21 ms·

I Miss the Old Internet

383 points by sT370ma2 7y ago

pwinnski 7y ago
The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller. I don't think it can scale.
- errantspark 7y ago
  I'm conflicted about this, my gut agrees with you but I don't want to because I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone The internet does bring value to everyone, and that's exactly what people are complaining about.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.
  - stebann 7y ago
    Just well said. Sad at the same time.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    True. It's everywhere but it feels small because we've trained ourselves to ignore 95% of it. There is so much coming out, all the time, and all vying for our attention. I can't stand it.
old-gregg 7y ago
To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM. In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > ...organizing the world's information... Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps the most successful example of such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally. (Already, Wikidata gets more edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open-Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint, for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se, it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways. And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Thanks for making me feel old. I really think of Wikipedia as part of the "new" internet, not the old one. Now, get off of my lawn, you whippersnappers!
buboard 7y ago
We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?
- x2f10 7y ago
  I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.
  - taborj 7y ago
    Also see: Eternal September[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - errantspark 7y ago
    It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'. Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to keep things sane.
    - faissaloo 7y ago
      I've found that an effective way to strike a balance is to simply refuse to scale. Once people can't access your site only the dedicated will remain.
  - hnuser77 7y ago
    This is the "dark forest" theory of the current internet, ironically posted on Medium [1]. You can put up registration barriers and such, but even being world-readable can attract negative attention. It's getting to the point where you have to "know people" to find cool stuff online. [1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
- 7y ago
notJim 7y ago
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
- ars 7y ago
  reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
  - skyyler 7y ago
    Did those forums go away? Or are new ones not being made?
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Yes. For all intents and purposes they went away. And there are mostly no equivalent discussion boards (beyond narrow mostly invite only mailing lists) that allow only the sort of people (for better or worse) who had access to the relatively early Internet. Some large companies, students and staff at elite universities, and so forth. Mind you it wasn’t perfect. But people tended to be posting under their own names associated with institutions. And the masses were kept out if they were even aware.
    - in3d 7y ago
      Unfortunately they are less popular but they didn’t go away. They offer more features than Reddit and have more real communities and discussions. Add “forum” or similar to to your searches.
narrator 7y ago
When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card Lawyers spammers.
- blfr 7y ago
  Yes, exactly. Usenet is an absolutely unsurpassed form of Internet discussion.
- Yetanfou 7y ago
  That, and a working DejaNews, before Google bought and sank it. I made a two-frame (as in <frame>) browser for it and revelled in the sheer abundance of information it provided. Enter Google, exit stage left DejaNews. Progress.
zokier 7y ago
This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create "professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones - professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads, shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress, shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent looking. They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I'd arguably divide history into a pre-Bootstrap and a post-Bootstrap internet. Bootstrap made it easy for anybody to have a decent looking website, replacing the raw and chaotic and wonderful mess that came before, and bringing down an echoing sameness across huge swathes of the internet. Another bright line is the Flash internet and the no-Flash internet. So much experimentation and uniqueness bloomed, and then died.
- sien 7y ago
  Exactly this. It's much easier today for someone who isn't a technologist to go and set up a website on wordpress or whatever or create a podcast or do whatever they'd like. Or put up videos on Youtube. Not to mention being able to easily self-publish a book. My RSS reader (inoreader) is full of things like that. Even inoreader itself is independent. Lots of the podcasts I listen to are like that too. Physical Attraction, The Internet History Podcast and all sorts of things are just set up by one person who wants to do it. A friend of mine who is a writer has an amazingly professional sounding podcast. There is just so much more stuff out there that this can be swamped. Also people who do it well often get pulled into larger organisations and are less independent.
mreome 7y ago
> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites. > it's getting increasingly harder to find them It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to do.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I'd wager it's getting harder to find because content strategists have figured out that they can pick up search traffic by creating throwaway blog posts about unrelated topics on a site that already has a high domain ranking. Take for example Game of Thrones. What does GoT have to do with personal finance? Nothing, but that doesn't stop sites like Yahoo Finance from posting bilge like "10 Epic Personal Finance Lessons From 'Game of Thrones'". Who's going to rank higher on a search for GoT related content? It depends on the search query for sure, but chances are Yahoo Finance, or HuffPost, or any of the other content mills will beat out your hand-coded personal website that probably doesn't even have Google Analytics set up on it.
LiveTheDream 7y ago
