I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet

by ocean_moist • 2 years ago

236 283 2 years ago

voidfunc3• 2 years ago

Nerdy teen laments being born too late. I remember when I said I regret not being born in the 70s because I missed the 80s. Oh before that it was the 60s and I missed all those Dad Rock err Classic Rock acts.

Live your life, not the one you think you should have had.

ranger_danger• 2 years ago

Hilarious given the second sentence is: I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”

zorrolovsky• 2 years ago

Exactly... the whole point of the post is to elaborate on the problems of the modern internet (addiction, fakeness, shallowness...). It's not a subjective nostalgic rant but a good analysis of everything that's wrong with today's internet.

Rinzler89• 2 years ago

I don't wish I was born earlier. I wish I was born later to have had access to the much better mental, dental and healthcare in my childhood than what was available back then.

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such. We had the Wii and other nice things. I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements. I talk about this in the second sentence.

I just think the internet is much worse than it was.

voidfunc3• 2 years ago

The internet is different, I hesitate to say worse. Yes advertising is constant, but it's not like the old internet was free of it. We had banners and bullshit galore.

The monetary model has changed for sure but that was inevitable.

The 90s internet was slow. Stuff like IRC and email are a product of their time. Stuff was designed to work on 28 or 56k modems. The lucky few had ISDN.

I don't miss the old internet that much. I miss some of the apps and the stripped down low bandwidth UX of stuff.

What I really miss is th era of native desktop applications that had a consistent look and feel.

Swizec• 2 years ago

I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such

I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.

I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements

Me too! This shift comes every few years. The first successful mass deployment of modern AI technology was in the 1970’s when the post office started using computer vision to route mail. The shift to AI that I got to see was Google. That was amazing.

Big fan of the current LLM shift too, of course, but it feels less magical than Google did. A little because I understand it better, a little because it benefits me less personally than Google did. Feels more like a marginal improvement whereas Google felt like omg everything is different now the olds are so behind the times they can’t even comprehend!!

But I think it’s more that the big shift happens with your newfound ability to grok things, leverage information, and get shit done in your late teens / early 20’s than the actual technology available. Whatever new tech happens around that age will feel like a profound hugely impactful change in the world (but it’s actually you, not the tech).

I just think the internet is much worse than it was

It is. And also it isn’t. Depends where you go and who you talk to.

stackghost• 2 years ago

I just think the internet is much worse than it was.

It's definitely worse than it was, in some ways. In other ways it's better. TLS is everywhere now. uBlock origin exists. The bar for pwning web apps is much higher today because we learned collectively from our mistakes/our fun times defacing PHP-Nuke sites.

But I miss pirating warez on IRC and scoring game rips from FTP topsites, and LAN parties. Facebook and Twitter were really fun in the early years, but these days Big Social really sucks and "growth focus" in tech is exhausting.

runjake• 2 years ago

I was born in the early 70s and lament missing the computers of the 60s and the genesis of usable UNIX. So it goes.

tdeck• 2 years ago

The second sentence of TFA: "I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements."

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

Funny post, pining for the days of old that he never knew.

I was there and I'm glad its past.

The computers were slow.

Microsoft ruled the day, which was fine for me because I was a Microsoft fanboy back then.

The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.

Things crashed - alot.

I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?

I'm certainly glad I witnessed all that first hand since 1979 but wouldn't want to go back.

voidfunc3• 2 years ago

Things crashed - alot.

The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown.

j4coh• 2 years ago

Why own a ton of vintage computers that you don’t want to use?

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

Exactly.

kevinventullo• 2 years ago

Things crashed and autosave hadn’t been invented.

planb• 2 years ago

Things still crash and autosave saves the stuff that you want to undo later but cannot...

ls612• 2 years ago

I want today's hardware with the internet of 2012 or so.

fulafel• 2 years ago

You had Macs, Linux and Unix workstations in the 90s. And before the graphical browser era anything with a terminal program (eg Amiga) worked fine for internet related things.

worstspotgain• 2 years ago

I was there too and I mostly disagree.

The computers were slow.

Not for mundane tasks, or not a whole lot anyways. Productivity software used to be optimized for the client. Today's equivalent is cloud-based, written in managed code and often actually slower.

Microsoft ruled the day

I do agree here, this part sucked.

The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.

This varies by field and task. As a developer, it was easier to break through because there were not 35,000 competing partial alternatives. Without this "value puzzle" new stuff was a much easier sell.

Things crashed - alot.

In my particular experience, things break a little more than they used to. OS's don't crash as much, though.

I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?

Same here, but only because I can emulate old platforms, otherwise I would. I still play old games and use old software I wrote.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

the malware of the early 2000s was truly awful. It was auto-install or very close to that and would nearly brick the system . So glad those days are over.

RGamma2• 2 years ago

At least it loudly announced itself (tough luck, you got pwned!). It is much more financially motivated and pernicious in spirit now, hiding its presence and infiltrating your entire network.

https://youtube.com/@danooct1 shows off some old malware.

swifthesitation• 2 years ago

Funny post, pining for the days of old that he never knew.

Agreed. I was born in '83. The author misses the things he never even experienced and is living in the 90s-00s "Highlights" reel.

5" floppy drives. 3" hard disks. Single core computers. 28k dial-up was almost torture. 56k was not much better. Waiting 5-10 minutes for a single picture to load one. pixel. at. a. time. CRT monitors. Trojans. Viruses.

Things crashed - alot.

Ahh, the Windows Blue Screen of Death. "hello darkness my old friend."

dlevine• 2 years ago

I lived through that time (was in high school and college). It was pretty neat to read about the Internet and web browsers in Newsweek, but we didn’t have it at home for a few years. Then it was just a 28.8 dial up connection that dropped randomly. It wasn’t until I got to university that I had a real broadband connection, and even that was slow compared to what I get on my phone today.

Programming (for me) was mostly basic and a bit of C, although I never totally figured out pointers. By the time I got to university, we had early versions of Java and HTML.

That time was fun, but right now is fun in different ways. The tools are much better. Computing is massively cheaper. Laptops weren’t nearly as good as desktops until the early 2000s. Also, you couldn’t do much with AI back then.

vbo• 2 years ago

I miss the 00s internet. I miss IRC and geeking out for the sake of it. Maybe i'm just missing my younger years, but I think there was a distinct feeling back then, of wonder and being amongst the first to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

gipsies• 2 years ago

In the future people might think the same about Bitcoin and AI.

darthrupert• 2 years ago

I already think like that of the first years of Bitcoin. It had the same energy.

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

In the future people might think the same about Bitcoin

In 2017 I thought I missed bitcoin, still managed to mine a meager amount on my parents computers. In the modern day I was proven wrong.

j452• 2 years ago

Won't compare

0points• 2 years ago

We already do..

aleph_minus_one9• 2 years ago

In the future people might think the same about Bitcoin and AI.

Perhaps, but these will be different people than those who miss the 90-00 internet.

anthk5• 2 years ago

Not even close. No one cares about Bitcoin even today.

gruturo• 2 years ago

Yeah, we will fondly reminisce about the planet-destroying ponzi scheme which made it so convenient to pay for illegal goods, scams and ransoms to cryptolockers. What a nice unnecessary ecological catastrophe we managed to concoct out of nothing.

ZaoLahma• 2 years ago

... to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.

Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.

And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.

... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.

aleph_minus_one9• 2 years ago

Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.

