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You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And nostalgia is a lie. > We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers

You have to realize your experience is not everyone's experience. And nostalgia is a lie. > We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow and so much more from a "techie" perspective. But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? Forums were nice but you had to find the right one and once that site shuts you might lose all content and all the people you know there but for most people social media is better. IRC,icq,etc.. Were not very secure,they were not multi media friendly either. You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein and the like make video chat and desktop sharing a breeze. Learning things is so much better too: pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs were not a thing in 2003. Free webhosting ,document editing,job hunting anf so much more (excluding things like uber,doordash,instacart that provide IRL services). But more than all that,there are so many more options for just about everything now. The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough! I think like most you're only looking at the popular sites and apps. E.g.: peertube vs youtube or HN vs Reddit. Daily I frequent 5-10 sites on a regular basis but I visit a lot more than that when finding external content on those sites,certainly a lot more than 10+ years ago.

buboard 7y ago
Half the services you mention either - require a phone and phone number to sign up - lock you in - will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to oblivion - are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized (skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle - arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents) - lock content away from search engines - are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint for the sake of ... i dont know what really - Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy - are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked better than webrtc solutions today - MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies. I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better - internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).
- badrabbit 7y ago
  I don't think I can change your mind but functionally I have a much better expetience and in many cases a simpler experience than in the past. Lots of lessons were learned and continue to be learned. I mean,popularity aside forums,IRC,Skype (use it everyday!) and all the old tech is mostly still there. In many ways isn't less more? Would you prefer forums with millions of active users or IRC channels with 100K+ active users? I think the internet is big enough and diverse enough to satisfy most people. But the trendy and popular stuff isn't meant for people who like the older internet much like SMS wasn't meant for people who love pagers and email wasn't meant to satisfy people that like to write paper mail,so long as there are enough enthusiasts of a tech it will live on but the future will continue to look a lot less like the past. For me after not using IRC for quite a while I used Matrix and it looked so much and so little like IRC,I think it's a good example of how more internet users means more things that satisfy more groups. One size fits all doesn't scale.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > and all the old tech is mostly still there Only as ghost towns > ways isn't less more? Err, no. Have you used facebook groups, the social groups that we are supposed to use today? Crippled intentionally, abysmally few options, impossible to discover. These are platforms for users who don't care about discourse, they want to come and shout, and shout often, to beat the algorithms. Yesterday's content is already lost. Compare that with even yahoo groups. > prefer forums with millions No! But that's what facebook is, what reddit is. Eternal september comes too soon > for quite a while I used Matrix and I wish matrix would catch on > One size fits all doesn't scale. Exactly . We have one size for everything today: platforms for billions. But it's a bad fit for niche, weird communities.
walterstucco 7y ago
>Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow none of this is a creative tool they are all just iterations of the same idea: streaming content the last creative tool was, sadly, flash sadly because it could have been the beginning of an era of open content creation platforms, but it was its end > But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? much less my mom could have browsed the internet 20 years ago, today she can't she doesn't know how to signup, she doesn't even know what "login with facebook" means > You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein Iterations of the same idea. Nothing new. > The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough! It is really not. There is just more content of lower overall quality. > pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs NNTP and IRC worked well enough and they were free
pmlnr 7y ago
21 years ago, in 1998, there was a software called Microsoft FrontPage 98. You started it, visually made a website with elements shared over all pages, and pressed a button to publish a static page. There's nothing like this today that is simple, financially accessible, and works out of the box. (With maybe the exception of Mobirise, but it has too much free-to-play vibe.) A little while ago there was an entry here: "Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242857 and reminded me of Swishmax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWiSH_Max https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWiSH_Max ), a tool I used around 2003. It was a breeze to use, to create animations. I'm unaware of anything like this today. In 2005, DC communities shared any content and had vibrant chat communities. Blog didn't immediately meant WordPress, but Pingbacks and RSS worked across them, so websites were able to talk to other websites. In 2008, Skype worked. File sharing over Skype worked, because it was able to use the local network and went p2p over LAN. Video and sound always worked. We're nearly in 2020 now, and video conferencing still sucks. Nostalgia is only a lie of you don't have proof. I still have the installer for most of these programs.

