A retrospective of my time on the internet

by felixdoerp • 22 days ago

269 300 22 days ago

anthk6• 22 days ago

It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.

There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.

And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.

On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.

On loggin' in today:

- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.

- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.

- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.

- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.

- No browser nagging, ever.

- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.

- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.

- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.

- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.

- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:

   https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news

   The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.

I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.

Finally, there's:

      gopher://magical.fish <- huge portal, the news site it's great
      gopher://sdf.org <- blogs in gopher
      gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn <- check the Gopher lawn 
      gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta <- updated blogs

airstrike• 22 days ago

Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online

anthk6• 21 days ago

I can chat with my SO over Jabber/Telegram with Biltbee+IRC or Pidgin thanks to Libpurple plugins.

On Usenet, being the only decentralized platform without neither corporation nor goverment control, it will come back, as it's being one of the major points for compsci (esp. comp.arch, where the Comp Sci -actual one- level it's far beyond HN and Slashdot combined). On sci.* you can have both PhD's, crackpot scientists... or both.

Ah, yes, no images/binaries ... but for a special case or a major ground discovery people could make an exception, such as a cure for the Alzheimer and the like. Just uuencode the image and attach it after the post, and at least downsize it to ~640x480 or 720x480 and dither it (if the detail level is not that important).

Ditto with IRC, tons of tech channels are not found anywhere else.

Borg32• 21 days ago

I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP. Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..

singpolyma3• 21 days ago

If you're just serving static pages the scrapers aren't going to be a problem

iamnothere8• 21 days ago

Text only means limited opportunity for vulnerabilities (new HTML/CSS parser bugs all the time), and it’s trivial to roll your own client if you want.

Text only also means your value has to stand on words alone. No memes, no flashy design. Some of us value that and feel that it’s been lost over time.

intended3• 21 days ago

This is what you and some people may do.

The internet which is being mourned was that period where it was better for the people who couldn’t make those changes.

There are always a few people who can manage to insulate themselves. Still, however well you insulate yourself, you are impacted by what happens to the majority, or the direction they vote.

rimworld• 22 days ago

The world I grew up in, no longer exists

dredmorbius2• 21 days ago

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

As is the future.

Live long enough, and you'll find yourself a stranger in a strange land.

timcobb• 21 days ago

Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.

add-sub-mul-div• 21 days ago

That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.

assimpleaspossi• 21 days ago

The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

low brow entertainment

it used to be much worse in this department. Many mainstream or at least popular websites in the early 2000s would be non-starters today.

lizknope• 21 days ago

It looks like it starts with:

I was born in the late 1990s
2001: The Family Computer

I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.

Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.

Then the author says:

2012: When Everything Started Changing

I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.

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

Delphiza2• 21 days ago

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.

If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

smackeyacky2• 21 days ago

I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.

Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.

sanderjd8• 21 days ago

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

rootusrootus• 21 days ago

We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.

reaperducer5• 21 days ago

it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along.

I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures.

Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty.

Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.

Aurornis2• 21 days ago

We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time.

Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere.

This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only remember the parts you liked. When everything feels new and exciting we have more energy to overlook the bad things.

windexh8er2• 21 days ago

Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.

Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.

I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.

I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.

I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.

I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.

randallsquared• 21 days ago

I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.

It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.

btheconqueror• 21 days ago

I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...

colechristensen2• 21 days ago

I bet when you were about 22 plus or minus a couple years music started to change for the worse too!

darkwater3• 21 days ago

I'm in your same age bracket (a bit older actually) and joined Internet mid-90's and there were already plenty of trolls and nasty, mean people. They were just fewer in absolute numbers because statistics.

Also, as youngsters, we probably tolerated those that were there much more - at least if the trolling wasn't directed at us - because teenagers are still learning life and emotions.

benfortuna• 21 days ago

Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

dlkasajiewo• 21 days ago

The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.

hnlmorg• 21 days ago

“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.

The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.

fluoridation5• 21 days ago

The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.

colechristensen2• 21 days ago

It's not elitist. It's just nostalgia.

"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"

"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("

thegrim332• 21 days ago

> The point is not the consumers of the Internet

A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc

B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture

dasil003• 21 days ago

How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.

I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.

I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.

toast0• 21 days ago

IMHO, it's more about being a community of choice rather than elitism.

When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.

sanderjd8• 21 days ago

Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.

microtonal• 21 days ago

Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.