There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no affiliation): - https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ - https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already enjoy such as https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/.
mattlondon 7y ago
I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache! The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time. The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically still there - i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running). Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.
- samplatt 7y ago
  >mary-celeste servers That is a wonderful term for it, and a delicious mental image.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  > sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels Due to the limitations of the medium, I think this actually used to be easier (if slower). You certainly didn’t get a different price if you were booking a minute later.
- AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
  >postal order >a bank >stand in line at a post office >car insurance quotes >booking flights/hotels >tax return These conveniences you cite of the modern internet all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their products and services! And at such scale! My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the old internet was a lot more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television as a service" internet we endure today.
DavidVoid 7y ago
The main thing I miss about "old" internet is personality. With Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you'll always have the same boring page design around your posts no matter who you are. Sure the content you post will get your personality across fairly well, but just like with art it's not only the painting that matters, but also the frame. It's one of the two main reasons[1] why I vastly prefer Tumblr over the three aforementioned sites. It lets you create a page that's your own to customize how you like. And that makes it much more personal and interesting than Twitter and Instagram imo. I really wish those sites would start letting users customize their pages more than just by changing their profile pictures and header images. [1]: The other being the ability to view all posts from people you follow in a sequential order instead of having some algorithm decide which posts you should see.
- ppseafield 7y ago
  I agree in part. However, there is an advantage to the same boring designs being popular: they're actually readable. Some Tumblr themes in my experience are more of an artsy flex rather than a conscious, well thought out design. E.g. small text, low contrast, links that move, the menu being in any number of places. This isn't exclusive to Tumblr - I remember many horrible MySpace sites that were nigh impossible to read. At least Tumblr has an archive view that doesn't throw you visual curve balls.
superkuh 7y ago
The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.
- vinylkey 7y ago
  > Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"
  - superkuh 7y ago
    If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
    - danjac 7y ago
      > The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.
romwell 7y ago
>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch. "apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?" I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem. DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me. And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it. Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's why the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same font and style, as to not distract the reader from the content. In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be. [1]http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html [2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply link to https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by Google. This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search -- it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding. Other search engines don't have the problem so much.
esotericn 7y ago
It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO. Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth. You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery. Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.
- lethologica 7y ago
  >if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat') Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.
  - BostonFern 7y ago
    I also think it's unethical, and I think it's disappointing how rare it is to hear someone speak honestly about what SEO actually is in practice.
  - anon9001 7y ago
    Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on people's browsing behavior? I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques. I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.
    - lethologica 7y ago
danso 7y ago
> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"? > I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out... This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"? By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough. (And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    I'm sure there are lists like these and we just don't know about them.
elorant 7y ago
I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active. What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent. And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.” Totally agree. If I am on a site about kiteboarding I would actually appreciate to get ads about kiteboarding. This could probably be useful. But instead I am getting ads about toasters because I bought one last week.
- brandon272 7y ago
  > Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.
  - stonogo 7y ago
    That would depend on your definitions. Reddit is #18 on Alexa's top sites list, and it's arguably nothing but forums.
fouc 7y ago
The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and information was open and accessible. Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is turning into walled gardens. The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is huge. Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the end user. The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet & the open browser is being strangled.
travisl12 7y ago
I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on. ...member chewbacca
- icedchai 7y ago
  The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss. I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for downloads over my 33.6k modem.
therealmarv 7y ago
Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for? The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays. Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists. Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Try searching with https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ as a first step, but it's not simple at all.
sys_64738 7y ago
gopher still works!
- pmlnr 7y ago
  I made my site available over gopher a while ago[^1]; After reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885 and it's comments I curiously started up lynx and entered gopher the first time* and it was a massively unexpected ride into the forgotten oldskool internet. * I'm from Hungary and gopher never really existed there. Besides, it kind of predates my internet-age, which really started around 1996. [^1]: https://petermolnar.net/gopher/ https://petermolnar.net/gopher/
beckerdo 7y ago
Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP (Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring charge.
kickscondor 7y ago
I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at http://href.cool http://href.cool. I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at http://www.kickscondor.com http://www.kickscondor.com. There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)
- Mizza 7y ago
  Hey man, I just have to say, I've randomly stumbled onto three(!) of your projects this week and love them all! Keep it up!
  - kickscondor 7y ago
    Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in advance, Miserlou.
bbanyc 7y ago
Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package. Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal liability) to provide. The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners, watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.
kamfc 7y ago
I miss Diablo II.
Causality1 7y ago
The continued integration of the "real world" and "online world" is cancerous in my opinion. It never mattered if xXDeath_BonerXx said he was going to show up at your house and kill you, but it matters when John Smith from Company Inc who lives at 101 Boulevard Street tells his 400 followers he's going to murder Cindi Jane from accounting. If you made a fool of yourself, you either made a new screen name or left that website and found a new one. Nobody knew a thing about you you didn't tell them, and that was wonderful.
crtlaltdel 7y ago
and here i thought this was going to be about compuserv or prodigy. those experiences, along with aol, were the means by which many people experienced "the internet" in the "olden days". the only place i used the "internet" was at the computer lab in my school...all my friend's parents had signed up for one of the walled gardens and had no idea what else was "out there".
JahWob 7y ago
Maybe someone could take inspiration from Blizzard and create a "Classic Internet" ;)
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Chrome has been sort of working on disabling or not showing http sites - it's already marked as insecure, so you might think you're joking, but I kind of believe that we'll see 2 internets very soon: one of http/non http-2 https, the other on some google abomination JSON-LD schema over HTTP3/brotli, only working with "modern" frontend/social media.
ethagnawl 7y ago
I generally agree with the author's sentiment regarding "the Old Internet". However, using "voat" and "thank goodness" in the same breath raised a red flag for me about the author and their motives. They mentioned being kicked off raddle.me for posting links to their site (the one that's currently linked to on the top of the HN homepage); maybe that was with good reason and not a result of gatekeeping? For example, from _Men and Women and Marriage_: > In contrast, from what I've observed of women's behavior, most women marry for money. Some of them marry several times for money. You see, women understand why marriage exists. It exists to ensure that women will be provided for while they raise their children. This is why so many marriages are dissolved after the children leave home. From the woman's perspective: no more children, no more reason to be married. Perhaps, in addition to the conveniences, opportunities (learning, employment and otherwise), etc. the "New Internet" has afforded us, making this sort of trash harder to find is a bit of silver lining.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- robotstate 7y ago
  The way you're just completely proving his point is amazing.
  - ChristianBundy 7y ago
    Voat is a breeding ground and gathering place for white supremacists. A small selection of the top posts on Voat right now: - "jew politician calls for war on whites" -> http://magaimg.net/img/9f2p.png http://magaimg.net/img/9f2p.png - "NFL player's wife accuses Dolphins owner of favoring 'Jew buddies'" -> https://www.timesofisrael.com/nfl-players-wife-accuses-dolphins-owner-of-favoring-jew-buddies/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/nfl-players-wife-accuses-dolph... - "Everything's about race. Every single thing is about race. Remember that it's all about race, everything. All of it." -- member-only discussion - "Voat in a nutshell" -> https://files.catbox.moe/se4iny.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/se4iny.jpg
    - 7y ago
jasoneckert 7y ago
I enjoyed reading this. However, a better title would be "I miss the old Information Superhighway" (the stark 90s name for the Internet)
ratsmack 7y ago
Like the author, I too had made an account on Raddle. After lurking for a while, I came upon a post about the Proud Boy March in Portland, and I made one single comment with a slightly cynical tone. Within a period of five minutes I was banned from the site.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
victorbstan 7y ago
Lol shut up boomer.
- dang 7y ago
  Comments like this will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post thoughtfully and substantively, or not at all.
root_axis 7y ago
Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more directed towards specific tasks rather than used for leisurely "browsing" the web.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  Google prioritizes social media content in their results.
- einr 7y ago
