the business teams behind them were unwilling to pay up. Even now, moderation is seen as a completely separate gig from the regular users engaging on the platform. When I think of how corrupted the organic social spaces on the internet have become for the profit of a few hundred CEOs, it makes me feel like I'm living in a dystopian hellscape.
This is why "The Internet is Dead" theory is the only conspiracy I think has validity. Lol
My lil bro and I were predicting the dead internet theory a few years before AI rolled out 😂. Its 100% a thing.
Old fart elder millennial checking in.
It was such a strange time to be alive.
AOL used to have tons of free trial CDs at different stores.
We would go to blockbuster to rent a movie and grab handfuls of them to have "ninja fights" where we threw the disks at each other 😆
Just found your channel, you are a talented and funny young man.
Instantly subscribed, i cant wait to see your channel blow up, as it deserves to
hahahh damn ninja fights sound incredible we've missed out, thank you though it was very kind of you to say that
Also, saying "young man" made me feel like I'm a fossil.
Cheers to your channel, bruv, much love from the USA
😭I love the expendable disk ninja fights
Omg I used to do that with cds as a kid lmao😂 we used to get aol CDs in the mail in cereal boxes they were like a plague 😅
Im definetly gonna remember the moderation section of the video. Its something i dont even think about but actually hearing about it its genually horrifying. Thank you for bringing it up, great video!!
I am old enough to dimly remember my folks -- school secretary + city office worker -- bringing home "memes" that were just called jokes & were photocopied or faxed & handed around, & later on, printed out ones colleagues sent over ethernet or early internet. One of the first ones I remember was a teacher doing up photocopied labels of Snowman Poop & putting them on baggies of mini marshmallows with photocopied clip art of snowmen.
& that joke-sharing practice spread so fast & wide despite constantly being reprimanded by bosses as a waste of resources. I kinda think we should've known where this would go turbocharged with social media, universal devices, public wi-fi, etc. Memes accelerationists.
oh my days i would've loved that hahah
Oh god, fax machines were where memes were for a while before memes became memes.
My grandma would print out whole packets of jokes in story form I loved reading them 😂
And Facebook continues to refuse to allow a post to be reported for being fake. As a wildlife photographer, it's kind of heartbreaking.
oh my word i hadn't heard of that, is it really that bad??
@@henryisdumb it absolutely is :(
Also, completely off topic, apologies for that, I'm so old I was teaching programming in 1989. Oh the dreams we had!
no need to apologise hahah i'm fully putting that on my list for things to research for potential new videos
Hey man, I've only watched for like 30 minutes so far, but looking at the comments made me realize how slept on this video and channel is.
And usually when I find a video like this I try to give some form of constructive criticism that would make the video even more palatable to an audience, but man you rocked this. The editing is intricate and entertaining. Your mic quality is great, your script is fun and energetic, your energy is engaging without being over the top and draining. The thing I think you've done the best with is the pacing. There isn't a moment my attention is fighting itself to stay engaged, the cut aways, the editing and how you've framed your dialog all has genuinely perfect pacing so far.
So honestly the reason I'm telling you all this, is from my unprofessional opinion you've really got the recipie down, all thats left is for the algorithm to pick up on that. and I hope you don't get burnt out or discouraged from something you obviously have a great amount of talent, hard work and knowledge on. If you want to experiment on things, maybe try different video lengths and thumbnails and titles although personally they seemed interesting to me on my fyp, that's really the only thing I can think of as to why this video wasn't instantly blowing up. You've absolutely earned a subscriber with how great this video was. Hope you see this and it makes you feel just a bit better and more confident.
