18 ms·

The old internet died and we watched and did nothing

• mashby 7y ago
  OK, Buzzfeed.
  • chapium 7y ago
    Yep, still doing listicles.
  • steve76 7y ago
    how was that not a trap?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• rasengan 7y ago
  The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.
  • shantly 7y ago
    If we want a (return to the) boom in open-source and paid standards-based solutions, we gotta ban collecting & monetizing user info. Monetized user info & related advertising paying for "free" walled services are keeping those down. We won't see widely-successful standards-based social networks or messaging services until that option is gone. [EDIT] and wide success/adoption matters for those in particular because much of their utility is in "everyone's on it" (where "it" may be some other, but interoperable, service)
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      The "old" internet was all static or lightly server-rendered pages, that can be developed and hosted at minimal cost today. Back in the day we didn't expect that "everyone" would sign up for whatever niche forum you were hosting, it was enough to have "everyone who's into that niche". These services don't need "monetization", they can be kept up with minimal amounts of crowdfunding, while federating through well-known standards (ActivityPub, etc.) can help them achieve a network effect that might ultimately rival the big walled gardens and incent them to open up in turn.
      • shantly 7y ago
        Sure, and those old sorts of forums still exist (well, the ones that didn't get eaten by Reddit and Facebook—OK, so I guess they kinda don't) but if you want the Web as it exists for most people to go back to standards and competing paid & free+libre solutions, I'm pretty sure banning spyvertising is gonna be a necessary, since those are the two main "services" most people use online, other than email (the rest is mostly shopping and reading news-type sites, both of which would also be improved by banning spyvertising).
      • icedchai 7y ago
        The actual "old" Internet is the stuff that predated the web: Gopher, IRC, Usenet, MUDs, Public Access Unix systems, telnet...
        • rasengan 7y ago
          I agree with this. It was when we designed protocols with consensus thru RFC, and apps communicating with those protocols.
          • shantly 7y ago
            And companies started dropping that when it became very important to their business model that they maximize the amount of data they can collect about a user. 3rd party clients for my service? Unacceptable, can't spy on the user as much there, and can't advertise at them. Communicating with users on other services? Unacceptable, I need those users on my service so I can spy on them too, and besides those other services won't talk to mine for the same reasons.
  • StavrosK 7y ago
    The problem is economies of scale, as it's easier to pay someone who specializes in that sort of thing to host your things for you than to do it yourself. Even I, a nerd who otherwise loves the old internet, don't self-host my website but use a provider (Neocities). When you compare learning HTML/CSS to make your own, quirky, beautiful website with spending five seconds making a Facebook/whatnot page, convenience will almost always win.
  • 7777fps 7y ago
    It's easier than ever to rent your own servers, it's harder than ever to run your own servers. There was a time when you could serve anything from a home ISP connection.
    • rasengan 7y ago
      Agreed. I still remember though being on dialup and using a UUCP method of mail receipt and delivery since I didnt have 24/7 connectivity. It was hard. With everyone on 24/7 cable connections, I really did expect something different. Its too bad IPv6 isnt taking off like it could and should.
    • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      Why are you all writing that? See [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926228 please.
  • w0m 7y ago
    > we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites .. Like... the AOL days? GeoCities? Different bubbles we've moved to
    • LinuxBender 7y ago
      One of those was forked and is alive and well. Neocitites [1] [1] - https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
  • foobarian 7y ago
    I feel like the ratios changed a lot which makes it seem like the old Internet died. But there are probably more people running their own servers than there used to be. It's just that that makes up just something like 1% of the user community instead of 100%. "The old internet" is what you got when only nerds were online. Replicate that and you got your old internet back. Cue the above mentioned decentralization work...
    • anongraddebt 7y ago
      This comment should be at the top of the thread.
    • xg15 7y ago
      I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background. In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to go.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        The UX on the old Internet was terrible, and I remember a solid generation of veteran users telling newbies to RTFM instead of either putting the hard work in to educate or improve the UX of the toolchain so education was less necessary (work that is hard because it is less about understanding the code and more about understanding how users think and why they don't think like the developer of the protocol or application). Average users who don't have the time to understand IPs, sockets, or authentication schemas have been served by companies willing to shoulder the burden of relieving them of those special-knowledge requirements.
        • ohyes 7y ago
          And terrible UX was a feature to some extent. The people who got through it put in some effort to do so, so it filtered out a lot of low effort people. (Think about all the garbage on reddit, facebook, twitter). Average users aren't necessarily the people I want to interact with on a daily basis. It's like an advanced version of a captcha. Maybe I'll make a technology and discussions site that is purposefully difficult to connect to. Maybe I won't use a standard protocol and you'll have to use netcat & gpg to read / upload posts or something absurd like that.
  • netcan 7y ago
    The article doesn't necessarily mean "old internet" in terms of internet culture or even the hosted services & structure of as such. She's talking about content, though most big swaths of that content was hosted on services, proprietary platforms or whatnot. It's a noteworthy point. Over the last decade or two there has been quite a bit of churn and not much archiving. You can kind of estimate a default rate of social media bitrot, linkrot or whatnot...
  • Timberwolf 7y ago
    I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP's news servers. What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.
    • flir 7y ago
      You've put your finger on something important - innovation moved from collaborative protocols to antagonistic web sites, and we're all the poorer for it.
      • rasengan 7y ago
        Exactly. The protocol era was hijacked for profit. I believe that incentivized, decentralized protocols are the evolution of all of this and will bring the protocol era back AND properly incentivizes participants.
        • api 7y ago
          I hope so, but if you mean cryptocurrency wake me up when there is more to it than speculation and gambling. Other than the "wire transfer" classic use case for Bitcoin I see nothing new that anyone is actually using that is not one of those two things.
  • tiborsaas 7y ago
    I do build my websites, I do run my servers and I still feel like in the wild west. Noise increased however by orders of magnitudes thanks to social media that's why you don't see the "old internet"
  • agumonkey 7y ago
    Was it really a matter of self hosting ? or a matter of what people meant by "web" ? early internet had no strong goal, but when it became a soil for a new economy the vibe changed from genuine, wild and funny to structure and optimized (for business, for users it's de-optimized).
  • papito 7y ago
    TTT
  • shadowgovt 7y ago
    I honestly don't think the decentralization is going to succeed. Most users prefer the benefits of centralization and aren't concerned with the drawbacks. Replacing the occasional collapse of a big central service with the low-grade noise of a distributed service run by a thousand unrelated sysadmins isn't going to be improved UX for most users, so most users won't sign up.
