An Amish community, but the "cutoff year" is 2008 instead of 1697.

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GrandmaForPresident@reddit

Dude doesn’t even know about xanga or myspace lol

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AdFun5641@reddit

There is no "cutoff year" for what tech the Amish adopt.

With every new tech the leadership meets and discusses if that tech will support and grow COMMUNITY or splinter community.

The Amish have all of the newist, latest, greatest farm tech. They are one of the biggest buyers of tractors and combines. These tools mean the men need to spend less time in the fields and can spend more time interacting with the community.

Telephones? Telephones mean that you can talk to people without looking at them, you don't need to go OUT into the community and interact with the entire community. You can easily have you secrete conversations with only the people you want and not engage with the community.

Look at every tech from the last 50 years. Can you name any that supports WALKING to your neighbors house and TALKING to them face to face?

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405freeway@reddit

A lot of communities differ but yeah the core principle is being with family. Technology that takes away from that is what they are opposed to.

Washing machines are insanely popular because washing clothes is such a time-consuming chore.

Television? Nope- that's not family time.

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squired@reddit

Well.. that doesn't sound crazy at all!

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Mr_Quackums@reddit

hell, there are Amish run website to buy Amish furniture and food.

granted, the websites tend to look like 1997 websites but certainly not 1697 websites.

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ChefArtorias@reddit

Were you an infant in 2008 or something? Social media and smart phones both existed then...

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Fetch_will_happen5@reddit

I think they mean 1998? But then again, we had early smartphones then too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smartphones

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Active_Public9375@reddit

They mean 2010. The real modern smartphone boom was the introduction of the iphone in 2007, but it took a few years to really take hold as a type of phone the average person had.

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Remarkable-Host405@reddit

fuck you, i had facebook messenger on my palm treo

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squired@reddit

I was dumb enough to buy both the Blackberry Storm 1 and 2!

I also had the 1998 HP Jornado back in the day.

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IamMrT@reddit

Hell, by 2015 you basically needed a smartphone to get through public school.

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Tacoman404@reddit

I graduated and 2013 and they were still banned completely and would be confiscated if someone had one out during class.

So 2015 really was the beginning of the end...

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Arminas@reddit

I also graduated 2013 and my experience was very different. I've heard kids just have their phones out in class openly now, and that's pretty wild to me, but "banned completely and would be confiscated" is not anywhere close to as strict as my school's policy was. It was more like a, hey put that away

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qwertyshark@reddit

In 2008 I remember I had a nokia 5800 which I used mostly for social networks as I was 14 at the time. I remember perfectly geeking around with my best friends, one had a samsung F480 and other the HTC Dream.

Most of the kids in my class had smartphones with social network capabilities at that time and I was in a public school (medium-lowish income) in southern Spain.

When the iphone first launched here it was out of reach by far for any of us until like iphone 4 (my first) but meanwhile there were many alternatives.

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Ascendant_Phoenix@reddit

You gotta go back to 1978 to not have internet/wireless phones.

I was born in 1996, but a less hyperconnected world would probably have less mental anguish.

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apcb4@reddit

I’m 99% sure Facebook was common in 2008. I was 12 and remember getting in trouble for making an account before I was 13. If the sixth graders were getting involved, it had to have been pretty mainstream.

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Marzipan_civil@reddit

Before 2006, you needed a college/university email to create a Facebook account, I think it was autumn or summer 2006 that they relaxed that rule to let anyone make an account.

But Facebook was not the first social media by a long way - there was MySpace, bebo, livejournal, various forums, the different messenger programs like AOL or MSN...

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apcb4@reddit

Oh yeah definitely not the first! I just think it’s extra silly for OP to say “absolutely no social media” when the exact kind of social media that we know today (albeit maybe going out of fashion, but still well known) was becoming well known during that period.

