The Old Internet
Once upon a time, I had a passionate love affair with Google Reader.
After my feedreader was snatched from my trembling hands (do I sound dramatic? Because it was really really really unnerving to change feedreaders), I moved to Feedly, which I now love. But it was a rocky start. I mean, I came to Feedly so raw, so upset from having lost Google Reader. Could I ever love a feedreader again?
Um, yes, yes I could.
But that is the mindset with which I read this post about that change in the Internet from the Google Reader days to the algorithms that now rule our lives.
I don’t think it’s just looking back with rose-coloured glasses. I think the Internet really was better back in 2008. When content was delivered to you chronologically vs. controlled by an algorithm that doesn’t truly know you but is trying really hard to deliver what it thinks you want to see based on all the data it has collected on you. Or how we once subscribed to the things we wanted to read rather than leave content consumption to chance by following links from social media.
When Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.
I miss that Good Internet.
5 comments
Oh, that’s so true that before the algorithms and the shameless data mining and the bubble-encasing there was a good internet. I suck at feed readers and so am at the mercy of blogrolls and roundups, but it would be terrible to have something you loved disappear and then be replaced with something more AI-y. I wasn’t even on Facebook in 2008, and I think there was a lot fewer social media choices for kids to get sucked into. Better times indeed.
I miss the good internet too. The algorithms and adjustments and so forth drive me crazy. I don’t want to have to scroll through half a page of sponsored content to get to my search results! I want my FB feed in chronological order, not missing things I want to see and seeing the same posts over and over. Grrrr! GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
I miss the heyday of blogging, when people really were just journaling online vs. trying to be “influencers” or build a business. And I miss a lot of the bloggers who I used to read regularly to whom I no longer have a connection because they’ve stopped writing, and our blogs were our only point of connection.
Oh, I STILL miss Google Reader too! I’ve been using Bloglovin since then, but it’s not quite as good and it is often down or overloaded these days. I opened a Feedly account as backup, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to transfer everything over there so I just added in my favourite blogs and cross my fingers I’ll never need to use it. Also, ditto what Sharon said about “influencers” — both on blogs and other social media.
I used to enjoy Facebook a whole lot more when they had interest lists and friend lists. I could organize the pages I liked into interest lists — for example, one for all the childless/free pages I followed — and I’d only see the posts from those pages. Similarly, I organized my friends into various lists — my relatives, dh’s relatives, high school friends — and I’d only see the posts from them. I had one list I called “All friends” that included ALL my FB friends, and I’d only see content from them — from most recent to oldest, too. I used that more than my regular news feed, to be honest, because it filtered out all the pages and other stuff that FB was pushing at me.
Then a couple of years ago, FB did away with the interest lists, and then it announced it was doing away with friends lists… they said they weren’t being used — and I know I got a lot of blank looks whenever I mentioned them to people — but those of us who did use those features really did love them! I suspect it was really just because they want us to see what THEY (and their advertisers) want us to see, not what WE want to see. :p You can still create friend lists for the purposes of posting certain content to certain people, but friend lists as I used them ceased to exist.
Or supposedly they did… the “Friends lists” option disappeared from the FB menu, BUT I had my “All friends” list bookmarked — and I was still getting just my friends’ posts there. The content was not in order any more — it was all jumbled up and I’d have to scroll through the entire feed, including posts I’d already seen, to ensure I didn’t miss anything — but it was still there, until just a month or two ago — and then it disappeared completely. So now I am completely at the mercy of Facebook and its algorithms and sponsored content and wondering what stuff and friends’ posts I’m missing that I really am interested in seeing. Grrrr…..
*cough* accessing this from The Old Reader *cough*
I used to read various blogs which I would access by clicking from other blogs, or had them bookmarked, etc—a jumbled mishmash. Finally I got organized and started using Google Reader. Which went kaput not that long after. Luckily I could switch over to TOR. Although most of the blogs I used to read are dead and I haven’t added any in a long time.