    • zozbot234 7y ago
      E-mail and Usenet (or even Fidonet, for that matter) were a vast UX improvement over Compuserve. Today's monopolized walled gardens are more like that Compuserve of old than a truly open ecosystem.
      • shadowgovt 7y ago
        But I believe th UX of the modern monetized wallef garden would also have displaced CompuServe. Maybe CompuServe is a bad example because their UX was just poor (and they survived in an era of near zero competition).
  • to0w1r3d 7y ago
    RFC 1436 Gopher - the joy http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngopher.com%2F http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher%3A%2F%2Fhngoph...
  • AndrewKemendo 7y ago
    The "old internet" isn't dead. It just looks dead, because the BILLIONS of people who joined the internet since 2002 simply never venture outside of the major centralized services. There are more privately run servers, self hosted websites and bb's now than there were back then. Its cheaper, safer and easier to start and run your own network and service today than ever. So in aggregate, there is 100x (1000x?) the niche, kooky, wierd, fun, specific internet that we had in 1997. But there is also 10^5x the giant consolidated internet that most people see.
    • keiferski 7y ago
      But this doesn’t factor in that smaller communities have been eaten by the bigger sites. Reddit, for example, has replaced hundreds of niche topic forums in the past decade, and done a rather poor job doing so, in my opinion.
      • TulliusCicero 7y ago
        The advantage of the big centralized services is that they're more accessible. They're generally very easy to use, it's harder to fuck things up there. A lot of the kind of nerds that post on hacker news, myself included, frequently discount how much of a barrier technical difficulty is. For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. But for the average person, they either can't or won't bother with that. So setting up an IRC client for them, is like a wall. Responses to pointing this out often go along the train of thought of, "It's not that hard! People could totally do it!" Well, regardless of whether they could or not, they won't. So you're basically just yelling into the void.
        • Eikon 7y ago
          > For us, setting up an IRC client, or even a server, is hardly a big deal at all. I administrated huge systems at massive scale, I deliver, what I believe is very high quality software which solves complex problems. And you know what? I would never want to setup a freaking IRC client that has such poor UX that you wonder if it was intentional. Oh, wait, you have to deploy a server to host your bouncer too! Oh, and then you have to interact with the nicserver! What a joy! Really. We have to forget about “state of the art protocols”, “unix philosophy” and very dumb UX if we want to see adoption of decentralized services. You know why HTTP is fucking great and so ubiquitous? Because it fucking works. IRC and what not protocols are so broken that it’s not even funny. I read too many RFCs of protocols that are so dumb that you understand they were never really written to be implemented and even less to be used but are more there to serve an intellectual challenge.
  • cptskippy 7y ago
    > The old internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were truly free in the wild wild west. Very few people did this. Unless you were at a university or paid for an ISDN line, you didn't have a persistent connect and could not host your own server. Even when DSL and Cable appeared, ISPs actively blocked hosting. Also don't forget registering a domain cost like $100 and required mailing or faxing paperwork. Getting an SSL certificate required even more paperwork. It's not like today where and can get a wildcard SSL cert faster than it takes to squeeze out a fart. People did build servers and host them in Data centers but that was the exception and they usually had a side gig or solicited donations for covering hosting fees. Again it was unusual. I worked at an insurance company in the early 2000s and setup an old machine with NT and a bunch of those Emachine softmodems to work as a poor man's ISP for a few of the IT staff. It also had an FTP server hosting stuff for an IRC channel I frequented. It was unusual and coveted because back then it was very rare for people to get access to a server they could host anything on.
  • seomint 7y ago
    BBSes live on today in all their ASCII glory. Logged on to an Apple ][+ BBS yesterday running on port 6502 ~grin~. Ah, good times... https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/ https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/
  • JohnFen 7y ago
    > The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now. I hope so. While I don't think the old internet is dead at all (it can look that way because the new internet has grown much larger), it is true that the web (for me) is getting less useful and more dangerous as time goes on. I 100% expect that the day will come in my lifetime that I'll stop using it entirely. I hope that something magical happens to change that trajectory, but I honestly don't see anything like that on the horizon. But the old internet does still exist, and so the internet will remain very useful to me even if I stop using the web.
  • winternett 7y ago
    It's not necessarily easier to run your own web servers... It's more costly than ever, and with the collapse of Net Neutrality going on (legal or not) and Google's stranglehold on search results and browsers, your likelihood of being seen are next to nil unless you have serious amounts of operational cash... This is also why brilliant people in school aren't inventing the next Twitter or Facebook. Big industry has stepped in to carve the Internet to suit it's profit needs and to put up walls for those who aren't accepted into the fraternity. Now company employees are encouraged to develop their ideas on company time, so instead of having to buy companies for a billion dollars, they get the same innovation (in house) for just a few annual salaries. Share holder driven companies are not our friends... The Internet how we knew it is indeed dead, and everyone was warned long ago, several times. :/
    • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      I don't fully understand what you mean by your first few sentences. You could use some dynamic DNS service for your domain, or host your own on the lowest end VPS and point that to your own connection, if it is reasonably fast, and then have some cheap and energy efficient SBC/NAS running some Linux serve your content with something like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server) or whatever else works for you. That doesn't cost me more than about 35 €uros per month (of which i have to pay 29,99 anyways for my line) and maybe 3 to 4 €uros energy (which is expensive where i live). While having 31Mbit/s upstream, which is the bandwith the external internet sees and could use. I don't need the scale the FAANGS have, do you really?
      • BrandoElFollito 7y ago
        I host my stuff more or less like you (also caddy, and docker automatically served by caddy). Internet is 49€, could be 30 but when I got fiber I gifted myself the max throughput because I could :) Domain is 2x8€/year Server was 600€ bought a few years ago. Power I do not know, never cared to measure but it will be 200€/y, roughly. So this is not that an expensive hobby. Then of course comes the maintenance effort, but that part is pure joy
  • madeofpalk 7y ago
    > Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. My completely uninformed guess says that more people are running their own servers now than ever before.