But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.

Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.

lordloki• 21 days ago

It was the smartphone that completely ruined the internet. Once everyone was connected 24/7 it became the ultimate eternal September.

thegrim332• 21 days ago

> Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012

Facebook didn't even exist 10 years before 2012 ..

jameshart4• 21 days ago

Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.

icedchai2• 21 days ago

I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.

rootsudo• 21 days ago

The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.

Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.

I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.

"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'

All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.

2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

When the "mobile first" design pattern really took off is when the Internet was handed to the masses IMO. That's when it became accessible to everyone's mom and grandparents through their phone and that really changed things from a user base perspective. At the same time, all the mobile apps started getting published and the internet, to most people, became answering the question "which app do i tap on?". Honestly, it's pretty much that way for me. The Internet, outside of work, consists of this website, my youtube app, my wikipedia app, spotify app, and maybe google news app.

31337Logic• 21 days ago

Oh hello, me! ;-)

amelius• 21 days ago

If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.

mghackerlady4• 21 days ago

I feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is

1over1372• 21 days ago

But what non-web parts are left? email lists, usenet, gopher, etc. are deathly quiet.

Aurornis2• 21 days ago

I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:

The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.

That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline becomes the topic everyone just starts pointing to their early years on the internet as the golden age.

baron3dl2• 21 days ago

like the old slashdot min(uid) flex

darkwater3• 21 days ago

The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:
The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.

And you can also replace "Internet" with any other concept and you will find a lot of people in their early 40s and over (sometimes even earlier) bitching about how everything changed and it's now messed up.

someonebaggy12• 21 days ago

It's more specific - the Eternal September concept is also about gatekeeping, and how a moderate barrier to entry is often good for a social space.

munksbeer2• 21 days ago

This is just life in general. Every generation thinks it is unique in growing older and thinking how much worse things have got since when they were young (or their parents were young). You can find examples of this in very old literature.

You can also see this in many threads here on hn.

fehu22• 21 days ago

Money getting into the net as created many problems

icedchai2• 21 days ago

Yes. The very thing that made the Internet sustainable, commercialization, also destroyed parts of it.

technothrasher• 21 days ago

I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."

tristor• 21 days ago

I also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.

I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.

By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.

DaedalusII• 21 days ago

until mid 00s broadband internet was not widely available outside US/Europe/Japan. At one point I think over 10% of the internet was just Russia. Even today Russia and Japan make up about 5% of the internet each. you can see this in early 4ch culture especially

this meant most of the people on the internet were middle class suburban from the developed world, educated, literate, and technical. importantly, 3rd world bot farms and relentless content grinding had not yet taken off. that is a big difference

Funes-5• 21 days ago

I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.

giancarlostoro• 21 days ago

I call this the first wave of Eternal September. Then you had Facebook, where all the "normies" joined the internet because of Facebook.

Then you had smartphones, people no longer needed to be home to be online.

These major events have impacted the internet greatly. I'd argue that everything and everyone being primarily on phones has impacted the web negatively since less and less people even bother using computers.

Facebook increased the interest for the average person in order to re-connect with old high school friends, then with family.

Mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry by becoming the standard gadget everyone had, and the main way people access websites and services.

I do wonder if society / the internet would be better off if we didn't all have it on our phones and would login after hours.

beej71• 21 days ago

Usenet is coming back through the cracks. Google finally graveyarded support and all the spammers went with them. It's pretty low traffic except for some select groups, though. comp.lang.c and talk.origins will never die. :)

munksbeer2• 21 days ago

This is me too. First access to the internet was through a dial-up to a "bulletin board" (via a girlfriend's fathers account). From there you could launch a shell and get (I will get things wrong here) lynx, gopher, usenet, telnet (muds), etc.

Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).

armchairhacker2• 21 days ago

Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
…your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.

Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)

ramon156• 21 days ago

This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue

armchairhacker2• 21 days ago

The average joe is a fundamental reason the internet he grew up with no longer exists. It’s not black and white, but away from average joe communities, there’s something almost like the old internet.

comrade1234• 21 days ago

My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.

smalltorch2• 21 days ago

With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.

The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.

I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.

Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.

I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.

intended3• 21 days ago

This framing sets up variables incorrectly.

People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day.

People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier.

There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.

iamnothere8• 21 days ago

“People” != Internet people.