Oh I have another idea that you could maybe take inspiration from. Something that I think would maybe help your channel is to create a "brand" or image and identity. While I enjoyed your editing a lot, there were many different styles and themes that you've included into this video and I noticed that many creators like to create a very specific image, vibe, or theme that is more consistent to their channel. This allows them to cultivate an audience that knows what to expect from your content to a minor extent and also it makes your content recognized and unique, people who enjoy these themes or channel identity will come back just for the vibes. But I'd also recommend to not be too restrictive if you decide to do something like this as you don't want to box yourself into a creative hole either.
wow, don't even know where to start with this, thank you for such in depth praise it means more than you would know. yeah i'm trying to experiment at the moment hence the crazy long video, so i'm definitely taking your advice and am going to keep trying. but truly, that does give me a boost to keep making more so thank you so much. (sorry for waffling in this response)
@henryisdumb No man, I wanted to say all this in the hopes that you would see it, and it would push you to keep trying and not give up on it. I know what it's like to have a creative endeavor flop and feel the motivation just seep away into nothing. So I'm glad you saw it, and it helped even just a bit.
it absolutely helped, massively, thank you so much
@henryisdumb I'm very glad to hear that dude, genuinely.
MySpace was awesome. Facebook and everything that came after was such a mistake. We didn't know how good we had it back then.
Could you imagine MySpace now that our computers could actually handle all the customizations.
I miss MySpace every goddamn day
While not as popular (moreso in a niche but with a dedicated community category), there actually is a modern sort of recreation of MySpace.
It's called SpaceHey, and it's still very customizable and supported by devs, so give it a look if you're curious.
@@dillonwalshpvd idk if have heard of it, but spacehey is a modern-day version of myspace that allows for customization. I actually get really excited when anyone brings up anything that relates to the old web movement so ill try not to yap too much, but I’d honestly recommend looking into it and other old styled social platforms that still exist. Don’t let these dumb tech ceos make you believe the only ways you can engage with the internet is through their own platforms (so they can profit off you), there so much more!!
My html as 14 y/o was on point
Commenting so that the algorithm continues promoting this video to people - this was my first time watching you, and I'm so glad I clicked on this. Keep up the good work
Sitting here watching this while on lunch and I genuinely assumed you had like 50k subscribers at LEAST. So hearing you say you didn’t even have a thousand, and seeing you only have 1.6k? Good lord you deserve so many more! This is such high quality stuff!
"This is the hardest thing I've ever done and I died legally!" My man either just framed my impression here or dropped some major dad lore. Either way. I love it and I love this video!
I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn from such a diverse group of individual. It's broadened my horizons in a way I never thought possible. /s
wow, what a masterclass in critical thinking
@@henryisdumb Bots were all I could think about during your video... there are lots of other problems than botting, of course, but while I understand the non-financial, non-political etc. incentives of making these silly automatons, just for the sake of it, its obvious effects and the cumbersome methods sites would use to "counter" them, degrading the overall experience, reminded me severly of why I can't find Runescape remotely fun at all.
Anyways, good video man.
If you didn't spot that I was real, there was a clue apart from the /s (no, I did not just edit that in). The "diverse group" had only one individual (you) in it from the beginning ;)
It's interesting to see such a well thought out, written, and produced perspective piece from someone so young. It genuinely made me think. Not something TH-cam content typically does these days.
that is without a doubt one of the kindest comments, thankyou so much for that, i'm struggling with the next video currently so this has helped quite a lot, thankyou
This video popped up in my recommended and I'm glad it did! Adding it to my list of long form videos to watch again and again when the paradox of choice makes watching some new anxiety inducing. More seriously, the pacing, the writing, the tone and humor are all excellent and remind me a little of hbomber's style of talking about serious topics in an engaging and fun way. Hoping to see more from you!
oh wow that's so kind of you to say! to be compared to a very very funny british person who stands in front of a green screen that means a lot, thank you so much
I have a friend that loves elon musk and is currently “impression farming” her Twitter account because she thinks it’s a long term investment into making “passive income”. She’s an average person with no fame or influence and I’m guessing she’s just piggy backing off other viral posts.
