If you have been online for several years as I have, chances are there are things you probably did in the beginning that you no longer do, or vice versa. For me, I used to save everything I read, thinking I might want to go back and read it again later, but seldom did. After awhile I realized that all I was doing was accumulating a bunch of files that I would probably never look at again (much like how a new VCR owner starts taping all the movies he can get off of cable, only to amass a large library of tapes he’ll never watch because he’s always recording new movies), so this practice waned. Also getting a full-time high-speed connection has lesened the need to have an offline copy of the information available to me. I also used to print a lot of stuff that I don’t bother to print anymore.
So how have your Internet habits changed since you first went online?
I used to spend an insane amount of time in chat rooms because it was so exciting to meet so many different types of people. It got old for me after a few years. I haven’t been in a chat for at least the past three years now. I do still enjoy the message boards.
It may be a time thing though. I haven’t had much time for idle chat, especially since the baby was born.
I also used to have a huge “favorites” file, which I kept in neatly divided subfolders. I lost it all once and I was heartbroken!
These days I rarely find anything worth going back to though, and if I do, odds are the link will die before I get around to it.
I think due to my time spent on LJ and here, I’m resistant to explore other sites thoroughly. If it’s not laid out cleanly and intuitively, and without intrusive advertising, I’m not going to bother.
I used to do the Chat thing a lot. That got boring real quick.
I also used to type random words into the address bar just to see where they went.
For example, Trash.com used to go to (I swear to God), a very angry gay man’s blog. This was back in like 1997 or so. I just checked and today it’s a trash information dump.
I used to surf a lot more in the first 6-9 months of being online here at home (July '00 - about April '01) than I do now. These days (and nights) I have a fairly stable circle of sites I go to for news, information, reference and laughs, and fairly well stick close to messageboards I frequent, like this one, NADS, Unaboard and a Kiwi one on Ezboard.
All part of settling down after the first rush of the “Far out, man!! What does this do???” period, I guess.
I was a huge fan of the chat rooms, too. I used to debate the atheist position on Christian chatrooms (and found that the Christians, even the fundies, were a lot more civil, open-minded and laid back than the “free thinkers” in the atheist chatrooms). It’s not so much that I lost interest; I started grad school and a career at roughly the same time and couldn’t spare the hours anymore.
Up until a very short time ago, I used to visit politically right wing message boards. That finally got boring. After a while, those guys all started to sound like the same angry, slow-tracked ninth-grader spouting off in his free time between detention hall and Saturday School. Same with reading Ann Coulter’s online column and Fred Phelps’s sewage. These people aren’t capable of improvising or coming up with new shit. If you’ve read them for a week, you’ve seen everything they can do.
I used to play a lot of Minesweeper. I finally quit cold turkey, and it was actually kind of painful.
I first got on the web back in 1994. There wasn’t all that much content and no real search engines so I used to surf randomly for hours at a time almost every day. I did that all the way up until about 2000 when I think I got overwhelmed and just settled onto a few key sites including here.
However, recently I discovered StumbleUpon. If you don’t have it, this is easily the greatest web invention of the past five years (YOMV). You get this little toolbar and then you get to set channels (out of hundreds) of things that you are interested in. Then, when you feel adventurous or bored, you just click the Stumble button and you are taken to a random website that other Stumble users have rated as Da Bomb and they usually.
Stumble Upon has actually helped me get taken back to that early, simpler time when each click was and adventure and the quality is a hell of a lot higher than it was back then.
When I first got online, Yahoo chat was the place where I spent my time. It didn’t take long for me to tire of the incessant chat-whoring, and incredibly bad grammar and spelling and I moved on to a roleplaying chat room, where I spent most of the next seven years. I made a lot of friends there (and in another RP chat room as well) and even had a go at the online dating thing a couple of times. It wasn’t too bad, until the last one. Someone who I’d been great friends with, and naturally fell into a more “serious” relationship with decided he didn’t want to know me any more, and needed to be with another girl we both knew - about two months before I was due to fly out to the US and spend time with him for the first time. That stung, and I left both of the RP chatrooms and almost all of my friends behind (he spent time in both, and we had mutual friends in both).
I still needed my RP fix, however, and ended up regressing in technology terms and spending a lot of time surfing roleplaying MUDs, MUXes and MOOs.
It was in an RP MUX that I met hubby in late 2002. We spent a while doing the MUX thing and roleplaying, but then that game actually closed down. By that time I was working full time again, and hubby had just come over, so my internet time went down the tube.