“People” at large were not part of the early Internet. They came much later and turned it into a shopping mall/surveillance hub.

I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses. We did just fine.

smalltorch2• 21 days ago

This framing sets up variables incorrectly.

What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?

For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'

Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.

hypfer4• 21 days ago

It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.

And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness.

It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.

I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?

___

Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design. It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.

That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.

Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.

It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.

gspr2• 21 days ago

It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.

I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.

hypfer4• 21 days ago

I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.

The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.

This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.

___

You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.

That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.

Panda_2• 21 days ago

Reticulum uses AES-256 encryption, which is considered quantum safe due to the sheer number of extra combinations adding 128 bits to AES 128 creates, including by NIST[1].

It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found.

The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the fundamental idea of Reticulum being able to run over any almost any connection, including LoRa. See what the creator of Reticulum said on the topic [2].

[1] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography/faq... "To protect against the threat of quantum computers, should we double the key length for AES now? (added 11/18/18)"

[2] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/181#discu...

hypfer4• 21 days ago

It's not that he's wrong in that assessment, but that doesn't really change anything about the fundamental problem of the cost of being wrong being a completely collapsed infrastructure.

We do not know if the quantum safe stuff is actually quantum safe, but we also don't need to. We just need to have a mechanism to use something else in the future if that should turn out to be a problem.

That mechanism is (from my understanding) lacking.

bilsbie2• 21 days ago

Let’s bring it back!

BLKNSLVR4• 21 days ago

On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.

https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern

I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.

noja2• 21 days ago

with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole

This is your regular reminder that many websites you are visiting are proxying your data to facebook for them. There is no host to block here.

Check out the Facebook Conversions API Gateway.

BLKNSLVR4• 21 days ago

Does uBlock Origin block this by default?

If not, what are the counter-measures?

not-kinsale-joe• 21 days ago

so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.

What do you mean by friction?

BLKNSLVR4• 21 days ago

All of the things that get in the way of what you actually want when you use the internet; the list of seventeen things in section 6 of the article.

bilsbie2• 21 days ago

There were a bunch of internet golden era but I think the last one was the rise of blogs and rss.

Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.

Habgdnv• 21 days ago

<sarcasm> Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating. </sarcasm>

The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.

alex11382• 21 days ago

I have PTCD. Post traumatic cookie disorder. Seriously. If I see one more of those I am going to throw my PC out the window

Apparently you can hide these with a ublock (origin) filter but I haven't found it and I know people have made separate extensions for this

nicbou2• 21 days ago

It's the "annoyances" filter lists. Takes a few seconds to turn on in the settings, works like a charm.

MarkusWandel• 21 days ago

To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.

Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?

brodouevencode• 21 days ago

I used 2012 as an example because that's when I was in my first year of high school

I don't think this person has the experience required to make a qualifiable judgement on what the internet was.

There is a large block of (Internet) time missing from this analysis.

EliRivers• 21 days ago

Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:

We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.

It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?

I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)

dirkc• 21 days ago

I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks

esailija• 21 days ago

TVs for consumers are sold at loss and the TV companies are making money with data and ads.

I guess the real price is 5-10x of what you pay. So only 10-20x more expensive for more apples to apples compariaon.

jameshart4• 21 days ago

There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.

baron3dl2• 21 days ago

i wonder if there's a niche market for an oled screen with a 100lbs glass surface for the hipsters out there. all the weight without that pesky electron cannon.

alnwlsn• 21 days ago

I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark.

CRTs are built like that because otherwise they would implode from the slightest bump and send thousands of tiny glass fragments flying in all directions.

Panel displays of today have their glass pieces glued together into one solid lump, and there is no pressure, so when they break the broken pieces stay where they are for the most part.

dn35002• 21 days ago

I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.

jameshart4• 21 days ago

The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?

dn35002• 21 days ago

You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.

pluc• 21 days ago

I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.

The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.

Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.

Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.

c16• 21 days ago

I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.

Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.

api• 21 days ago

2012: When Everything Started Changing

I have independently dated it to that same year.

Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.

The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.

This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.

Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."

I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.

Sophira• 21 days ago

This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.

In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.