I’ve desperately tried to tell them it’s not going to work out but they just laugh and tell me that “you’re funny”.
it's one of those things people have been conned into thinking it's a legit business venture, like all those FOLLOW ALONG WITH MY TIPS TO MAKE $4000 A MONTH FROM HOME things, if it's too good to be true, it always is
That's not even a social media thing. That's a fascist bootlicking thing. Throughout history people have bootlicked fascist kings, and sometimes they get rewards in exchange.
When I was in middle school (7-9th grade), I was in a special class we called the virtual class. Our studies were more media focused than our peers, including extra classes that focused on the workings of social media, understanding algorithms and so on.
I think it was 7th or 8th grade, we got to watch a documentary of moderators talking about their experiences. It was brutal, hearing people talk about the very things mentioned in this video. Really opened my eyes for how insane internet and social media are, to hear people talk about constantly seeing illegal things and having to just... deal with it. Mad props to the teacher who decided we could handle watching it (if I remember correctly, you were allowed to leave if it was too much + parents were notified of course)
With how much sexual content we see on youtube for example, with cartoonish content farms that are lowkey fetish content, sexual ads, just creepy innuendos (those TikTok fuckboys making thirst content for kids.... ew), it's insane we don't have more moderators. People dealing with the stuff that we don't see are heroes but it's sad how much more we are seeing of it
Hah! I was 25 in 2000, kind of ignorant of all things techy, and had to learn computers and internet from scratch in one go at design school. The feeling of having the knowledge of the world at your fingertips after the dial tone was mind-blowing. Being able to text people in other countries in realtime. 100.000 search results on my favourite band! By 2002 I knew the concept of memes and another few years later I was on FB.
I quit FB in 2022, apparently within an inch of it beoming a retirement home full of hate mongers and terrible A.I.😅
I do have a TH-cam Premium Lite subscription now though. I still think TH-cam is the single best thing to have happened to audiovisual media since the Lumiere Brothers.
Aaannnd I just subscribed, of course. Going to watch your A.I. video next.
that's so interesting to hear from someone who was an absolute tiny child in 2000 hahahah, it must be such an immense shock seeing where everything's gone now
(also sorry for the long reply time so many came through in such a short span)
@@henryisdumb Hah not really! I have relatively little nostalgia for the Web 1.0 world. Most of its charm was doubtlessly its utter novelty 😁
Especially TH-cam, even with its current problems, is something I rely on heavily for my commentary, entertainment and education.
And it _did_ take decades to change...
Actually I may not be entirely representative of my generation, most of whom were a bit further along on their computer journey (ie more blasé) than I when I first heard those modem beeps.
The fact that today's internet seems to be dominated by, say, two big monopolists, is of course less than ideal.
Every single website has to deliberately make itself worse in order to appeal to customers who don’t exist
perfectly said -- we're doomed. i don't have anything much to add, so i'm just commenting for reach. i hope your channel gets big soon, you definitely deserve it :)
How are you not way more popular?
This is really well written! Absolutely enjoyed having it on in the background while I drew art and played random mobile games on my phone
thanks for those kind words, i'm really glad you enjoyed it!
for any website to be profitable it requires to monopolize your time and that is antithetical to mental health and a healthy communities.
as a 29 year old who remembers the tail end of wild west days, the internet wasn't great then but it was nowhere near as toxic.
thats entirely true, i don't think lockdown helped with this because these corporations realised how much time we COULD be spending on their websites and infront of their products so it's only super-charged their endless desires
2009-2013 was easily one of the most toxic periods of the internet.