buboard 7y ago

Half the services you mention either - require a phone and phone number to sign up - lock you in - will shut down next year unless someone buys them and bastardizes them to oblivion - are services that replace services that were bought and bastardized (skype). they re bound to repeat the cycle - arent as popular / dont work (ipfs vs torrents) - lock content away from search engines - are basically rehashes of the same idea with much heavier browser footprint for the sake of ... i dont know what really - Are all platforms - they dont specialize, they force you inside an eternally septembered community . I Liked having separate accounts in separate forums - having many identities is a virtue - and good for privacy - are Incremental updates. E2E encryption is the one thing that matters, for the rest, we had flash video converence in 2003, and it worked better than webrtc solutions today - MOOCs are not a successful thing today either though. good that we have all that content, but it wasn't enabled by any of the aforementioned companies. I m not sure i m convinced we have a fundamentally different - or better - internet today. Everythinig you mention is repackaging. (and we had job ads and lots of free webhosting too btw. You know neocities, they re even named out of nostalgia for geocities, craigslist is still a thing).

badrabbit 7y ago
I don't think I can change your mind but functionally I have a much better expetience and in many cases a simpler experience than in the past. Lots of lessons were learned and continue to be learned. I mean,popularity aside forums,IRC,Skype (use it everyday!) and all the old tech is mostly still there. In many ways isn't less more? Would you prefer forums with millions of active users or IRC channels with 100K+ active users? I think the internet is big enough and diverse enough to satisfy most people. But the trendy and popular stuff isn't meant for people who like the older internet much like SMS wasn't meant for people who love pagers and email wasn't meant to satisfy people that like to write paper mail,so long as there are enough enthusiasts of a tech it will live on but the future will continue to look a lot less like the past. For me after not using IRC for quite a while I used Matrix and it looked so much and so little like IRC,I think it's a good example of how more internet users means more things that satisfy more groups. One size fits all doesn't scale.
- buboard 7y ago
  > and all the old tech is mostly still there Only as ghost towns > ways isn't less more? Err, no. Have you used facebook groups, the social groups that we are supposed to use today? Crippled intentionally, abysmally few options, impossible to discover. These are platforms for users who don't care about discourse, they want to come and shout, and shout often, to beat the algorithms. Yesterday's content is already lost. Compare that with even yahoo groups. > prefer forums with millions No! But that's what facebook is, what reddit is. Eternal september comes too soon > for quite a while I used Matrix and I wish matrix would catch on > One size fits all doesn't scale. Exactly . We have one size for everything today: platforms for billions. But it's a bad fit for niche, weird communities.

walterstucco 7y ago

>Signal,whatsapp,ipfs,discord,slack,github,confluence,twitter,twitch,stackoverflow none of this is a creative tool they are all just iterations of the same idea: streaming content the last creative tool was, sadly, flash sadly because it could have been the beginning of an era of open content creation platforms, but it was its end > But have you considerer how much more accesible the internet has become? much less my mom could have browsed the internet 20 years ago, today she can't she doesn't know how to signup, she doesn't even know what "login with facebook" means > You heard of Viber? Super popular in non-western countries on-par with whatsapp. Skype you say? Zoom,webex,logmein Iterations of the same idea. Nothing new. > The past always looks shinyand guess what,the internet is even more mysterious now for those who get curious enough! It is really not. There is just more content of lower overall quality. > pluralsight,udemy,cybrary and MOOCs NNTP and IRC worked well enough and they were free

pmlnr 7y ago

21 years ago, in 1998, there was a software called Microsoft FrontPage 98. You started it, visually made a website with elements shared over all pages, and pressed a button to publish a static page. There's nothing like this today that is simple, financially accessible, and works out of the box. (With maybe the exception of Mobirise, but it has too much free-to-play vibe.) A little while ago there was an entry here: "Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21242857 and reminded me of Swishmax ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWiSH_Max https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWiSH_Max ), a tool I used around 2003. It was a breeze to use, to create animations. I'm unaware of anything like this today. In 2005, DC communities shared any content and had vibrant chat communities. Blog didn't immediately meant WordPress, but Pingbacks and RSS worked across them, so websites were able to talk to other websites. In 2008, Skype worked. File sharing over Skype worked, because it was able to use the local network and went p2p over LAN. Video and sound always worked. We're nearly in 2020 now, and video conferencing still sucks. Nostalgia is only a lie of you don't have proof. I still have the installer for most of these programs.