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hungoverlord@reddit

Maybe 1988 is the safe cutoff point. There were even cell phones at that time, so we can have a brick cell phone no problem. Computers too. But definitely no smartphones, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

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ParentPostLacksWang@reddit

Did they mean 1988? IRC wasn’t invented until August that year. Or maybe 1978, when the first BBS went online?

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Ok_Dog_4059@reddit

I remember things like ICQ in the early 90s. It wasn't like modern social media but it still connected tons of us around the world.

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ChefArtorias@reddit

Basically just an IM service or chat room? lil bit before my time, but yea idk if that qualifies as social media really.

Was there really a big social media site before myspace? Idk if it was actually first or just what my age group started with.

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beard_meat@reddit

Not really. MySpace was kind of like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire, where you were using HTML code to make a website. There were tons of other free webhosts like that, which are long gone. MySpace gave you tools to create such a website with very little effort, but also made it a "social" thing in a way the other examples definitely were not. MySpace made all this much simpler, too, so anyone could do it without any fuss. This combination made it catch on in a unique way that no other service had before. GeoCities and Tripod were definitely not sites that "everyone" was using, and they originated at a time when society, in general, was still dipping their toes into the internet for the first time.

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SongBirdplace@reddit

No. We were scattered to a thousand smaller sites. AOL Instant Messenger was a big thing.

Honestly, just getting everyone back to a thousand small silos might be a better move.

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The_Troyminator@reddit

Usenet and BBSs before that.

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tim36272@reddit

Facebook and MySpace were actually good back then though.

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anastis@reddit

Ah yes, no privacy settings and poking all day long!

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tim36272@reddit

Fill out my survey to get your gangster name! Just take the last four digits of your social security number, add that to your mother's maiden name, and end it with your favorite pet's name!

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Noodletrousers@reddit

2781FlambellaJeffie! Ok, what’s my gangsta name?

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Noodletrousers@reddit

I forgot the street I grew up on 671 Maple Ave, just for good measure.

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tim36272@reddit

Awesome! I just made a charge on your debit card, your gangster name will appear as the vendor name in 24-48 hours!

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Noodletrousers@reddit

Amazing! Thank you so much! I can’t wait to find out my cool new name! I hope it’s a good one. I hope it’s good and tough!

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ChefArtorias@reddit

reblog or ghosts will come for you in your sleep

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ChefArtorias@reddit

The post doesn't say "we're going back to when socials were good"

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Scrangdorber@reddit

Smartphones technically did, but just barely. The iPhone was out in 2 countries, pretty much nobody had one, and the first Android phone was going to launch that year.

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ChefArtorias@reddit

First BlackBerry came out in 99

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RunForTheWoods@reddit

It was still way different to how it is now though. The 2000’s were the peak for technological advancement while not being all encompassing

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DookieShoes626@reddit

Not even close to the same thing though. It was just a fun thing you did from time to time, it wasnt all encompassing

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ChefArtorias@reddit

The post doesn't say to return to when they were simpler, it says to revert to having NO smart phones or social media.

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TheBalloonEffect@reddit

So summer camp

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Real_Accident_3350@reddit

I say we cap the technical development at gameboy color. Anything beyond that is not allowed. Kids don't know how good they have it these days playing on devices with backlit screens

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Real_Accident_3350@reddit

I realize that I forgot about the Gameboy advance which is fine to exclude. The first 2 generations of pokemon is all we need to keep anyways

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PantherkittySoftware@reddit

no smart phones

The Samsung SPH-i300 & i500, HTC PPC-6700, and HTC Touch would like to have a word with you. I got my i300 in 2001, my i500 in 2003, my PPC-6700 in 2005, and my Touch in 2008.

The two Samsung phones were both PalmOS and had "always-available" unmetered (kind of) internet access. During Hurricane Wilma, I watched live radar maps HOURS after the power and DSL went out, and played Day of the Tentacle using some ScummVM host whose name I've long since forgotten.