Fantastic video, and while i knew of the horrors of moderation, this really put it into a perspective it hadn't been before.
yeah looking into it in depth was a wake up call, and i cut a bunch of stuff out that was pretty nasty too, it is sobering to say the least
This is the first video of yours I've seen. I love your style! Humorous, informative, thought provoking. Keep it up!! :)
(I'm a 30yr old and knowing what the world was like before social media and then being thrown into the world of it is...exhausting. I hate it. It's like I was born in a liminal space.)
that is super kind of you to say thanks!! yeah i can imagine seeing the state it's in now is looking on a barren wasteland
I am genuinely so happy for this video having popped up on my homepage because omg the production quality and general message are so thought out!! Instant subscribe and I hope you get the recognition you deserve :)
truly thanks, it's rocked my brain how many people are saying stuff like this hahahah, i'm not used to this
Been a yt premium boy for years and honestly not having adverts interrupt my whether im watching some absolute slop content (which i try to minimise) or a very long video essay and being able to lock my phone while driving and just listen has been great. Highly recommend, never used an ad blocker im just scared of downloading nefarious software
0:51 “Wait it’s all hatred scams and funny dog videos”
“It always has been.”
This is why I use adblockers and personally curate an audience based on my own work. It takes time but it's been rewarding and it avoids all of this slop.
I can't believe how much YT wants each month to avoid ads. There is no way they make that much a month through me watching ads.
Of course not, they have to profit.
Ten bucks? If you watch a lot, they do.
That's literally the whole point
@@thewhitefalcon8539 Trust me, they don't.
Cleantube
My first exposure to the Internet was actually the ARPANet, in 1980. The long slide from utopian promise to dystopian reality has been one of the more depressing experiences in my life.
The fact that people consider TH-cam social media now compared to when TH-cam actually had real social media features is kinda funny to me
im so glad i discovered your channel, im shocked you dont have even near 100k with this stuff man, also honestly you with glasses makes u look like a whole different person to the point that i GENUINELY thought i clicked on someone elses video by accident
hahahah yeah i get that glasses point a lot, i got some new ones the other day and look even weirder now, thankyou for the kind words though it means a lot!
@@henryisdumb HOORAY anytime!!
I managed to stumble this video and my god this is most well written video, the fact that you have 800 subscribers really surprised me. So I had to subscribe to help you because I see potential and also you are underrated.
that means a lot to hear! at least people appreciate my dumb ramblings
800, The Subs have nearly doubled since this comment.
Hell yeah.
social media is also an amplifier for all the trauma society and the collective consciousness has gotten since the pandemic. people are hurting and then we spend so much of our time stuck in these torment nexuses, which are all actually secondary to the actual purpose of siphoning as much data and advertising dollars as possible. the dystopia arrived and nobody noticed.
285 views and 725 subscribers? Damn this channel is so underrated!
why thank you, that's very nice to hear, it means a lot
I’m so happy to see how your channel is growing, Henry! You can clearly see how much effort you put into your videos, can’t wait to see how far you go xx
that is super kind of you to say thanks!
This guy is gonna blow up. Gonna check this video in 5 years.
this sounds like a threat but thankyou
There is NO way you only have around 1k subscribers
This video is so well made!
I turn 40 in a few months, the world was a significantly different place before the Internet... I look forward to nuclear winter. Good video kid, you earned a sub.
This Mojave of cheap content and clamoring opinions almost makes you wish for it.
damn, man, that's so bleak, what can I point at in the world to counter it?
uhh... errrm... uh... damn, man.
I was born in 90 while my brothers were born in '81. Technically we're all millenials but the world they grew up in vs the world I grew up in are even different places. Watching it form into this....blob.. is as much interesting as it is frightening.
Hell yea. The only feed I allow to suggest stuff to me is TH-cam and I’m pretty aggressive about curating it. Left both Twitter and TikTok because they kept trying to pick ragebait from people I didn’t know to show me.
I can’t imagine being a person whose sole goal is to make money. Crazy how most of those people already have unimaginable wealth.
and they still look to cut corners to get more of it, it’s baffling
@@henryisdumb tru. I guess when you’re that rich, there’s really nothing significant to do with your life than to get richer.
