Maybe I'm misremembering (completely possible), but it feels like the 2000s was the beginning of the end and shit was REALLY good in the mid-90s.
But then the normies invaded and, with them, corporate interests up the ass. Everything was monetized, sanitized and eventually censored to appeal to the advertisers' whims.
People younger than 30,35 simply do NOT know how good it was.
Yes, it took 5 minutes to load up a low-def picture of a naked woman, so beating your meat was really hard, but that's why those of us who were horny 10 year olds back in 94 would buy/steal physical playboys from newsstands (another thing which I haven't seen in ages: newsstands).
Basically everything was a lot less centralized and you wouldn't just go to reddit/facebook/twitter for all your online social interaction. You'd have to actively hunt down forums for each of your specific interests, which meant:
a) each forum had a pretty... "unique" vibe, so you weren't just always stuck in your little bubble.
b) Each forum was small, usually operated at a loss and was purely a passion project
c) Corporate interests didn't care about these forums. They were only for a tiny minority of nerds, who cares about them?
All of that meant that most people were exposed to a lot of different subcultures, so we'd (for the most part) be a lot more open-minded.
Not making money was crucial, because, if nobody's making money off of this shit, no one's kicking out other people to please advertisers either.
If anything, as soon as you started banning all the trolls and kooky crazy people to "bring order", the forums would GET BORING and everyone else started leaving too. You NEEDED these people to bring life into the forums and spice things up a bit, so censorship was something that was naturally discouraged.
Extra: AESTHETICS
Also, aside from censorship, this is a personal preference which NOBODY seems to share with me: websites simply looked a lot cooler back then. I loved the geocities aesthetic, it was (and still is) a lot more charming than the homogenous made-for-mobile bullshit of nowadays where every website looks exactly the same and feels very lame to use on a PC
Back then people would find weird ways to divide things into tables, there were animated gifs all over the place, music started playing in the background and sites actually used side frames. Mobiles killed sideframes, but it is a very handy and logical way to organize things.
Also: anybody could code a website, because it was just mostly raw html. Sites were essentially fancy word documents, which is how they should be.
Man, that shit was fantastic. Each person's website really felt like a window into their soul in a way that a facebook/twitter profile simply does NOT manage to feel like.
They have a whole series because they love money and anything discussing vaccines is top tier clickbait.
This video was completely useless, doesn't make me feel hopeful for the next installments. They're just stretching it out for views at this point, man.
And listen: I am skeptical of these vaccines and think they're bullshit.
But it's very plain to see that this video really, really isn't what's going to convince people on the fence. If anything, their flimsy reality tv show editing, overt appeal to emotion and, well, lack of substantial evidence of any legit "smoking gun", is just more likely to push people into accepting the vaccine.
At this point I'm pretty sure they're either grifters or controlled opposition.
LOL
It's a nothingburger, like I knew it'd be.
These Veritas guys hype themselves up a lot, but fail to deliver anything most of the time. I can think of only a couple of things they actually delivered significant shit on and this was not one of them. Bunch of grifters.
This time they just recorded an antivax nurse having conversations with an antivax doctor who shares her opinion that the vaccines are bullshit. That's it.
We know there are doctors out there who think the vax is bullshit, this isn't a surprise at all... but it's also hardly evidence of anything. If anything, this video is so flimsy it serves more as pro-vax propaganda than anti.
Laaaaaaaame
Being aware of how orwellian the world is becoming really doesn't do anyone any favors. People will treat you like a lunatic, you will feel like a lunatic, no one will listen to you and you will achieve nothing.
So just become a normie, start following the news 100% without thinking too much and take the jab already. The option to resist does not exist.
If you get side effects and die, there's your suicide option. If you don't get side effects, you keep your job and people stop pissing you off.
I don't know how it's going in americaland.
But here, people are getting fed up with this covid bullshit and I see less and less people complying with masks and social distancing, especially poorer people.
Middle and upper class still put up their masks to go everywhere and spray their hands with tiny alcohol bottles 24/7 like it's going to help at all. In fancy shopping malls and boutique stores everyone is all masked up.
But poor people just don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuck. They only put masks on to deal with middle class people, usually when they're working their service jobs.
But the rest of the time? It's masks off, piling on top of each other and breathing on each other's faces, massive amounts of people going to beaches, parks, getting drunk off the shittiest booze you can imagine on the pissiest bar on the street, picking up hookers who may or may not have a penis on shady streets, and all of that with zero social distancing, zero masks, 100% happiness.
In other words, for the vast majority of the population, life is back to normal (actual normal, not "new normal"). It's just that the old normal was kind of crap too.
Not really, man.
I mean, you CAN make a raw html website, but nobody will want to visit it, because:
a) nobody really visits small websites anymore. They find shit on facebook and twitter profiles instead.
b) even if you did find an audience to view your personal website, the majority of people browse the internet on their phones nowadays.
So you gotta design a "responsive" website to please your audience, but doing that with just raw html and css, even though it CAN be done, is a bit of a nightmare and really hard to test.
You CAN do it, but it's easier to just stack a bunch of frameworks on top of frameworks that deal with this nightmare for you. Or, even better, pay wordpress or something to deal with it for you and create a really bland-looking website.