26 ms·

I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

• ferros 5y ago
  In 20 years somebody will write an article about missing this ‘old’ internet from 2021. I wonder what they will miss.
  • IgorPartola 5y ago
    Memes, Discord, the “old” Twitter, and either having ad supported sites (as opposed to everything being paid) or having premium sites (as opposed to everything being as supported.
    • slver 5y ago
      Memes won’t go away. Nor will ads.
      • vkk8 5y ago
        Memes will be killed by some entrepreneuring copyright troll at some point. In many jurisdictions, memes would either break the copyright laws or at least be in the grey zone. It's only a matter of time before someone exploits this. After one case, the platforms will ban them to avoid the risk of getting sued themselves. The same will probably happen for gaming videos.
        • slver 5y ago
          Really. All right, I'm looking forward to the author of dickbutt stepping up and claiming what's theirs.
          • vkk8 5y ago
            The author of the dickbutt (if he/she can be found) might easily sell the rights to their creation to a copyright troll for one million dollars after which my scenario could take place.
            • deleted 5y ago
              [deleted]
            • slver 5y ago
              You see, if they had the rights, we'd know who it is. You reserve your rights through registration. If we don't know, then there's no way to prove you have the rights.
    • bruce343434 5y ago
      they will miss not having to use a browsing agent that logs everything you do to your identity/passport and sends it out to the government to keep you in check
  • meowster 5y ago
    Less-invasive advertisements.
  • politelemon 5y ago
    Web pages under 100MB
    • ratww 5y ago
      I like your optimism in thinking it will take full two decades for people to miss sub-100MB pages. :)
  • cutler 5y ago
    AI-enhanced web pages. Sorry, SPAS.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      you said pages
  • xwdv 5y ago
    Anonymity.
  • einpoklum 5y ago
    They might, but the piece will be less credible. Or - Fagoomazon might censor it.
  • ajuc 5y ago
    > I wonder what they will miss. Being able to log in without providing you national ID number. And being able to run a public-facing server without a permit.
    • selimthegrim 5y ago
      In India they already miss this.
    • Sleepytime 5y ago
      Unregulated encryption will be out in the next decade, it's too powerful for us plebes to have. Things will be safer when only the paragons of infosec like big corporations and banks get to use it freely.
  • zeroonetwothree 5y ago
    I don’t see that anyone could have predicted the change of the past 20 years so it’s silly to think we can even guess at the next 20
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  "I miss old ATX." "I miss old [X]." There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.
  • serf 5y ago
    >There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine. the point of reminiscing is to steer the current time towards the good points of the past, while trying to navigate around the difficulties experienced previously.
  • jcfrei 5y ago
    I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se. For a lot of people who are young today the internet the way it's right now (with TikToks, Instagram, Twitter discussions, rants and memes) will be the one, true internet. And in 10-20 years they will say it has changed and how they miss it. This is a cycle as old as time.
    • npteljes 5y ago
      That's absolutely the case. It's also them encountering the first X, and then the millionth X. And a bunch of other biases also come into play, like survivorship bias. The good old refrigerator that's chugging along just fine for the twentieth year. It's not like today's shitty refrigerators can ever last this long. What's unseen though is the huge pile of discarded refrigerators on the landfill.
      • failwhaleshark 5y ago
        The fridge I grew-up with lasted 30 years. It does seem like an industry-wide conspiracy to make "durable" consumer goods last only as long as their warranties. And also, to make money on replacement parts and complete replacements. The "Just go buy another one"-mentality makes me cringe.
• abhiminator 5y ago
  Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author: * https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/ * https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ * https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-dead-b36aaebe708d https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d... Can't help but agree with most of their assertions. Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
  • scelerat 5y ago
    “Internet” here is appropriate too. Although he’s reminiscing about mid ‘90s websites, most of that was still an extension of the amateur, interest-driven culture (and counter culture) that was prevalent across Usenet, gopher, and ftp sites prior to the web’s domination and conflation with “Internet”
• Kiro 5y ago
  I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
  • ratww 5y ago
    It's not the same thing. What everyone misses are the personal, hobbyist, non-commercial websites. This was replaced by things like Facebook, Wikia, Pinterest, Twitter, Medium, which are both constrained and ad-ridden. A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr. The "every site looking the same" thing is fine, however, and still preferred for commercial sites, government, newspapers, startups, other utilities. In fact most of those could still look more of the same, because visitors rarely care about the differentiation for marketing purposes. You could get away with removing all parallax effects from those sites and nobody would miss them. Same for advertisements: nobody cares for the forced variety of colourful banners in web advertisement.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      The sad part is that those websites do exist, but are nigh impossible to stumble upon except in association with a particular context. For example, small communities around specific interests, and personal sites of authors of specific works. We really just need a concentrated effort to catalogue and curate them under a single banner. These efforts also do exist, but haven't yet reached critical mass. Probably because policing content is a full-time job.
