The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

https://muddy.jprs.me/posts/2026-05-03-the-best-is-over/

by jprs • 3 months ago

315 279 3 months ago

muddy.jprs.me

functionmouse3• 3 months ago

I agree, but it's been said by all...

make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console

pick up cross stitching or weaving

make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props

find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store

write a 1 page short story in pen

it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having

jonhohle• 3 months ago

Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.

In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).

Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.

coffeebeqn• 3 months ago

Don’t try to make money from it and you can still do fun things in life

DivingForGold• 3 months ago

Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.

brightball2• 3 months ago

We need to bring back BBS's over short range radio transmitters.

The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.

neilwilson• 3 months ago

Or just make homebrew.

It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.

It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.

soopypoos• 3 months ago

I can't wait to find out if I made pruno or jenkem

summa_tech• 3 months ago

I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.

The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.

Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.

fragmede4• 3 months ago

Why do they have to be pre-exisiting? Release the whatever to the world, make a Discord for it, and find people that way.

frm88• 3 months ago

The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration.

It sometimes still is, albeit only on niche sites like tumblr, which created Goncharov (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goncharov_(meme)

the__alchemist3• 3 months ago

I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.

Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.

sevenzero• 3 months ago

bottom-feeder content

So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.

dgellow6• 3 months ago

Do you have interesting urls to recommend?

Melatonic2• 3 months ago

Kagi Small Web !!

moffkalast3• 3 months ago

The big, bold world outside the internet is arguably far more locked down, enshittified and regulated than the online world.

I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.

You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.

MSFT_Edging• 3 months ago

Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.

The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.

I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!

That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.

It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.

Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.

Folcon2• 3 months ago

Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion"

And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?

For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area

This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging

dogleash• 3 months ago

A: "The vibe at my favorite bar has changed"

B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"

I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.

bradley13• 3 months ago

This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive.

I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.

With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.

Waterluvian• 3 months ago

A little while ago I got my hodge podge Amazon soldering kit out and took the time to fix two DMG-01 Game Boys from my childhood. I opened up a bunch of PS5 controllers and replaced the analog sticks with hall sensors.

Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”

functionmouse3• 3 months ago

I repair electronics every once in a while and I've always hated doing it. If you actually like doing that, then you absolutely should try doing it for a living.

scelerat• 3 months ago

as someone who laments the loss of spaces and pastimes that once brought people together -- bowling alleys, dance halls, pubs, movie houses, etc. -- to work from home, home entertainment and especially anything and everything online, I keep hoping for some kind of reversal.

Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.

vinceguidry• 3 months ago

all of these things are not internet.

Forgeties79• 3 months ago

I swapped to Linux last year and my computer has actually been fun. Bazzite is great. I barely tinker with it if ever and it’s mostly because I feel like it, not out of necessity. I have a very reliable gaming and video editing machine, mostly using open source stuff, and I am in no way a coder/programmer/engineer. I just love using it.

Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.

Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.

harimau777• 3 months ago

That seems kind of like a non-sequiter none of that stuff has anything to do with what made the internet special so I don't see how doing so would help either bring the internet back or create a viable alternative.

ButlerianJihad2• 3 months ago

pick up cross stitching or weaving

Ironically, it was the Jacquard Loom that made redundant a generation of highly-skilled, mostly female, weavers.

Of course, any human can choose to take up this hobby manually, but we will never again compete in the job market with machines that are accurate, blindingly fast, and so far haven’t demanded the right to vote

JKCalhoun2• 3 months ago

Ha ha, just discovered these kids from 1989 using their parent's camcorder:

https://youtu.be/IvHaL2BxqvM?t=151

We can still do that.

jjav• 3 months ago

Encourage yourself and all your similar-minded people to keep the fun going!

Yes, 99.99(however many 9s)% of the internet is walled-garden advertising garbage.

But, you can exist in the remaining space and bring your friends along!

I run my website and my blog like I've always done (since 1994), I run mailing lists for a few topics (some date back to 1991) and subscribe to many others. Zero corporate involvement, no ads, no monopolist in control. Just peer to peer real people. I run my email server so I can communicate without depending on the monopolists. There are still hobby forums for specialty topics, or start your own! I even still read Usenet weekly. And so on...

The fun parts of the Internet used to be all of it, now it is a niche, but it's still there for you. Keep it alive!

zacharycohn• 3 months ago

We have entered the Eternal October.

theultdev2• 3 months ago

Skill issue.

