Cloud Yelling Part 2: Early 2000s internet was peak

In keeping with my theme, the last blog I ranted somewhat about how I dislike a lot of social media and how it makes things so impersonal(while letting everyone just share a ton of aspects of their life to thousands of strangers.) 

But with this one, I'd like to actually discuss aspects of the Old Internet for some of the younger readers, and why, for me, it was kind of the peak. It really comes down to a couple of things; it was a good balance of on and offline, and actually had some community to it. 

I have noticed nowadays more and more people sort of getting sick of the current 'ways.' I'm not sure when the turn happened, but it feels very recent. I'm not sad for it at all, but I'm noticing that I guess the "social media bubble" started to burst a little bit. People are talking about taking apps off of their phones(some folks go as far as the dumb phone; personally I am of the "Take a bunch of apps off, leave a few on that come in handy like Messenger/FB for international family contact, necessary ones like the public transit ticket buying apps we all need now, etc" camp. I think having a good camera/camcorder on my phone is cool; after all, I did say I enjoy taking *some* concert footage and the like when I go. 

The whole "Good Balance between On and Offline" is, for me, the biggest thing that I enjoyed about those years, pre-iPhone(though to be fair, not everyone had one of those at launch at their price.) Online was a place you went, and you had to actively look for things. You looked for communities that you were interested in, via, say, webrings or just surfing. Despite keeping in contact online via message boards, forums, and AOL/AIM chat(or other chatrooms), you still sent each other things. We still traded hard-copy demos and CDs over the mail and so on, and even sent each other stuff. And yeah, we met in person, too!

While there was definitely an air of that "online stranger danger", a bunch of us were 18 to 25 and were generally able to tell. I had online meet-ups with a lot of cool people from the message boards I was from, and saw many others-some of these people I'm still friends with! Hell, one could connect with the scene in one's own town from the message boards, chatrooms, and forums. Some folks we'd meet at gigs and local record stores, others we'd meet online, and then proceed to meet AT gigs and record stores in person. I met a LOT of cool folks from online in those days! And we got the webzine together by a lot of like-minded folks meeting on a message board for another band(Danzig 7th House Crew, Unite!)

As time went on, online and offline started to blend more and more. I'd say this absolutely had to do with the smartphone-even moreso than social media itself. I have been on record saying that if I couldn't get back Internet, 2005-2006, I'd go for Internet, 2009-2011. Social media existed, but it was sort of in its larval stages, and when you look at worldwide smartphone usage, in 2007, it was around 122 million units sold. This went up over time, but unless you were a very high-tech and kind of on the rich side business person, you probably still had a flip phone or maybe a Blackberry at the time. 2012 is when I kinda remember smartphones becoming more of A Thing, and even then the worldwide smartphone sales were around 1 billion, according to charts-still less than it is now. 

After that, though...when the apps rolled in and more and more phones became good at stuff, everything started to blend together a hell of a lot more. And that's when the internet lost its feel and became homogenized. 

I never really fell down the social media rabbit hole TOO hard. I used it, and I have spent some time doing the dumb doomscrolling(especially over the pandemic), but I am pretty happy that I never really tumbled fully down the hole like many. I did quit certain ones because I just thought they were stupid(I will never in a million years understand why people just wanna upload videos and pictures of themselves and/or their friends, and/or SOs, and or other family members Doing Random Shit for thousands of people, I said it before and I'll say it again), and I've since kinda cut down screen time on others. I've gotten to the point where my phone is just another tool. I make a point of not using social media when I first wake up in the morning until I've had some coffee, and I try to leave off it before bedtime(though I'll play games or something on PC or my retro handhelds.) Mostly, if I'm chatting, it's on Discord with friends of mine, sort of like in the old IRC-days or AIM days. 