    • DavidVoid 5y ago
      > A bit of that old web still live in places like Tumblr. It will be a sad sad day when/if Tumblr gets shut down. I really appreciate the fact that users can customize their own pages in many more ways than just changing their profile picture and header image, it gives it a lot more personality than you can get on Instagram/Tumblr/Facebook. It also has a timelessness that you don't really get on other sites, at least not to the same degree. Posts have timestamps, but on the dashboard they're only visible if you look for them. So most people don't notice if the post they just reblogged was originally posted yesterday -- or seven years ago. This also gets rid of much of the repost issues you see on Reddit and similar sites, since the original post can remain relevant for much longer.
• kh_hk 5y ago
  Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of expressing what was not possible with the old means. After adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again. I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now? Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression. EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it. Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm). Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
• evgen 5y ago
  Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.
  • cdrini 5y ago
    I never got to use the internet before the mid-90s; what do you miss about it?
    • evgen 5y ago
      I miss a high bar for entry that meant most of the people online were at a relatively small collection of universities, tech companies, or government and public service agencies. It was elitist for sure, but sometimes that is not a bad thing and the level of conversation was something we will never see again. I miss being able to read everything interesting on Usenet over a long lunch sitting in front of a vt220. It was slow, but you didn't mind because it was all text based. The protocols were open and barely compressed so it was easy to explore and play around with things. A few hours in a wiring closet with a punch-down tool, a crimper, and spools of cable could be used to create magic. There was no money to be made so no one took it too seriously. There were vast spaces to explore; we didn't know as much as we do now about what is and is not possible (and what can or cannot be solved with technical solutions to what turn out to be meatspace problems) so every crazy idea held a kernel of possibility.
      • cdrini 5y ago
        That's fascinating! Thank you for sharing :) Feels completely otherworldly.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion. Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads. What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform. Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
  • ozim 5y ago
    That is combination of great points. Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt. The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band members sitting in the evening messing with HTML I want them to make music. Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do. This is why I don't miss "old internet", people are crafty and interesting anyway.
    • mschuster91 5y ago
      > Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do. The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure. Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).
• kh_hk 5y ago
  counterculture is ephemeral
• marban 5y ago
  Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web. Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web. Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons: 1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn. 2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself. 3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time. 4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
  • ratww 5y ago
    That's fair, but the technological improvements in the network layer that made it faster, more accessible and cheaper are not directly related with the complaints by the author. We can have one thing without losing the other.
    • markus_zhang 5y ago
      I agree with you. Too much bloat somehow.
  • mrtksn 5y ago
    > Easy access to many high quality contents. On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations. The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher. Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it. It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
• jumploops 5y ago
  Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again. As I see it, there are two main issues to solve: 1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages” , in whatever form they envision? 2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
  • okamiueru 5y ago
    Regarding 1. When you say "no longer trivial", I would point out that if it isn't now, then it surely never was? Not using a framework (by which I assume you mean the likes of wordpress or squarespace) is still as much possible today as it ever was. And, the knowledge on how to do so is ever more accessible. I can see your point that when provided with easy ways to do things, you are limited to design decisions and choices of those frameworks. However, I think the progress of open source has lowered the bar significantly for creating a completely custom platform.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      I had a friend with zero programming experience who put up a simple webpage for her small business in 1995 with just a text editor and some photos. Yes, it was much simpler. And it was encouraged, because most ISPs offered free web page hosting - including a free URL, and email - with an access account. Wordpress is a nightmare in comparison. And a fully engineered blog stack is far beyond the reach of most users. You could argue that the modern equivalent is a Facebook page, but of course web pages were fully public. You were in a public space, under your own name, limited only by your willingness to learn some very basic HTML. It's a completely different experience to being in a privatised space with its own content management tools, which you only have very limited user level access to.
• amelius 5y ago
  With the right blacklist, the old internet is still there.
  • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    It's considerably easier to maintain a whitelist of actual content, than attempt to maintain a blacklist of ever-expanding spam.
• papito 5y ago
  Please sign my guestbook...
  • marban 5y ago
    F5
  • 55555 5y ago
    There's still ~75,000 results on google for that string. At least a few thousand are still /guestbook/ pages.