  today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for IMO this is empathically not true. Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming the system on an immense scale. Search for basic information on a topic and more often than not everything is an ad-ridden Wordpress site with lots of big pictures and ten paragraphs of SEO-optimizing fluff (because Google likes lots of text to harvest keywords from) before the actual information. Google has utterly failed at de-prioritizing all this useless nonsense, probably because they make money from ranking it high. I have to work much harder now than ten years ago at getting Google to return useful information.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    The handful of anti-features that google has implemented do not nullify the immense progress in the other direction. There is literally nothing I cannot find on google.com with ease if I know what I am looking for.
platz 7y ago
remember Hipster Runoff? apparently, he was "The Last Relevant Blogger" https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the-last-relevant-blogger https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the... including posts such as: - Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet - U, Me, And Every Concert We Attend: How We Grow Older With Concerts - My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and the mainstream workplace]
playa1 7y ago
I was just listening to 'Internet Sucks' by MC Frontalot and it basically has the same message. The old internet was amazing and I also miss it.
MattyRad 7y ago
"I2P, TOR, and DAT" is an interesting callout in the article. Purposefully removing the search engine as a way of opting out of internet "homogenization" is an interesting counter-culture move. I would be very interested to see if it's possible to reclaim the individuality on the Old Internet using these protocols.
kyledrake 7y ago
There's still great creative stuff on the clearnet, you just need to know where to look for it: https://neocities.org https://neocities.org
SimeVidas 7y ago
Old internet? I miss pre-internet.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  The old internet was an escape from the ordinary, from the unforgiving world out there. This seem to have swapped in the past ~20 years.
stared 7y ago
It's essentially self-contradictory nostalgia. > I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks. vs. > Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or frequented by many.
anon1253 7y ago
Similarly named discussion from a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552
j_wtf_all_taken 7y ago
INTJ = "incredibly tiring jerk"?
ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
More and more I blame not just social networks, but the Web Search (and I mean Google) for strangling old-web community-centered resources. Many blogs and forums were shadowed by infinity of click-farms and other CEO'ed to crap sites, later adding tons of easily identifiable marketing black holes. Discoverability plummeted. That's understandable, as Google have zero intention to lead to "real people" discussing things.
pmlnr 7y ago
"I Miss the Old Internet" - an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself. What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites. Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.
- ahje 7y ago
  This. Also, make sure you have an RSS feed on your site. RSS helps people get back to your site for new content later on.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc. As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: https://indieweb.org/follow https://indieweb.org/follow There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all. Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it. Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome. [^1]: http://www.unmung.com/ http://www.unmung.com/ [^2]: https://indieweb.org/Microsub https://indieweb.org/Microsub [^3]: https://fediverse.network/ https://fediverse.network/
    - ahje 7y ago
      If we'd be talking about any category other than "the old Internet", I'd say you were absolutely right. In this case, though, we are specifically talking old-school web sites and I therefore maintain that RSS should be included. :)
- 7y ago
camexp 7y ago
I wholeheartedly agree and think this pretty much every day. Additionally, I still have my best links ever thread back from the early naughts on my personal website (be sure to put protections up to full-on, I haven't tested those links since back then (the site is still almost alive)). https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links-ever https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links...
notacoward 7y ago
I always find it a bit weird when people wax nostalgic about the "old internet" when they're still talking about the web. The real old internet had existed for a while before the web, BBSes and Usenet before that. Eternal September[1], of which the early web was effectively a continuation, practically obliterated those communities. There's a lot to like about being able to do my banking, shopping, etc. online. I value the contacts I've been able to make and maintain via Modern Social Media. Still, the loss of something that existed before looms larger for me than any differences between different generations of websites. The author is missing the middle period interent, and that's OK, but some of us also miss the truly old internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
art4ur 7y ago
The internet is a better place when it's treated like a network of people instead of a network of Brands™.
randcraw 7y ago
I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain. It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.
blakespot 7y ago
My homepage from 1995/6. https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/ https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/
- agumonkey 7y ago
  damn, I think in 1995 I was barely discovering you could used EDIT.COM to craft a "website" with your bare hands. I'm smiling at how dreamy and powerful it made me feel. ps: favorite part of your html is `<font size=+3>`
agumonkey 7y ago
One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio-economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making Google's original job meaningless.
mcovey 7y ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but the internet does not entertain me like it used to. There used to be so many fun communities, now everything is Facebook, Reddit, etc. We used to make fun of people who took the internet too seriously, but nowadays the internet really is serious business. I think the dawn of smartphones, high-speed wireless data, and the internet being in everybody's pocket is one of the primary drivers behind this.
clareaka 7y ago
So, not sure what is meant by “old internet “ ... is meaning 1980’s BBS ‘s ? Because the equivalent of those probably still exist for those who seek. Is meaning 1990’s and early noughties? Or is meaning the noughties in their entirety?