Since hubby came to Aus full-time, and I’ve been working, most of my time now is spent reading blogs and surfing a few message boards. Occasionally I’ll ebay or shop in other online locations, but that’s not very often. I don’t chat any more due to time constraints, and the fact that it’s banned at work. Even if I did, the original RP chat I used to go to has been taken over by the ‘netspeak’ crowd after UGO purchased it, and the other one still has my ex present. I’m still a bit bitter over that, so it’s best I don’t go there.
a) Well, I use a web browser extensively now. For the first 4 years of my history of internet usage, I didn’t have a web browser at all on my computer, and had used one (Mosaic) on a different computer only a couple of times.
b) I don’t BinHex stuff much at all any more. In my early internetting years, if I were sending a file to someone or uploading it to an FTP server for other folks to download, it was an absolute given that the file had to be BinHexxed — converted to 7 bit ASCII, a text file containing the hexadecimal characters that represented the binary of the source binary file. If you didn’t do that, folks using email programs and connection utilities that would not preserve the 8 bit transfers would end up with unusable files. PC users and Unix geeks weren’t immune to this, either, although they tended to use UUEncode instead of BinHex. Mac folk used BinHex because it preserved resource forks, which UUEncoding did not.
c) To be on the network nowadays is intrinsically to be on the internet. (Even when I’m in the office, behind the firewall with a 192.168.xx.yy address, the internal network is directlly appended to the internet and I have internet resources at my fingertips). Back in the old days, the internet, big and pervasive as it was, was still only one network among others. There was BitNet, there were commercial networlds Adelphi, Prodigy, America Online, and CompuServe, there was the local AppleTalk or NetBEUI office LAN that wasn’t over TCP/IP (and many folks didn’t even have a TCP network stack loaded in their OS), and so on.
d) Long after I had a browser and started going to web pages, they were mostly text with a small bit of graphic element. Not much because nearly everyone was on modem, and the modem wasn’t a 56K either. Typical would be a 2400 baud modem. That’s what web designers had to optimize for. Not to mention that browsers weren’t doing CSS and Flash and stuff like that back then.
Considering my online experience started with local BBS systems that were almost all exclusively chat boards, and now I spend most of my time on the Straight Dope, I’d say I’ve come full circle.
I used to download many many wallpapers and screensavers.
Now I keep wallpaper up for 6 months at a time, and have no screensaver, only a poweroff timeout. That’s because they made reawakening a faster process.
Ah, yes, when I started waaaay back, it was all text and menus, and my first modem was, ugh, 300 baud. To download a simple news story took the better part of the afternoon.
While never a big fan of GUIs, the Web sure has made a difference, to say nothing of broadband.
When I started, was still working, and most online tme was devoted to that. Today everybody can sneak in a few minutes surfing other suff. Now I enjoy not only the SDMB, but research for myself, shopping of course, email, and other wonderful stuff we retired guys can enjoy (every day is a holiday).
Probably the biggest thing for me is email. I used to email a lot, and recieve lots of email. I’d always leave my email program running and have it check for new mail every ten or fifteen minutes. I responded to emails immediately. If one of my friends was online, we’d conduct a near real-time conversation via email.
Nowadays, I only run my email program once or twice a day. That’s only if I’m expecting something. Otherwise, I might check it every other day, maybe even longer. I tend to treat email much more like my real-life mailbox.
I used to think having a “real” email address was important. That is, the email address provided by my ISP. Now I consider free, web-based email (like gmail or something) preferable and more permanent, since I’m liable to switch my ISP at any time.
There used to be some websites that looked down on free email addresses like hotmail, etc, and they wouldn’t let you register using one. I haven’t seen that so much lately.
I wasted many, many hours playing Slingo - it was such fun to talk to people whilst playing the game.
I would follow-up on every joke I forwarded. “Did’ja get it? Did’ja like it?” Finally, someone who’d been on the 'net longer than I told me that just about every joke had already hit the rounds at least once.
I used to chat a lot. I can’t remember the last time I even logged on to AIM now.
When I first started using the internet in…1997 or so, I spent huge amounts of time roleplaying. (In retrospect, it wasn’t what you’d think of roleplaying now, it was more like an extended multi-writer fanfic.) I made a lot of good friends doing that, but I stopped in 1999 or 2000 or so.
I hardly ever Surf the net anymore. The Spyware has just gotten too nasty. I used to post & read Snopes a lot, but hardly ever now, due to nasty pop-ups and an occassional Spyware attack from said ads. (Every so often, I check out what’s new when I can do it from the Library or other computer)