  • RGamma 5y ago
    Thank your for this great content. It has really improved my insight. Buy Viagra ONLINE NOW !! Best viagra sildenafil pills medication 100% safe reliable online shop. Edit: I guess this ironic post may be indistinguishable from actual spam
    • DavidVoid 5y ago
      If your link wasn't directed to a video that is LOUD AS HELL then your comment would've been fine. Why not redirect to the regular Rickroll video instead of fucking with people's ears?
  • imiric 5y ago
    I miss guestbooks. It was great to see comments from visitors thanking the webmaster; it made it feel like each site had a small community around it. Nowadays such a concept is hidden behind CAPTCHAs or happens on external forums, so feels much more disconnected. Also, hit counters were rad.
    • jd3 5y ago
      > Also, hit counters were rad. https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html https://stuff.mit.edu/doc/counter-howto.html still works! I still use it alongside an old php guestbook script on my personal homepage.
• fabbari 5y ago
  I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".
  • cik 5y ago
    As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.
    • sneak 5y ago
      There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.
      • driscoll42 5y ago
        That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for. Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
      • mcherm 5y ago
        Sounds useful. Which such tools do you recommend?
        • sneak 5y ago
          youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-subtitles-of-videos-using-youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-...
    • emodendroket 5y ago
      I don’t understand. Has someone made it so you don’t have access to books anymore? The videos are additive.
• api 5y ago
  Has anyone tried Gemini? https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web as a simple information store. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech. The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade. (The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.) The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
  • ______- 5y ago
    https://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi https://alex.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-01-08-useless.gmi
  • EamonnMR 5y ago
    I got really into using gopher and Gemini a few years ago while playing on SDF, but I was never able to find anything that held my interest and I don't think I ended up setting up my own phlog. Maybe my dopamine circuits have been reamed out by years in the attention economy... Every once in a while I think about writing a gopher server that serves content out of a WordPress database...
• cm2187 5y ago
  It’s like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills, crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of altavista results before finding something useful, etc
  • npteljes 5y ago
    I'm not sure why you're downvoted, whatever there was, it was also abused or shit. Spam everywhere, banners as annoying as ever, the nice insights in forums buried between low-effort one-liners and the trendy extra spacious forum signatures, and you couldn't do much against the flashing banners because adblocking was hit or miss. It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing, it's a human experience, shared across time and culture. Oh yeah and the popups and the pop-unders can rot in hell. I can't believe how long it took for developers to control the situation.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• zubspace 5y ago
  I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended. This is one of my favourite songs now: [2] It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way. [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/ [2] https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU
  • ketanhwr 5y ago
    +1 for "Welcome to the Internet". I was thinking exactly of that song when I read the post!
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet" transformation into one phrase: Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).
    • sprkwd 5y ago
      What happens next?
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        Predicting the future is a more lucrative talent than summarizing the past, and I'm not that rich. :)
      • keiferski 5y ago
        If we ever get around to having a Basic Income, it may help this somewhat. Creators may feel less pushed to monetize the things they make.
• fnord77 5y ago
  the old internet still exists here and there.
• j_wtf_all_taken 5y ago
  Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap. As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit. Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
  • torh 5y ago
    I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      So who takes on the full-time job of curation? Could probably get donations eventually, but the portal would have to sufficiently succeed first.
      • MentallyRetired 5y ago
        Wiki? With a double approval before the edit happens?
        • robjan 5y ago
          Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was a great curated directory of the old internet despite SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is trying this but I haven't really looked much into it: https://curlie.org/en https://curlie.org/en
      • torh 5y ago
        Yeah, that would be the hard part. But in the spirit of the old internet, make it first and then, if it becomes popular, deal with it. Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  This is a classic. It was put up 18 years ago, and still has plenty of relevance: https://www.internetisshit.org https://www.internetisshit.org
  • globular-toast 5y ago
    This touches on something a bit different to the linked author which is people thinking the internet is something it is not. During my time at university I didn't initially use the library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it? Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was interested in. A real eye opener.
• keiferski 5y ago
  Million Short is a nice way to find some of these old websites. It lets you remove the first million search results from your query: https://millionshort.com https://millionshort.com The thing I really miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
  • unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    Which is another way of saying part of the problem is the search engines we use to discover the web. IMO, another piece is that Wordpress and similar engines homogenized design-- it's superior but always unsurprising.
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      That's the only problem. Google shows big player websites now because it has lost the ability to detect spam.
• barney54 5y ago
  This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good. So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
  • npteljes 5y ago
    I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.
    • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though. Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone! No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.
      • andrepd 5y ago
        How ironic. I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments. At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).
        • ryandrake 5y ago
          You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.