It ran pretty well from what I recall.

zackkitzmiller• 21 days ago

Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.

anthk6• 21 days ago

In the XP erea, potentially they were.

felix-the-cat2• 21 days ago

I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

when they went bust all their fancy furniture showed up on ebay and second hand stores. I know an attorney that bought Herman Miller Aerons by the dozens. It was like the startup chair in those days haha.

felix-the-cat2• 21 days ago

Not to mention all the great deals on expresso machines, lmao.

sire-vc2• 21 days ago

This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.

freehorse• 21 days ago

The world changed for a reason.

Sure, but the actual reasons matter. A big part of it changed due to making the internet primarily a place for circulating ads, and that's a change many may not like.

sire-vc2• 21 days ago

I don't like ads either, but there are ad-free corners of the internet. If you don't like Facebook then don't use it.

watwut• 21 days ago

The world can change both toward better and toward worst. The countries go from peaceful to war obsessed, from autocracy to genocide and from peaceful democratic to pogroms. Women or minorities can gain rights and loose rights.

The algorithmic propagation of toxicity is changing it towards worst. And internet is actively used to incite some of the things I listed above. And major companies actively facilitated those changes towards the worst. And by actively I mean "we now know they were actively helping the bad stuff to happen".

fluoridation5• 21 days ago

It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free.

Oh, you mean hosting as in, from your home. I wouldn't say hosting from a provider is significantly harder than at home. It might be philosophically more attractive. Serving the data (whether from rented or own hardware) is probably the least of the technical hurdles, especially compared to actually designing the site.

LastTrain• 21 days ago

It’s far easier to host a website now than it has ever been.

hamza7159• 21 days ago

amazing idea

atemerev• 21 days ago

The "old web" is now darknets, like Tor or especially I2P. Everything fits. It requires some technical expertise to set up (particularly I2P). Slow downloads. No Javascript (usually disabled for safety reasons). Some content that will shock you at 30 exactly as the old internets content occasionally shocked you at 13. Intermittent connection. Anarchy. You can explore this world.

Funes-5• 21 days ago

We desperately need to develop more for I2P. Make it a real place to thrive instead of just a curious piece of technology or a mere repository of pirated media. Let's say right now it's mostly an abandoned and almost empty museum.

ajackfox• 21 days ago

This resonates: the Internet was such an interesting place to grow up in, though my experience may be a little before the author’s.

I miss the niche bespoke websites and forum communities of the years past, but there’s nothing holding us back from creating and maintaining spaces like that these days, aside from spam and AI slop. Some are still out there.

The shift is mainly attributable to lowering the bar to access as cellphones with browsers came on: it became such a valuable consumer platform, rather than a place for creators, hobbyists, and those with a nerdy curiosity to congregate.

I hope the pendulum swings back the other way someday, but I fear ‘dead internet theory’ may be the current endpoint of least resistance.

t0bia_s• 21 days ago

It all still exists in dark web. Anonymity, small communities, exploration, etc.

Funes-5• 21 days ago

It's mostly devoid of content and participation, unfortunately. We need more people to join in.

Funes-5• 21 days ago

I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.

teekert2• 21 days ago

Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.

Funes-5• 21 days ago

You might think to look for it through a smartphone app; I certainly wouldn't. That's some projection right there. And no, it's not there, still. If you knew anything about the deep web, you'd know it's quite different from the Internet of old, as well as much less populated.

xnx• 21 days ago

Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.

znpy• 21 days ago

The internet went to shit pretty much when Facebook went mainstream: internet stopped being some kind of alternative reality and started merging with regular reality… but worse.

kordlessagain• 21 days ago

Let's build a new one! We have the technology.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

bind to port 79 and tell your friends.

ngvrnd• 21 days ago

the internet i grew up with didn't exist yet

massysett• 21 days ago

The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.

No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.

goldenarm• 21 days ago

The old internet still exists, we're just distracted by commercial slopware.

Switching back to RSS and Linux made me a much happier person.

delduca• 21 days ago

The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…

Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.

nekusar• 21 days ago

Authors first problem is "Using MS Windows". Its now solidly an advert and spam vehicle for other Microsoft shit nobody wants (like the 63 different things named Copilot). Seriously, use Linux. It is better in almost every way, other than extreme rootkit based games.

Next, use Firefox or Iceweasel with Ublock Origin and a useragent changer. Disable the spammy shit, but there's less of it.

For phones, run Graphene. Hands down.

Focus on Fediverse applications. Twitter -> Mastodon. Instagram -> Pixelfed. Reddit -> Lemmy. YouTube -> Peertube. Various chat -> Matrix (but its not good). Various search engines -> SearXNG.