@@Crowz0xxit's all just about beating their high score
Thank you for speaking facts on our behalf, this was a surprisingly comprehensive commentary video about the greed and dystopia we find ourselves stuck in
I have a 10 part documentary covering a similar thing
oh wow that is super kind of you to say, so weird how many others feel the same, i did just feel like an idiot rambling, i'll absolutely check that out when i get back from work
People were only using Facebook for an hour or half an hour a day. Jesus Christ, we have people who can’t even get out of their chairs for weeks.
The only time I used Facebook was to play the games 😂 cause flash sights in that era were unbearable with ads before ad blockers were a thing. But when they took them away the whole site became useless to me. Haven't used it since 2015. Almost 10 years dang
This channel is great, your hard work doesn't go unnoticed.
I loved the father Ted style intro into the children's TV personality slowly having a breakdown 😂
I'm glad to see you finally start getting the recognition you deserve ❤
hahah i'm glad at least one person enjoyed that section, i'm glad you picked up the reference too
I’m cringing so hard watching 2012 Pinterest humor slowly morph into Instagram memes. It will probably be what causes me to delete the app
but it's that combined with the fact people act like they're the ones inventing the joke hahah, we all saw it and grew out of it a literal decade ago ahah
@@henryisdumb EXACTLY. Like why are we laughing like it’s the first time we’ve seen it? The one I saw today was the one like “my grandma’s password is MickeyMinniePlutoGoofyDaisyDonaldAlbany because it told her she needed 6 characters and a capital” (something like that. You know the one.) Come on, guys.
@@henryisdumb and congrats on 1.2k!!
@@alisonsoller oh my days hahah that was somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, they're basically jokes you'd see on the back of chocolate bar wrappers
@@alisonsoller thanks! it's all too much to cope with hahahah
You were in fact not the only child obsessed with Banjo-Kazooie. I see you, mate
hahahahh i'm glad it wasn't just me
I remember Myspace coming out because everyone made fun of me because I was a nerd and had my own website and all that but suddenly it was cool to use the internet. Super weird how fast that spread.
it was legit in the blink of an eye, i know exactly what you mean, i once laughed at my friend for having an email account hahah
I made a whole site for my friends in 8th grade. Like... dude, I learned to setup and admin phpbb so we could have our own site...
...aaaand nobody cared lol. And yet they're twice the internet addicts I could even hope to be. And still know next to nothing about how any of it works.
Incuriousness is basically a disease in my mind.
One day I was a gamer geek getting shat on daily, the next day, the entire high school bought COD: MW1 and was begging me to build gaming PCs and set shit up. Hustled a lot of extra cash. Remember when being a "gamer" was social suicide?
"IT'S JUST ELON MUSK!!" 😂 This video is gold - Internet history, social media analysis, just super funny and also thought-provoking. Thanks and subscribed!
hahah that's super nice of you to say, thankyou
Don't forget the funny cat videos. Those compensate for a lot.
Wow! I come back now and then to check on how your channel is doing and this was amazing to see. This is an amazing step forward for your channel I can’t wait to see what’s next.
It’s hard to believe I found your channel over a year ago
yeah it’s wild isn’t it hahah i’m pretty sure it was a random minecraft video too, i’m positive you were like my 20th sub or something like that
wow look, you've got a cool icon next to your name now ahahaha
I've never understood why more people don't get TH-cam Premium. I can't imagine how horrible YT would be without it.
it feels immoral to give them any money. Just use ad block, it's free
why would I buy a premium to get things youtube used to have before. Just use an adblock?