  • thrwaway69 7y ago
    > Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do. fewer in ratio/percentage or pure numbers. If it is later, I disagree. Running your own instance of federated platform or forum has never been this easier. I have a discourse, pleroma etc running currently. There are lot of people running them when you dig around. What you find the problem is noise and search - both of which are dominated by big companies and pesky marketers hijacking. Anything big with traction has people paid by companies in big sums trying to game their post to the top. If you don't have shit ton of traffic or content, you won't even get on google search unless you search for very specific keyword or direct name which very few do. The search everywhere not just your search engine but on social media is optimized for the lowest denominator who searches for x when he wants y. The search learns the way to ignore your words or meaning completely. So both social media and search are hijacked. What else is there for discovering things? specific niche forums which also needs to be discoverable for people to land on. With so many gate keepers on what should be installed on your device - app store or playstore. I am surprised lot of quirky things still pop up from time to time. But then I look into my surrounding, no one else gets the same stuff that I do....which means I am living in an echo chamber. Edit: example of companies fucking with search - https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ https://ibb.co/Lzh5ktQ
  • m463 7y ago
    The promise of computing has sort of died too. We buy computers, but they are owned and restricted by others, especially and problematically phones.
  • buboard 7y ago
    i m not so optimistic. The old internet died because it's not as profitable as the new internet, not because it's not sustainable, but because it doesn't stand a chance to grab the attention of makers, when compared to the obscene profits of the new internet. People either build a B2B SaaS (which is assumed to have higher unicorn probability), or go work for Faang. communities are over
  • jimthrow 7y ago
    Decentralized services won’t help at all unless the means by which people find stuff on the web is decentralized: google.
• esotericn 7y ago
  Is this a joke? I mean, it's buzzfeed, so it obviously is, but seriously? That internet didn't die at all! You're looking at the same thing with different company names! Myspace and Facebook are the same thing with a different skin. I figured this would be an article about like, vBulletin forums, IRC, tilde pages, something like that. They all still exist, you're just not using them, why don't you start?
  • Pigo 7y ago
    I do pine for the days when the Undernet or Dalnet was bustling with activity. I'm always looking for a server worth hanging out on. I'm glad Freenode is doing good, but it's people working. That said, this article was exactly what I'd expect for an article from Buzzfeed.
    • hydgv 7y ago
      I'm so looking forward to that one comment that always appears "no acshually this is buzzfeednews and they are great and they've won 1337 pulitzer prizes" Edit: oh there it is, hanging from my grandparent
      • samb1729 7y ago
        Got you covered buddy
      • Pigo 7y ago
        I just read that comment before seeing yours, ha. Well they both seem to work the election of Trump into every article. You can't drum up traffic and ad dollars without adding that into the conversation.
        • ilikehurdles 7y ago
          You worked that into your comment, but ctrl+f for "trump" yields zero results on the article in question. Are you intentionally being this inflammatory?
  • 7y ago
• madengr 7y ago
  Unlike that article, the old internet didn’t have inline video ads, mandatory cookies, and social media bars at the bottom. Not to mention dynamic pages that can load 100 ads if you scroll long enough. I swear my reading comprehension has been poisoned by the new internet.
  • throwno 7y ago
    I guess everyone forgot the days before pop-up blocking was built into every browser? Sure, Javascript modals are disgusting, but by definition they have to be one at a time, not a giant stack of ads every time you browse a site. Also, lets not forget the joy of being nagged to install Flash and Real Player on every website.
    • hobs 7y ago
      Yeah, how about javascript being able to move your browser window whenever it wanted? I still remember the albino black sheep page that had dubdub by scooter and moved your window to the wave form of the song.
    • jakemal 7y ago
      Along with the fact that we have the option to block all of those distractions now. With my blocking extensions, that article was a single photo and all text on a plain white background. It was a very enjoyable reading experience.
      • zozbot234 7y ago
        Back in the day, blocking all the distractions (well, almost all of them, <blink> and <marquee> tags were a thing) was the default. You had to click a button in order to load all images inline, after the text had finished loading.
        • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
          And hitting ESC stopped animated GIFs.
• friedman23 7y ago
  News outlets like buzzfeed contributed to that. The old internet was an uncensored free for all and I really doubt that is what they are advocating for here.
  • Pigo 7y ago
    Of course not, because extremism is on the rise according to this article... If they got one whiff of what the wild west days were like, they'd be writing their Congressmen. They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.
    • cirno 7y ago
      > They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with. Just host your site behind Cloudflare and optimize it for Google SEO. With the admitted and notable exception of two websites, they'll host absolutely anything and give it top rankings.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• PaulHoule 7y ago
  It is ironic that when I loaded that page on my mobile device i could see those scare ads for old people and then more ads covered up the content. Makes me think the back button is still the best thing since sliced bread and I wonder when Google is going to take it out of chrome.
• decasteve 7y ago
  More than a dozen comments on this article and none reference the actual content of the article and miss the point of the article entirely. It's a headline the evokes different ideas but it has nothing to do with the Internet not being what it used to be. The sorry state of platforms is an issue, for sure, but it's not what this article is about. Commenting on headlines is another sorry state of Internet discussion. The article is about a loss of content and a lack of preservation. It's about doing nothing to preserve an era of digital heritage.
  • Chinjut 7y ago
    Wow. You're correct. Absolutely incredible that this is the only comment actually responding to the article's content.
    • papreclip 7y ago
      The content isn't really front-page-worthy. People have gathered here to discuss the topic suggested by the (clickbait) headline. And in this instance I would say the headline discussion is probably going to be more substantial than the contents of the article To most people here, the "old internet" was not photobucket and myspace.
      • yoz-y 7y ago
        The discussion about this headline has been going on in circles for some time though.
  • rchaud 7y ago
    I remember bookmarking a great article critiquing the style and content of the Economist, a publication I read regularly. I was reminded of that article recently. When I went to look up the bookmark, and the site was dead. No redirect to a new domain, nothing. Fortunately I used the URL to pull up a copy on Internet Archive, but there's a wealth of good info that isn't being archived.
