The internet in it's heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of 'The big dummies guide to the internet' which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you'd find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
Do you use this? I’ve been thinking that there has to an underground “internet” that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I haven’t gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
I would limit it to the "web" in it's heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there's a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don't think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it's downright scary at this point, it's just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
I said/did/wrote (in my personal journal) so much cringe shit as a teen. I am GLAD it's not out there on permanent record. I got my Facebook account when I was like 17. Well after all the other kids my age did (I'm 31 now). I stopped using it by 23. I usually just made witty quips about life in general on Facebook, never aired my dirty laundry or spilled my guts or called a girl a bitch for not wanting to go out with me. I did go through a tough breakup during this time in my life, but the most I ever did was quote Cee-Lo's "Fuck You."
Facebook being problematic for kids is nothing new, but now many adults are intimately aware of how bad it is because we were those kids.
Back in the day personal blogs were pretty popular. Most of my friends had one, and we pretty much all treated it like a personal journal. So we aired our dirty laundry, for all to see, and it’s still in the internet archive to cringe at there too. We were blogger people, but LiveJournal was hugely popular for the same purpose.
Setting up your computer before you go to bed to download a demo for a game that's... 20 MB large! Waking up in the morning to inevitably discover the download failed part way through.
Getright was my choice for years, until it decided to scrap an entire 600MB iso I had downloaded over 56k, and start over. Getright pissing me off was thebmain reason why I got pretty good at perl 25 years ago - I decided to write my own download manager.
sometimes I still have to do this, sure not for something that's only 20mb but a 1gb file can take a whole night to download in my uni accommodation. The landlord doesn't seem to give a shit though because they're still advertising that the building has "up to 100mb/s" wifi speeds.
Huh, I think they all flew to Mexico, I did a road trip from Mexico to Austin TX recently and I do recall having not many bugs in my windshield in the USA... But back home to Mexico they all started to appear LMAO.
It's two things, one personal vehicles are designed to bend air around them rather than slice through or just brute force through air resistance. This means that more bugs are pushed out of the way with newer vehicles now, compared to older vehicles which just had the bug hit the windshield. The second and much more impactful reason is because the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
Unfortunately yes. This story by NPR isn't an academic source but it's definitely worth listening to. On average bug populations have declined by 2% a year for decades or more in some areas, less in others. It's an average.
Now truthfully, whether or not a declining bug population is the main cause of fewer bugs on our windshields or if it's better aerodynamics I don't know. What I do know is a more aerodynamic vehicle isn't something I need to worry about, a declining bug population is.
I just drove through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas and confirmed there are still enough bugs out there to make you use a squeegee when you fill up for gas. But I remember when I was younger having to stop just to clean the windshield or else you wouldn't be able to see.
Car design change? I'd assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
Not all, but most don't seem to have adventures. When I was a kid I'd go off into the woods and build a den or climb a tree, we once spent a whole week trying to dam a stream, god knows why. None of my friends kids go anywhere by themselves, a lot of them do 'forest school' where they'll be taken by adults to a sanitised woodland and taught how to build a teepee with pre cut wood, and it's just not the same thing.
A building down the street from where I live has like 3 families with kids renting and they are always outside in a big gaggle. Like is the weather close to halfway decent? They are out.
I think because their parents are never around supervising them. But that’s about the only place with obvious kids. There must be more, but I have no idea where.
The town I live in renovated a park to have a gigantic playground, and every nice weekend day I've been there there's tons of kids and parents there. On Halloween there were tons of kids out despite it being around 0F out that night. But random weeknights? I don't see kids playing in yards much. I don't see kids riding their bikes to convenience stores to get snacks. I think the risk acceptance of parents has shifted a lot plus kids are more able to occupy themselves with fondleslabs so they have multiple reasons to not go outside
Playgrounds are fenced off and parents constantly stay within 2 steps of their helmet wearing kids here in Czech Republic. When those kids are older than toddler age, they disappear from public life.
It's not like that in my home country where maybe they just sit around playing with their phones, but at least they're outside with friends.
Yes, for some reason shrubs and plants are ripped out more and more. Lots of nice areas are now just empty patches of grass. Not sure about the homeless but it is much harder now to find a place to pee in private if you're outside a lot
I read an article recently about kids not spending much time outdoors anymore. One of the main reasons not mentioned here seems to be that the majority has nice rooms for themselves at home, and they enjoy the time they spend there.
Kids rooms are a lot nicer nowadays, and often they don't need to share it with a sibling as they might have 30 years ago. Also the amount of toys has risen, I suppose.
Not that this is entirely a good thing. Children need to spend more time outdoors. But let them enjoy their indoor time if they want to.
Same. There are a few kids in my road that will play directly outside their houses, but when I say 'kids', definitely 12+. One kid about 15 sets up skateboard ramps and does jumps which I love to see, but actual kids? Never see them without their parents. Kids are taken to school into their teens, I'd have been mortified if my parents came to school past like 9 or 10.
A lot of folks blame this on kids simply not wanting to go outside anymore. But I believe a significant dimension to it also lies in the fact that the world is a lot more hyper vigilant about punishing things like trespassing, loitering, hooliganism, and the like.
The woods? Whose woods? Someone owns that land. Are they gonna call the cops on you if they notice you're in there? Do they not want you damming up their creek? Is that going to be considered vandalism? Do they not want to be liable if you injure yourself on their property? All questions that probably aren't in a kid's head, but I imagine would be on a modern parent's. The safety risks are high. Always were, that's not new. But the legal risks are new.