I'm pretty serious when I say that if I could snap my fingers and return the net to the way it was in 2005(limited social media, Youtube, message boards, webrings, etc), I would do it without a second thought. Myspace was a thing, but it was pretty...alright. It was less invasive than a lot of stuff. Smartphones? You know what, they can stay-without social media, they're just cool pieces of tech that you can surf the actual internet on, which is fine. I loved having to actually seek stuff out. I will say cutting out a lion's share of social media kinda brings that back again, but it IS still sorta crappy since websites just aren't what they used to be. A lot of places just use social media AS their sites now. Not just musicians-for example, the old comic store I used to frequent in the US uses a Facebook page and has an Instagram. It's...pretty normal for a business. (If I got back into regular DJing, I might end up grudgingly using an IG just to announce gigs, but I'd rather first just unlock my FB to more public and use that, instead. Which I'd try first.) Websites for artists, businesses, and everything do still often exist, but as I said, they're kinda more bare bones. I missed when they had the message boards to meet people. 

Artists and businesses do have those official FB groups...but they always end up feeling so much more impersonal, somehow. I'm not sure what exactly it is, but whenever someone posts to one, it just doesn't have the same community-building effect as it did when folks would post on a message board. It just feels so...empty.

In a pinch, though? I'd take that '09-'11 internet again. Yeah, there was a little more social media around, but it *still* wasn't as bad as it was now. Forums and message boards were still used, websites still existed, and while things were getting a little too cross-pollenated, it was still an alright place to be. Twitter was used to mostly talk about other media and odds and ends, Tumblr was a pretty cool place for talking about other media(though things could get a little weird there, you could keep your circles small), IG was still pretty dumb but way, way more tolerable and less used than now. 

And let's face it, nowadays, jeeze. There's so much of your info out there. I'm not one of those tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists(though if you live in the US right now I'd be, uhh, protecting your data for reasons), but I really dislike oversharing online, and feel like there was a form of...I dunno, anonymity in the older net. It's weird, since forums were there and it was easy to get access to them, and they could get hacked and everything, but generally all you had to do to sign up was use an email(which could've been some burner hotmail account) and a screen name, which could generally be changed whenever you wanted. You didn't really have to give out any info you didn't want. Sites got more and more pervasive until they ALL want you to sign up and half of them want you to pay.

I also think the more 'connections' we got, the less connected we got. I can think of very few people I met through twitter or whatnot alone. Most of my modern, post social media online friends were met via Tumblr and the Final Fantasy XIV circles-we kept in *touch* on Tumblr, Twitter, and Discord, but we met originally other places. There is one friend that comes to mind I me through a mix of Twitter and Tumblr, but I saw their Tumblr first, and then added them on Twitter. One other set of friends I DID meet thanks to Twitter, but we mostly got to know each other on Discord. But before that, I certainly grew closer to people I met via message boards. (And even then-the folks I met on twitter were met somewhere between 2015-2020...which was, believe it or not, quite a different time. Even social media, at one point, was a little better in those days before algorithms and all the other bullshit blasted it into what it became post 2020.) I find it's just not very good since 2020 for actually *meeting* people online. 

I know nothing I am saying here is new and I am once again probably preaching to the proverbial choir, but I do feel like we're coming to a sort of boiling point where I think more and more people are jumping out. In the communities I AM in, I've seen more and more discussion about it. Perhaps it's due to how the world has been going, or perhaps it's something else, or a mix of things. Maybe the lockdown still has some of the remnants of its tendrils stuck in us. It could be any number of reasons. But perhaps it's just a lot of us having just mentally gotten tired of being constantly connected, and it's all hitting a bunch of us at once. I think since it's been probably a bit over a decade now that social media and smartphones have gotten their full grasp in us(I feel 2012 was the biggest major turning point, and it just sped up from there), maybe a whole lot of people decided collectively that it was enough. Smartphones are still selling(there are more now than ever), but with SO many things online turning into such shit-well, one can hope that perhaps we can start blasting the more OG internet out of it. 

I'd love to be a part of a couple more message board communities again. 

Old Metalhead Yells At Cloud, Part 1: Random Reels Suck

I want to preface this by saying that I have, as of the past half year or so, basically ditched most social media. To be honest, I wasn't particularly attached to a lot of it; but I had accounts, used them from time to time(albeit casually), and eventually just got tired of them. 