383 points by sT370ma2 7y ago

pwinnski 7y ago

The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller. I don't think it can scale.

errantspark 7y ago
I'm conflicted about this, my gut agrees with you but I don't want to because I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone.
- krapp 7y ago
  >I'd like to hold on to the idea that it's possible to include and bring value to everyone The internet does bring value to everyone, and that's exactly what people are complaining about.
CalRobert 7y ago
When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.
- stebann 7y ago
  Just well said. Sad at the same time.
- rchaud 7y ago
  True. It's everywhere but it feels small because we've trained ourselves to ignore 95% of it. There is so much coming out, all the time, and all vying for our attention. I can't stand it.

old-gregg 7y ago

To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM. In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire

zozbot234 7y ago
> ...organizing the world's information... Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps the most successful example of such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally. (Already, Wikidata gets more edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open-Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint, for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se, it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways. And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.
JohnFen 7y ago
> To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Thanks for making me feel old. I really think of Wikipedia as part of the "new" internet, not the old one. Now, get off of my lawn, you whippersnappers!

buboard 7y ago

We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?

x2f10 7y ago
I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.
- taborj 7y ago
  Also see: Eternal September[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- errantspark 7y ago
  It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'. Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to keep things sane.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    I've found that an effective way to strike a balance is to simply refuse to scale. Once people can't access your site only the dedicated will remain.
- hnuser77 7y ago
  This is the "dark forest" theory of the current internet, ironically posted on Medium [1]. You can put up registration barriers and such, but even being world-readable can attract negative attention. It's getting to the point where you have to "know people" to find cool stuff online. [1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-int...
7y ago

notJim 7y ago

I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.) I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.

ars 7y ago
reddit is 75% teenagers. You might get human thoughts, but you won't find high quality ones unless you filter carefully. (Teenagers, and yes I was one and I remember, usually have an inflated sense of their own abilities and knowledge, and they write that way.) What I wish we could bring back is usenet and/or mailing lists. Or at least highly targeted forums, where people spend years curating relationships, and sharing knowledge.
- skyyler 7y ago
  Did those forums go away? Or are new ones not being made?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Yes. For all intents and purposes they went away. And there are mostly no equivalent discussion boards (beyond narrow mostly invite only mailing lists) that allow only the sort of people (for better or worse) who had access to the relatively early Internet. Some large companies, students and staff at elite universities, and so forth. Mind you it wasn’t perfect. But people tended to be posting under their own names associated with institutions. And the masses were kept out if they were even aware.
  - in3d 7y ago
    Unfortunately they are less popular but they didn’t go away. They offer more features than Reddit and have more real communities and discussions. Add “forum” or similar to to your searches.

narrator 7y ago

When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card Lawyers spammers.

blfr 7y ago
Yes, exactly. Usenet is an absolutely unsurpassed form of Internet discussion.
Yetanfou 7y ago
That, and a working DejaNews, before Google bought and sank it. I made a two-frame (as in <frame>) browser for it and revelled in the sheer abundance of information it provided. Enter Google, exit stage left DejaNews. Progress.

zokier 7y ago

This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.

mattlondon 7y ago
It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create "professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones - professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads, shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress, shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent looking. They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more which I guess is part of what people are missing.
thrower123 7y ago
I'd arguably divide history into a pre-Bootstrap and a post-Bootstrap internet. Bootstrap made it easy for anybody to have a decent looking website, replacing the raw and chaotic and wonderful mess that came before, and bringing down an echoing sameness across huge swathes of the internet. Another bright line is the Flash internet and the no-Flash internet. So much experimentation and uniqueness bloomed, and then died.
sien 7y ago
Exactly this. It's much easier today for someone who isn't a technologist to go and set up a website on wordpress or whatever or create a podcast or do whatever they'd like. Or put up videos on Youtube. Not to mention being able to easily self-publish a book. My RSS reader (inoreader) is full of things like that. Even inoreader itself is independent. Lots of the podcasts I listen to are like that too. Physical Attraction, The Internet History Podcast and all sorts of things are just set up by one person who wants to do it. A friend of mine who is a writer has an amazingly professional sounding podcast. There is just so much more stuff out there that this can be swamped. Also people who do it well often get pulled into larger organisations and are less independent.

mreome 7y ago

> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites. > it's getting increasingly harder to find them It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to do.

rchaud 7y ago
I'd wager it's getting harder to find because content strategists have figured out that they can pick up search traffic by creating throwaway blog posts about unrelated topics on a site that already has a high domain ranking. Take for example Game of Thrones. What does GoT have to do with personal finance? Nothing, but that doesn't stop sites like Yahoo Finance from posting bilge like "10 Epic Personal Finance Lessons From 'Game of Thrones'". Who's going to rank higher on a search for GoT related content? It depends on the search query for sure, but chances are Yahoo Finance, or HuffPost, or any of the other content mills will beat out your hand-coded personal website that probably doesn't even have Google Analytics set up on it.

LiveTheDream 7y ago

There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no affiliation): - https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ - https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already enjoy such as https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/.

mattlondon 7y ago

I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache! The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time. The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically still there - i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running). Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.

samplatt 7y ago
>mary-celeste servers That is a wonderful term for it, and a delicious mental image.
Aeolun 7y ago
> sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels Due to the limitations of the medium, I think this actually used to be easier (if slower). You certainly didn’t get a different price if you were booking a minute later.
AndrewUnmuted 7y ago
>postal order >a bank >stand in line at a post office >car insurance quotes >booking flights/hotels >tax return These conveniences you cite of the modern internet all feel like they help the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with their products and services! And at such scale! My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the old internet was a lot more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television as a service" internet we endure today.