The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.

hi_hi• 2 years ago

I agree somewhat. There really was a sense of wonder. Whats coming next? Where will it go?

I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.

HackerQED• 2 years ago

now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.

intelVISA• 2 years ago

Firefox was good, Electron wasn't a thing and Microsoft didn't own most game studios... we really messed up huh.

mglz3• 2 years ago

Well, who can realistically oppose billions of dollars coming to ruin something?

surgical_fire5• 2 years ago

A lot of things got worse, it's not just nostalgia.

The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.

Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.

There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.

mschuster914• 2 years ago

On the other side, a lot of it wasn't sustainable. Just how many forums just vanished all of a sudden as the owner died, ran out of money or was simply fed up moderating bullshit and infights, not to mention the ever increasing compliance workload/risk (yeeting spam, warez and especially CSAM)?

A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.

Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.

And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.

I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.

Dalewyn3• 2 years ago

When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream,

This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.

josephd79• 2 years ago

I miss it too.

j452• 2 years ago

Maybe folks were waiting for someone else to make the internet better for the many when it’s now that group itself who could.

fipar• 2 years ago

I miss the 90s internet and I think even though some things have objectively gotten worse (most people interact in proprietary networks, as opposed to using open standards), as a parent, I think part of that feeling is still there, since my kids are doing some of what I was doing back then, only that instead of irc they're mostly using discord now.

The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.

hattmall2• 2 years ago

Yeah, half of my Facebook feed is shit that is intentionally wrong so that people will interact with it because they get paid based on engagement.

johnisgood7• 2 years ago

If you miss IRC, come to Libera.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

When it comes to technologies or cultural periods there's usually a Goldilocks zone where new developments open up possibilities for people to participate but complexity and the usual market capture hasn't yet set in. Basically points where ideas are up for grabs and the culture is especially dynamic and the barrier to entry is low.

For computing and the internet I think the author is spot on. The late 80s to mid 2000s had that these kinds of features. For electronic, rock or punk it was probably the 60s to 80s. I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.

There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.

Maybe a little bit uncharitably put we went from young people writing Doom and PageRank to bored ape nfts being hustled on Discord servers.

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.

AI (LLMs) represents a platform shift on a large scale and I feel the environment is similar to that which birthed Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs. I think in the next 5 years Gen Z will have its heyday in terms of tech startups... At least, that's what I tell myself.

Yeah, I agree the Web3.0 stuff was overhyped--not really a platform or thinking shift. There are a lot of black-hat hackers who are Gen Z, because generally only young people take risks like that while simultaneously having the skills to get paid a tech salary.

Karrot_Kream• 2 years ago

I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.

It's not a relativism as applied to a specific technology, it's a relativism as applied to development as a whole. The 60s-80s represented a flowering of semiconductor applications, before which we had a huge period of radio and telephony experimentation. Each era had its low-hanging fruit ripe for innovation which became a mature, hard-to-innovate technology in the future.

There's new trends out there now. On the creative side of things, bloggers, artists, and influencers are toppling the old ideas of media empires and stodgy publishing houses. A Soundcloud god can sell out a stadium and virtual avatars are filling concert halls. Non-web-tech fields like climate tech are seeing crazy investment throughout the globe. It's true that webtech now is seen as a safe, stable, lucrative career but there's always something on the bleeding edge. It just might not be your thing and that's okay, that's what the kids are for. Or, pivot your career and try something new if that's what you want.

chaosist2• 2 years ago

I would imagine Doom and PageRank was the right person finding the right problem to work on at the right time in the right domain.

If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.

A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.

I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.

kazcaptain2• 2 years ago

Dial-up connection, ICQ, and 10mb files left to be downloaded through the night were my connection to the world.

I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.

Is it nostalgia, or is there something more? Who knows at this point.

I’m 30.

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

I’m not that much crazy older than you, but I do remember well being a teenager at the peak of the dotcom craze, being a heavy internet user, and even back then having a vague feeling that the ad riddled, desperately monetized (and shitty) websites built on the back of mostly investment capital run amok felt a little shitty as an end user. It’s hazy now and lost to time (the internet is not actually forever it’s like ~10 years old at most now) but i vividly remember pages that became harder and harder to navigate because of invasive ads, and sites that’d somehow embed malware on your computer that’d spam you with weird porn popups when your parents used the machine - it all feels vaguely similar to now, albeit much sleeker. Adware in my opinion is bordering on malware to the point I find the definitions indistinguishable. It collapsed then for good reason, and IMHO similar conditions as to now. I don’t want to live through that as a fully grown adult with a tech career now, and it worries me a lot.

What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.

echelon_musk• 2 years ago

the internet is not actually forever it’s like ~10 years old at most now

The internet has existed for longer than the web which is already 30 yrs at this point. Not sure I catch your point that it's 10 yrs old.

RGamma2• 2 years ago

it’s like ~10 years old at most

Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...

G3rn0ti3• 2 years ago

I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.

The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.

I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.

JohnMakin4• 2 years ago

Blaming consumers for the state of things and for “not spending money” is a common refrain, and honestly is gaslighting and revisionist. The internet functioned fine for over a decade, profitably, without invasive adware like we see now, which is to the point of total degradation of the core service itself - this is not the cause of consumers, but rather the current mindset of the wall street landscape.

As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.

This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.

lomase• 2 years ago

I have paid maybe 10k in my lifetime to be connected to internet. That is why the telecom company has been able to invest in infra. I don't have good fiber thanks to Netflix.

dmead• 2 years ago

How old were you? I'm 41 and I also miss that stuff.

johnisgood7• 2 years ago

I'm in my very late 20s and I do miss this, too. I used MSN more than ICQ, however. I still use IRC just like I did when I was ~13 years old, without much knowledge of English.

kazcaptain2• 2 years ago

I was a child really so it’s not simple to differentiate between nostalgia and “real” world for me.

cutthegrass2• 2 years ago

I've been thinking about this too, perhaps it's my age (43) and the fact I vividly remember earlier times.

If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.

aleph_minus_one9• 2 years ago

If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.

That's very plausible.

I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.

Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).

When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...

Foobar8568• 2 years ago

For me, it was the buy out of geocities by Yahoo was the inflexion point with a sure and slow demise. Death of ezboard was also a pain.

So corporate profit over users.

Another acceleration was google turning to shit as well.

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

Some people pointed to 2007 for lots of simultaneous reasons:

http://0x0.st/Xx1H.png

marklubi• 2 years ago

I'm 45 and have been in the industry for more than 25 years. I think it was closer to 2010/11 when things went sideways.

The birth of the iPhone changed a lot of things, but it took a few years to reach critical mass.

Izkata2• 2 years ago

One of the possible names for Gen Z that was thrown around about a decade ago was "iGen", a reference to the iPhone and noticing there was a cultural shift in those that came of age on/after 2008.

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

Been there, got on the internet ~90 (pre-www), my first web page ~93, first web coder job ~95. I do think it is overglorified (the web-part) - 80s BBS were more of a wild world with excitement to me.

What I did love though was getting on IRC, sitting in front of an amber VAX terminal late at night till morning, talking to people across the world. Reading NEWS and discussing things with people around the globe. What an eye opener for me.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

The internet nowadays is run by gatekeepers, as traffic is increasingly funneled though a dozen or so popular sites. If you get banned from Facebook, twitter, Amazon, reddit, youtube etc. you're SOL. You either have to use in read-only mode or make new account and hope they do not notice it is tied to the old one (also, you're putting all your eggs in a single basket). A social media ban is effectively a ban on the person if it's tied to a real name/identify. The only people who get to use social media to its full capability are those who have the connections or clout to negotiate/dispute the bans that are inevitable.

tayo42• 2 years ago

After myself being banned, it is a weird experience. There is no recourse if you think it's unfair.