          • raffraffraff 5y ago
• prepend 5y ago
  Sadly, it’s the people. The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people. Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
  • grishka 5y ago
    Not quite. Companies decided to monetize the internet, and because they want to earn all the money in the world, they want as many people as possible to use the internet. So they dumb it down to make it "easier to use".
    • CyanBird 5y ago
      > Not quite You are just describing the same thing as OP said And it is not even a matter of direct monetization, but growth into monetization So yeah, OP is correct
  • vkk8 5y ago
    I think that most of the filtering happened because different communities operated on different platforms rather than a single huge one like Reddit or Facebook. A small, old time discussion forum for a specific interest in my (rather small) language had only perhaps a hundred active participants and another few hundred casual posters. In that sort of environment it is actually possible for the actives to get to know each other and have occasional live meetings, which builds a much better community. The threshold of participation is a lot higher since a new participant would first have to find the forum and then go through the registration process, both of which filter out people who were not actually that interested in the topic. In Reddit or Facebook, any "community" (the word in quotations because I don't think they actually are very communal) for even a mildly popular topic gets filled with thousands and thousands of posts from thousands or millions of casual participants. The quality of the posts get very low, it becomes impossible for anyone to read all of them and personalities of the participants don't matter at all.
• ms123 5y ago
  Come say hi at the Midnight (https://midnight.pub https://midnight.pub) if you miss the old internet. :) I built it for those reasons.
  • CalRobert 5y ago
    Oooh this reminds me of hoe.nu or anada or http://textfiles.com/ http://textfiles.com/ ! Thanks!
  • bitwize 5y ago
    Flashing back hard to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, where a bunch of William Gibson wannabes would write for each other as an audience, set within a "virtual bar" known as the Chatsubo.
• Lapsa 5y ago
  +1 for zombo com. you can do anything on zombo com!
• boboche 5y ago
  Remember the “back in my days” talk about some old stuff that you didn’t know or fully care about, or in some rare cases sparked some curiosity? Time is brutal and some of us have become that old dude. Scary. Cycle of life and evolution vs. nostalgia I guess. I’m cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem (https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-232-wifi-modem-for-under-10-using-esp8266-and-zimodem-firmware/ https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...) to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
  • StavrosK 5y ago
    That's a nice hack. Also, if you can power it from somewhere, you can use a bare ESP8266 module and put it in the serial enclosure to make it fully self-contained.
• mattlondon 5y ago
  To a certain extent, Wikipedia has replaced a lot of the old Geocities sites for a certain subject. The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :) The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading. Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• borrowcheckfml 5y ago
  I believe the main reason the internet has turned out this way is because of flawed economic incentives. It's a winner take all game ruled mostly by American corporations. The individual blogger, Usenet contributor, IRC moderator, or open source software creator never got a piece of the cake. As the internet became mainstream, the incentives to engage in these kind of activities vanished. I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned out very differently.
• hzay 5y ago
  We all miss the old internet. But what is to be done about it honestly?
  • leadingthenet 5y ago
    What made the early internet great was a combination of a somewhat high bar of entry, with the right type of people climbing it. I'm not entirely sure how to recreate that.
• decasteve 5y ago
  Paraphrased from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which he referred to books but I think he captures the sentiment universally: It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
• firekvz 5y ago
  It's just nostalgia You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
• scrutinizer80 5y ago
  There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based websites at: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
• superasn 5y ago
  Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think those were the days at the same time think everything contemporary has gone to the dogs? Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc). I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look). E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    There is a term, it’s called memberberries: https://youtu.be/OJoQJKTc3nM https://youtu.be/OJoQJKTc3nM
  • jeliotj 5y ago
    "Romantic", as a noun for a person who has an idealized view of reality, especially one that has passed.
  • uncertainrhymes 5y ago
    Old. I kid, but it does seem a function of age. I've always seen a dividing line between people whose fondest memories are in the past, versus how much they look forward to making new memories. I am right in the middle right now, and trying not to let it swing too far into curmudgeonness.
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      I'm in my late 40s and already feel that curmudgeon voice in my head. Ignoring it is harder and harder every year. New Internet sucks because it's too commercialized. New software sucks because it's all cloud based rather than native. New cars suck because you can't wrench them. New music sucks because everything sounds the same. New movies suck because they are made for people with a 5s attention span. Everything else sucks because it's more expensive than I remember. It feels truer and truer every year. My newest car is late 2000's and that's also around when I stopped subscribing to new stuff and adding new things to my home media library. I look at my parents who are kind of culturally stuck in the 60s-70s, and then see myself getting more and more stuck in 90s-00s. Happens to us all I guess.