DavidVoid 7y ago

The main thing I miss about "old" internet is personality. With Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you'll always have the same boring page design around your posts no matter who you are. Sure the content you post will get your personality across fairly well, but just like with art it's not only the painting that matters, but also the frame. It's one of the two main reasons[1] why I vastly prefer Tumblr over the three aforementioned sites. It lets you create a page that's your own to customize how you like. And that makes it much more personal and interesting than Twitter and Instagram imo. I really wish those sites would start letting users customize their pages more than just by changing their profile pictures and header images. [1]: The other being the ability to view all posts from people you follow in a sequential order instead of having some algorithm decide which posts you should see.

ppseafield 7y ago
I agree in part. However, there is an advantage to the same boring designs being popular: they're actually readable. Some Tumblr themes in my experience are more of an artsy flex rather than a conscious, well thought out design. E.g. small text, low contrast, links that move, the menu being in any number of places. This isn't exclusive to Tumblr - I remember many horrible MySpace sites that were nigh impossible to read. At least Tumblr has an archive view that doesn't throw you visual curve balls.

superkuh 7y ago

The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time. As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.

vinylkey 7y ago
> Don't use any javascript frontends. I'm struggling to find the connection between a Javascript front end and content that has (to quote the article posted) "the voice of individuals"
- superkuh 7y ago
  If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it. Time and the ability for your coworkers to contribute matters. You don't have to bring these compromises forced on you at work to home.
  - danjac 7y ago
    > The reason people use JS frontends is because they're at work being paid to do it And of course employability and the need for buzzwords on your resume.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >If you use the same JS frontend as everyone else it isn't very individual and form constrains content. You seem to be confusing the implementation of a site with its content, and assuming that homogeneity of layout corresponds to homogeneity of content. It's an understandable bias to find in a community of programmers and web developers, but it isn't true. The pages of a book are uniformly sized, generally speaking uniformly colored with one of a very narrow set of fonts and typefaces, spaced and typeset according to an industry standard - and yet this places no constraint at all on the nature of the content that can be displayed within those pages. In the same way, a website rendering content on the frontend rather than the backend is an implementation detail which has nothing to do with what content is rendered. And even in the 90s, many sites looked similar. Rather than having standard templates focused around typography, people just copied what other sites were doing, using the same table-based layouts with black backgrounds and GIFS, and none of that necessarily made the content any better than what exists today.

romwell 7y ago

>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch. "apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?" I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem. DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me. And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it. Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's why the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same font and style, as to not distract the reader from the content. In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be. [1]http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html [2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply link to https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/ instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.

JohnFen 7y ago

> Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by Google. This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search -- it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding. Other search engines don't have the problem so much.

esotericn 7y ago

It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO. Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth. You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery. Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.

lethologica 7y ago
>if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months. Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative practices (despite it all being 'white hat') Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my previous role.
- BostonFern 7y ago
  I also think it's unethical, and I think it's disappointing how rare it is to hear someone speak honestly about what SEO actually is in practice.
- anon9001 7y ago
  Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on people's browsing behavior? I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to stay current on techniques. I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword stuffing.
  - lethologica 7y ago

danso 7y ago

> You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"? > I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out... This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.

zozbot234 7y ago
> how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"? By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort. It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet overall is a lot more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough. (And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a Web directory.)
- solarkraft 7y ago
  I'm sure there are lists like these and we just don't know about them.

elorant 7y ago

I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active. What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent. And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
“What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.” Totally agree. If I am on a site about kiteboarding I would actually appreciate to get ads about kiteboarding. This could probably be useful. But instead I am getting ads about toasters because I bought one last week.
brandon272 7y ago
> Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.
- stonogo 7y ago
  That would depend on your definitions. Reddit is #18 on Alexa's top sites list, and it's arguably nothing but forums.

fouc 7y ago

The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and information was open and accessible. Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is turning into walled gardens. The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is huge. Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the end user. The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet & the open browser is being strangled.

travisl12 7y ago

I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on. ...member chewbacca

icedchai 7y ago
The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss. I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for downloads over my 33.6k modem.

therealmarv 7y ago

Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for? The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays. Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists. Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.

pmlnr 7y ago
Try searching with https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ as a first step, but it's not simple at all.

sys_64738 7y ago

gopher still works!

pmlnr 7y ago
I made my site available over gopher a while ago[^1]; After reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885 and it's comments I curiously started up lynx and entered gopher the first time* and it was a massively unexpected ride into the forgotten oldskool internet. * I'm from Hungary and gopher never really existed there. Besides, it kind of predates my internet-age, which really started around 1996. [^1]: https://petermolnar.net/gopher/ https://petermolnar.net/gopher/

beckerdo 7y ago

Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP (Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring charge.

kickscondor 7y ago

I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at http://href.cool http://href.cool. I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at http://www.kickscondor.com http://www.kickscondor.com. There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)

Mizza 7y ago
Hey man, I just have to say, I've randomly stumbled onto three(!) of your projects this week and love them all! Keep it up!
- kickscondor 7y ago
  Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in advance, Miserlou.

bbanyc 7y ago

Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package. Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal liability) to provide. The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners, watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.

kamfc 7y ago

I miss Diablo II.