I was never into Tiktok, I felt that Snapchat and especially Instagram were pretty stupid and vanity-chasing nowadays, though I think IG was alright at the start when I used it to follow artist friends of mine, and actually managed to FIND stuff like cool artists and cool photography, but it turned into a reel-soaked vanity mine that made me feel like a disconnected alien, so I ditched it. (I could never fathom why people would need to show so much of their lives, doing whatever, with whoever, or whatnot, but millions of people like to do it so I guess I'll never get it.) Twitter I ditched for obvious reasons(I didn't delete, but I locked and basically let it gather dust), and anything else is just...whatever, I never really needed it. 

Basically I have a F&F Facebook since a bunch of my US family uses it(and I basically have to know you to add you), Bluesky, and I do use Reddit, but I consider that almost *close* to a message board, since one can at least sorta just post to communities that one cares about. 

FB features those reels, too; luckily a lot of my friends that use them don't really use them like the majority on the other sites do.

So what is tonight's cloud-yelling about? How I notice reels just made so many things, especially concert stuff, so freaking boring and samey now. This was mostly brought on looking at some cool old pictures(like, actual photographs) of some 1990s gigs online, as well as watching some old video(as in, camcorder footage) of some old gigs. 

All of those were so exciting to watch! I thought getting to see the time Megadeth played Lepakko here in 1988(a small club that used to be popular, the building was torn down in...'99 or so?) was really cool. And the quality was pretty damn good for a camcorder; I imagine the person recording it was *probably* with a magazine or publication at the time. I also saw footage of a 1996 Satyricon gig from Belgium, likewise taken from the side of the stage. Again, really nice quality for what it was! 

Then I started to get nostalgic for Tuska 2006(yeah, almost 20 years ago now), when Celtic Frost played; the gig was fantastic, and I managed to find a few videos of it-not too many, though, as iPhones weren't actually out yet at the time, so this was likely taken with a digital camera or mini-DV. Not the best quality, but nonetheless, cool to look at.

While I did all of this, I started asking myself  "Damn, if these were on now, I could have my absolute pick of footage. Like, I could have footage out the ass. I can call up concert footage even on Youtube, let alone the other sites, from the past few years and get my pick of a hundred different smartphones." 

And then I realized like-this may well be why so many of them are boring now. I love having a nice professionally shot concert to watch, but the glut of everything else just...oversaturated things. 

At any given gig, 99% of the crowd has a smartphone, and of those people, at least half are filming a whole bunch of footage from the gig. Mostly from the start and end, sometimes from the middle, etc, etc. The day after a recent concert, I had my pick of a few songs that were uploaded overnight. 

And I was...barely interested in it. 

So...what happened?

I feel like footage back then was taken with more consideration? More care? Like, usually when I'd take gig pictures with press, I'd take a few of the first 2 or 3 songs, and *maybe* a video. I was lucky, I got to use a proper digicam. Others only got to use a disposable camera, which for a lot of places was the only allowed format if you weren't press. (Some places allowed digital cameras, so long as you didn't have a zoom lens.)

Thinking more about it, I'm going to set up a scenario of BobTheMetalGuy, both a 2002 member of a message board, and a 2023 member of whatever social media, to try to explain why I feel like reels and such got mega boring. 

In 2002, BobTheMetalGuy is going to a gig in Philadelphia(we'll use Philly since I used to live there.) So, in those days, again, there were a couple of choices. Digital cameras or disposable cameras. The former were definitely more convenient-but still limited. They didn't take *the worlds best* pictures, they had limited space(a large card in 2002 was sixty-four of god's own megabytes, 32s or even 16s were more common), and you had to transfer them, pick out the best ones and so on. Video? Only if you had 32 or 64. 

Disposable cameras net you roughly 24 pictures, and you had to get them developed the next day(luckily most drugstores had one-hour service.) You didn't even KNOW how well they turned out until after the fact. 

Your whole night-including any pregame with the crew, post-game with the crew, band pictures, AND concert photos-were basically at the whim of this space. So BobTheMetalhead is gonna make damn sure that the ones he takes counts. Thought and care are put into them. 

Now keep in mind, at a typical gig, not everyone is gonna have these. Maybe a handful of people. And out of this handful of people-not everyone necessarily ran in the same circles! Maybe one of Bob's RL friends belongs to this message board, but that's it. And they might not even be taking pictures. It could be the other 30 people at the gig with cameras don't belong to this particular community, so will be posting their pictures elsewhere-or not at all, maybe keeping them.

So Bob gets done the gig, gets some good photos, and decides to post them to the message board. There's some really cool ones, and everyone gets to see pictures of a gig they weren't at. Maybe he has a digital camera, and the band played a song they usually don't, so people get a 30 second clip of it! It's pretty freaking cool. Later on, some professional video of the gig comes out, and that's cool too-but Bob's pictures are still, in a sense, one of a kind. 

And this happens for other cities; but even then, it's something different. One of Bob's message board friends, Abyss Fracture(we'll go with that name) posted some really neat front-row pics from the LA gig, and another person neither of them know managed to get a rather excellent top-down view of the drummer from the Chicago gig. 

There's pictures, the pictures were shared, and they're online; they aren't locked to the forums itself or anything. These pictures are freely available for anyone to look at, as are the videos. And they're probably still around even later. The video might get uploaded to Youtube 3 years later, even, as a short video! The pictures were discussed and shared in a community. 

Now, we'll go into 2023 Bob, and we'll compare the two. 

Bob, like everyone, has a smartphone. About 99% of the people at the gig he's going to has a smartphone, too. He really doesn't have to be careful what he films; he films a ton of the pregame(and uploads it instantly to his reels), and at the gig, he, along with 1/3 of the audience, watches a good portion of the gig through their phones-not all, no, but a lot-and uploads it pretty much instantly to whatever sites he's uploading too. As does everyone else. And then he films a bunch of the post-game(uploading it), so a bunch of strangers who might be looking for a little gig footage-perhaps they couldn't make it-ends up getting a bunch of reels and clips of people they don't know going to a bar because of the algorithms. 

Maybe I'm sounding a little scathing and biased here; I can't lie, I AM biased. This is what it feels like.

Instead of some nicely thought-out pictures and maybe a video, we get a ton of the same gig, in the same city, of some of the same songs(maybe some mixing up there, sure, but definitely the intro and the encores), at maybe slightly different angles depending on where whatever uploader was standing. These videos are all shown to a bunch of strangers, rather than a community, and the posts on said reels and whatnot are all impersonal emojis. 

I'll try to be fair here. I try, when possible, to look at the good in things. So I try to look for advantages where I can, and that goes for things that I'm not particularly a big fan of. 

Nowadays, getting a lot of high quality video of a gig CAN be cool! Maybe if you can't make it, it's nice to be able to see. Granted, a lot of the coolest videos still end up coming from the professionals who can get the stage shots and everything, but yeah, it's pretty cool to be able to see gigs you missed. Also, having better quality of things is nice, too, and sometimes, having more of it is beneficial. When your only footage of a gig is a grainy video, or a video from someone who, say, never films the drummer or keyboardist or something, then it can make you kinda yearn to be able to see them, and being able to maybe call up another video or set of reels that DOES do this is kind of nice. I can even use the example above of that awesome 1996 Satyricon gig; that band is known for having one of the most proficient, fastest drummers in black metal, and the camera person didn't film him nearly enough, if I had to nitpick. I'm still grateful I got to see that gig, but yeah, if I had to pick an advantage of the 'Modern Times', the fact that you get more footage means you might, possibly, end up with some better footage. 

And hell, not ALL reels are just mindless oversaturated drivel. I mean, if, say, Metallica(just to throw a band out there) posts a few behind the scenes reels for their fans of them heading to the studio, or heading to a city, that's pretty cool? It reminds me of footage you'd find on an old tour video, the only difference being you'd have to wait for the tour video or DVD to come out.(Back then, that was how we got the behind the scenes tour and studio stuff.) In this case, I'm not bothered by it and even think it's cool. Fans like getting inside peeks and the studio and tours-it's just they can get them a little sooner now. These reels and such have a purpose. Same thing for when a friend of mine takes a trip overseas to see a festival, and makes an album out of it to share on their F&F Facebook or something. That's got some purpose, I think, when you at least share to your circles. And sure, some of these include those pre and postgame, some overseas food and the like. 

Essentially, I think the format can be used "for good". Like many, many things in the world, the actual tech itself is just...neutral. It's there. It's not good or bad. It's how it's used, as always. I've seen Youtube Shorts used for good(I love ones that deal with cute animals and follow a few), and for the boring(a million and one reels of the same thing.) 

But I think, here, the cons outweigh the pros at the end. I can almost feel that the reels are 'soulless' in a sense; they're just done to post material online. While Bob may not care about getting a ton of followers or anything like that, these hundreds of reels just feel...posted. Very little discussion(if any, since often reels don't allow them, at least some pictures that get posted to, say, FB or something allows for some discussion about them), just...content. 

Content. There's that word. 

That cursed(in a bad way, not in a cool hellfire kinda way) word.

"Information made available by a website or other electronic medium." Even the definition of the word has a new addendum, now, to discuss online content. 

People LOVE uploading content. 

Uploads nowadays just feel like...content. That's the best possible way I can think to explain it. When I watched those videos I mentioned above, they didn't feel like "content." They felt like neat views into the time period, concerts that I didn't get a chance to see, and the photos felt like cool things posted to a community to share them with others and spark discussion about stuff. And sure, we all liked to show off JUST a little if we met the band! (After awhile working press, and moving overseas, it became pretty common for me to do that, so it was like, Just Another Night, but I know people liked to see the pictures, so I posted them.) And I'll post a picture of the gang together at a bar or something(to my F&F FB, which...just basically involves the people I was with.) 

I think we're ALL, in modern days, guilty of uploading 'content' now and again. You could argue this rambling blog of mine is content under a modern definition. I don't like using the word for thought-out things, though. 

And this rambling brings me back to why those reels always feel so soulless; they're just recorded, uploaded, rinse and repeat. Why? I guess millions of people just really like uploading stuff. There's endless reasons why. Maybe it's because it's "the thing to do" now. It's just...*normal* to do so. 

This is maybe why it lost me and why I started feeling so disconnected to a lot of modern social media. The "this is just how it is" aspect. I already will never understand why people want to show off so much of their lives online(look, if it makes you happy, you do you, find happy where you can get it in this world, but I will never understand why), and now I just don't understand why, for example, you'd wait so long for a gig just to watch it through your phone. Again, by all means snap a few good pics and a video for memories! We've been doing that for decades.  But does it ALL need uploading instantly? Do you need to watch the entire gig through your phone? 

And hell, imagine being the band. Imagine being onstage and just looking at a sea of phones instead of feeding off the crowd energy. I really don't blame Ghost for banning phones from their gigs(though I do think medical use should be allowed, of course-smartphones do have necessary medical uses, so they should be allowed to *exist* at gigs.) 

I kinda miss having a little bit of friction or inconvenience is all. I really didn't mind waiting until the next day to do my uploads(and who knows, maybe even nowadays with a smartphone I'll practice patience myself before uploading a few pics to my friends, just because I can.) I know I missed not knowing everything that everyone was doing-that's why I ditched a lot of social media. I was able to get rid of that. 

I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say I feel like people have been changed by this; I've seen it firsthand. I guess what I'm saying is maybe take a chance. Take a few good pictures of a gig(I think rarer gigs are pretty cool to take more of?). Take one video. Maybe even two, if you get a rare song or a killer encore. But wait a day to upload it. Find some of the best or coolest pictures like we used to. Maybe try uploading the video to a more personal friend and family circle instead of adding to the online reel glut of which there will be hundreds of. Maybe the whole world doesn't need to see the trip there. Maybe post a pic of the pre or post game to a tighter community like in the message board days to talk about it instead of blasting antics to thousands of people who don't even know you or you don't know. I mean I admit if I fly to a different country for something big, it's natural to have several pictures, and I also think there's intent behind it. Sometimes I get the impression people just post stuff to post, and one can tell the difference between a 50-picture album made with thoughtfulness(like a group going to Wacken and posting it to their friends) and a 50-picture album that's just thrown into public social media for the hell of it where thousands upon thousands of people end up tripping over a stranger's antics. 

But in any case, maybe enjoy the gig swinging your neck around in the front row instead of watching the entire thing through your phone and give back some of that energy that the band is feeding to you.