Been doing this for 20 years.

I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.

All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.

I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.

LeCompteSftware• 3 months ago

That's not what this article is about. It's really about algorithmic social media. There is one short paragraph near the end that mentions AI: "AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it."

theultdev2• 3 months ago

Yeah I admit I only glanced at it. So okay, it was the other common nostalgia take...

Yes it was more whimsical, yes I miss it, but no point talking about it anymore, that part of life is over.

client4• 3 months ago

A domain + compute has never been cheaper. That said, I think the signal-to-noise ratio on the modern internet makes discovery difficult.

2ndorderthought3• 3 months ago

It's approaching near impossible. The amount of articles posted to hn that are near AI slop is so high it's almost not worth using anymore.

bjelkeman-again• 3 months ago

I mostly hang out in small online communities that essentially become tightly curated by people I am interested in interacting with.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.

notnmeyer2• 3 months ago

i think discovery is the real thing all these “back in my day…” blog posts are about. they want the quirk delivered to them, but they’re fallen out of the zeitgeist and conclude that the old days are completely gone.

brrrrrm• 3 months ago

same can be said for a lot of things tho. e.g. nature used to be fun but then we discovered it all :’( I miss when ships literally sailed into the unknown and found surprising and novel things like hot peppers and pineapples

2ndorderthought3• 3 months ago

I don't agree entirely with the cleansing being done on behalf of AI. Sure the Internet was slowly descending into influence bot nets and sim card farms. But it couldn't scale to all corners of the internet. AI is the tool that destroyed that. Soon the amount of human content on the Internet will be so small it will be a place mostly for bots.

quxbar• 3 months ago

I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.

izzydata• 3 months ago

Things being too easy takes the joy away from the process. All you are left with is the result and not the journey.

DarkNova62• 3 months ago

Sure they exist. But nobody knows they exist because everyone just uses apps and SEO punishes actual good websites.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 3 months ago

How many of these will we get on a daily basis? Ten million nerds—7 million of which work for Meta—writing ten million blog posts about how nothing is fun anymore, and about 4 of them are doing anything fun.

3form• 3 months ago

All other things aside, there definitely is some profound void which demise of Flash created and has never been filled again.

micromacrofoot2• 3 months ago

the fun is still there, it's just harder to find because of all the shit burying it

doodlebugging• 3 months ago

The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.

micromacrofoot2• 3 months ago

true, but always people around who just squeeze for the fun of it

bluegatty• 3 months ago

The Internet Is Not Yours - and - You Can Do What You Want.

All the little niches can be your personal Web.

There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.

Craigslist is alive and well.

PayPay is weird but who cares.

The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.

That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.

I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.

jonas21• 3 months ago

I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.

It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

outime• 3 months ago

That's when you ask what exactly was better and then you can tell whether it's just typical nostalgia or if there are genuinely things to miss.

Jtarii2• 3 months ago

You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.

I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.

bitmasher9• 3 months ago

It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.

This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.

mrits• 3 months ago

Music becoming more commercial is a widely held complaint. It’s also mostly all the same chord progression so you could say sloppy as well

John23832• 3 months ago

I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).

pfannkuchen• 3 months ago

I believe it was “Eternal September”.

yur3i__• 3 months ago

I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.

In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.

pragma_x2• 3 months ago

I've heard people describe this phenomenon in basically two ways:

- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.

- The past is another country.

The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.

ErneX• 3 months ago

This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.

cucumber3732842• 3 months ago

They're often not wrong though. Nothing ruins a city quite like a white collar industry boom. It normalizes everything down to the "globalhomo" (for lack of a better word) baseline. The bars, the stores, the government, the transportation, it's all the same. Unless you fixate on appearances like the local architecture (a reflection of local climate for the most part) or minutia like "this city has a park by the river" vs "this city has a park by the highway" they're nearly indistinguishable.

Whether it's an old industry town going to shit or a hippies and artists type place or a former the shit it goes to seems to be the same every damn time.

threepts2• 3 months ago

Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.

I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".

munksbeer• 3 months ago

This is an amazing comment. I'm old. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and miss those times so much. But that is because I was young, immortal, the world was mine to discover.

In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.

Robdel12• 3 months ago

Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…

joe_mamba8• 3 months ago

Are they wrong though? Are there any metrics people today can look at and see things were indeed better in the past when they weren't around?

suzzer99• 3 months ago

At my first Burning Man in 1998, I met a guy in his 3rd year who told me, "It's changed, man."