There are more niche places, but it does get strange seeking out this tiny communities online

anthk5• 2 years ago

Twitter.com -> xcancel.com Youtube.com -> invidio.us Reddit -> teddit.net or gopher://gopherddit.com

And so on.

tim3333• 2 years ago

I have multiple accounts on fb, twitter, reddit, maybe youtube. It's not that big a deal in practice. And it's quite unusual to get banned unless you do something quite bad.

INTPenis2• 2 years ago

The only thing I miss from the 90s-00s was the fun we had on IRC. And that was mostly due to our carelessness and youth, so I think I'm good in this future.

The funny thing is I'm still on IRC, with about the same size channel, but everyone is "new" and we're all old. I don't have any contact with the peeps from IRC back then.

jhy• 2 years ago

What IRC network(s) do you like nowadays?

INTPenis2• 2 years ago

I'm on a private one with local friends that I met through hacker spaces.

The rest like indymedia, libera, oftc are mostly to stay updated on tech and ask questions about tech.

Gigachad2• 2 years ago

I was a big user of IRC in the past, owned some channels that had thousands of daily messages, IRC may be mostly gone, but the experience and vibe is still as alive as ever on other IM apps.

They all essentially work the same as IRC did but with modern bells and mobile support.

meiraleal• 2 years ago

It is not the same. For me the magic of IRC was to not be online all time. People needed to actively connect and join the channels every day

Bedlow• 2 years ago

well I was around then and am around now and yeah, still writing a blog that is in no way monetised or SEO prepped. I do use OG for better search & share but thats it. built first websites en of 90s, started on Blogger in 2003 and if I had not done that I would not have done the webdev and video knowledge of my tech pivot. That changed my life and made possible everything I have done since.

bottlepalm4• 2 years ago

AI has me super jealous of how quickly kids can learn things today. Back in the 90s banging you head against the wall trying to get the simplest things in Linux to work, and trying to learn programming from a book with minimal resources online. It was 'hard mode'. I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that.. though I would like to play some Quake deathmatch again on a populated server..

There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.

paulpauper4• 2 years ago

yeah but it also meant that the job market may have been easier, lower barriers to entry

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that..

I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.

bottlepalm4• 2 years ago

The problem is you struggle to hack together a sub optimal solution because you don't have the resources to figure out anything better. It didn't make me better, it was a waste of time. Remember experts exchange? Uhg..

Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.

Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.

nyarlathotep_2• 2 years ago

Dunno, I never saw the value of learning some esoteric piece of language/library/sysadmin trivia I'd use once or twice after spending hours poking at things trying to figure it out.

system22• 2 years ago

Hey, you can still play Q2DM at tastyspleen.net

Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

This is true. I am lucky to have learned as much as I have by this point. My Dad reminds me almost daily how lucky I am.

There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.

bregma• 2 years ago

Just think: AI is being used to train doctors too.

sirsinsalot• 2 years ago

I cried my eyes out when I was about 8 years old and finally got my Unix install connected to the Internet with only the man pages to help.

ggambetta• 2 years ago

I left Windows for Linux in 1999 and I do NOT miss how difficult everything was to get working, even with the reasonably user-friendly Red Hat (5? 6?). I even became the maintainer of a Linmodem driver by accident (it was abandoned, the author was uncontactable, and I needed the modem to dial).

I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.

steve_adams_86• 2 years ago

I’m so glad I lived through hard mode. I have a kind of perseverance and resilience in the face of difficult learning challenges that my teenagers are hardly developing (despite my best efforts), and it has made my life so much richer.

carabiner• 2 years ago

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

svantana• 2 years ago

but it ain't what it used to be

hembarker432• 2 years ago

Let’s fix it

system22• 2 years ago

In your dreams. Corps are running the internet and small fish have no place to go but the social networks. I am surprised why forums even exist anymore at this point.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

The Internet was dream once, back when giant telcos ran circuit switched copper line monopolies. It remains a dream today - unfinished work we still have not realised. Because it's not a thing, it's a social project.

There's a line in "Leave the world behind" [0] where Rose says about Friends that it's feel is "nostalgic for a world that never happened"

It's called "anemoia" [1] It's many things. One is that it's a way of expressing latent values that don't fit into the current culture.

"Small fish have no place to go" is a comment on a perceived reality that misses (and so reveals) two important points; the Internet didn't change [2], people did. It's not a place you go, it's a thing you do and the attitude you bring to that.

But ultimately the Internet is nothing but people connected by wires. People have moods we call "culture". Back then it was unbelievably optimistic and giddy. People wanted to reach out. Everything was ripe with possibility and fun. The OP is justified to wonder what it was like to live then.

Now we know what kind of things are at the other end of that wire and it feels more like a dark forest.

It's more than that people like me "just get older", the culture has palpably changed for the worse. Climate change maybe. It's become objectively more pessimistic and neurotic. Sure there's a few hold-outs, but that takes a lot of Prozac to keep up.

Anyway, the future of the Internet is all about "small fish". That's all it's ever been about.

[0] book: Rumaan Alam screen: Sam Esmail

[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/anemoia-nostalgi...

[2] Of course the Internet did change technically, it got much bigger, faster, cheaper, more reliable etc.

soh3il• 2 years ago

Man, I feel you. The old internet had this raw, curious energy that just isn’t the same today. That’s kind of what led us to create Bettermode. We still believe in that mission of giving people the tools to build, connect, and create something meaningful—like the good ol’ days but with today's tech.

It’s not about looking back, though—it’s about bringing that same spirit into the future. We’re still here building towards that, even if the landscape looks a bit different now.

0dayz• 2 years ago

The only thing that sucked about 00s web was the tech.

Compared to today, I really wish that you could've had the creativity and general attitude of the 00s web with the tech of today.

But I guess this is why I don't regret spending so much time on the 00s web.

almost_usual• 2 years ago

I was about 10 years old when I first started using the Internet (Netscape) in the mid 90s.

Around 97-98 was really when I went deep into it mostly because of Starcraft. That led to battle.net which led to IRC and the rest is history.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Haha it was a fun time. We had forums and blogs that people would visit. It was a blast. I still have a blog but back then I'd get random visitors from the Internet. These days not unless it's linked somewhere. Centralized platforms won the discoverability game.

On the plus side we're never bored. But I'll tell you, man. Back then we'd comment with our real names on random blogs. And shit like that. Privacy and stuff wasn't really a big deal.

tropicalfruit• 2 years ago

after hearing mark fisher slow cancellation of the future, i believed there was more to it than just an eternal september.

there was a real utopian feeling of the early internet. one i remember. this was lost due to the commercialization and corporatization of the web.

the internet began as a place for creativity, freedom, exploration andlater became dominated by profit-driven platforms, surveillance capitalism, and monopolies like google and facebook.

neoliberalism turned the internet into a tool for consumption and data extraction, stifling the initial sense of openness and possibility, and replacing it with controlled, market-driven environments.

this shift eroded the hope for a radically different digital future. and that is (part) of the reason i miss the 90s - 00s internet.

the other side of it is the emergence of the complex web. where things that used to be simple are now endlessly complicated, and working on the web feels like building a jenga tower on a plane in turbulence.

shakna• 2 years ago

I'll go against the grain, here.