  • mumblemumble 7y ago
• maxymajzr 7y ago
  I remember the sound my 28800 modem made before connecting. I knew I have exactly 1 second below 60 minutes to be online before I get disconnected from my student dial-up. I had ICQ. We used Altavista (and Astalavista to crack the software we illegally got). Relevant information and socializing was done via newsgroups, as well as content-sharing. Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive into multiple files (so they can fit 1.44" floppy disk and avoid upload limits). Later on I used Miranda so I can use ICQ/IRC/AIM/MSN from the same client. Browser wars were nonexistent. First "awesome" browser shell I used was Maxthon and content was shared on lan parties or you used obscure xdcc search engines to leech off of IRC. FPS games that I played (quake 1, 2 and 3) lagged, I had 200 ping - which is how I learned about the importance of latency and what it is. It dropped to 50 once I got ISDN. Now, why did I type this? Not to present myself as "the old internet user". I don't consider myself a user of internet from "before", I'm well aware of even older generation whose internet looked even different. I'm just saddened by the fact that buzzfeed, one of the worst ad-ridden sites that exists, is making this kind of an article, spreading false knowledge (which is what it does anyway). It's not even an article. It's made by someone who used Facebook when it looked slightly shittier than it does now. That's not "old" internet. The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet. They simply haven't experienced how internet used to be when total population online was well below 50 million people and when broadband was a luxury.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    > Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option to split an archive into multiple files (so they can fit 1.44" floppy disk Good archiving programs came with the option of using erasure/error correction codes so that the archive would still be recoverable, even if some of the floppies were returning read errors or became unreadable altogether.
  • ravenstine 7y ago
    > The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet While I share your sentiment towards Buzzfeed and clueless millennials, I don't think it's entirely fair to say they have no right to write about the "old" internet. I began to experience the web around 1997, and it was different in a lot of ways compared to now. More personal pages, less centralization, little content policing, Netscape, Real Player, etc. I'm sure some old fart from the 80's would tell me that I didn't know the "old" internet because I'd never used Telnet to log in to a BBS. While there's truth to that, it doesn't mean I don't have my own perspective of what's "old".
• MisterTea 7y ago
  As far as I'm concerned the internet is just a global IP network. I can still ssh to my openbsd server and connect to my plan 9 system at home. I can rent a server that is still a PC. I can rent a VPS that feels like a pc. Until the day comes when I can no longer send whatever IP traffic where and when I want, I'm still using the same old internet. The roads are still the same. The scenery just changed with time. Everything else is just a roadside attraction along the way. And like roads the attractions ebb and flow with time.
  • xg15 7y ago
    That's all fine and good as long as you only build things for yourself (even then you'll have more trouble routing niche protocols and defending against hacking attempts) - but the scenery becomes extremely important once you involve others.
• agentultra 7y ago
  Parts of it were good but there was a tonne of bad stuff too. Entire sites devoted to content that is beyond indecent that were completely open. Networks of sites devoted to exploiting young people. Nothing has entirely changed in that realm except that such sites are more rare. There was a whole cottage industry of software dedicated to making using the Internet for younger audiences possible. Without it the Internet was a funnel for the most base garbage humanity could produce. I'm all down for decentralization but I think part of the protocol should be dedicated to enabling us to filter the content we receive.
• Zenst 7y ago
  One aspect about old archived stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
• mumblemumble 7y ago
  > Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010, other than your old Facebook photos? Nah, because I never felt compelled to put pictures of myself on the Internet before then. I still don't. What I miss is the personal website, where people shared information and opinions about things they loved. That Web has been crowded out by, well, people posting pictures of themselves. It's like that point in the party where the stimulating conversation ends because the host decided it's time to break out the slide projector.
  • prox 7y ago
    I think the advance of mobile phones and the cool factor that surrounded it for a long time, and “Hey look at this picture of my coffee I am drinking right now” kind of drowned the blogosphere. It was the time Facebook could count on being cool. Which evaporated after 2010/2012. I think my personal take is that the idea of “your content is your own” got lost in the process of sharing-everything culture. Luckily it isn’t dead, this site and the people writing informative blogs is still available.
    • mumblemumble 7y ago
      Even blogs feel a little bit stilted to me. They encourage a certain way of organizing things that is useful for RSS syndication, but at the cost of placing some fairly tight editorial limits on the person running the site. What I really miss is what came before the blogosphere really took off: Geocities-style loosely organized collections of static pages.
      • zozbot234 7y ago
        What's RSS syndication?
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • prox 7y ago
• pioneerpass 7y ago
  Pearl-clutching swine. Die.
• whatitdobooboo 7y ago
  I've heard that less new websites and blogs are actually bad for large services like google in terms of their search product
  • RinTohsaka 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on this?
• marcus_holmes 7y ago
  Interesting that they don't mention the business model that powered the old internet: VC money based on a vague promise that a large enough user base, coupled with ad revenue, would bring untold riches. As TFA says, most of those sites switched to paid accounts as the promise of "build a huge audience and work out how to monetise them later" didn't actually deliver any money. So it's not that they died (they're mostly still there). It's just that they're not free any more. I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the only way this will work now. The rise of information products and services focused around actually providing what their customers want, for a reasonable fee.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    > I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the only way this will work now. I think that "pay what you want"/crowdfunding models can fund a lot of the stuff that used to be provided "free" back in the day. The thing about paying for stuff on the internet is that many people find it quite inconvenient. It's not about the actual monetary expense, that's a minor factor (although it is a barrier to causal browsing, in and of itself). It's everything else you have to deal with as part of paying for something.
    • marcus_holmes 7y ago
      I'm curious, what's the "everything else"?
• 34679 7y ago
  Buzzfeed did not watch and do nothing, they actively participated in creating its replacement. The author of this article is so tone deaf that he rails against social media giants dominating the netscape in an article with "Tweet" and Facebook "Share" buttons at the top.
  • orthecreedence 7y ago
    I can dislike the state things are in and still use the tools available to spread a message or advance a cause without compromising my morals.
    • 34679 7y ago
      Not if what you dislike about the state of things is having a few major entities control the spread of messages.
• hanniabu 7y ago
  > and did nothing False, it's just that plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world.
  • yesenadam 7y ago
    >plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the corporate world. That's just what they want you to believe. You won't fight because you believe no fight is possible. The good news is, that's not true. (Gee, feel like I'm writing the V for Vendetta script or something!)
• whywhywhywhy 7y ago
  Shocked how many of the creators I'm interested in who previously would have had a website presence now only have Instagram pages. Mostly find it shocking because Instagram is so anti-internet you can't even post links to promote/sell your work...
