In search of 2000's vintage gif art I embark into The Geocities Gallery, which is.. kind of amazing - and expansive. I'm struck by how intimate and creative the random sites I open are.
One page logs a man's life over time - you can see that he got divorced, then daughter graduated college, has now met another woman, and seems to be doing alright. There are a couple pages of gif art that he collected - a much more difficult feat in those days to get 10 whole pieces of art that you actually liked and wanted to share on your page. Some pages about motorcycle stuff. A page on animal facts.
And some German kid's Star Trek site detailing the crew and technical details of their S.A.D class starship 🛸, describing their efforts in worldbuilding and creating some sort of RPG game the link to which has crumbled into the sands of internet time. 🌬 ⌛

I know it's not like this stuff stopped happening - dads still make websites, kids still dream up RPGs together online. But back in, uh... stardate 9711.28 there seemed to be a much higher chance of finding websites like this. Maybe it's because I was [actually not yet even] in middle-school, and therefore in the know about where the "cool web" was, and today I'm just stuck in the orbit of Reddit or Hacker News...
But I kinda feel like the garden walls weren't as high as they are today. Forums vanish into Discord. Personal pages and group pages vanish into Facebook. The collections that were carefully curated and arranged have become infinite lists in feedback loops. Plus advertisements. Plus bots / genai-rated content flood. It's just such a different experience overall.

To compare to Facebook is not really fair (self selection of the type of people creating websites vs broad and ubiquitous access of modern social media) but I did it anyway... Checking out the profile of one friend who still actually uses the platform...
There are a lot of pictures here dude. I can certainly appreciate the taking of a shitload of pictures, I do that as well, but it's just kind of astounding - there must be thousands of pictures here going back over a decade.
I wonder what would happen to all this if he died today (early 30's). How long would this live on?
And if he lives long enough to see Facebook shut down, will he know to / know how to / want to / actually do the exporting of data to save the thousands of memories that have been collected here? ( not that I'm any greater a steward of digital artifacts)

Memes and reels (which I guess have supplanted memes? ugh, I hate having sound on... I'll skip this fad) and reaction videos are interspersed with family and life photos, and it just keeps going and going and fuck man, I'm just trying to find a place to stop scrolling, I'm looking for a way out but these fucking videos just keep playing and the top of the next post just grabs my attention and keeps pulling me further down until WITH HERCULEAN EFFORT OOOOOF ☢ -- -- finally I manage to snap myself out of it and close the tab.
Same BS happens to me with Reddit, and any of the other modern social media site I'm sure I would use in lieu of those.

I see many problems - third party control of data, endless scroll feed designs, structured profiles for structured data, the low-effort sharing mechanisms as input to the feed[back]...
But I would sum up the issue as a loss of intentionality that permeates so deeply, it is an ingrained thought pattern.

1. Browse Reddit for a while
2. Eventually decide it's time to stop and do something else; Close Reddit tab
3. Immediately open up a new Reddit tab ☠ ☠

It's not necessarily the content. How many times have I read through <random> <technical> <analyses> on fields I don't work in, geeking out on information I'll never use?
I love these things - it's insight into worlds I could have but did not go into. When it's reading an article here and there, that seems perfectly healthy. And when I'm in the throes of a microbsession and I have 20 new tabs opened from one article... I'm OK with that also because at least it's directed attention. ☛ This guy ☚ is making the decisions on what content we're going to read next and what we want to spend our time on, and if that means we spend all Sunday reading air traffic control SOPs, that's a good use of a Sunday.

Most of the time though I end up in the 'passive attention' mode, where my brain automatically opens up Reddit or HN - and even if I end up reading anything technical or long form I usually don't end up writing anything down or engaging with it in any real way. And even finding the attention span to read something real is wishful thinking - most of the time I just check the comments to see a very diluted and skewed idea of what was posted.
And that last sentence betrays me - anything I find is via social infinite feed type link aggregators.

If I want to see what someone else has curated, it's all jumbled up with the crap of the platform around it. The very soul of the creation is woven into and obscured by the platform. ( and unfortunately the platforms encourage us to curate endlessly, generating a ton of noise )

I do like that I can see my friend's life changes over time - starting to date what seems like the thousandth woman and getting married to her, and seeming to become stable and happy and having a child together, all through the pictures he posted. (Also a steak he made one time. Looks underdone to me.)


And again, caveat is that having the platform available made sharing all of this accessible to someone who wouldn't have been interested in creating a website. But...

If everything lives inside a walled garden, and kids grow up learning that creating on a computer means building on top of a CMS, how will anyone even know that they can make cool things like colorful websites with silly pictures in designs and with features that express themselves. And then how will they find out that while they were playing, they were also actually learning?