I do miss a simpler time. I run some very modern hardware, with modern games and hardware. But I also play around with my GameBoy, maintain a DOS VM for writing my novels, reach for Lynx as often as Firefox.

Simplicity isn't just an aesthetic though. I find it to be a requirement just for getting through life. I shouldnt need adblockers and popup blockers and consent optouts just to view a site. They're worse than the era of iframe popups.

Granted, I am prone to overstimulation and get seizures when it happens. But that just reinforces what I already want. A space to enjoy what little life I've got.

qiqitori• 2 years ago

Social media is like TV zapping, just... probably more addicting because you're likelier to find something mildly interesting (to you). It's also described as junk food for the brain. Don't go there, instead spend time in the weird and fun niches, which are probably just fine still! (Note, even back then they had people who were wrong on the internet.)

If you use Social Media sites sometimes, I recommend at least getting rid of "recommendations"/"sponsored" boxes. To see what that looks like e.g. on Twitter without installing an extension and keeping it up-to-date (cause Twitter keeps changing their stuff), you can try a bookmarklet like this:

    (javascript:document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-label="Trending"]').forEach(function(v) { v.remove() }))

Not all is worse in this decade though. If you're actually looking to learn stuff that involves e.g. physically building stuff (rather than just doing stuff on your computer), YouTube et al. have improved that by a lot! (Of course, this kind of content can be addicting too. But at least you learn a thing or two!)

Note: the YouTube of the 00s was very low-resolution and the comments often were really bad! (https://xkcd.com/202/)

beloch• 2 years ago

Some random observations:

1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.

2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.

3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.

4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.

5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.

6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.

7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.

8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!

9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.

8bitsrule• 2 years ago

Every now and then as I find a piece of scarce, non-trivial information on the net in a minute or 5, I stop to think about how long that would have taken 30 years ago.

If I did have some appropriate physical reference books to look in, it might still take 15 minutes to an hour. But if not, I'd have to travel to a library (weather permitting) while/if it was open, find the appropriate section of books, read through the index or chapter titles, etc. and scan - in hopes the answer was there.

Today, in some spheres (except e.g. those where the answers are still hidden) I'm much -much- freer to ask many more questions and deep-dive into subjects that, back then, I could only dream of learning about. Yes, I could read a book, if I knew the book existed. And where to order it from. And wait for it to arrive in 2 to 6 weeks.

If only I'd had this 30 years ago. Hell, I imagine, what if I'd had this power as a child in a small town.

alex1138• 2 years ago

Let's be honest, one reason many of us loved it was because of Flash. Thankfully there's Ruffle for that, now

Also, it would be helpful if Google hadn't steadily degraded their product. +words +that +must +be +included +should +have +those +words +in +the +search. Not "fuzzy search". Not "can't find my result even when I explicitly tell you". Which includes surfacing of more obscure sites (like what wiby/marginalia do now).

(Which also includes censorship but that's a different story)

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

Don’t know if it’s sad or sickening to see Google pretend it only has 10 results for a query when we all know every single query got 10k-1m results before they nerfed it

asadotzler• 2 years ago

Flash was late, early 2000s when it blew up on the Web.

bugthe0ry• 2 years ago

Whenever I come across posts like this, I need to remind myself that it's actually a very small minority of people online who feel this way. Most people are perfectly happy with how the internet is right now and don't care for going back to things you used to do online a decade or two ago.

On social media: today it's no longer even about ordinary individuals sharing their ordinary lives online like they used to 15 years ago. It's about consuming content around your interests (which includes entertainment). Very few people on my instagram make personal posts anymore (myself included) and when they do, they're few and far in between. It's all brands and content creators. I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online. It was a new concept to many between 2006-2014 to be able to do it, and so many did. Now they're past it. It was interesting in 2008 to see that Johnny is currently sipping on a latte in front of his window. Now nobody gives a fuck unless Johnny is a celebrity.

On scrolling TikTok-like feeds: not to glorify the concept but it makes it easier for the anti-social-medias to accept if you think of it as the equivalent of when your parents would get home, turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels trying to find something interesting to watch. TikTok and Reels put the TV in your pocket. 80% of the content on them is of no substance but occasionally a valuable post does come up and provide me with something I need/enjoy. The other day, I had a spontaneous date night because a reel showed up for my wife about some food truck nearby and she shared it with me (we went there an hour later and it turned out to be a good one - we're going again next week). P.S. it didn't even cross my mind to bother posting a snap of my meal as a story on IG :)

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online.

I tend to disagree. I have a few hundred friends/people I follow on Instagram and I see people post stories and posts about their life all the time. People are generally trying to portray "Look at me! I have such a cool life!". This is how it is for young people.

As for TikTok, I find myself scrolling with no end in sight. I think the studies on the addiction level of shortform content and its long term effects is going to be extremely shocking.

I can watch an episode or two of a show, maybe 30m-1hr, and turn it off. But TikTok keeps me constantly stimulated and I can easily forget what I am watching and "doomscroll" for hours. With TV I make the conscious decision to watch it. With TikTok I have to make the conscious decision to not watch it or open the app. This may be a side effect of how my brain works, but a lot of young people have similar experiences.

I think the main difference in our experiences is a generational gap in how social media is used.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

But why wouldn't the solution with TikTok just be to delete your account and the app? I am young like you and that works perfectly fine for me.

If friends want to share videos/tiktoks with me, they download them and then send them with another messaging app so I don't have to go to the platform. And that's not something I force on them but something they do because they really want me to see those videos I suppose.

tarsinge• 2 years ago

And what is the content people scroll to? And how does one become a celebrity in the first place on IG or TikTok? And what teens do all day long? Yep, sharing their live.

I share your experience, but for me it is just the one of a millennial getting older.

cjbgkagh• 2 years ago

Was tough to get past the first sentence. I wouldn’t consider 18 the prime of your life, that’s still far too young to know better.

The trope of old man yells at cloud should have the dual of young person thinks they have discovered something new. It takes a while to learn there is nothing new under the sun.

Sure, normies have invaded the internet, but there are plenty of niches in various fields that are sufficiently avant-gard that even the most dissenting hipsters can still find a home. But it’s never easy, almost by definition such places are defined by their difficulty of entry.

skydhash2• 2 years ago

I was late to the party (but with my country’s tardiness in anything technology, it was pretty much the same) as I started around 2010, but the one nice thing I do remember was how easy it was to find random blogs or forums about your subject of interest. Even though I was connected for only an hour or so a day, information was readily available although sparse. Now, we have more data, but it feels more like a humid jungle full of tarpits and biting insects. Even corporate sites have the slimy feeling you’d associate with shady sites that wanted you to update flash.

femto• 2 years ago

I was on the 'net pre-WWW and wrote my first web page in 1992.

The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.

I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.

I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

I joined in 2003, so I'm probably around 10 yrs younger (born 88).

From my perspective, the only thing that changed is that most millennials grew up and realized that their quality of life mostly peaked in their teenage years and that most will never be able to provide even a fraction of that quality of life to their offspring.

It's honestly not really about the Internet itself, that's just a place where the same people ultimately communicate on. If they're hopeful in real life, they're gonna be hopeful on forums etc.

I make this statement under the expectation that millennials are even now the biggest fraction of Internet users. Though I'd expect that to change within the next few years. I doubt the sentiment would change however, as the zoomers/Gen alpha will ultimately come to the same conclusions, as their prospects are even worse

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.