• gravitas 7y ago
  The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages, Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has a better version that speaks to me: https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-from-the-90s-go-when-we-all-got-facebook-and-quit-web-1-0/ https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-from-t... In any case, we all agree Eternal September was the beginning of the end. :) http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html
  • ewzimm 7y ago
    September 1993 Internet use shows the silliness of the idea of the death of the old Internet. In 1993, "...the World Wide Web, has seen the number of daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000 in October" https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technol... There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make just one daily query on the web of the "old Internet," then it's still larger than the web before the Eternal September. Protocols like IRC and Gopher are more active today than late 1993. It's true that data moving through centralized services is larger today, but that doesn't invalidate the continued life of the "old Internet" any more than the relative domination of analog communications over copper wires in 1993 meant the Internet was dead back then.
    • gravitas 7y ago
      It was a tongue in cheek sarcastic comment, my friend. Whole new paragraph, smiley face at the end, fun link to the "me, too!" history, you know - lighthearted and jovial.
      • ewzimm 7y ago
        Intent understood! It's a classic turning point in Internet history, and I think the massive rise in traffic to 400,000 queries per day is the perfect example of how much bigger things are today and how all those old paradigms are even more alive now than they were then.
• malvosenior 7y ago
  > The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica. When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like Buzzfeed politicizing absolutely everything. This statement by them is 100% in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the internet with the past 10 years.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    That's the thing about extremism, it comes in lots of flavors. And clickbait farms are incented to whip it up.
  • elfexec 7y ago
    By rise of extremism, is buzzfeednews talking about themselves and their fellow extremists huffpo, etc? The worst thing about social media is that it allowed toxic extremists like buzzfeednews, huffpo, etc to thrive.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• batt4good 7y ago
  It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche. The vast majority are people looking to watch youtube, TikTok or some other social networking garbage. It's sad but this is the reality. People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb". :(
  • krapp 7y ago
    >It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users today. We are a niche That's not sad, actually, it's great. Being upset about that is like being upset that too many people use telephones who've never operated a switchboard or know morse code. The internet (or at least the web) was never meant to be a niche redoubt only for nerds and programmers, it's supposed to be for everyone. The old hacker ethos was about liberating humanity from censorship and centralized control of access to information and communication, but now that that vision is actually coming to pass (kind of) people are complaining about how the normies ruined. Fie. Fie, I say. Also, almost everyone from the 'old internet' is watching Youtube and using social media as well. Your implication that everyone using social media is only doing so for entertainment or a dopamine rush is inaccurate. There are more hardcore, old school nerds on the modern web than there ever were on the old web. >People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb". Nobody says that. Your can stuff your sorries into a sack, sir or madam.
• mattlondon 7y ago
  It is interesting that people say "the internet never forgets", yet this article clearly shows it does. Do we want the internet to forget, or not to forget? Is forgetting so bad? Not everything needs to be collected and catalogued and preserved forevermore. There is a lot of crap out there - I'd be happy for some personal stuff I posted many years ago as a much younger and naïve person to just slowly rot away.
  • agumonkey 7y ago
    Interesting indeed, internet never forgets you but it can forget itself.
  • krapp 7y ago
    "The internet" never forgets porn. It never forgets your dox. It will never forget anything it can use against you for the lulz. Everything else is a house of cards, though. It's just software on a server, after all, and if no one cares to back it up, no one will.
• nathias 7y ago
  i'm still using irc
  • superkuh 7y ago
    Yep. There's a million of us still active on IRC daily. Federated protocols > centralized services. Also, the old internet where everyone hosted, or at least coded, their own website still exists. In fact almost all the old internet is still around. It's just that most people are stuck in their walled gardens and can't see it.
• balozi 7y ago
  Predictions: Reddit will make the next list.
• carapace 7y ago
  First, it didn't die, it attenuated. It's still there. Even Gopher is still there. Second, when one says, "we did nothing", well, speak for yourself, eh? Lots of people did a lot of things and are still doing them. But the normals do not care. It's that simple: apathy and complacency (the twins demons of our New Age) and a good stiff whollop of ignorance. (Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Internet! Chew on that.) Meanwhile, you know who didn't lose all their content? This guy. Because backups. (Another thing normals try not to think about.) I've been saying for years now that the world is bifurcating into Eloi and Morlocks. This is "victim" blaming, yeah, but in this case IMO the "victims" are to blame: no one's forcing people to be Eloi. If you care about your digital shit, back it the frak up already. (E.g. Tarsnap, Amazon Glacier, a box of DVDs!?)
  • krapp 7y ago
    >Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Internet! Chew on that While that's a common axiom bandied about on HN, as is your general tone of condescension towards "the normals" (Eloi and Morlocks, seriously? You know the Eloi were the villains, right?) I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.
    • mrmuagi 7y ago
      I'm utterly confused. Why is your reply so combative? I just read the Wikipedia entry on Eloi and Morlocks and I don't even see how you could pick apart OP's on this item. Consider this odd line: > The Eloi are herded, bred and maintained by the Morlocks as a food source, much like cows or pigs are today. Right. I've got no dog in the ol' Eloi vs. Morlocks debate, but let me apologize, I do not want to appear as an Eloi sympathizer in you presence -- or even risk taking any creative analogy (for one even I am glad to have made aware of, as my reading list ever grows), lest you accuse my tone against a fictional race as you are surely itching to -- as demonstrated prior. Nonsense aside. > I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists. Well if we're exchange common things bandied about on HN... Let's take a glaring example here. The above is an opinion presented with uttermost confidence about groups of users and their knowledge -- all in the presence of zero evidence. Hah, take that! Wait, how many does it take to tango? It is a personal anecdote and long held opinion of mine that although the ease of access towards the internet, and therefore availability of, has increased, the technical chops of the general population may not be spread equally -- perhaps the unfairest of this is on the age variable with retired seniors not being able to get around much without help. I have helped old people with this matter, so I experience this sometimes. Perhaps I agree with OP on this, that they don't know the web really exists, and it's all a Cumulus cloud to them and I'm the wizard handles those unknowns for them. And I can take a step back and say, its alright that not a lot of people know https vs. http, or yada yada and perhaps on that point I differ from some opinions on HN, but I don't think you understand how oblivious people can be to the internet. I fear you will accuse my tone of condescension towards "retired seniors" and must now stop lest I dig myself any further. It was all fun and games with the fictional humans...
