Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
You are thinking of Nim with the white page; Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it! And of course everything is searchable. We would literally go out of business if we sold a web product that didn't index in Google.
As for the timestamp, click or hover over the timestamp to see the full date/time, etc.
> Discourse serves up a page with JS disabled. Try it!
The only content is in a <noscript> tag, so this complaint is probably coming from people only blocking third party JS.
When reading a random Discourse forum I don't intend to participate in, blocking all JS usually results in a smoother experience than accepting scripts from discourse-cdn.com. The only exception I've found is for massive threads, because there's no JS-free search.
Don't take this the wrong way: Being indexed by Google does not add anything for me personally, as I am not using Google. If there is a forum, which can only currently be indexed by Google, then I might even see that as harmful to the web in general, as it adds incentive to users to use Google, instead of other search engines.
I have experienced it multiple times, that stuff is only in some discourse forum and I see a blank white page. Basically a JS-wall. Not sure, if the people, who hosted it did something weird to cause that issue, but that is the impression I have of discourse forums. Rarely I allow its scripts to run and make the effort to view some content in any such forum. Usually I just close the tab.
Edit: Now I know why I might have had that experience: I also block loads of third party CDNs. Perhaps they were trying to load scripts and resources from there and that's why nothing was shown.
Edit2: But you are also correct: The Nim one does not show anything without JS.
I disable JS by default and had enabled JS for a couple of Discourse sites I read, but once it started working without JS I gladly disabled JS again because I find the consumption experience quite a bit better sans-JS: faster and more consistent with how the rest of the web works.
Discourse often shows a blank page with certain ad-blockers. JS is enabled, but the Discourse CDN gets blocked, so nothing displays unless the ad-blocking setting is overridden for that site. Some sites do load HTML, but others are blank.
With javascript disabled on mobile, you just get a header with links that don't work and "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" even on the official https://try.discourse.org/ site
What I don't understand is why discourse can't serve up content that isn't interactive. I get lazy loading if there are >1000 comments on a post, but for anything else, static content should be perfectly fine. Even when you have js on, ctrlf doesn't work because of dynamic loading so the site has to hijack the shortcut with different interaction patterns (pressing enter doesn't go to next result, it loads a separate page).
I just tested with the 999 comment post on that site. First page load with no cache is 5.98MB (1.25MB) and took 5.76s load time. Holding the end key to get to the bottom until I hit the last post downloads a total of 1.91MB (718KB transfer) and takes 70s! That's including all the pictures. That cannot be better than than loading all text and optionally deferring all img loads, right?
"Lets not load so much static content all at once, it will be slow!", but then serve megabytes of JS dependencies and perhaps some web fonts for good measure. Unfortunately this is becoming more common.
"I remember though, what impressed me about Rachel the most that day. She told me during my OS/2 demo that she knew how to tweak her WIN.INI file. I knew right then and there she was a keeper." I love this!!
