Coffee Query : What was life like before caffeine?

©JustAsmahDesign

Sit your asses down, you little shits. We're going back to the Jurassic era of the turn of the millennium, and I'm going to tell you how we socialized online before one ginger fuck in a hoodie turned a fratboy project into a multi-billion machine of global influence.

Lately, searching for a particular Stanisław Lem quote led me to archives of Usenet groups saved on Google's servers. And I realized that Usenet groups, mailing lists and BBS predate even me, meaning they're truly ancient, all things considered. What was there when I started was the Internet Relay Chat, or IRC for short - non-persistent chat system, after which countless in-game chats are patterned and which still serves as the backbone of Twitch chat. E-zines running on volunteer-funded servers or distributed on computer magazine cover CDs as a curiosity and typically written in static HTML were often surrounded by communities, particularly when they were focused on some specific nerdery. Then, with the advent of Web 2.0 and the dot-com boom that fueled it, we got blogs, forums and internet communicators. The communicators were mostly centralized, but only some of them were maintained by large corporations like AOL and Microsoft. Blogs and forums, though? Anyone could run them, as long as they had the money to pay monthly hosting fees.

Around that time, someone came up with the idea of dating sites that evolved into the first social media. A lot of them had various gimmicks in addition to actual functionalities like groups, built-in blogs and so on. People started moving there from forums and the entire thing went downhill from there.

Because back then, around the turn of the millennium, we would actually get off our asses and meet up in the real world sometimes. I remember meetings with the D&D forum members from my town when I was in college, and even an in-person meet with the owner of DeviantArt because he actually flew down to Eastern Europe and gave a quick talk about the site's new features in a park downtown.

Yep, this is Angelo "Spyed" Sotira, DeviantArt's head honcho, in a company merch t-shirt, meeting a lot of weirdos under a tree. Not on some corporate stage you probably saw at TED Talks and gaming expos. Under a fucking tree.

At first, we could see our friends' posts in chronological order, right when they were posted, and scroll through what we have missed. But no, that just couldn't stay this way - first, they started shoving ads between the posts, then fucking with displaying the posts themselves, "suggesting" the exact shit you didn't want to see, like some right-wing idiocy, obnoxious "christian" proselytizing (so, more right-wing idiocy) and so on, and delaying your friends' posts by entire fucking days. And once they started banking on video content, because some 80% of social media users are fucking illiterate, the need for data center space and processing power grew exponentially.

Yes, you absolute slobbering, mouth-breathing cretins. The data center problem dates back at least a decade, when language models could barely process your social media feeds to generate laughably awkward "new posts", but social media were burning through computing power to transcode and stream videos like crazy. You probably were told that the video about a woman complaining that the nearby data center took all the neighborhood water was related to OpenAI, and AI in general - guess what, shitheads, it's a 2019 video from Northern California, and the data center in question belonged to none other than Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram. But since social media are telling you what to parrot every fucking day, you were told to ignore the problem, because your favorite influencer would get less money from her sponsors, and every fucking company out there would have to come up with new ways of trying to sell their shitty product, or just have to make shitty TV commercials for your grandma. And even that doesn't always work, because who would want to watch ads for affordable funeral financing in the middle of her usual evening soap opera?!

Because the social media companies don't give a shit about your content. If it's too long, it's gonna get unceremoniously punted out of the queue, because they can't show enough ads in the time needed to go from the beginning to the end. They want you to scroll, watch ads, scroll, watch ads, and so on, and so forth. Just like they always did.