I’d have said the World Wide Web “opened to the public” on April 30, 1993, when Tim Berners-Lee released the WWW software and source code into the public domain. (IIRC, that’s when the news media started in on all the “huzzah, the Internet is here!” coverage.)
I don’t think it has jumped the shark, thats not really an accurate term IMO.
However there has been a massive downgrade now that everything is about money, likes, manipulating people and sponsorships. I miss the old days when we just used it to screw around. Now its full of propaganda, bots, ads, hidden ads, emotional manipulation, etc.
Hell, they weren’t even that well-separated back then… teenage me wanted a MP3 of some song and ended up receiving a dog-woman porn video instead. It was disturbing yet slightly intriguing… made me briefly wonder, “huh, is that where werewolves come from…?”
I don’t think modern cookie banners and AI spam have anything on those days. One wrong click later and you’d end up with five hundred X10 home automation ads and a redirect to rotten.com. An age of innocence, that was not…
My recollection was youtube started in 2004, and streaming porn started a few years after that. Before that, you had to download porn clips on peer to peer networks, and you had no idea what you were getting.
I’m not sure when the internet was in its golden age. Maybe the late 2000s and early 2010s.
I still wouldn’t say its ‘jumped the shark’ as it is a constantly changing technology and I can’t really say that the internet will be downhill for the next 100 years (it’ll be totally different by then). But the internet now is worse than it was around the ~2006-2015 period.
Even just looking at boards like this, most small message boards are gone now as everyone has gone to reddit. Now reddit has gone to shit since its only goal is to make money with ads and selling data to AI companies.
We also lost the IMDB boards, that sucked quite a bit.
I put 1994, but for different reasons, with 1995 being a close alternate. That was the year that Netscape was founded. Before then, the Internet was largely an information-sharing endeavor amongst universities and government bodies for the betterment of humanity. The founding of Netscape started the “money money money money” commercialization of the Internet and any continued benefit to humanity has been more of an accident than intention. Netscape IPOed in 1995 to a 3 billion dollar valuation despite making no profits and no clear road to doing so. In 1998 it was acquired by AOL, then the division was disbanded in 2003 and the browser killed in 2008 (to be fair, Microsoft and Internet Explorer were a big reason for its demise). The capitalist and tech douchebaggery lives on, though, with Marc Andreessen and so many others that, to this day, see mankind’s greatest information sharing achievement and think, “Yeah, but how can I exploit this to get even more money for me?”
I like social media, but I count any internet chat as fitting within that category including sites like here, so even though the big ones have all been turned into frightening behemoths, the idea of social interaction online is I think healthy and should be encouraged. It’s the enshittification of anything that ruins them, not the entities themselves.
For me it was the algorithm driven feeds. I wouldn’t say it was 2008 because it took a long time for the algorithms to become dominant, but it’s definitely driven the enshitification that I see now.
April 3, 1996, when Jennifer Ringley fired up a webcam in her dorm room and introduced the world to live performances via JenniCam. She wanted to chronicle her entire life online, but of course, everyone tuned in to see if they could catch her having sex, or at least being naked. Then she got hacked, doxxed and received death threats, thereby introducing the reality of unintended consequences for Internet creators.
It’s changed and not the same. I miss the days when the major newspapers’ content was all free and easy to access, but I still use it daily where I also stop watching shows that jump the shark.