Burning Man may have peaked by now. But looking back, most would agree it still had a lot of good years left in it in 1998.

bakugo5• 3 months ago

The statement "[thing] is worse now than it was X years ago" is not something that can only be true at a single point in time.

What if [thing] is just contiguously getting worse? What if that statement has always been true regardless of when it's been said?

vardalab2• 3 months ago

I like the forums of the old way better than what we have now, Discord and reddit suck I mean, even back button on reddit does not work 50% of the time, lol. Hacker News is the only thing that we have left that's similar to what we had from forums of the old. And even then, I think I like those forums better. Remember Deja News before Google bought them. Shit like that, that was good.

brokenmachine3• 3 months ago

old.reddit.com is still ok. Don't tell anyone or they'll take it away.

I have an auto-redirect userscript set up in Firefox so I never see reddit.com.

1970-01-01• 3 months ago

2026 and we still conflate the Internet with the WWW. As obscene as conflating culture and pop culture.

jexe• 3 months ago

Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.

Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?

joenot4433• 3 months ago

I think we just got older.

People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.

Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.

There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo• 3 months ago

Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.

Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.

joenot4433• 3 months ago

Yeah, that was a lapse :)

Silamoth• 3 months ago

I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).

joenot4433• 3 months ago

You're right - I think I could have made a better comparison.

Maybe a better comparison might be Source engine custom games to Minecraft mods?

bonesss• 3 months ago

Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.

Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.

And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.

I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.

Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.

lesostep• 3 months ago

> Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.

Blast on mIRC isn't comparable to TikTok. It's direct comparison would be a discord or tg chat.

There are a lot of discord chats full with teens that spend their time talking about modifying software. It mostly a whimsical software like small games or desktop pets, not something of interest to most adults.

I, uh, might be biased, but I think not a lot of teens were at the mIRC chats at the time. Mostly teens bought magazines, watched TV and rented porn.

It seems to me like you are comparing outliers then to a baseline now. Baseline now is pretty good, drug addiction down, teen preggy down, less crime, etc

dgellow6• 3 months ago

It’s true but things did change meaningfully. Before you could read forums discussions, mailing lists threads going for weeks or months on a topic. The content wasn’t optimized, it was between some people chatting/debating without the expectation of a larger audience. Same for blog. Not to say the quality was always great (blog comment sections were notoriously extremely low quality, I spent way too much time having the dumbest exchanges there) but you had some interesting things to search and look for. All current platforms (not HN) are full of cropped Twitter posts with cynical commentary that you consume in a few seconds or minutes (if you read the comment) before you scroll to the next one. Even if you go to smaller subreddit the discussions are dominated by whatever is the latest thing someone said on some other platform (still so much of Reddit is made of cropped twitter screenshots…), there is very limited actual engagement with the content. No interaction between whatever is posted (very likely out of context) and the original author. Virtually nobody ever interact with a discussion slightly older than a few hours.

Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?

I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest

jwr• 3 months ago

No, it's not! If you don't like the super-monetized over-optimized AI-generated walled garden we've-got-you-hooked experience —

just don't participate in it and do your own thing.

Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.

Write for yourself, not for "engagement".

Do your thing.

bakugo5• 3 months ago

What does this accomplish? You could always write some words on a paper and then throw that paper into a fire, you don't need the internet to do that.

The whole appeal of the internet was that you could write about some random niche thing you liked and reliably find other people who liked the same thing. It was never about screaming into a void or otherwise "doing things for yourself". It sucks now specifically because whatever you "do for yourself" is now far less likely to be seen by anyone else who cares than it has ever been before.

ux2664783• 3 months ago

That hasn't been my experience. The problem is do you expect it to be seen by thousands upon thousands of people? That wasn't a thing back then and it's not now either. You get a handful of hits, as you always did. The big numbers are the algorithm's game, though for many people, they've become normalized. If 1000 people see your niche little project, that's a failure by modern standards. That was huge success for a noname nobody 20+ years ago.

knowaveragejoe• 3 months ago

I think this cynicism is more borne out of a despair for the average person stuck in all that. They often don't know that there's something else, that you can just Do Things.

CityOfThrowaway• 3 months ago

In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.

On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.

The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).

It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.

AlexAplin• 3 months ago

Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.

I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.

nemo• 3 months ago

I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.

apsurd2• 3 months ago

So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).