Precisely this. I grew up in a post-communist country and I can definitely say that the democratic transformation gave everyone a sense of hope. Sure, there was the ozone hole, but other than that, when people thought "the future" they imagined all the technological advancement that would not only make life comfortable, but also solve most of social issues.

And then we saw the opposite happening.

nathias2• 2 years ago

For me, that hope was realized, we have access to most of the books in existence, incredible projects of knowledge sharing, and countless other resources to learn any subject you want.

If the majority of people don't want to use this, but instead just want to yell about politics and the news cycle, that's their problem and doesn't really diminish the achievements of the web.

aleph_minus_one9• 2 years ago

For me, that hope was realized, we have access to most of the books in existence

As long as you are willing to enter a legal gray area, you can get access to some interesting books; but these are still an insanely small fraction of "most of the books in existence".

chaosist2• 2 years ago

Exactly. I got online in 1995 and the promise was kept by the internet. I have taken so many free classes from Ivy league schools along with all the books, pdfs, tutorials, physical books I would have never found otherwise.

What I highly overestimated was people's thirst for knowledge. I really thought that by this time I would be unemployable as the average young person would just be so learned that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The advantage of growing up with the internet would be just so huge.

I would have never guessed that the average young person instead almost has a type of learning disability from being addicted to political nonsense, stupid videos and gossip.

Everything is there from what I envisioned in 1995 though. It is just this useless, pernicious aspect dwarfs what I envisioned then in terms of popularity.

keybored• 2 years ago

There are enough problems right now. Wishing you were born in time to see Led Zeppelin in the 70’s? Before some mass-Web consumption turning point? No, being born in the 80’s/90’s was late enough for me. Some kids these days are so neurotic about their future outlook that climate change lives rent-free in their minds, worsening their daily mental health.

Have fun with the ever-worsening Anthropocene, kid. I mean, we both will.

dav_Oz2• 2 years ago

Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health"). Since I'm older I had a more of a choice in terms of social media presence (and get away with basically none) the younger folks practically don't.

Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.

As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.

[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...

[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0

donw• 2 years ago

We are very careful with our kids in terms of they interact with technology for this reason.

Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.

It's a difficult balance.

My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"

Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.

The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.

ericd• 2 years ago

On the last bit, it seems like more parents are coming around to your way of thinking, and our public school system just sent out a survey about how hard they should ban personal electronics from our public schools.

scruple• 2 years ago

The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.

This has been our priority as parents forming peer groups with other parents. But it's very hard to find the kids that your kids like and are friends with who aren't constantly inundated with tech.

1over137• 2 years ago

Shutting junior up with iPad seems to be the default. When those parents were kids, they were shut up with television. In a way, nothing’s changed.

jdthedisciple• 2 years ago

Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health")

Is it?

It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.

Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.

umbra07• 2 years ago

Just about everyone I know understands that social media is addictive, and can lead to a littany of/exacerbate mental health issues.

All my friends constantly joke about being addicted to x social media app

jajko• 2 years ago

It is.

Its normalization of failure / suffering. in a village full of alcoholics, drinking with your family/neighbors was part of greeting, social contracts, or venting out frustrations. It was evident to everybody how things end up down the line without exception, but when all are in the suck, mentally it feels better.

Our herd social behavior which make humans such a successful species are showing its darker, and easy to abuse side.

dav_Oz2• 2 years ago

GenZ are mostly aware[0] but feel powerless about it so they don't act accordingly which may seem that they are oblivious.

From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time. Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.

I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964. Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.

It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.

[0]https://talker.news/2024/08/28/why-3-in-4-gen-z-blame-social...

[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16007

marttt• 2 years ago

I think this has to do with how a child's parents inform them about the addictive nature. I've been telling this to our children early on ("games = mostly engineered for addiction, be careful"), and the youngest (11yo soon) has no problem understanding this. And I'd say he manages to regulate his gaming hours surprisingly well all by himself.

What I particularly like is that children seem to be quite interested in what it actually is that makes games addictive. So a 10yo might reason along the lines of "Dude, gaming 2 hours straight must be worse for my brain than gaming 45 minutes straight. This game's got too many flashing things, too. Don't want to get addicted. Must go out".

So, from personal experience as a parent, I'd say we adults should not underestimate the influence of educating our children about the dangers of too much gaming. Apparently, quite a bit can be done with very simple means (talking!) to keep things healthier for them. Consistency is key, as always.

bubblebeard• 2 years ago

It’s refreshing to see a young person with such sound reflections about social media.

This post made me reminisce about learning web development when I was 11. Finding resources online was tricky, especially since I didn’t always have access to the Internet. I got books from my parents, and not very good ones either, but I loved them all the same.

I miss those days, when everything was more of an adventure.

fzeroracer• 2 years ago

I miss the 90s/2000s internet too, but I'm also realistic about it.

Dialup sucked, search engines sucked, it was easy for random stuff to brick your computer and it was hard for anything you published to reach an audience. If you think ads now are bad, they were even worse back then.

What people miss is the slower sense of community. Social media has removed all boundaries between smaller local communities and many people aren't interested in finding one. So a lot of people have local friends, and then the amorphous blob of people on social media that they throw posts into. But these things still exist. You can find forums with only a couple hundred users, or circles of blogs. There are IRC channels dedicated to niche interests.

I haven't engaged with proper social media in years because I realized the above and just...left.

grafelic• 2 years ago

I am hoping and waiting for the 80s punk equivalent anti-SoMe counterculture to appear.

maurits• 2 years ago

I think I just miss being 14-ish when technology felt mesmerizing, and world seemed infinite because I was learning Pascal.

Now I just want to wake up, have my coffee, and not read about some new machine learning framework.

dackdel2• 2 years ago

check out nostr. gives me the feeling of 90's internet

aleph_minus_one9• 2 years ago

check out nostr. gives me the feeling of 90's internet

I'm not so sure about that: in the 90s, there was no social media.

dackdel2• 2 years ago

its just a protocol like irc. its not social media. its purely a protocol, nothing else. the first thing that has been built on it is social. IT itself is not just a "social media"

singularity2001• 2 years ago

The first time I entered a random chat in the 90s someone typed Italian and I panicked thinking it may be the mafia and unplugged the modem.

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Well, the clean, handed coded page posted is a good start.

It's refreshing to see - I think the web got boring once bootstrap hit and everything started looking that way.

MrVandemar• 2 years ago

It's not hand coded, but I can see why you think that. It's a Bear Blog, which has sane readable defaults.

mark336• 2 years ago

One of the things you didn't mention from back then was P2P file-sharing. I don't know when the RIAA won, but suddenly downloading mp3s was illegal. And now kids think that paying for iTunes songs was always normal.

haunter• 2 years ago

And now kids think that paying for iTunes songs was always normal.

Maybe paying for Spotify which is dirt cheap and satisfies what most people are looking for

What makes you think piracy is worse nowadays? We have more legal obtions but piracy is absolutely booming with high quality rips. Young me would have killed to have the whole Nintendo ROM library a click away and now I can just download it in 2 minutes.

High quality: I don’t miss the old days of searching for music > no ID3 tag just file names > turns out my wholenight download was a peruvian pipe band not the one I was looking for. Every single torrent tracker has now better in quality options and absolutely no fakes

leetsbehonest• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the short period of time in human history where global connectivity and individuality coexisted

boffinAudio• 2 years ago

I've been on the "Internet" since the mid-80's, when I was lucky to gain my very first shell account on an Internet-connected system at the electronics assembly line where I apprenticed as a junior programmer, building test software and eventually the DOS driver for a locally designed and produced modem. I wrote a lot of software on that shell account, relying on access to USENET and my email address for a lot of the research and hand-holding that booted me from junior to somewhat competent developer.

