I was on the internet in the mid-90's (I was 15 in 95 which I think is the year I got on the net, I'd been on BBS's for about 5-6 years before that) and it did used to be much more weird
as a percentage of sites than now (though the number of sites was tiny).
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.
As the grownups came along and commercialised everything a lot of that went away and back then if you wanted to say something online you had to learn HTML and what FTP was as a minimum.
So things were weird because quite a few early adopters were not techies by nature.
It's different now.
It's one of the reasons I don't use facebook, instagram, snap etc, they just don't stick for me.
I do use twitter but that is because it's a nice way to follow projects and programmers I admire so it has some utility to me.
I was an early user of reddit but since the redesign (on the back of cleaning up the community) the trend towards just another social network (EDIT: speaking of which https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19039571) is pretty clear at this point, it's utility is going down as is the quality of the average posts in the subreddit's I cared about.
HN has been fairly consistent since I join over the last 5 years, a testament to the effectiveness of decent moderation.
It used to be I checked HN after reddit but that switched over the last year or two.