I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.

I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.

boh• 3 months ago

This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.

dale_glass• 3 months ago

This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.

Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.

I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:

* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.

* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.

* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.

dhosek• 3 months ago

Indeed. I was trying to sell a loft bed a couple years ago and Craigslist is essentially dead for that sort of thing now, killed by Facebook (I deleted my account in 2021 and I have to say that eschewing that corner of the internet has been a net positive for my mental health). The only replies I got were obvious scams (“I love this! I’ll pay you $100 more than you’re asking for it!”)

Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).

I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.

A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.

ctippett• 3 months ago

* The site still exists but has been taken over by Tapatalk, snuffing out what little remained of the original community.

soupfordummies• 3 months ago

Care to provide some examples?

staplers• 3 months ago

  the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason

Billions have been spent building walls around niche and small sites to funnel people into major platforms. Pretending this ad/discoverability infrastructure doesn't exist is very naive.

fidotron• 3 months ago

It's almost preferable for sites to die than for them to be captured by the various ideological extremes that it seems necessary for them to subscribe to these days.

notnmeyer2• 3 months ago

i don’t think it has to be like this. make dumb or silly stuff, share it.

it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.

stackedinserter• 3 months ago

All fun is on discord now.

zitterbewegung• 3 months ago

Maybe on the surface this is true but you try to look for it you can have a lot more fun. Looking for communities that are harder to find but with common interests and you can find it but you have to work for it.

z0r• 3 months ago

The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.

frozenseven• 3 months ago

Another predictable anti-AI rant.

Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.

pseudalopex6• 3 months ago

They said AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it.

csours• 3 months ago

"The Medium Is The Message" - Marshall McLuhan

People aren't nihilist - social media is.

People aren't shallow - dating apps are.

The world isn't shit - late capital is.

But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.

runjake• 3 months ago

I think this is more a consumption problem.

Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.

Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.

Step 3: Read more books.

Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.

Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.

PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:

https://pinboard.in/popular

https://minifeed.net/

baggachipz• 3 months ago

RSS is great and I love that it's making a resurgence. I've sworn off big social media sites, including Reddit. Lemmy/Piefed feels more like "old internet" and I like it.

kgwxd• 3 months ago

It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.

Havoc• 3 months ago

Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.

Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.

Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.

yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"

munificent3• 3 months ago

I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake.

But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.

That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.

nibbleyou• 3 months ago

I too have felt the same around me. There is this lack of faith in the institutions now, feeling of distrust. Someone on HN called this the era of shamelessness and I kind of agree to it. The top has gotten shameless and the people at the bottom are trying to scrabble whatever they can to become one of them so that they can escape this hellhole that has been created.

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

Definitely the fish stinks from the head.

I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.

A long time ago there was a french saying "noblesse oblige", or the german pendant "Wohlstand verpflichtet".

yifanl2• 3 months ago

Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.

joe_mamba8• 3 months ago

It's not the end of the world though. Not everyone has to be a CS graduate. There's other professions out there.

tristor• 3 months ago

It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.

The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.

the_real_cher• 3 months ago

How reductionist.

DarkNova62• 3 months ago

The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.

This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.

sandy_coyote• 3 months ago

Tragedy of the Commons. It was around 2012 when my reactionary boomer relatives started trying to friend me on Facebook, wondering what the kids were all talking about.

packetlost• 3 months ago

There are pockets of this on the internet, but you really have to go out of your way to find it

pseudalopex6• 3 months ago

The central platforms began before smart phones were common.

creamynebula• 3 months ago

More like a consequence of capitalism, as big tech companies used their massive capital to instrumentalize and develop knowledge to keep mostly everyone dependent and addicted to their systems. Due to the way capitalism work, when a push back against it through public policies was staged, they bought their way out of regulation of their toxic platforms and were allowed to retain their monopolies.

seydor• 3 months ago

90s had much less wealth concentration than today.

Truth is everything rots over time, there is no escaping from entropy.

clickety_clack2• 3 months ago

If you feel that way then you have to question what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way. Many people (most that I know) don’t feel that way. It may be the online communities that you are in or the news you consume, and the great news about that is that is stuff that is not only optional; you choose to consume it. You can just stop consuming it.

apsurd2• 3 months ago

You can feel how you feel and understand how and why people feel how they feel too.

Instead, reads like you're blaming the victim. Shoulda worked harder in school!

energy123• 3 months ago

It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.

I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:

- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.

- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.

- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.

- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.

munificent3• 3 months ago

what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way.

I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.

I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.

If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.

vardalab2• 3 months ago

I think it's as simple as Citizens United and wealth inequality exploding.

shit_game• 3 months ago

That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.

I think that two significant social conditions that very strongly affect how people socialize online now are

a) there are multiple parallel well-established, invasive, unstoppable, government-sanctioned economies of theft that seek to profit at everyones expense (advertising, AI, surveilance). Why would anyone want to share anything if it's going to be stolen? Why would anyone want to be online if they're going to be spied on? Why would anyone want to look at anything if it's all advertisements?

b) it's politically en vogue for major online platforms to allow (and even propagate) hateful content because of the current political situation in the west. The companies that have grown to control the online spaces that people use are the same companies operating the economies of theft, and have demonstrated that they will happily bend the knee if it means they are allowed to continue stealing and spying and selling all this data to governments. Why would anyone want to use a platform filled with hate speech and political propaganda?

I would describe this combination of conditions as repulsive. There's no more appeal in the social internet because the bad guys won.

roncesvalles2• 3 months ago

And yet, by most development and wellbeing metrics, America is doing better than ever before.

My theory is this:

People are just more aware of wealth disparity now. People in the 90s and 00s knew that multi-millionaires and billionaires existed, but they were faraway mystical gargoyles in Connecticut or Monaco.

What's more transparent now is that you might be making $50k and your neighbor might be making $500k. Or the kid you grew up with moved to Dubai after making a small fortune on crypto or drop-shipping, or became a YouTube/TikTok celebrity.

People didn't even know surgeons hit 7 figures, not low 6 figures, until recently. People knew Wall St suits made good money but they assumed it was $200k, not $2m or even $20m.

I remember when levels.fyi first came out and lots of people on social media were like "these numbers are completely made-up". A lot of SWEs themselves didn't even believe FAANG IC SWEs made $200-500k.

Not to mention, social media video lets you experience their lives through their literal point-of-view now.

In a way, the democratization of wealth and fame, and the transparency of information around it, has made people more anxious. We basically live in an era of epidemic FOMO.

cedws• 3 months ago

I’m in my 20s but I’ve felt the same way for years. If I were growing up now, I’m not sure I would still make it into my career.

I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.

Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.

I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.

feverzsj• 3 months ago

Enshittification is just how platforms try to adapt to new users, and it actually works very well. It's just old users have grown to be ... classy, which are less profitable for platforms.

dec0dedab0de• 3 months ago

Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.

I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.

I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.

littlekey• 3 months ago

Yeah I had a similar experience, even as a teen I resisted the move from myspace to facebook because it felt so bland and lifeless. Hard to overstate the psychological benefit of having a customizable page that really feels like your own space, especially at that age.

maerF0x0• 3 months ago

The best part about the best is over is that it can be a turning point to drive us back to what is better than online -- offline. Go live real life, touch grass, and give real monetary value to things which give meaning back in return. For most people this involves people or animals, maybe dirt, and often involves giving more than you take.

an0malous• 3 months ago

My theory is that basically everything is controlled by income inequality and interest rates. AI should not, in theory, lead to a loss of creativity. If anything, we should see a creative explosion because it’s easier to create more and better things. If nothing else, generative AI is a great tool for brainstorming and prototyping ideas.

What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.

The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.

We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.

finghin2• 3 months ago

I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.

It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.

I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.

nemomarx• 3 months ago

Gemini? Gopher, if you're old school? I also vaguely recall something called flask

there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages

finghin2• 3 months ago

I intended to explore it more as to say, this is my ideal, it used to be a lot more like it, now it is not, and further is less and less so.

I think overall, the pull and fun of the internet was in the content delivered; now the attractive forces are overwhelmingly rooted in the delivery.

btbuildem• 3 months ago

It's not just the internet -- it's everything in western society, as far as the eye can see.

This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.

You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.

alt227• 3 months ago

This is the intended end result of capitalism, maybe its time we all gave socialism another chance?

baal80spam• 3 months ago

How about no.

microsoftedging• 3 months ago

The internet is what we make of it. Of course there has to be some realism about it (most services algorithmic by default etc), but I don't think it's enough to declare it's all over. Generally, yes, the internet has become worse, but some corners are growing, the 'small internet' especially-- if only in these small circles. Where you spend your time in really determines how you feel about this matter.