During the 90's, I set up and maintained my own Linux machine at home, pushing my 28.8k modem connection into service to put my little 486 on the Internet as a dedicated host, running Majordomo and mailman list-servs devoted to topics I was interested in - mostly music-making technology and the like.

Those listservs (and also, of course, USENET) gave me access to a vast and awesome array of folks around the world, some of whom were my early guru's, some of whom became my nemeses, but most of whom were a part of a worldwide community of folks I knew I could rely on for an entertaining and educational hour or two, each day, of reading. (Some of those listservs still exist, but have gone into comatose, dormant state with the last decades' rise of social media..)

Without question, I feel that the quality of the community is directly related to the involvement of that community in the methods used by the community to sustain itself - as the "AOL'ization" of the Internet occurred, the quality when way, way down. Yes, I was there that fateful September when the Internet was invaded by the hoards of unwashed masses. I still feel that phenomenon was a turning point in social community - it went from being a community, to a media.

I also still think there is a place for these kinds of locally-built and run communities. I often wonder how viable it would be for me to set up and run another little box, locally, and invite some friends to join me on it, discussing whatever we want, through a shell-only account, or at the very least, using only email/listservs for distribution ... I think there's still a lot of room for that style of community building, personally, since: technology doesn't get old - only its users do.

tessierashpool9• 2 years ago

90s internet versus now is like eating steaks and potatoes with red wine versus chocolate and gummy bears with coca cola. even those who are hooked on the dopamine rush despise it cause it just makes you sick even after a few hours already. sleeping is the tolerance break and then you need it again like a chain smoker needs his first cigarette - but after a few rounds one already anticipates the hollowness it leaves you with at the end of the day.

and it's not just the internet. the 90s and even more so the 80s were for sure the better time to be young (at heart).

glimshe• 2 years ago

I miss Delphi/C++ Builder for professional application development... :'(

pera• 2 years ago

There is neocites, and a small community of people who share this philosophy about the web (and that are relatively young), but I have not met anyone my age, in the real world, that would choose to do something like this.

When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.

Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.

mglz3• 2 years ago

Well, the old internet was partially based on people knowing each other. Then the large players made it all about mass engagement. Maybe we should go back to linking your friends webpages from your own and have a small amount of readers.

bojan• 2 years ago

I'd rather say in was based on common interests, and you'd go out of your way to find "your" community. I'm still friends with people I "met" on various phpBB forums 20 years ago.

madaxe_again• 2 years ago

When I was a teen, most of my peers were not online and were not interested in being online, and actively derided anyone who even touched a computer without it being under duress - U.K., mid to late 90’s. A scattered few, usually those with bands, had a MySpace. I can count the geocities sites on one hand.

A big part of what the author is lamenting for, and touches upon with his final paragraph, is the Internet of weirdos, before the cool kids and your mother also got online.

It’s gone. September happened. It also still exists, in niches and pockets here and there - but the Wild West days are done.

xnorswap• 2 years ago

It's funny how the mind plays tricks with our memories too.

I could have sworn myspace was around ~2000/1, but apparently it wasn't founded until 2003.

illwrks• 2 years ago

Bingo, you hit the nail on the head. At that point in time my friend group were skaters and rockers with bands - the internet was a connection to that world that was in short supply in the small town we grew up in.

veunes2• 2 years ago

The web was a diverse and dynamic space. Users were free to experiment with design, content, and interactivity without worrying about conforming to algorithms or best practices.

7222aafdcf68cfe• 2 years ago

I have been on the internet since the mid-90s and computers have defined my life , personally and professionally, since I was 4 years old.

And still, this kind of messages make me uncertain about what to really think. There is a nostalgia for the authenticity of the earlier web, and I have felt that myself. Things were hard in the 90s, but maybe that is what made it feel more worthwhile. It is also true that a lot of the current internet is dominated by financial and corporate interests.

BUT ! everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so. Access to technology and software has never been easier, neither has the opportunity to learn about pretty much any topic. We have access to the output of so many people in an instant.

This can be liberating, but it can also be paralyzing. An ugly mix of FOMO and impostor syndrome making many of us paralized on most days and scroll for a quick dopamine hit instead.

But what if we consciously choose to focus on the positives by focusing on what we feel truly engaged by, and to ruthlessly ignore the rest ?

We can only make that choice ourselves.

aucisson_masque• 2 years ago

This forum is literally the proof that old web still exists, its ugly but efficient.

People there aren't chasing for social recognition or karma and genuinely want to share their opinion.

And back then website were still chasing for advertising money, the popups and ads were absolute cancer. More than today. IMO the tool (internet) hasn't changed, it's the people using it who changed for the worst.

johnisgood7• 2 years ago

[REDACTED]

veunes2• 2 years ago

You've witnessed the internet’s dramatic transformation and I think that it's one of a kind experience

Al-Khwarizmi• 2 years ago

everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so.

This is only true in a narrow technical sense. But the Internet is not only the technology, it's its users. Many social interactions that were possible in the 90s are not possible today because, even if the infrastructure that facilitated them is still there or can be built, the people are not there.

ruthmarx• 2 years ago

The reason I miss the net from that time is not due to web design, but just the types of people that were online. I'm too young to have experienced Eternal September, but it seems every generation has their own...well, the current generation probably won't.

Nowadays you have every idiot spouting off half-baked opinions with horrible grammar and spelling, everyone arguing just to be right and not to test their own ideas, being ridiculously tribal, calling anything that disagrees with them fake news, etc etc.

When there was a little more barrier to entry, the net was vastly better. As someone that cares about truth, fact and good faith discourse, I miss that time terribly.

swsieber• 2 years ago

I mostly agree; but we are experiencing the Eternal September of AI and bots.

i_c_b• 2 years ago

I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod files and .xm files from aminet and learning to write tracker music in Fast Tracker 2, downloading and playing all sorts of cool Doom wads, installing DJGPP and pouring over the source code for Allegro and picking up more game programming chops, and getting incredibly caught up in following the Doom community and .plan files for the release of Quake.

Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.

There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.

This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.

I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).

JeremyNT• 2 years ago

Similar story here, with similarly disastrous impacts on my GPA. There was something magical about that time - technology was moving so rapidly and access to information was exploding. It was all so very early that it seemed like anything was possible for an aspiring computer nerd with a good computer and a fast internet connection.

Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.

Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

Same here, the Internet, game modding, early LAN->Internet bridges for multiplayer gaming, IRC and all that probably reduced my GPA by about -1.0 and that caused me to miss out on the "premium" tech employers early in my career, ultimately set me back decades. Thank you, rec.games.computer.quake.* hierarchy and Quake-C mailing lists.

Dalewyn3• 2 years ago

It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way.

We hate the internet today because it became mainstream.

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

JohnFen2• 2 years ago

I hate the internet today not because it became mainstream, but because it became commercialized and that squeezed out too much of the best stuff.

beowulfey• 2 years ago

I think this is genuinely true. The internet today appeals to the lowest common denominator, in the same way that blockbuster movies often do. It is less appealing because it is less specific to our tastes.

canucker2016• 2 years ago

The Green Card spam on Usenet is my line in the sand. Usenet got a lot more annoying after that. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

addicted• 2 years ago

The internet was quite mainstream in the 90s and 2000s.

