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...because that's a little bit what it feels like even writing it.
But I'm kind of weirdly emotional about yahoo answers shutting down.
(Not like... tearing at my hair and rending my garments or anything. But I definitely have more feelings about it than I would have guessed.)
It's probably like... some weird "getting old and nostalgic" thing, but I'm gonna ramble about it for a bit.
I had internet starting in late elementary school (dial up, but eventually with a second phone line so that we didn't have to get off the internet if someone was expecting a call.) As time went on, I definitely remember sites disappearing, as people lost interest and stopped paying for the domain, or the hosts went under. (RIP geocities and tripod and mediaminer and all the others.) Some messageboards and forums only keep old messages for so long before inactive threads are purged.
Which means I'm not really a stranger to how a whole section of the internet can just metaphorically go dark, but it's still sad to me when it happens. That feeling of something being *right there* one day, and then just a broken link the next, is a specific type of internet-sad, I think.
A lot of times the internet feels semi-permanent, where things from years ago are just as (or nearly as) accessible as things from yesterday. Sometimes that's a good thing - you can find articles and art and media from years (and even decades, now) ago. Sometimes it's a shitty thing - that embarrassing thing you said or thought ten years ago is suddenly dragged up.
There's also been a sort of... unbound-by-time shared culture aspect to it. There are memes that I first saw in high school that I *still* see used as templates for new incarnations, 15+ years later. And yahoo answers was never something I used, but I was peripherally aware of it, as the source of so many dumb things that get referenced across the internet. ("How is babby formed?")
So with that "shared culture" feeling: the internet is full of inside jokes, ones that you can sometimes share with total strangers just by virtue of being around on the same sites. And it feels like we're losing the source of some of those inside jokes, and there's something weirdly sad about that to me. (Despite the fact that we're talking about something that, again, in many cases was objectively stupid.)
Losing Flash was definitely a much bigger *thing* for internet history, and tbh I realize I won't even notice that Yahoo Answers is no more. But it's just kind of a reminder that stuff that's been a background constant for years-to-decades-to-more can always disappear.
There's plenty also to be said about Web 2.0 and capitalism and corporate control... as fewer companies wind up owning more of the internet, and as profitability becomes the only real metric for a site's "success", bigger sections of the internet will ultimately be in danger of deletion.
Maybe this is kind of a *getting old* thing. When I was your age and we walked uphill both ways to get our internets...
Bless things like the internet archive and the wayback machine, which I unironically am extremely grateful for. This may be where it's crossing over with the whole anthropology degree thing, but I DO have very strong feelings about the importance of preserving history, even now (especially now?) that so much interaction/art/artifacts is digital. Even when a big site/service/host goes down, there's a chance that much of it will still be accessible.
It also makes me more grateful that sites like Dreamwidth and AO3 still exist. Sites that aren't ad-driven, that exist because the creators and users want them to, and think the service they provide is worthwhile, not because they want to make the most money possible (and therefore sell their users as their product.)
I don't really have anything to tie that together with, I'm afraid. But the reminders that stuff is temporary sometimes come at me by surprise.
But I'm kind of weirdly emotional about yahoo answers shutting down.
(Not like... tearing at my hair and rending my garments or anything. But I definitely have more feelings about it than I would have guessed.)
It's probably like... some weird "getting old and nostalgic" thing, but I'm gonna ramble about it for a bit.
I had internet starting in late elementary school (dial up, but eventually with a second phone line so that we didn't have to get off the internet if someone was expecting a call.) As time went on, I definitely remember sites disappearing, as people lost interest and stopped paying for the domain, or the hosts went under. (RIP geocities and tripod and mediaminer and all the others.) Some messageboards and forums only keep old messages for so long before inactive threads are purged.
Which means I'm not really a stranger to how a whole section of the internet can just metaphorically go dark, but it's still sad to me when it happens. That feeling of something being *right there* one day, and then just a broken link the next, is a specific type of internet-sad, I think.
A lot of times the internet feels semi-permanent, where things from years ago are just as (or nearly as) accessible as things from yesterday. Sometimes that's a good thing - you can find articles and art and media from years (and even decades, now) ago. Sometimes it's a shitty thing - that embarrassing thing you said or thought ten years ago is suddenly dragged up.
There's also been a sort of... unbound-by-time shared culture aspect to it. There are memes that I first saw in high school that I *still* see used as templates for new incarnations, 15+ years later. And yahoo answers was never something I used, but I was peripherally aware of it, as the source of so many dumb things that get referenced across the internet. ("How is babby formed?")
So with that "shared culture" feeling: the internet is full of inside jokes, ones that you can sometimes share with total strangers just by virtue of being around on the same sites. And it feels like we're losing the source of some of those inside jokes, and there's something weirdly sad about that to me. (Despite the fact that we're talking about something that, again, in many cases was objectively stupid.)
Losing Flash was definitely a much bigger *thing* for internet history, and tbh I realize I won't even notice that Yahoo Answers is no more. But it's just kind of a reminder that stuff that's been a background constant for years-to-decades-to-more can always disappear.
There's plenty also to be said about Web 2.0 and capitalism and corporate control... as fewer companies wind up owning more of the internet, and as profitability becomes the only real metric for a site's "success", bigger sections of the internet will ultimately be in danger of deletion.
Maybe this is kind of a *getting old* thing. When I was your age and we walked uphill both ways to get our internets...
Bless things like the internet archive and the wayback machine, which I unironically am extremely grateful for. This may be where it's crossing over with the whole anthropology degree thing, but I DO have very strong feelings about the importance of preserving history, even now (especially now?) that so much interaction/art/artifacts is digital. Even when a big site/service/host goes down, there's a chance that much of it will still be accessible.
It also makes me more grateful that sites like Dreamwidth and AO3 still exist. Sites that aren't ad-driven, that exist because the creators and users want them to, and think the service they provide is worthwhile, not because they want to make the most money possible (and therefore sell their users as their product.)
I don't really have anything to tie that together with, I'm afraid. But the reminders that stuff is temporary sometimes come at me by surprise.