It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?

chrisallick2• 3 months ago

disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.

fullstop• 3 months ago

Maybe this is just a personal thing for me, but I have difficulty saying that anything that Claude creates as "my own stuff".

pesus• 3 months ago

Getting Claude Code is the opposite of writing your own apps.

chrisallick2• 2 months ago

i think its more nuanced than "is" or "isn't." an architect does't pour the concrete. the gap between me or claude comes down to the architectural decisions. take a large functional spec in jira for example, any developer can pick up a ticket, but they aren't steering the product. i have zero issue with claude or anyone doing mundane dev tasks to pull off a product im trying to make. but i guess if you want to say you typed every byte, thats a personal preference. i guess i agree if your one shot prompting software, sure, you're still making but not really coding. i see claude as my agentic pair programmer not "the" developer and most of my software is archicted by me and written the way i would. one thing i like to do is point it at my code bases so it can pick up on my stylistic choices.

snozolli• 3 months ago

Golden ages are usually defined in retrospect.

I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.

I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.

I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.

MatthewPhillips• 3 months ago

Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.

I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.

Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.

Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.

magicmicah852• 3 months ago

The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.

It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.

Based-A• 3 months ago

It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own.

I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.

Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?

magicmicah852• 3 months ago

I think that's fair, the algorithms are manipulative and one has to be very aware of their own susceptibility to it. Everything you specifically mentioned is why I don't go on Twitter to scroll anymore. I will use the platform to search something or I will click links to it but Twitter is not my go-to for scrolling dopamine because it is too negative.

randusername• 3 months ago

I think a lot about this post along these lines:

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.

Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.

homeonthemtn• 3 months ago

Well, time to enjoy other things then, no?

Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)

threepts2• 3 months ago

Before internet existed, people went to clubs and malls, I wonder if they still do it now?

sspiff• 3 months ago

OP, the Badger Badger link is leading to a wiki page about the dead Internet theory.

Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI

Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)

jprs• 3 months ago

Thank you, fixed!

TaupeRanger• 3 months ago

Do we really need one of these articles every month for decades?

inagiledev• 3 months ago

The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.

pseudalopex6• 3 months ago

Easy discovery was part of the fun for people who complain now I think.

tolerance• 3 months ago

I now understand that writing like this is lamenting over a dearth of things to consume.

Edd314159• 3 months ago

It’s true. AI slop is not what will kill the fun Internet. It’s just the mechanisation of the forces that already killed it.

Apreche2• 3 months ago

People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.

The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.

bakugo5• 3 months ago

Okay, so where are they? Show us some.

Let's be honest here, how many of these "specialized ultra-nerdy communities" are closed off Discord servers?

Apreche2• 3 months ago

To find these spaces, you have to think in reverse. You can’t look for the community first. You have to start by having a specialized interest. You can’t rely on an algorithm to tell you what you care about and how you want to spend the time in your life. That answer has to come from within. Once you have that answer, finding the community online is quite easy.

The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.

kilroy123• 3 months ago

I run an entire site and newsletter dedicated to showing fun things from across the web.

I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.

https://randomdailyurls.com

trashb• 3 months ago

I also like to press "surprise me..." on https://wiby.me/

There is a lot of fun stuff still there, but a corporate search engine might not point you to it.

netcan• 3 months ago

The music was new, black polished chrome And came over the summer like liquid night The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days

There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.

There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."

That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.

Wasted potential is a mournful thing.

coolThingsFirst• 3 months ago

The problem is discoverability.

Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.

yuppiepuppie• 3 months ago

I understand the sentiment. However, I would also suggest that people cultivate the culture/scene that they want to see.

In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.

It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.

ranger207• 3 months ago

Yeah, it's all about communities, not platforms. What happens is that people find a community they like, then the platform underneath it dies (IRC, MySpace, Digg, etc) and they can't find the same community on a new platform. I've made a lot of friends on Discord, and ionce a year or so when it looks like Discord's about to finally give up we talk about our plans to migrate the community to a different platform. But since the community is the important part, we don't really care about the ills of the platform until it starts to actively hurt the community

CrzyLngPwd• 3 months ago

Getting the "nothing new to be discovered in physics now" (Lord Kelvin) vibe.