And yeah, it's not like getting in trouble for these sorts of things didn't happen back in, say, my dad's childhood. But I'd wager my dad would have gotten picked up by cops in his youth and sent off with stern tut-tut by the local sheriff for being just another incident of rowdy boys being boys, while my kid (if I had one) would be far more likely to make it out with a criminal record if they're old enough, or trigger a lawsuit against me for my negligence if they aren't.
I'd be so scared to let a kid do that now. Barbed wire is everywhere, everyone wants to brandish a gun at strangers, and truck drivers can't even see pedestrians anymore.
I don't have kids though, because I couldn't force a kid to hide indoors all day, either.
We used to scramble over barbed wire fences like it was nothing. My dad actually speared his leg on a fence spike as a kid, at least barbed wire just cuts you up a bit. None of our parents had any idea we were doing that though, we'd come home if we needed a plaster and say we fell off a bike or something.
The modern day equivalent of this is including sound effects or a break in the music in the official youtube music video to prevent people from using yt-dlp to rip the audio directly to their playlist.
Getting your finger stuck in the VCR because the videotape would not eject. You had to stick your finger in and poke the tape while mashing the eject button. Worked everytime. Also pushing rewind on a tape and walking away because someone forgot to rewind and you don't want to watch the video in reverse.
I think my family may have had a later generation VCR then yours, because I don't remember ever getting my hand stuck, and if you pressed the rewind button while playback was stopped (not paused) it would rewind at like 10x the regular playback speed.
It's so hard to find remotely good games now... I have hit the point that I don't even bother looking at anything but paid offline games but even those often have microtransctions. I am glad that you can get a refund most of the time as long as you only used it less than an hour.
Tbf, as a parent now, I wouldn't let my kids go unsupervised that long without some periodic check-ins throughout the day. I mean, I definitely remember much of my childhood being like this, but in retrospect it also led to us doing lots of stupid/dangerous shit that did result in a few ER visits over the years (e.g. broken arms, legs, concussions, stitches, etc).
It was definitely the time to do stupid shit, but it was also great freedom. I remember constructing skate parks in abandoned factories that would rival some of the best pre fabs today. We made a 2 story indoor go-ped track. Obviously very dangerous stuff, but i wouldn't trade those memories for anything.
Haha, same here, but ours were packed dirt trails with dirt and wood ramps in the woods (our neighborhood had a large forested area nearby). Fun stuff, and definitely some very fond memories.
But, I was definitely one of the kids that broke their leg (my femur) and had to get 4 steel pins that stuck out of my skin to set the bone while it healed for about 3 months before getting a regular cast for the rest of the healing. It was pure agony, the entire healing and physical rehab recovery process took almost a year (my school even sent an in-home tutor to my house for a couple of hours a day since I had to stay at home for several months). I'd never want anyone to go through that, particularly my kids.
That being said, I do think it's important for kids to have a degree of privacy and autonomy, I just don't think I'd be kosher with the amount of unsupervised freedom that I had as a kid (my kids are still <5, so I have some time before they're semi-free range animals).
Dirt tracks were amazing. We had a few, one of which was a huge bowl in the ground. The jumps were enormous and I always thought "whos hitting these?" Like pro level size and you would never see anyone on them. Then you'd hear "so and so" did a 3 on that one. It made for some good myths. Luckily there was so much empty space, we'd just make some jumps for our skill level.
I don't disagree. My comment was saying a healthier balance is what I would prefer when my kids are a bit older. That article fails to be well-rounded and only focuses on proving their hypothesis versus presenting data in an objective manner. For example:
The answer lies in expectations. Parents today receive constant messaging that in order to be “good parents”, they must always keep their children safe. And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.
Yet just a bit earlier in the article, she mentions this:
Every successive generation of children since the 1970s has seen their outdoor play and freedom shrink. Time use data show that children’s leisure time has gone down, particularly time spent in unstructured outdoor play, while time spent in academic and screen-based activities has increased. Between 1975 and 2015, outdoor play among UK children decreased by 29.4%, while screen-based activities increased by 22.4%. In the U.S., only 16% of children in 1997 played outdoors every day. By 2003—just six years later—that dropped even further to 10%.
So how can they rule out that it's safer now because the amount of kids engaging in unsupervised, dangerous/risky activities is the lowest it's ever been? (As a side note: In the US, I think she also ignores the very real financial problems with serious injuries. A medical bill for a broken bone or other serious injury can cost some families tens of thousands of dollars without insurance. Back in the 60s/70s and earlier, medical bills were way, way more affordable than now.)
There are other problems, as well. She seems to only focus on "intensive parenting" and showing that structured activities are a negative thing. Whereas articles like this, https://parenthetical.wisc.edu/2017/01/23/acing-afterschool-making-extracurricular-activities-work-for-your-teen/ , argue that structured activities can be beneficial, too. Later near the end she does discuss simply prioritizing it versus going all in, but the way it's presented throughout the rest of the article makes it seem like structured activities are entirely a negative thing and unsupervised, unstructured activities is the best way for kids to thrive.
Anyway, I'm an advocate for simply striking a healthy balance between the two: Don't overburden your kids with supervised, structured activities, and don't let them become feral by completely going hands-off with their free time. In other words, gently guide, mentor, and support them. :)
As an old school retro enthusiast I can assure you a good laser mouse is leaps and bounds better than a trackball any day easily. I still love the track ball though because I was there gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago.