Hi! I'm Samuel. I'm from Brazil and past 40. I got my Computer Science BsC in the middle of the 2000s, and this is my story.
My first Geocities website was created almost 30 years ago, in 1997. I remember those days fondly. Actually, more than that. I remember those days as magical. Internet was superb. You had Geocities for creating your own favorite band's fan website, you had ICQ for communicating realtime with your friends and sharing files, you had several great websites to visit with simple animated GIFs and JPEGS (good looking streaming were far from being a thing).
Hotmail did not belong to Microsoft, you had NO YouTube (or even Google!). Search? Yahoo! or Altavista. Music? MIDI only, or you could adventure yourself in waiting hours for a connection to someone's personal FTP server on the other side of the world - Napster was yet to be born. RealPlayer was your best shot in streaming videos, and it was TERRIBLE!
People don't realize that technology seems to have gotten better, but not the intent of the Internet. It slowly (and predictably, really) fell into the hands of a few billionares that command the gross of the traffic. The internet became a huge, a colossal advertising business, with such a lack of soul... And I'm not even talking about "modern" social networks or AI.
Fact is that, when I enrolled in a computer science course, I was excited with computers and the internet, and expecting to build great things. I wasn't expecting that everything would become SO advertising-based. Yes, ads existed, even back then. But it was "newspaper-like" ads. There wasn't people willing to pay millions for segmented hate speech. There wasn't any professional platform for making even the amateur influencers NEED to become so pro that they don't have even time to read a book or take a few days off.
So, let me stop ranting for now. I intend to build better things. I'm also a musician, and the good side of tech is that I can now record music and videos from the comfort of my home. When I have the time, I'll share those videos right here - all using PeerTube, no corporate streaming nonsense. So thanks for your interest!
