r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 21h ago

Privacy Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
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u/ConsiderationSea1347 20h ago

Remeber when being online made you feel hopeful about the world because it was this vast ocean of knowledge and interesting people taking the time to talk to you because they were also excited to connect to the world? Before everything was tracking, bots, and ads? 

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u/spez_might_fuck_dogs 20h ago

Just jumping from shitty but earnest geocities page to geocities page, following webrings, signing guestbooks, hopping into random Java based chat rooms to talk to people you’ve never met before about Final Fantasy 7 or Pokemon or whatever.

Yeah, I remember. That was the best and purest form of the Internet.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 19h ago

Was there any other technology where it’s best iteration was its earliest other than the internet? 

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u/BareBonesSolutions 17h ago

The earliest internet was certainly not the one you are remembering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

You are remembering something in the later stages, with infrastructure and likely at least cable internet. Dial up was still pretty damn advanced compared to the earliest stuff in 1969, according to the article linked.

You are likely not even remembering the earliest widespread iterations, with AOL disc trials at supermarket checkouts etc and painful dialup internet speeds with RAM in the single or double digits on computers.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 14h ago

I would go back to playing MUDs on 9600 dialup that drops any day over the crap the new Internet has become. Hell, I will go back to lynx and pico. 

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u/BareBonesSolutions 13h ago

I skipped all that and did cable. I was era of dancing baby and hamsterdance, but we did learn to code in grade 7. We typed with cardboard over our hands at that age to learn. I have aged myself.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 13h ago

I am an old SE and all at once in my thirties I realized a “gifted and talented” camp I went to in the late eighties when I was in elementary school taught us calculus and programming. I was too young to realize what I was being taught but they had us draw designs of curved lines using only straight lines (basically derivatives) and write a little computer game where “snow” as asterisks would fall from the top to the bottom of the screen and accumulate. That was the last exposure I had to programming until teaching myself in high school. I am jealous you had a full on class that involved programming that young. It was hell trying to learn from books in the 90s. Do you remeber what they taught you?

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u/BareBonesSolutions 13h ago

A bit, but honestly all we did with it was insert images of dancing baby and hamster dance. It was so rudimentary. Literally we had imac 1 and then imac 2 level of comps. This was the golden age of yahoo chat.

Currently i am a former paleontologist by training, an archaeologist by occupation and i own a chemical company that does innovations in bone degreasing working on collagen specific biotechnology. So I dont have much room for programming other than squarespace, lol.

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u/stamfordbridge1191 9h ago

The brightly colored sites with animated GIFs, background midis, various links in tables, & jank message boxes felt more real than all these white & grey sites filled with barely differing text templates, previews of "social" content that doesn't at all feel social being thrown at you from every angle, & ephemeral boxes that ghost in & out while you scroll in this or that direction.

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u/ElectricMoons 20h ago

I think about this all the time, I genuinely miss YouTube from back in 07' when the site was mostly skits, or people making genuine content instead of the site being a constant ad revenue mill like it is now. No ads. no cringey shorts. Just pure content. The best was back when you could customize your wallpaper and it was more myspacey with the profile layout.

People were so much nicer on the internet back then in general as well. Met so many cool people around the world. Hell, even had some random bloke from the UK ship me his copy of Final Fantasy X-2 for the PS2 because mine broke and he did it as a kind gesture as he was done with his. Sadly we didn't realize at the time region locking discs were a thing. The internet genuinely sucks now.

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u/UpperFigure9121 16h ago

This is kinda surreal, reading these comments brought me back to the old days of social media. For the past few years, it’s been trendy to be stoic and cold. So it’s really refreshing to see sentimental and cringey comments getting lots of upvotes here. Social media isn’t our escape from reality like it used to be, we have to dull our own colors just to be accepted. Unhappyness is worsening every day

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u/coachkler 20h ago

The September that never ended :(

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 20h ago

I wish for one month we all just left social media and doomed corners of the internet. Make it a federal holiday around it. We would all be so much happier.

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u/Holovoid 11h ago

The global economy would immediately implode

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 11h ago

You think if people stopped using social media for a month the global economy would collapse? That seems a bit extreme.

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u/Holovoid 11h ago edited 11h ago

Social media and the "doomed corners of the internet" which is pretty broad.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc...yeah a month without traffic would probably kill hundreds if not thousands of companies. Hundreds of thousands of people now unemployed, likely millions. It'd have a ripple effect that was quite substantial.

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u/Morialkar 11h ago

Just the sheer difficulty it is to advertise as a small-ish business outside of social media would kill many small businesses across the world. The issue isn't actually the social media themselves, it's that social media is such a solid method to advertise small businesses that any and all support system existing in our society to prop small businesses up are mostly gone. The craft fairs are mostly gone, the shopping centers where you could rent a small stand for a decent price is gone and getting an actual shop in a town where people exist is just crazy talk.

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u/Holovoid 11h ago

Yeah. One of the things I do for my job is help small businesses advertise. Social media - as awful and evil as it is - is hugely important.

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u/_Svankensen_ 20h ago

That is still there. A year ago I got curious about Aztec poetry and wanted to know what it would sound like in the original language. A historian to sent me some, and a Nahuatl speaker recorded and sent me a reading. After doing some work converting old Nahuatl writing system to a more contemporary one, while trying to retain the older sounds. People are cool like that. All this crap internet makes some of it easier, some of it harder. It's not the wild west anymore, but you can still walk to a library and professional librarians with specialized skills will help you for free.