• maerF0x0 7y ago
  Time for buzzfeed to experience ego-death and realize they're not immortal and nothing they do will be either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
• logfromblammo 7y ago
  Right. Buzzfeed. Trying to slide itself into the group that just watched it die, eliding over all those times it injected Old Internet's regular IV drip with 100 mL of a 25 M solution of listicles and clickbait.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  The saddest thing about this is how desperately people cling to records of the past, as if they matter. If you actually missed something from back then, you would remember it, and it's not really gone. If you don't remember it, it wasn't important. But here people are, trying to convince you you've lost something that you don't even know what it is. The first time you lose all your files, it feels like disaster. The second time, you realize it's just digital materialism, and you get along just fine without it.
  • carapace 7y ago
    "All things are impermanent.", eh? :-)
  • btrettel 7y ago
    > If you don't remember it, it wasn't important. I've found time and time again that something I thought wasn't important before can end up being very important later. That's only what I can remember, too. Plus, there's a selection bias in what you remember. If you don't remember it, how would you know that it's important or not later? If the cost is small then I think "digital materialism" is probably mostly okay. I've come to the conclusion that it's hard for me to predict the importance of things later, so if something appears to be ephemeral and has even a modest chance of being important later, I'll archive it and organize it so I can find it later if I want to.
• ukyrgf 7y ago
  > If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs. AIM never stored chat logs, did they?
• KaiserPro 7y ago
  The old internet is still around, if you know where to look. You just need to look past the light pollution of google, facebook and twitter.
• meisterveda 7y ago
  Technology and how we share information always moves forward, this is just a new iteration, I expect that soon we will see decentralized internet services based on what we have learned from cryptocurrency, most services being hosted on others pc with high encryptions and high availability. Imagine a data center that is just the entire world.
• jasoneckert 7y ago
  I think it's more accurate to say "The old Internet evolved while we watched. Because after all, that's what technology does and we like to see where it's going."
• tempsy 7y ago
  This is a terrible article and tries to make something out of nothing. we’re supposed to shed a tear because AOL died? Is that really a version of the internet that we wanted anyway?
• augusto-moura 7y ago
  There's a project focused on backuping this kind of information[1]. It's actually a distributed and communitary way of doing it, anyone can run a "warrior" instance and help the project. Modern problems require modern solutions Edit: In the project wiki there's a lot of interesting links, like this one listing all tracked projects that are dying[2] [1]: https://www.archiveteam.org/ https://www.archiveteam.org/ [2]: https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch
  • btrettel 7y ago
    Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older. Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like phpBB or (even more modern) archiving a copy of a subreddit or Facebook group. Some people on a mailing list may already have a full copy simply from their participation in the list, and if the list has archives then presumably they are in a format which has stood the test of time. The other cases contrast with this. You can run wget on online forums, though the result is not as clean as the mailing list. Someone (maybe me) should write a bot to parse the pages into something more useful. I've also seen a script to scrape subreddits, though in my experience scraping subreddits is rarer than spidering forums. No idea what you can do with Facebook groups. While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So there might be some hope here.
• EGreg 7y ago
  We can do something https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-a-new-one https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c... We have already been there with AOL, MSN, CompuServ. We learned that instead of government regulation we just need a really robust open-source permissionless ecosystem of software to run on servers and clients, like the Web, to disrupt them. I saw this coming in 2011 and built a company to be part of the solution. If you want to learn more about the solution, ignore the token part (that’s to make it more like Xanadu) and read this to diagnose the problems and the solutions: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-System https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-... Contact me if you want to join the effort btw. Especially if you’re proficient in Javascript and/or PHP and like to work from home.
• badrabbit 7y ago
  Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s were much better. Anyway, back on topic: The internet is the global BGPv4 and BGPv6 network,as seen in the global routing table. It's a network and how that network functions has not changed much. The web on the other hand has changed a lot both in terms of functionality and content. But here's a different perspective: the "old web" was very slow. There were so many limitations, i mean are we talking pre-adobe-flash? If so,you had little rich and dynamic content. You couldn't stream movies,things like napster were viewed as criminal , as much as i dislike it youtube on it's ow has given much such rich and valuable content. Social media sucks but man, we're living in the golden age of memes!. Look at all the great things that happen because people can record videos and share them live/instantly! And security! We have come sooo far!!! From how amazing twitter has been to help infosec pros communicate to all the crypto improvements. I don't think i can go back in time and be able to share or access the same sites and content i did in the past,knowing how everything was so full of holes and made with little to no security consideration. I think I can easily make the argument that the old web was a dumpster fire. But in reality, I think it was ok for it's time and what we have today works for our time as well. Let's be real here, anyone can host a discord server and many do that. There are so many free web hosting services now that let anyone host their own site without needing to learn html or webadmin. So many blogging platforms like medium and wordpress. So many privacy friendly products and services. The past always looks different in hindsight and you don't know what you have until it's gone. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
  • 83hajfjeijg 7y ago
    You can't host your own discord server.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• duckqlz 7y ago
  Wow a super one sided article. Pretty sure that with the advent of cheap VMs for hosting or even seeding has increased the total number of personal servers but I could be wrong. Bottom line though is that the internet opened up to a much larger user base and this shaped the majority of interactions we see. I don’t think there is anyone who could reasonably claim the Internet was hindered by the rise of large tech companies. Hosting your own server or using sites who’s interfaces didn’t translate well with other cultures was a barrier to entry for a huge portion of the world. Having everything look similar and hosting content easily and seamlessly made it so even non-English speakers could access the same content. There have been some big hiccups caused by things like conflicting ideals and automation which helped create the ongoing battles we have now where likes are monetized and content is pushed aggressively to vulnerable sections of the population but with those new problems also came new rewards. We are living in an age where a huge majority of the world is connected in ways we never could have dreamed of in 2010. Right now I see the world as being on the precipice of cooperation where we are all shouting at each other but if we step back we might just realize that while everyone is fighting we are all still coming to the table, posting our content and inching closer and closer to a fully connected society.
• starpilot 7y ago
  Meta: Does nostalgia always pick up during the holidays? Is this the time when we reflect, on computing as well? We were reminiscing over the Windows 95 GUI, of all things, a week ago. What's next, "in defense of COBOL" or "the elegance of PC DOS 3.0"? If you look hard enough and you have some personal connection, any antiquated architecture seems worth reminiscing, but thank god all of it went away.
  • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    Sounds like a worthy title for some Cyberspatial Archeosociologists.
• kickscondor 7y ago
  Oh hey - this is my dept. https://kickscondor.com https://kickscondor.com I cover what's happening in modern personal blogs and independent web weirdness. Rest assured, you can now put Buzzfeednooze safely behind you...