The problem with the internet today is it’s a bunch of disconnected privately owned silos.

linotype• 2 years ago

I miss the Internet of the 90s because every page I visit today has a pop-up asking me if I want to accept cookies. It makes browsing the open web a jarring experience.

Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.

zackmorris• 2 years ago

Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.

So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.

Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.

What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.

So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:

  - AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
  - VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
  - Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
  - WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
  - 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
  - High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
  - Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
  - Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
  - Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
  - Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
  - SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
  - CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
  - Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
  - GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
  - Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)

Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.

The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.

Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

It is greed indeed. Visionaries lost once reality hits in. We're at the largest IT unemployment since the dot com bubble burst.

It's not that nobody cares, it's you're either rich and have influence, or you're a visionary like the rest of us.

I see all the coolest things get slapped behind a $50/m fee (or $ fee)

It's how it is, you hit it dead on.

We can try and fix it, but... all that's offered is running on hamster wheels. We lost. And we lost bad.

But, we can still create things and hope those things we create pave the foundation for things to be. That, that keeps us going.

michaelbrave• 2 years ago

the AI image generation and 3D printing community had a similar kind of feel from 2021-2023, both are slowing down now though and becoming more mainstream everyday and needing less tinkering everyday. Which is great but disapointing at the same time.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 2 years ago

It doesn't feel like the same energy to me. Image generation was always "ok, maybe we release this for free or cheap now to see how people feel about it but sooner or later we're going to charge $$$" and 3d printing... I don't know, I think those guys are still doing their own thing. The barrier to get in is lower but there's still Luke warm interest to do so.

haxiomic• 2 years ago

A thread to pull on for anyone who misses this unconstrained creativity and humanness of online communities. It exists again, in a new form in VR. It's absolutely wild and fantastic and unbelievable.

Perhaps start here https://youtu.be/hVWlgh8QP5s?si=z4RD6FnMpPGQYuem&t=1523 And feel free to email (see bio) if you want to connect in there

mattlondon2• 2 years ago

These sort of posts are getting tiresome.

I now file them in my head alongside the same sort of mindset of the Amish - i.e. a rejection of modern technology and centering on some perceived "better times" in the past (for better or worse)

I was there in the early-/mid-90s. Yes there was more "authenticity" but there was also a lot of crap (probably 50-75% of the self-published sites were essentially empty "welcome to my website! I'll add more soon!" type things) and critically there was a lot of stuff we take for granted today that simply was not there. It was shit compared to the modern internet when you think about what we can do now Vs what you could do then.

Yes there were more frequently found self-published kooky websites, but even "professional" sites were done as second-thoughts and the quality/freshness was often low, and there was a whole raft of things that make our lives easier today that simply could not be done or were terrible (decent search engines, decent high-quality news sites, chatgpt, wikipedia, book flights or hotels, watch videos, github, stream music, order groceries, turn your lights on, view online maps, attend university, talk to your friends/family on the other side of the world in crystal clear HD video, have Amazon deliver something to your house on the same freaking day etc etc etc etc).

A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption.

1dom2• 2 years ago

I think your post feels overly cynical. It doesn't seem to really address any of the points in the article, and it doesn't really give any examples to support your argument against it.

A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption.

Isn't this the point the original article is trying to make? All the good old simple stuff is still there (neocities) but now it's relatively undiscoverable to the average internet user, because big money interests exploit fundamental weaknesses in human nature for attention.

Be selective in your consumption.

I feel like you're not really considering the nature of addiction.

I agree with you these posts are getting a bit tiresome too. But I'd much rather they get more tiresome, and maybe lead to change vs letting the problems they're highlighting get worse.

I was there in the 90's too, let's not pull up the ladder behind us.

mattlondon2• 2 years ago

The old stuff was largely undiscoverable back then too. Perhaps someone sent you a link, or perhaps you clicked on a link from some other site or Usenet, and if you were lucky it was not a broken link. It's not like you'd just open your browser and be inundated with this cornucopia of wonderful, thoughtful , high-quality content (let's face it a lot of stuff online then was crap). You had to find it, often by chance. I don't think things have changed that much, only today there are a lot of alternatives that give a quick hit when in the old days you'd probably give up instead.

The vast majority of geocities were essentially empty sites. The ones that were interesting and with decent content were not from the same sort of people shit-posting on twitter today. It takes time and effort and dedication to curate something and put something useful and interesting together - people who are in that category will still be doing that even with or without tiktok (and indeed if someone wants to host their collection of cat pictures on tiktok and not geocities then why not?). The content is still there, but the internet is a whole lot better today - there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today.

Nobody missed out on anything apart from a whole load of GIFs.

nutshell89• 2 years ago

I think what's missing from a lot of these discussions is how much more commerce-driven the present day internet is over the 90s-00s. Social media is highly addictive and destabilizing in order to get it's audience to eventually pay for something in TikTok Shop, or view sponsored content, for example. Dark patterns were introduced to increase revenue or to get users to dole out their personal information for advertising effectiveness.

I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade

tim3333• 2 years ago

As a counter example I'm old and I prefer the internet now to the 95-00s. The problem I had back then was there was a lot of potential but the content was mostly junk. There's a lot of great content now.

gmuslera• 2 years ago

It is not just technology, but people, and culture, and mindsets, and more. I started in the local BBS arena and from there all the stages till now.

And even something similar from the technological side is done, catching a critical, and big enough, and diverse community may be something short lived, as we live with the rest of internet, that is trying to grab our attention and set our agendas

ChrisRR• 2 years ago

I miss when ads were just a single banner image

rainingmonkey• 2 years ago

The vibes of the early internet are still out there, you just won't be directed there by Google or any of the other "social" silos.

Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.

Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

Gemini to me feels to be dying, every time I open lagrange there's another 10% or so of the default bookmarks that are perma-offline; and the sites like geminispace.info have fewer and fewer results

floren• 2 years ago

Gemini is Markdown-but-worse over HTTP-but-worse. The modern Web and all its crappiness didn't come about because there's something inherently wicked in HTML and HTTP, it came about because people built things on top of the basic foundation, extending (sometimes poorly) and expanding.

The more people play with Gemini, the more they'll want to "extend" it... and the closer they'll bring it to HTTP, because it follows the exact same fundamental model once you strip off the extraneous document format specification. Hell, there's no reason you couldn't serve HTML over the Gemini protocol, along with Javascript and all the rest.

I've said before, if you want to pretend you're an undergrad in 1993, go play around on LambdaMOO or something else that actually dates from that time, something that's more interesting than shipping text files over "HTTP but the status codes are shorter". Hell, all anybody does on Gemini is write their "gemlogs" anyway, and if you want to publish short texts on a weird system that needs users to run a special client anyway...