The two HTC phones ran Windows Mobile, and were arguably more capable phones (once I discovered xda-developers.com and learned how to hack them) than my first two Android phones that came after them (Android Bluetooth, in particular, was a hot fsck'ing mess until Android Ice Cream Sandwich).

no algorithms

Ummm... I hate to break it to you, but "algorithms" were around long before 2008. I personally was writing web apps that tailored content to user behavior back in the late 1990s. Trust me on this: you were being served personalized content online designed to maximize engagement long before "algorithms" became a household name.

ABSOLUTELY no social media

Lol. It's cute you think "social media" wasn't a thing before clueless non-computer-literate people had smartphones and were doing things online. Stuff like Facebook existed more than a decade before 2008. The only difference was, back in the late 1990s, people like me were using them. What happened circa 2009-2012 is, people like you started using them.

I mean, hell, back in fsck'ing 1998, I was tethering my Palm Pilot to my Sprint phone & using PAM ("Phone as Modem") with a foot-long cable whenever I got bored in South Beach on Friday & Saturday nights. By 1999, I didn't even have to be particularly purposeful about it between 11pm and 6am, because I had unlimited minutes of airtime late at night anyway (and enough night/weekend airtime to burn through in 1998 that it wasn't a huge barrier).

Simply put, "smartphones", wireless internet, and "social media" all existed for a decade or more before people like you gave them funky names and started endlessly complaining about them.

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SpaceMonkey@reddit

Why "Video game consoles are immune to the "cutoff year"."

"Retro" gaming only! A lot of good 80s and 90s video games out there!!

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guesswho135@reddit

the videogame cutoff should be online gaming. LAN parties and split screen Goldeneye were peak gaming.

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Mr_Quackums@reddit

not to mention the retro homebrew scene

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Longwell2020@reddit

You can just call it the neo luddites

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guesswho135@reddit

Those darn neoluds.

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Head-Engineering-847@reddit

Straight up

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Maxpower2727@reddit

Smartphones existed before 2008.

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discostud1515@reddit

I think I had both facebook and myspace in 08.

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cherry_monkey@reddit

Honestly 2008 was kinda peak social. Facebook was pretty fresh to the mainstream and MySpace was right before the fall. We also didn't have Twitter or Instagram yet. Truly the Pinnacle of what social media should be.

I remember having a conversation with the same person on Myspace messenger, Facebook Messenger, and text (t9). Myspace and Facebook were on the laptop, obviously.

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Piece_Maker@reddit

Twitter was definitely a thing back then, it felt a bit nerdy and exclusive though and it was mostly an SMS-based service (which is why tweets had to be 140 characters)

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cherry_monkey@reddit

That's probably why I was unaware of it's existence

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Mr_Quackums@reddit

too complicated, make it simple to follow and understand - 56kbps internet conectivity, other than that everything else is fine. that is 56k total bandwidth for everything you own; phone, smart TV, game console, tablet, whatever.

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Scrangdorber@reddit

Holy crap, you've read my mind! I've often thought of the idea of being "2007 Amish!!". My idea was only off by one year from yours!!

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karmais4suckers@reddit

1999 would be way better. Before all the bad happened lol

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Timmah_Timmah@reddit

Seems like the way you ask your question caused it to go off track. Maybe you need to try again sometime.

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UnitK-306@reddit

Imagine all the Amish trying Jackass 2 stunts in their free time and the only radical stuff they're worried about is shredding boards on a Tony Hawk Xbox game

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chupathingy99@reddit

Hi I'm Jobe and this is the Buggy Whip!

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spielerein@reddit

This is exactly what it would be like. Anything extreme has to be attempted by anyone and everyone, with no regard for the disclaimer

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ashleyshaefferr@reddit

Video game consoles are immune to the "cutoff year"

It fucking kills me that this had to be added.

I think it's a lot of the reason why we heard 0 complaints from Redditors about data centers and water cooling before AI lmao

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