  • krapp 7y ago
    Wow, that layout is so old-school quirky I think I may have literally injured my eyeballs reading it ;)
  • louisv 7y ago
    I've been following your blog for quite a while now, and I enjoy it a lot. Are there any other link-blogs that you recommend? (besides the usual ones like kottke, etc..)
    • kickscondor 7y ago
      Oh thank you and yes, link blogs - the biggest one for me right now is at imperica.com. The weekly 'web curios' roundup. I link this one a lot, so apologies if you've seen it already. (And I'm sure you mean Waxy in the 'usual' ones, right?) I've also linked to these quite a lot, but hey: * https://philosopher.life/ https://philosopher.life/ (see his 'link log' pages) * https://www.gyford.com/ https://www.gyford.com/ * http://tilde.club/~jonbell/ http://tilde.club/~jonbell/ * https://thingstoclick.com https://thingstoclick.com * http://fimoculous.com/recs/ http://fimoculous.com/recs/ The Internet is lacking good linkblogs - people don't run them nearly as much.
• ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  I always considered the "Old Internet" to be before 1994. Get off my lawn!
• dana321 7y ago
  Where is Hotmail, Geocities, Xoom, Webring, Metacrawler etc? lol
• Zmetta 7y ago
  Is indefinite retention and archival of all the shit put online really good for anyone other than AI feeding? When encryption eventually breaks and all our old private emails, AIMs, and other junk can be searched as easily as Shodan are we really going to be glad we have an extensive digital history? I don't think it's as simple as more data = better.
• stevefan1999 7y ago
  The old dies anyway; what we need to do is to learn from their mistakes and prolong your life any means possible
• DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Falling completely off my year-long diet, I decided I wanted a pizza at all costs. So I went to a pizza store. As it turns out, this was a store I had managed 30 years ago, and I haven't been inside one of these stores since, so it made for a nice moment of comparison. People are the same, the business is the same. What have computers brought? It used to be, when you talked about computers, you talked about data, although at the time we confused behavior and data. Here's my computer. It has my pictures. I write programs on it. There is a thing. I posses this thing. It holds other things I posses that I can do neat stuff with. But a weird thing happened. The arcade had sex with the IBM PC. That is, computers stopped being about "things I own that I can do things with" and became almost exclusively about the experience, the game. Having a good time. If you'd asked me in 89 what the store would evolve into in 30 years, I'd probably say something about robots. Paper free, human free. Maybe humans out front to talk to people with robots working behind the scenes. Instead, the computers controlled the workers. They took orders, they printed tickets to be stuck on boxes, they provided instructions, they tracked how much time the worker took for various things, they provided a cool interface for people to both order and see how their order was being processed. Who owned what that did what? Nobody cared. If you have an enjoyable, perhaps addictive experience doing X, and it's free, who cares about ownership or data? We never thought behavior/experience and ownership would be separate, so we reason poorly about it. On the old net, I would visit sites lovingly-crafted by their owners, with everything their owners enjoyed. We shared the experience of their creation, both creator and consumer. If there was a problem, I'd email. Your site doesn't work. You own it. Fix it. The new net is full of companies providing unique and fun experiences that people like, collecting data on their fellow humans like their lab rats with the exit strategy of being bought out by even larger companies with even more data. We create things we do not own. Instead we're like prostitutes in a red light district that are forced to dance in glass windows. We are displayed. Our existence and the things we create is owned by others. They choose to show the parts of us as they will. Your data isn't important. My experience online using some app is important. Everything else is subservient to that. The old web is gone because it either died or was eaten by companies who understand the new selection criteria. Anonymity is gone. Privacy is gone. Ownership is gone. We are left with just a collective experience which we will optimize for at all costs.
• markus_zhang 7y ago
  But nowadays we have so many personalized stuffs distributed across the Internet. For example you can just build a static page and put up on Github for free, and there are so many startups that provide all kinds of blogging (some of them are very serious and educational, just one level below books). I'd say that if the old Internet died then let's look forward to the future and build something new.
• kirykl 7y ago
  The internet is what you make it. Until the incumbents legislate an impenetrable switching cost for themselves, if don’t like the way the internet serves people, you have the power to give them another option.
• knorker 7y ago
  I'm sick of hearing about the death of blogs. I read more blogs now than ever. More than in the 90s. What are you even talking about? As a percentage of online content? Who cares? there are more blogs to read on any topic than you can read in a lifetime. > A look through its “Deathwatch” page — a list of websites and services shut down over the last 10 years — is harrowing. It's really not.
• beatpanda 7y ago
  People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article: "WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon." It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful. Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.
  • frank2 7y ago
    Automattic has raised US$617.3 million in six funding rounds, the latest one being 3 months ago. (Source: Wikipedia.)
    • beatpanda 7y ago
      Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.
      • frank2 7y ago
        617 million is a lot for the general sector. Quora has raised 226 million; the company behind Stack Exchange, 68M.
• yoz-y 7y ago
  Is it worth preserving all social media content from MySpace, Facebook et al though? I see the argument for blogs because people usually put more thought into the articles and they are more likely to be timeless. However, an endless stream of breakfast photos or drunken lashing out may well be better off deleted. Imo, the danger lies when the "serious" conversation/publishing moves to ephemeral platforms.
• bdcravens 7y ago
  Funny how they use services like MySpace and Flickr as the “old Internet”. For me, the old Internet was Geocities and IRC, where sharing content required a maker mentality, not a service.