RRRA• 3 months ago

If you think the 2000s were special, try going back to the 90s when you could finish browsing the web! :P

Finnucane• 3 months ago

As much as you could at 9600 baud.

hootz2• 3 months ago

"You have reached the very last page of the Internet. We hope you have enjoyed your browsing. Now turn off your computer, and go have fun."

pragma_x2• 3 months ago

A vantage point from a very long time ago: The big social media services are pining for the days of CompuServe and Prodigy.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.

These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.

Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.

Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?

jrowen2• 3 months ago

This is a great point. Us millenials all look at AOL through rosy colored glasses as part of the halcyon days of the free internet, but there was probably just as much depressing corporate overlord bullshit going on, we just thought it was fun that they printed billions of garbage CDs!

imgabe• 3 months ago

Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.

BLKNSLVR• 3 months ago

The internet is just a 'means'; the medium through which an 'end' is reached.

The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.

I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.

Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.

chuckadams• 3 months ago

Right after reading this, I stumbled on another HN link showing a web-based version of Zork running in an interactive ZIL interpreter. The fun stuff is still out there, you just have to learn to screen out the ever-increasing background noise.

randomNumber72• 3 months ago

I still enjoy the things that are not overtaken by big tech (although it isn't much). Anna's archive and streaming niche movies.

I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.

The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.

I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.

crawshaw• 3 months ago

Nah. There are billions of people on the internet, and it varies from a dusty library to Atlantic City (though for some reason we let kids into the casino?). It is not one thing any more, but there are plenty of fun corners.

JohnMakin• 3 months ago

People created for the pure joy of creation. It's rare now. If you talk to younger people about it, they will sometimes look at you puzzled, like that was never a thing or doesn't make sense. "Back in the day" is a dangerous thing when you're older - we tend to idealize the past, but truly, back then if you made something that went viral, you didn't try to spin up a crypto rug pull and sell merch, you'd just go to a party and they'd be like "oh my god, you're THAT guy!" and you'd smile and say "yep, was me." and that was literally it. Perfect example of how distorted this is now is watching the brief story of the Hawk Tuah girl - one small viral moment, all of a sudden she's got crypto, a multi million dollar podcast, the whole standard path sans an onlyfans. Off a 10 second clip. Just absurd.

It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.

jazz9k• 3 months ago

The main issue is that we can't really joke around anymore, without someone being offended (and then convincing a mob of people to destroy your life).

It sucks the fun out of pretty much anything.

hootz2• 3 months ago

What kind of joke?

lbrito• 3 months ago

Enshittification was very advanced in the 2010s, which the author describes as still within the golden age.

I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.

rchaud• 3 months ago

The old internet can't come back, no matter how many MySpace[0] and Geocities clones[1] are spun up. The world has changed. Even the author's reference to TikTok lip-syncing videos are at least 5 years out of date - kids aren't doing that anymore.

People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.

If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.

- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/

jrowen2• 3 months ago

This is pretty much true, but also, you're older now. The people the age you are now were saying things like this when you were having all that fun. You are in a different place now. Your life is not about coming home after school and goofing off. You have important things to do. Those bored, lonely, funny, obsessive, angry, horny, curious kids are still out there, finding their version of what we had. They always are.

The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.

anal_reactor• 3 months ago

It's the normies. Any group that grows larger starts losing its initial focus, and starts being a vague mass of undefined humans. As the internet grew larger and more accessible to everyone, it lost its initial focus. Same reason why a house party with your friends is more fun than a ceremony of 200 people you don't know.

Melatonic2• 3 months ago

TROGDOOOOOOR

dividefuel• 3 months ago

My take is the shift to mobile is what really caused the biggest change in the Internet.

By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.

Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.

Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.

OkayPhysicist• 3 months ago

Not just difficulty on the browsing side, difficulty on the presentation side, too. It took a while for anybody to figure out a decent presentation for forums on mobile devices, and in the meantime the experience was terrible. Frankly, you can get away with much worse UI on desktop, which made hacking together a webpage much easier.

stronglikedan• 3 months ago

Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult

I tried a foldable phone thinking it would solve my issues with mobile interactivity, and learned that it's not the small screen that hinders me. It's the terrible mobile input methods in general, particularly surrounding text manipulation and entry. I didn't keep the phone since it didn't solve my seemingly unsolvable problem after all.

snek_case2• 3 months ago

It's not just the UI... It's that producing content is much easier on a laptop or desktop, with an actual keyboard, or video editing software available. The rise of mobile contributed to a shift where the internet was split between producers and consumers, or influencers and followers. A lot of mobile users are only passively consuming content.

rosstex• 3 months ago

Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puOCoRc17I4

k33n• 3 months ago

Fun has been optimized out of the streets. No one plays kick the can anymore.