And old stuff still exists. IRC is still a thing. Gopher still exists.

You can also run your discord chats, Facebook, Instagram, etm. Just run them through a web browser, and never let them see any apps.

Its easy to be all defeatist and shouty-at-clouds, and 'back in the old days'. They'll never come again. Instead, its all our jobs to MAKE the current place friendly to us and ours.

StilesCrisis4• 21 days ago

This bit feels naive, in 2007:

While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.

2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.

eska2• 21 days ago

For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)

StilesCrisis4• 21 days ago

The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS)

Source: was there

anthk6• 21 days ago

That's because both Americans and Asians see Ye Olde Europe as somethiing fancy to stay and/or meet and for us Europeans it's just fancy but old, boring trash from the old town in our cities, something to run away from... or to look from a distance with a nice scenery ;)

I mean, when you can see a 12th century church daily by just taking the subway in 20 minutes, Medieval stuff gets boring fast.

Even more if you own volumes at home older than the half of the US' history like nothing...

From that perspective, what you want to know and met it's the new, fancy, technological futurist stuff.

The US loved Ultima and maybe FFVI and medieval ARPG's. Europeans... maybe urbanites, townsfolk people loved racing/soccer games and futurist games like Half Life and Deus Ex.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

Doesn't Everquest pre-date Wow? There were support groups for people married/in a relationship with someone addicted to Everquest. I know someone personally that almost dropped out of college because of "Evercrack".

StilesCrisis4• 21 days ago

Yes, it does, and also quite lucrative AIUI.

giobox2• 21 days ago

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Ultima Online and Everquest would have had circa 500k-1m subscribers between them by 2003. Ultima Online had 100k subscribers as long ago as 1998.

goodroot3• 21 days ago

Agreed.

It's a fair point, but there's definitely more to the history.

Ten years earlier, let's look at 1997:

- Final Fantasy VII

- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

- GoldenEye 007

- Banjo-Kazooie

- Fallout

- Age of Empires

- Diablo

- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

- Grand Theft Auto

- Planescape: Torment

And crucially... It was 2000 when we received Counter-Strike. This game undoubtedly started the competitive gaming scene, and opened up new avenues for expansion and profitability, with the potential of vast sportlike eyeballs and sponsorships.

shimman3• 21 days ago

Don't disagree, but Quake already had a competitive scene before counterstrike with prize pools + tournaments too.

Esophagus4• 21 days ago

Not another one of these.

The connected, small community internet still exists.

The article comes off as kind of a curmudgeonly old man yelling at clouds.

More nostalgia bait… I hope one day I get downvote privileges for posts.

alaudet• 21 days ago

The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.

You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.

shimman3• 21 days ago

Yeah, consuming corporate internet you'll get corporate results. The internet of yore is still out there, it's drastically smaller and requires more effort to find but worth it.

Have to put in that effort tho.

mathgeek• 21 days ago

The structure is there, but the community is not. There will always be some holdouts (thus the age old trope of the older generations longing for the golden days).

Essentially the internet as we once knew it is a proxy for the world as we once knew it. We older folks can't go back in time to it, any more than someone in the 1950s could go back to their youth in the 1920s.

Kiro• 21 days ago

Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.

playorizaya• 21 days ago

Mostly agree with the timeline.

I would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.

(Anyone remember Klout?)

By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.

At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.

I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.

Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.

Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.

Alexadar• 21 days ago

No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.

jdw642• 21 days ago

The internet has changed because attempts to bring commercial interests into it have been too successful.

In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hate beyond the typical local community hate speech, and hate speech was just one agenda item that could be discussed.

But now, even hate speech has become fragmented. And as hate became fragmented, people became too willing to pay money to those who agree with their opinions. It became easier to pay people who say what you want to hear.

On top of that, in the old days, if you were a minority in a local community, you had to bend your opinions somewhat for the majority in order to be heard. Unlike the old society where you had to tone down your voice to create a single unified voice, now you can speak out even if it's unpopular. The only catch is that it's now subject to a different metric: popularity.

And the generational divide in internet usage has also changed a lot.

For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same. That's why internet etiquette was important. But these days, there's a binary divide: the internet is the internet, and reality is reality. People think that even if they do something stupid online, it's separate from real life.

Damaging physical infrastructure is visible, but polluting the internet is invisible. Yet once someone starts it, there's no end to it. And the broken windows theory applies to advertising too. Most websites run ads, and many of those ads are low-quality porn ads, which easily create a mindset of 'this place is fair game for attack.'

In the past, the internet was less widely available and limited to a small elite, so it was relatively clean. The reason is simple: because only a few people used it, they were socially traceable, and their online reputation actually affected their real-life reputation. But as everyone gained access, it became harder to track identities online, and that changed everything.

It's no one's fault. It just seems like a natural shift of the times

ileonichwiesz• 21 days ago

For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same.

I’d argue the opposite. On the old internet we all used nicknames, and everyone knew not to share their personal info. These days nearly everyone posts stuff on social media using their real name and a photo of their face.

jdw642• 21 days ago

Reading your comment, I realize that the local context was something I had been missing, and your point makes a lot of sense. I think I should revise it like this

"The online self used to be an identity that was managed within small, persistent communities. Now, that self is easily discarded and reformed."

Thanks for the insight

chasd0011• 21 days ago

there use to be a saying "on the Internet, the men are men, the women are men, and the teen girls are FBI agents". It was very anonymous.

cuvert• 21 days ago

Honestly, I also miss, sometimes, those days, when every website had a toolbar to install. I didn't have high expectations in those days. Now you see these billion dollar companies and you ask yourself what are those people doing there? Can't they afford at least one guy to do the bugs?

ratsimihah• 21 days ago

Born in 89, I always feel nostalgic seeing screenshots of Windows 95. It brings back a time of novelty, exploration, and freedom. And what a ride it's been.

It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves.

I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.

cisrockandroll• 21 days ago

Needing a QR code to order food is a signal

bluedino3• 21 days ago

Things we don't have to worry about anymore:

10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...

Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.

Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.

Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.

Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...

ramijames2• 21 days ago

And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!

giobox2• 21 days ago

I don't think I'll ever stop pressing ctrl + s/cmd + s every 5 minutes, the habit is too deeply ingrained at this stage!

DavidPiper• 21 days ago

Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!

This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)

bluedino3• 21 days ago

Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'

In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.

glaslong6• 21 days ago

Right? The 2000-2010s saw a massive rejection of popups. Blockers became common. Best practices emerged that avoided them like the plague. I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop.

Now popups are fully back as login, sign up, cookie and deal spam. We've actively regressed on this front back to "pop-ups everywhere!"

dmantis• 21 days ago

Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.

Google adds cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feeds private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and sells data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.

Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.

anthk6• 21 days ago

Win 98 was 32 bit but half-an OS, NT and GNU/Linux were far better.

- Terrible streaming.

WMA files too.

ryandrake2• 21 days ago

10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers

It sucked having them installed by default on your desktop, but I'd argue the availability of numerous ISPs was a good thing that we have lost. Today is far worse, where at most two of Comcast, Charter, Cox, AT&T, and Verizon are the only options for most of the US population.

bluedino3• 21 days ago

Sort of, but they were all dial-up providers and it ended up being a race to the bottom, which seemed to be $9.95 a month, full of busy signals, then they all merged.

Seeing something similar today, we have the phone company and cable company, and now we've got a third option of fiber, the same lines being re-sold by 4 different companies, I'm sure in few years we'll be down to two companies.

TrackerFF• 21 days ago

My recollection, growing up and living mostly in Scandinavia

90s - mid 2000s:

- Pre social media days, you visited home pages. - Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you. - Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.

mid 2000s - early 2010s:

- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes. - Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all. - Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus. - Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.

Early 2010s - late 2010s:

- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms. - Personal websites die off. - Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc. - Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services. - The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed. - Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.

Late 2010s - now:

- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players. - It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present. - Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it. - You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan. - Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.

Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.

Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.

CM30• 21 days ago

I mean, the old internet still exists if you want to use it. At least, in many places online.

There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.

There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.

Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.

The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.

It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.

reaperducer5• 21 days ago

The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore

You're not alone. The internet we built doesn't exist anymore.

When I talk with fellow graybeards, the sentiment is universally the same: This isn't what we built. This wasn't the intent. This isn't what we worked so hard for. This isn't what was supposed to happen.

Easily 90% of the graybeards I know who were involved in the early days have largely given up on the internet. They use the new breed of "essential" technologies like smart phone apps to talk to their doctor, or online bill payments. But they don't have a lot of internet use because they're just not interested in it anymore.