• zackmorris 7y ago
  I'm more worried about technological and legal chokeholds on free expression like GDPR, whose main effect was to nag users with a popup about cookies on every major website. To me, it feels like the original possibility of inventing something, posting it online and earning a passive income is all but dead today. Too many hurdles now must be overcome. You pretty much have to learn a programming language, containerization, the various layers of HTML/Javascript/CSS deployment, amoral stuff like SEO and bribing influencers, to even have a chance at making more than $10 per month. When I think of every major innovation in web dev since 2000, almost all of it has gone the opposite direction from how I would have done it. Instead of autoscaling distributed servers, programming languages and databases, we ended up with "bare hands" tools like Kubernetes, async-await and sharding on proprietary monopolies like AWS locked into physical regions. My description of what's wrong is fuzzy at best, but I feel it deep down, that this trend away from computer science to application has all but halted progress. I could write at length (seriously dozens/hundreds of pages) about better ways of doing all of this. I already have to some degree. But nobody cares, and nobody listens to me since I never built anything that made any appreciable money. So what's the point? There isn't one. That's the internet today. Late-stage capitalism, pretty people, and divisive political discourse. Dystopia.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    You know? In another galaxy, a long time ago there was some young guy who did freelance sysadmin and education for private people and small businesses, while assembling personal computers maindays in some omputer store. Let's call that time 1995, where one early evening young Largo was asked by the very established owner of some electronic parts import-export business with whom he was on good terms if he liked what he does, and if he wanted to do it any longer? Whereupon young Largo LOL'd almost hysterically and said: 'What? NO!" This is so fucked up it isn't funny anymore!' He was very surprised and asked why, young Largo couldn't say exactly why and needed some minutes to collect his thougts and then began: 'This may come as a surprise to you, with me being an atheist, but what we have now reminds me of the story in the old testament of the bible about the building of the Tower of Babylon.' That indeed raised some eyebrows! Young Largo rambled on about the siloing of data in different non-interoperable applications for reasons of customer tie in, which is against the interests of said customer. About the bloat in software which requires ever more potent hardware in regular intervals with every new software version, while the old ones would be perfectly servicable if they only could read the data from the newer versions, which of course is a No-Go because it is against the interest of the software producers. He rambled on about lack of stability and unintuiveness of UX while compairing that with kitchen- and general household appliances, which would be considered useless and broken if they required the effort PC's did then. He fantasized on about something which combined the ease of use of Hypercard and Visual Basic in some hypothetic platform with the versatility and networkability of some Unix, extendable with modules available in countless variations like in DOS/WIN in a way every other 'module' would benefit from, because of extended capabilities and 'teaching' them new data formats, creating a bespoke environment exactly fitting your needs, while being able to run on ridiculously cheap and small hardware, nonetheless capable of reading everything you could reasonably throw at them. Young Largo rambled on about the impossibility of this happening in our current society and economy with patents, intellectual property, and so on, that this was easy to see and extrapolate into not getting any better EVER! Because even then bloat was a thing. What young Largo didn't really knew at the time were Plan9, OS-9, QNX and TRON but he had dabbled in 386/FreeBSD, early Linuxes, knew some FORTHs and some Assemblers and paid a shitload of money for his ISDN to get onto the internet with his hot rod Pentium. Young Largo concluded then that this all was nothing else but the biggest bullshit job creation program since the building of the egyptian pyramids, and at the end of the day almost as useless as them for society, with a few exceptions of research and simulation, CAD/CAM and such, but not applicable to the general public. When asked 'But what for!?' he answered: 'How should i know? TO THE STARS!' There could be a prequel to this, where an even younger Largo said in school that he wanted every computer being able to speak with each other, one big universal library, when being asked in class what the biggest thing he wished for would be.' That was pre- or proto-internet Anyways, in a purely technical way all of this is possible, and even has been realized in parts, or as complete proof of concept, except the ability of handling proprietary data formats by already entrenched market players behind their moats.* So one part of the army of bullshit jobbers is pecking like vultures at the long rotten carcasses which were thrown out of some research labs eons ago for antimonopolistic reasons, producing nothing but bloated zombies in different paint schemes. Another part specializes in exploiting the bullshit jobbers with proprietary software and services which don't really run according to their needs, but clogging their toilets, while the part who feels like it is the airforce tries to simulate being intelligent while unable to reliably reproduce or even explain their cheap stunts, the part being the navy looming beneath the waves and snorting..err snorkeling every and any shit, while the real spaceforce which does solid engineering could have been up in the sky in O'-Neil cylinders since decades, if the rest of the retarded shitheads wouldn't have dragged them down so much. Instead of the universal library with nice haptics i got craptastic movieplayers in different sizes, which i use like giant microfiche readers. So be it! Aye häff SPOQQN!
• indigodaddy 7y ago
  Kind of ironic when these type of articles inevitably show up on these heavy, slow, ad-ridden websites such as this one..
• riffic 7y ago
  All I ever see from media and journalists is bitching and moaning about centralized services shutting down, yet none of them have taken the effort to implement their own decentralized systems. The protocols exist today. Smart media would do wise by adopting them.
• AlphaWeaver 7y ago
  > Companies don’t make internet culture; people do. People make communities; they make the inside jokes; they make their own mores and unwritten rules. But people need the web services and platforms made by companies to create this culture. We’re locked in a symbiotic relationship: We, the users, need the companies, and they need us to keep running. When they shut down or delete our precious stuff, it’s because we’ve abandoned and neglected them for years already, leaving them to starve. This line resonated most with me. Truly though, it's sometimes not our first instinct as developers to design for the future- the current culture of "build an MVP as soon as possible" doesn't always incentivize forward thinking. If you're interested in thinking about how we can better design software solutions to support online communities further into the future, you might be a good fit for a discussion group I'm starting soon, called VC3. We're trying to bring together people who are as interested as we are in solving the problem of building meaningful virtual community. Building communities that stand the test of time are part of that. If you have any questions, shoot me a message (profile) or check out our website at https://vc3.club https://vc3.club.
• scottmcdot 7y ago
  This is a bit rich coming from buzzfeed.
• rdiddly 7y ago
  That's why your local storage is the single source of truth, and anything you put "on the internet" is just a copy of something from there. I mean that's how you did things riiiight? No biggie if not. As someone said elsewhere in the thread, most of that stuff is clutter and probably best forgotten anyway. But if it's something you want to keep, and the only place it exists is someone else's site/computer/database, then yeah, it's not a bad idea to start thinking of it as being gone soon, or even gone already. (Unless you WANT it to go away; in that case you should apply Murphy's Law and think of it as uncontrollably hanging around forever.) Growing up with computers and the internet and not knowing how they truly work is maybe the central problem here. Did you "post a picture on Instagram" or did you create an image file, upload it via an app or browser, pass it across the network, to a server somewhere, where it's getting stored in a database, to be retrieved and displayed later? Seems like if you understand how it really works, you automatically start thinking about better practices. I dunno.
• robsinatra 7y ago
  Really tired of people living in their own bubble drawing broad generalizations about the entire internet. If the author doesn't go beyond Facebook, that's her choice. She doesn't know what's out there, but she will tell everyone that it's not there.
• throw7 7y ago
  Unfortunately the old internet died because "instant gratification" wins the masses. Zuckerberg clearly understood "dumb fucks" and went "full retard".