Causality1 7y ago

The continued integration of the "real world" and "online world" is cancerous in my opinion. It never mattered if xXDeath_BonerXx said he was going to show up at your house and kill you, but it matters when John Smith from Company Inc who lives at 101 Boulevard Street tells his 400 followers he's going to murder Cindi Jane from accounting. If you made a fool of yourself, you either made a new screen name or left that website and found a new one. Nobody knew a thing about you you didn't tell them, and that was wonderful.

crtlaltdel 7y ago

and here i thought this was going to be about compuserv or prodigy. those experiences, along with aol, were the means by which many people experienced "the internet" in the "olden days". the only place i used the "internet" was at the computer lab in my school...all my friend's parents had signed up for one of the walled gardens and had no idea what else was "out there".

JahWob 7y ago

Maybe someone could take inspiration from Blizzard and create a "Classic Internet" ;)

pmlnr 7y ago
Chrome has been sort of working on disabling or not showing http sites - it's already marked as insecure, so you might think you're joking, but I kind of believe that we'll see 2 internets very soon: one of http/non http-2 https, the other on some google abomination JSON-LD schema over HTTP3/brotli, only working with "modern" frontend/social media.

ethagnawl 7y ago

I generally agree with the author's sentiment regarding "the Old Internet". However, using "voat" and "thank goodness" in the same breath raised a red flag for me about the author and their motives. They mentioned being kicked off raddle.me for posting links to their site (the one that's currently linked to on the top of the HN homepage); maybe that was with good reason and not a result of gatekeeping? For example, from _Men and Women and Marriage_: > In contrast, from what I've observed of women's behavior, most women marry for money. Some of them marry several times for money. You see, women understand why marriage exists. It exists to ensure that women will be provided for while they raise their children. This is why so many marriages are dissolved after the children leave home. From the woman's perspective: no more children, no more reason to be married. Perhaps, in addition to the conveniences, opportunities (learning, employment and otherwise), etc. the "New Internet" has afforded us, making this sort of trash harder to find is a bit of silver lining.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
robotstate 7y ago
The way you're just completely proving his point is amazing.
- ChristianBundy 7y ago
  Voat is a breeding ground and gathering place for white supremacists. A small selection of the top posts on Voat right now: - "jew politician calls for war on whites" -> http://magaimg.net/img/9f2p.png http://magaimg.net/img/9f2p.png - "NFL player's wife accuses Dolphins owner of favoring 'Jew buddies'" -> https://www.timesofisrael.com/nfl-players-wife-accuses-dolphins-owner-of-favoring-jew-buddies/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/nfl-players-wife-accuses-dolph... - "Everything's about race. Every single thing is about race. Remember that it's all about race, everything. All of it." -- member-only discussion - "Voat in a nutshell" -> https://files.catbox.moe/se4iny.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/se4iny.jpg
  - 7y ago

jasoneckert 7y ago

I enjoyed reading this. However, a better title would be "I miss the old Information Superhighway" (the stark 90s name for the Internet)

ratsmack 7y ago

Like the author, I too had made an account on Raddle. After lurking for a while, I came upon a post about the Proud Boy March in Portland, and I made one single comment with a slightly cynical tone. Within a period of five minutes I was banned from the site.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

victorbstan 7y ago

Lol shut up boomer.

dang 7y ago
Comments like this will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post thoughtfully and substantively, or not at all.

root_axis 7y ago

Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more directed towards specific tasks rather than used for leisurely "browsing" the web.

heavyset_go 7y ago
Google prioritizes social media content in their results.
einr 7y ago
today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for IMO this is empathically not true. Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming the system on an immense scale. Search for basic information on a topic and more often than not everything is an ad-ridden Wordpress site with lots of big pictures and ten paragraphs of SEO-optimizing fluff (because Google likes lots of text to harvest keywords from) before the actual information. Google has utterly failed at de-prioritizing all this useless nonsense, probably because they make money from ranking it high. I have to work much harder now than ten years ago at getting Google to return useful information.
- root_axis 7y ago
  The handful of anti-features that google has implemented do not nullify the immense progress in the other direction. There is literally nothing I cannot find on google.com with ease if I know what I am looking for.

platz 7y ago

remember Hipster Runoff? apparently, he was "The Last Relevant Blogger" https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the-last-relevant-blogger https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the... including posts such as: - Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet - U, Me, And Every Concert We Attend: How We Grow Older With Concerts - My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and the mainstream workplace]

playa1 7y ago

I was just listening to 'Internet Sucks' by MC Frontalot and it basically has the same message. The old internet was amazing and I also miss it.