They're also at the age when their interests are more focused on real-life things like families, and increasingly taking up the same real-life hobbies they used to make fun of online.

Maybe they're just burned out after dozens and dozens of hype cycles.† But for the most part, I think they've just given up hope.

† Just last night, I saw an article in a 1980's computer magazine about a company that came out with what we could call "AR" glasses to project a screen in you field of vision so you could compute on the go without a monitor. Nothing in technology is new anymore.

rvz• 21 days ago

Now it's time to move on.

basisword• 21 days ago

I think the biggest 'change' was when 'online' went from an activity you sat down in a specific spot in your house to enjoy for a couple of hours to something we have on our person 24/7 (sometimes via multiple devices). Less constant communication via SMS, Call, online messenger (on desktop) was very different from what we have now.

excalibur• 21 days ago

Those of us who were cool used things like MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. to chat quickly without having to use an email.

Rubbish, MSN Messenger was never cool

Semaphor• 21 days ago

what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet
Listening to music

Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.

There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.

It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.

They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".

randusername• 21 days ago

There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III

We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away

That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.

chasd0011• 21 days ago

That's how I feel about the internet.

are you talking about the internet or are you talking about yourself though?

wduquette• 21 days ago

I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.

Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.

It was ever thus; so shall it be.

willmadden• 21 days ago

Most of the old internet could be restored with the right search engine and browser. Index all of the invasive BS to page 100 or the results, and put the interesting/relevant things up front. People might pay for it. You could do some of it with an extension.

afpx• 21 days ago

Lately, since I've pretty much blocked most media companies in /etc/hosts, I've been enjoying reading the pre-2015 from archive.org. Although, I do have some grief, I guess I'm ok with being the last analog generation; it's not my world anymore.

scrapcode3• 21 days ago

I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.

I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.

goodroot3• 21 days ago

Love the post. It brought me back.

The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

But now the vast majority of people have their own hyper lanes on the Worldwide Information Superhighway.

And geez, isn't that a noisy highway? We're somewhere way under that thing.

scrapcode3• 20 days ago

The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.

ProllyInfamous2• 20 days ago

DSL v. CableModel crew, checking in. Also got online in early 90s, first with a 14.4k via several janky adapters (none intended for interwebs). Also first with cable internet, circa 1998, in my redneck part of the world (Texas) – Dad got tired of the phoneline never working.

Decades later, I worked datacenters, including those with the last gasps of usenet – what a time to have been alive on the internet. Back then, it truly was a place where nobody knew you were a dog/kid/disabled/whatever (primarily text-based experience).

I remember at DefCon (LasVegas hackercon) ~2010, I ran in to somebody that had run a competing tech corner of the mid-90s internet; we chuckled that we both were obviously younger than our childhood text-based personæ had even purveyed having been, back then – we met, decades later, still in our twenties =P

scrapcode3• 16 days ago

I never made it to any hackercons, and haven't kept up with many of the folks I "ran" with back in the day (before social media). And I'm not really sure if I would even remember their handles and such if I saw them today. I remember a fella that went by "proph3t," I believe he was in a band or at least helped with George Smith's website End Effect (looks like it is still up). That guy was a bit older than I was but I remember him being extremely patient and gracious with his time helping me when I was learning PHP.

harel• 21 days ago

Yeah and we all did that. Each and every one of us here that over the last 30+ years built part of that infrastructure, software, companies, culture etc. We all set out to build one thing and ended up building another in some weird switch-trick or something. Each of course in their own little micro cosmos within the macro, brick by brick, router by router.

Centigonal• 21 days ago

Looking forward to reading something very similar to this in 10 years about the Discord servers and Insta DMs of the 2020s.

TacticalCoder• 21 days ago

Not a bad TFA but half of the author's issues would be solved by not using Windows (all the first bullet points he complains about are Microsoftisms).

Then half of the other half would be solved by taking some agency back: self-host stuff.

I can disconnect my LAN from my router --which I often do-- and be fully operational. I can dev. I've got servers, VMs, containers, etc. I can rip audio CDs I own, I can play my music offline (I also have Qobuz: they're not mutually exclusive), I can watch movies offline (I have a lot of family movies and I know a friend who's sailing the digital high-seas), I can model 3D parts to fix stuff around the house than I then 3D print --all fully done offline.

