#btw this is your reminder that internet radio does still exist and that's awesome

[niconiconwo]

It's pretty wild to think about how much cool stuff we had for internet culture before Social Media and Web 2.0. I mean it's still out there, plenty of niche PHP-driven boards, simple websites, and even a Geocities clone (though it really is just nostalgia-as-art and not really the same thing at all, don't kid yourself). The issue is most of it is very unused.

RSS was awesome, but now everything wants you to go to Twitter for content updates. Most web boards were community funded, and all but a handful didn't survive; they migrated to Facebook instead and became subsumed entirely. There were all kinds of shoutcasts and other small time broadcasts via the internet; most internet radio channels see far far less listeners and has generally been replaced by Spotify. Big Tech messengers have virtually replaced email and neutral applications both standalone and web-based; only sweaty nerds even know what a mailing list is anymore let alone actually correspond via emails in long form.

All the cool stuff from the old web was replaced or smothered specifically to wall the garden and make you more profitable to tech corpos. Beyond that, the social ramifications of Web 2.0 and the appification that followed are astounding.