MattyRad 7y ago

"I2P, TOR, and DAT" is an interesting callout in the article. Purposefully removing the search engine as a way of opting out of internet "homogenization" is an interesting counter-culture move. I would be very interested to see if it's possible to reclaim the individuality on the Old Internet using these protocols.

kyledrake 7y ago

There's still great creative stuff on the clearnet, you just need to know where to look for it: https://neocities.org https://neocities.org

SimeVidas 7y ago

Old internet? I miss pre-internet.

pmlnr 7y ago
The old internet was an escape from the ordinary, from the unforgiving world out there. This seem to have swapped in the past ~20 years.

stared 7y ago

It's essentially self-contradictory nostalgia. > I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks. vs. > Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or frequented by many.

anon1253 7y ago

Similarly named discussion from a while back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552

j_wtf_all_taken 7y ago

INTJ = "incredibly tiring jerk"?

ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago

More and more I blame not just social networks, but the Web Search (and I mean Google) for strangling old-web community-centered resources. Many blogs and forums were shadowed by infinity of click-farms and other CEO'ed to crap sites, later adding tons of easily identifiable marketing black holes. Discoverability plummeted. That's understandable, as Google have zero intention to lead to "real people" discussing things.

pmlnr 7y ago

"I Miss the Old Internet" - an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself. What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites. Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.

ahje 7y ago
This. Also, make sure you have an RSS feed on your site. RSS helps people get back to your site for new content later on.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc. As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: https://indieweb.org/follow https://indieweb.org/follow There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all. Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like https://fed.brid.gy/ https://fed.brid.gy/ and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it. Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome. [^1]: http://www.unmung.com/ http://www.unmung.com/ [^2]: https://indieweb.org/Microsub https://indieweb.org/Microsub [^3]: https://fediverse.network/ https://fediverse.network/
  - ahje 7y ago
    If we'd be talking about any category other than "the old Internet", I'd say you were absolutely right. In this case, though, we are specifically talking old-school web sites and I therefore maintain that RSS should be included. :)
7y ago

camexp 7y ago

I wholeheartedly agree and think this pretty much every day. Additionally, I still have my best links ever thread back from the early naughts on my personal website (be sure to put protections up to full-on, I haven't tested those links since back then (the site is still almost alive)). https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links-ever https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links...

notacoward 7y ago

I always find it a bit weird when people wax nostalgic about the "old internet" when they're still talking about the web. The real old internet had existed for a while before the web, BBSes and Usenet before that. Eternal September[1], of which the early web was effectively a continuation, practically obliterated those communities. There's a lot to like about being able to do my banking, shopping, etc. online. I value the contacts I've been able to make and maintain via Modern Social Media. Still, the loss of something that existed before looms larger for me than any differences between different generations of websites. The author is missing the middle period interent, and that's OK, but some of us also miss the truly old internet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

art4ur 7y ago

The internet is a better place when it's treated like a network of people instead of a network of Brands™.

randcraw 7y ago

I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain. It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.

blakespot 7y ago

My homepage from 1995/6. https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/ https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/

agumonkey 7y ago
damn, I think in 1995 I was barely discovering you could used EDIT.COM to craft a "website" with your bare hands. I'm smiling at how dreamy and powerful it made me feel. ps: favorite part of your html is `<font size=+3>`

agumonkey 7y ago

One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio-economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making Google's original job meaningless.

mcovey 7y ago

Maybe I'm just getting old, but the internet does not entertain me like it used to. There used to be so many fun communities, now everything is Facebook, Reddit, etc. We used to make fun of people who took the internet too seriously, but nowadays the internet really is serious business. I think the dawn of smartphones, high-speed wireless data, and the internet being in everybody's pocket is one of the primary drivers behind this.

clareaka 7y ago

So, not sure what is meant by “old internet “ ... is meaning 1980’s BBS ‘s ? Because the equivalent of those probably still exist for those who seek. Is meaning 1990’s and early noughties? Or is meaning the noughties in their entirety?