@create $note named "blog post 9/11/2024"
write "This is the first line of my blog post" on blog
write "And this is the second" on blog
read blog

aproductguy• 2 years ago

Reminds me of this article from Salon published back in 2002: https://www.salon.com/2002/05/31/back_in_the_day/

mglz3• 2 years ago

If we want back the old internet we must build it. Create your own website, link to those you like, get in contact with the people running them. Mine is mglz.de, check out the link collection and get in touch about linking between sites :)

AndrewSChapman• 2 years ago

A better version of this article: https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb

mexicocitinluez• 2 years ago

born in 2006

not to be pedantic, but how do you miss something you never experienced to begin with?

atlantic• 2 years ago

When you miss something, you're not referring to the original experience, but to a memory of an experience. Memories being mental artifacts, it's perfectly feasible to miss an imagined experience. Hence the current wave of nostalgia for the Roman empire.

debugnik• 2 years ago

I read miss here as "failed to be on time for", not as "long for". They specifically say "I wish I was around when [...]"

vegadw• 2 years ago

I, born in '98, wrote something about being "nostalgic" for the 80's : https://opguides.info/posts/xx80/

ocean_moist7• 2 years ago

Like I literally missed out on that time period, like how you could miss a class or meeting.

f30e3dfed1c9• 2 years ago

You're reading the title wrong. He means "I wish I hadn't missed out on the '90s-00s internet," that is, that he had been around to experience it.

bayareateg• 2 years ago

One thing that's happening currently that has been alluded to by other people in the comments is the rapid disappearance of forums.

Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.

Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.

layer8• 2 years ago

I’m curious what the general demographic preference is regarding real-time/chat vs. async/longer-form. I never much liked real-time/chat, even back in the times of IRC, BSD talk, and ICQ, and have always preferred mailing lists/Usenet/forums.

schnitzelstoat• 2 years ago

I hate Discord because of that.

Subreddits are okay, although I preferred the less centralised way of the past with the myriad vBulletin forums etc.

But Discord is built to replace IRC, not to replace forums, yet people use it for the latter.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

I've been scratching this itch by getting into https://atproto.com/ and https://activitypub.rocks/ the platforms are much smaller than the mainstream ones, but the older internet was smaller too. I'm not sure you CAN have something like the old internet above a certain user penetration, it will always devolve to grocery checkout tabloids and afternoon talk show without a filter.

tolerance• 2 years ago

“Live and let die.”

— Kool G Rap & DJ Polo.

h6do84go83b83• 2 years ago

Nostalgia can be a “now” killer. careful with it.

shark1• 2 years ago

It's the general feeling, I have been observing it. We are missing the personal touch, similar to what we had in small bookstores, cafeterias, and restaurants where, on each visit, we had a different experience, the walls reflecting the dedication (or lack of it) beliefs and dreams of the owner. The commoditization of social profiles, always packaged in the same way by a huge conglomerate, telling us all the time what we should consume, shaping who we are and what we believe by blatantly exploiting the dopamine sensors of our brain and other mental triggers to steal our attention at any cost. All of this is making us sick and desiring to reset it all, hoping that someone will do something to bring back the real fun and the creativity of the Internet on top of our search results again, and not lost somewhere in this sea of avatars resharing, reposting, forwarding and never creating anything themselves.

The real good and fun Internet still exists, it is just much harder to find it.

ddingus• 2 years ago

I don't. I miss that Internet, and am always seeking bits here and there where it can be found and enjoyed.

The other thing I miss from that time is USENET. So damn great, until it got swamped by noise. Some parts of it remain active today.

Threaded conversation is fantastic. And it's searchable. So damn much can be found in the USENET archives. The modern tools we have today aren't the same at all, mostly super functional silos. Not bad. Also, just not very good!

Finally, mailing lists. Those are still a thing, and like USENET, are searchable, high value communication exchanges.

Reddit is a lot like USENET. And the original charter around the Aaron time was similar, basically by users, for users kind of thing. Now the enshittification is happening everywhere near constantly devaluing online discourse.

The way I see it, those of us who do miss the great things about this early Internet time can keep talking about it, and one day, one of us, or one we talk to, will figure out how to reboot USENET for all of us to enjoy just as was done back in the day.

graypegg• 2 years ago

Maybe if I can challenge something a little bit,

    > What’s the ratio of followers to following you have? Are your story highlights organized and “aesthetic”? What reels are you liking? [...]
    > It has become so shallow, you can tell almost nothing about who someone actually is through Instagram or tiktok. You can only tell how they want to portray themselves to the general population and, by how they organize their profile, if they are eligible to be a part of your social circle.
    > [In the past,] There was little incentive to lie, to manipulate truth, and each blog entry or piece of information was tied to identity. (except in the cases of anonymity).

There's this idea that the internet had a point where it was _universally_ genuine, curious and welcoming. I don't really remember that? I'm a sucker for rose-tinted memories, but I don't think I remember 00's forums NOT being social cliques. There was a lot of posturing, clout-chasing, and mean-spirited trolling. Your identity online was crafted from scratch for a particular space because you really could be as anonymous as you wanted to be. A pseudonym on an image board, forum accounts, personal sites, that pitiful amount of web space your ISP would give you, MMORPG account, MUCK profile, etc could all be totally distinct "people".

Lying on a speed running forum about a time you got in a game. Making things online, just to dog pile on hating 1 particular person. The mean shit people said to each other on any IM platform. Cyber bullying was a word I remember being tossed around a lot in the mid 00's.

The corpo vibe of things today sucks. Totally agree. But it's not like the internet of 2005 was this utopia of good vibes and positivity. It's never going to be that _universally_. Find your tribe eh?

---

However,

    > Also, websites just simply looked cooler.

Fuck yeah they did :)

listenallyall• 2 years ago

In the late 90s, I greatly enjoyed reading The Industry Standard every week. On paper.

There are dozens of sites today that try to cover emerging technology companies, none do it nearly as well.

p3rls• 2 years ago

We just added an appeal system to our wiki-database for kpop at kpopping.com... There's lots of little projects going on that resemble the old web, you probably just don't hear about them because you're outside the niche.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Not sure that old internet was better, it was too slow for the most interesting imagined uses, but unlike today's internet users were invited to imagine many possibilities for how it could be used. Today, so-called "tech" companies, basically incorporated websites that have reached absurd, unmanageable sizes and are used to do things people in the 90s and early 00s would never have imagined using websites to do, have attempted monopolise and commercialise all those possibilities.

The internet has sadly become synonymous with the web for the majority internet users and this web is infested with middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, that refuse to honour that any internet user would ever imagine their own possibilities for usage of their netwwork subscription, e.g., non-commercial usage. These middlemen purport to determine how the network should and will be used. There is nothing left for the internet subscriber to imagine, no decisions to make. All usage is predictable, pre-determined by the so-called "tech" companies. They want internet subscribers to believe an internet subscription alone provides no value; all value resides in the middlemen that wait for subscribers on the network, lure them in, surveil them and serve them ads. To add insult to injury, they coerce internet subscribers into "subscribing" to websites!

With internet speeds today, those possibilities some of us imagined in the 90s and 00s are now possible. The problem is so-called "tech" companies stand in the way. Attempting to intermediate anything and everything.

jfil• 2 years ago

I like Jason Scott's take on the nostalgic internet: it was a cosy place for people "in the know" and we miss being in a special club.

https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-nostalgic-web-episode

The post's author also talks about how social media is different from the web of the past. This is a good time to point out the difference between operating on the Web and operating on the Internet. The Internet is just a client-server technology. The Web is about hypertext and making connections. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are on the Internet but not on the Web, because they penalize linking to the wider web. Blogs, search engines and Reddit are "Web".

phendrenad2• 2 years ago

I miss all of the quirky, smart people being online and none of the boring, mid people being online.

We need a Net 2.0 where we can go and be weird again.

tonyedwardspz• 2 years ago

This post struck a chord with me. In keeping with it's spirit, I wrote a reply.

https://tonyedwardspz.co.uk/blog/im-glad-i-miss-the-old-inte...

I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet

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