Honestly if it takes a few months to make a video like this, then I say, time well spent! Very enjoyable watch.
that's insanely kind of you to say!! in the middle of the next one, will still take eons
< 5k subs... I don't expect this channel to be in this zone for much longer
you're so underrated!! your script and editing style is so good at grabbing & maintaining attention
I'm so chuffed I've discovered you early on... looking forward to what you do. Great video. Oh, and I'm ancient so I was a young adult when we got the internet in the mid to late nineties. I miss those days.
that’s very kind of you to say thank you
Hey just wanted to say I was GENUINELY surprised that you only have a little over 6k subs! Your content is on par with someone with millions. Please keep up the good work!!!
that's insanely kind of you to say, thankyou
u are so unbelievably funny idk how u dont have more subscribers. love u king
glad it's not just me that finds me funny, means a lot
This is fantastic, I love your delivery! And your fast editing style doesn't feel abrasive like some of the other types of essays I've seen recently. Can't believe youtube waited so long to recommend your channel. I've just started in making longer videos and I can't imagine the craft and patience to make something like this - really well done, look forward to the next one
thanks for that sort of feedback, always appreciate when people comment on the editing style, it's just a different discipline, once you get used to it it gets a lot easier (as long as you shush your brain up from time to time, that's what i have to do)
and by the way, wish you all the luck on your longer vid journey!! hope it goes well
@@henryisdumb That's really sweet, thanks for that mate, good luck to you too!
I remember 90's Yahoo chat where all the pdfs went.
A/S/L was a dangerous question to answer.
YOU'RE ALREADY TO 3K??? THAT'S SO COOL YOU DESERVE IT IM SO PROUD OF YOU 🔥🔥🔥
hahaahah that's so kind of you to say, yeah you missed a lot of people rocking up in a very short space of time, it was a lot
when you said you only had 1k followers my jaw dropped and i had to go check assuming you must have 10x more now- imagine my surprise seeing you under 2k! instant subscribe. amazing content
that's very kind of you to say, i've just started the next one so hopefully it'll be up soon (that's a lie it'll be like three weeks)
10:07 "then I realized I really don't want to be in touch with them anymore" shots fired
Appreciate the work you put into your long form videos. Hope you get the increase in real people subscribers because you deserve it! Loved this condensed follow along of internet history.
thanks i appreciate that a lot!!
I quit social media back in 2018 and ive never been happier. I dont fell fomo, since quitting gave me back all that free time social media took to actually do stuff.
The algorithm auto-played this after I finished a subscribed video, so congrats. It's still pushing it. Subscribed.👍
thank you for that!!
it feels weird watching videos about things from my childhood and teen years being reported on by people that were children as i was graduating high school LOL
wow. the end is really fucked up. i already felt bad enough for people's mods on Twitch and Discord but i never thought about how awful it prolly is to be one on big platforms.
regarding internet back in the 90's, one thing that many people forget is that it was dial-up and __every minute was charged to your phone bill__ much of the internet was unsustainable due to how phone companies were making profits over phone plans. The internet in general started to get more traction as companies like AOL would have 800 numbers you can use to connect to the Internet, and phone companies started "nights and weekends free" plans. From there the cost of using the internet started to drop and being online for hours wasn't as difficult as it used to be. combine this with other things like call waiting and voicemail being offered on the phone provider side and the internet finally became usable by our aveage home owner
once again, wonderful content 🖤 please keep doing what you're doing, we need more drops of sanity in the rapidly derailing sea of garbage that is the internet
again thankyou, genuinely so kind of you to say such things
@@henryisdumb Seconded. Even if we aren't super engaging and loud about it, (even if we were, we're screaming into a void of trash), your message is being heard and there's ass-tons of us that feel the same way.
My earliest memory of the internet is joining a Radiohead mailing list and making some friends on there. We would email each other like pen pals. It was quite cool. There weren't many people at school who shared my taste in music. I guess this was around 1996 or 1997. The big shift was when Napster came along, it was the first time the internet meaningfully transformed our media consumption (and took down an industry). The insidious side of Google and social media is that the advertising revenue they generate has always existed, it would have traditionally have gone to publishers and journalists
This channel delivers top quality content AND ONLY HAS 1.2K?? AM I HALLUCINATING?!WHAT!?
hahahahah thanks, means loads hearing so many people say this