Guys, we got old.

l72• 3 months ago

For me, what has really changed is the feeling of having community on the Internet.

In the 90s, I had:

    Instant Messenger with people I knew
    IRC channels for interests
    Forums for specific topics
    A Web Ring for my James Bond website

Back then, the Internet felt like an actual place I went to. I would sit down at the computer, dial up, and enter a space that had boundaries. When I was done, I left, and that separation made the time I spent there feel focused and real. You couldn't take it with you, and that was a feature, not a bug.

In the 2000s, we had:

    Social Media (Facebook), where you actually talked to people you knew and shared experiences with them

It hadn't yet become a content distribution machine. It was still a tool for connection.

All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.

Maybe that's why something is missing.

Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.

On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.

Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.

We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.

Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.

The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.

Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.

ux2664783• 3 months ago

This is 100% nostalgia writing.

Yes the internet has changed, as it always has. The internet is many layers built upon each other. Under no circumstances would I consider the 2000s to be the "old internet", there are probably plenty of people in this thread who get a chuckle out of that. I assure you, there are plenty who look down on what you think was the "golden age". The procession of generations is to lament the younger and affirm Hesiod's ages of man in their own way. I'm sure you don't have to dig very hard to find computer scientists lamenting the new generation of undergrads in the 1980s who spent too much time with the low-brow, crude and totally soulless Usenet phenomenon.

The "old internet" isn't dead, and this is somewhat acknowledged by the author with a disclaimer. In fact, they make note the number of people producing work that they would normally value is higher than ever. But they lament it with a vague feeling that it's simply "not the same", not feeling like it "came from some place". That's very telling, because that's exactly a sensation of disenchantment. As we age, there are less surprises, less things feel new, less mysteries to wonder about. Patterns that were hidden and novel come into stark relief. The more pessimistically minded begin to suffer from world-weariness. Anomie sets in, and rationalization begins, attempting to ground the loss of youthful whimsy with some external phenomenon.

I would say embrace it, you were always on your way to become a crotchety old coot. That's a very important social role to play. Just don't mistake your rationalization of feelings for something substantial, it's nothing but a hard-wired delusion to help guide your development as a human being.

aaroninsf• 3 months ago

"Everyone is saying it."

Cory Doctorow's Enshittification for example.

For good reason.

Me, I understand this through the analogy of how drug markets go.

1. Addict people to the product.

2. Profitmaxx by reducing quality at the addicts' expense.

That's it, that's the whole story.

JKCalhoun2• 3 months ago

wikipedia (downloaded)archive.org & worldradiohistory.com (I have over a terabyte of magazines and books already downloaded)…

There are really only a few sites that I would miss (and I have worked to move the content that interests me locally).

jesuslop• 3 months ago

Reports of the death of large swathes of the internet have been greatly exaggerated. This guy blog post "RSS Feeds Send Me More Traffic Than Google" is evidence by existing (personal web blog) more than by making the point. https://tinyurl.com/5n8cub5a

estimator7292• 3 months ago

"The Internet" as always actually means "the top six websites".

The old internet still exists, you just have to look for it. There are still personal blogs and forums and webrings.

It's just that you can't find those things on reddit and Facebook.

jaredcwhite• 3 months ago

The Web is Dead. –WIRED Magazine, 2010

But seriously, I feel like every few years we're all wringing our hands about what's happening to the web. And plenty of folks think they have the correct remedy. Remember when web3 was going to swoop in and save us all? lol

Truth is: the "Keep the Internet Weird" phenomenon never left us, it just went a bit underground. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, perhaps not. Many of my friends in the Fediverse specifically don't want it to grow much, or grow very slowly at most, and I don't entirely agree but…I get it. Would your local comedy club down in the basement be better if it seated 20,000 people? Hell no!

The small web, the slow web, the indie web…these are all movements which are alive and well. Join us!

sleight42• 3 months ago

Ignore TikTok

Ignore Facebook

Ignore X

Ignore all of these places that teach us to be the all-singing all-dancing shit of the world.

yusucan• 3 months ago

Marketers, man. Everything they touch turns to dust once they’ve sucked the essence out of it.

maxglute• 3 months ago

How much of this is old man yelling at clouds because he doesn't know where the fun spots are.

The fun has been optimized out of the Internet

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