My car, which is an incredibly comfy high-end luxury car, has no Internet connection. It's got its own memory for music files: no need to be connected.

And I don't always leave home with my phone. My phone has got two apps installed: the mandatory state-related ID thing (sad but this one I need) and one app for my stocks broker 2FA. And that's it. I don't believe in smartphone apps. Heck, I don't believe in smartphones: tiny, inferior, computing devices that are really more spies than (underperforming) computers.

You don't need to be a victim of Microsoft and you're not forced to waste your life on a phone that spies on you.

I never had any Meta account: like is better without Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. I use Telegram: 1 billion monthly active users now. Sure, it's not that better but at least it's not from mediocre Meta.

Really: give Microsoft the middle finger once and for all. Give the Zuck the middle finger. And spend less time on your phone.

Install Linux. If you're anything of a techie, do yourself a favor and run a server at home, try to host some stuff on it: it's never been easier. Doesn't even need to be a real server with ECC: a NUC will do. Heck, a Pi may do (although I'd advice buying a used Xeon with ECC).

Life's already going to feel better.

And I'm no luddite: I've got a sweet setup, with desktops, laptops, servers, NUCs and Pi (lots of Pi) at home.

It's just that you don't have to be a slave to the big tech slavers.

NoSalt• 21 days ago

Every one of the items on the list can STILL be done in meat-space.

RajT88• 21 days ago

Dating

I have never done online dating, even though I was a teenager when it became a thing. It always seemed to be a complete horror show, and even today those are the stories I hear from people.

xhkkffbf• 21 days ago

Let me tell you that the Internet was really wild in the 70s. No need to log on or anything. It really was like the movie "War Games." If you had the right phone number, you were golden.

Sateeshm• 21 days ago

It's entropy

NetOpWibby2• 21 days ago

I was born in '88 and I feel like my generation is the last great one (doesn't ever generation think this? Hah!) because I got to experience playing outdoors and online, and was able to do a bunch of dumb stuff before smartphones existed so there's no photo proof.

I miss the feel of the internet I grew up with...I don't think it's coming back. However, I do think we can make a new one.

wprstw• 21 days ago

Web3 can solve many of the problems he mentioned.

stasomatic• 21 days ago

It's nostalgia through and through, I go through that as well.

Finally, no one owned the internet. Sure, we can get into semantics of the DNS system and infrastructure, but the web - and specifically, content - quickly became decentralized after the early stages until the recent centralization of content.

I just miss being able to visit the web, find personal content from fellow internet explorers, and not spend the whole time avoiding the pitfalls of the modern web.

It was all new for us and it was "ours", finally we had a place to ourselves and then the "others" showed up. It's fine. There are still places on the net to mine that dopamine.

I remember switching ISPs on the regular, panic.net, akula.net, earthlink, etc to just get a better ping in Quake. Then my clan mate in Bensonhurst discovered that one could get a double ISDN line through Nynex for $80/m if you pretended to be a business and all was again well. T1 lines at the time were $1K or more IIRC.

skeeter2020• 21 days ago

I'll be the person who says what a lot of us believe, and even more know: the internet was cooked when the general public started to use it. The magic, community and naivety were all washed away when the socioeconomic & technical barriers fell, expanding the audience from industry & universities to the entire world. Next came those looking to solely profit and consume; not contribute back. This isn't a new problem just the current loudest version.

stronglikedan• 21 days ago

The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore

Every generation can say this. It's been a constant evolution since inception.

elwebmaster• 21 days ago

Can we bring it back with LoRA? It has a lot of the properties of the original internet: decentralization, slow speeds, and limited access.

tim333• 21 days ago

You can't step into the same river twice.

A lot of his gripes about 2026 internet seem quite fixable - if you don't like Windows, Chrome, Google junk use Mac/Linux, Firefox, DuckDuckGo or similar with ublock and a cookie pop up stopper.

freakynit• 21 days ago

Might be weird, but, I have heard this "2012" reference many many times when things started to change (for worse), and then "2020" when it all started to go downhill with an ever-accelerating pace. Very consistently these two years from multiple people.

Any rational explanation for this?

tokyolatino• 21 days ago

but funbrain still exists

tolerance• 21 days ago

Technopopulist dog whistle.

jackzhuo• 20 days ago

maybe add your age before commenting this post. :)

A retrospective of my time on the internet

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