• cdrini 5y ago
  I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons. As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons. Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
• akudha 5y ago
  I guess this is a good thread to ask - can you share your favorite, lesser known, hidden gem corners of the internet that are still around?
• krychu 5y ago
  It’s now mostly “top 10 whatever-you-search for”, or pages that generate automated comparisons. People unconsciously craved for authentic experiences after supermarkets, and chains. And same goes for the Internet.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  I blame Facebook and Apple. The old Internet was doing great right until the "Web 2.0" idea combined with everyone getting access to it. First app installed on their new iPhone? Facebook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...
• nix23 5y ago
  Hop over to https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
• zanethomas 5y ago
  Sadly the current state of the internet was predictable.
  • zanethomas 5y ago
    gotta wonder why that got a -1 not only was it predictable i am not the only one who predicted it
• thom 5y ago
  I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it. I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point. I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
  • erikbye 5y ago
    Yeah.. this younger generation you speak of will at some point lament about Discord or Snap with the same nostalgia. Maybe.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      They already do so for Vine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4
    • gentleman11 5y ago
      Won’t be long. Discord is in talks to be sold. I can see it becoming as scummy and invasive as LinkedIn or Facebook depending who buys it https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-more-014123558.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...
  • cloverich 5y ago
    Firstly I strongly agree with everything you said and also just wanted to say this was a very eloquent description that i hope i remember a year from now. I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we have also changed, and there’s nostalgia involved, and that the internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more ways we don’t appreciate but our kids will. However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before it, but it’s still a very limited experience. With facebook and reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don’t mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I suspect a bit of the frustration is some people’s inner belief that we could have something even better and somehow we are stuck.
• superkuh 5y ago
  There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of protocols set to allow individual humans to share information about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make a living. Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything. Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive. The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even drop them after a handful of years.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  If you miss the old internet, then don't be two-faced and support big corporations that centralize it and act as ministries of truth. That's not what the old internet was about.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ______- 5y ago
  Some Tor hidden services, or `Onionland` as it's called are very similar to the early web. For some reason a lot of the pages look like Angelfire[0]. I can't figure out why though. Perhaps the technical challenge of setting up an .onion was so hard that the webmasters were glad just to have something hosted and the bulk of their energy was spent on the hidden service and they didn't spend 5 hours creating a Javascript single page app in their free time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire
  • ashleyn 5y ago
    Many tor services eschew javascript because it's recommended not to have javascript enabled for services requiring anonymity/security (or, at least it was several years ago when I last checked). A lot of the sites will be very technically simple.
• causality0 5y ago
  Ah, back when you could safely ignore a racist tirade because it came from xXBone_Lord420Xx instead of John Smith from Accounting.
  • roachpepe 5y ago
    Ignorance is bliss, they say - it was still John, but you just didn't know it. Also, back then when it was allowed to have more imaginative names we were also able to have actually meaningful arguments online. Now you have to be in the line of "non-entity_#83591" without any opinions on anything to not offend anyone, and mostly voicing a different opinion results in a veritable s*tstorm that has no relevance to the topic that was discussed. SJWs and white-knighting simps... /sigh.
• erikbye 5y ago
  While I agree, there is still great content to find online, content of the type he refers to, it is just damn hard to find. To discover it I use alternative search engines and custom built crawlers. There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content. Used to be many of those, too.
• every 5y ago
  I had been in DOS for almost a decade when I got my first (dial-up) unix shell. I had been using ported unix utilities (MKS Toolkit) for some time so it was somewhat less painful than being thrown into the deep end. Now I have a terminal Debian container on my Chromebook and can wax nostalgic whenever I wish. And no, I do not conflate the internet with the web...
• hrtk 5y ago
  I have never seen the old internet but looking at the remains of it, it does appear really interesting. It is sad that the most popular search engine throws complete garbage at you when there still exist fabulous websites with real content.
• d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago
  What’s the alternative?
• flyinghamster 5y ago
  From the thread: > If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it easy. Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to figure out what was going wrong. Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
• goto11 5y ago
  Nostalgia never changes. In 20 years todays kids we will be lamenting how everything was better, more fresh, more fun and more innocent back in the 2020's.
  • Sleepytime 5y ago
    Based on the direction the web is going, it might continue to be true. Easily 90% of the bandwidth a typical webpage uses is trackers, battery/CPU drains, and assorted worthless fluff when some text and a few pictures would suffice just fine in the majority of cases.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  Would there be much interest in a large pubnix system? A high-trust social network of a sort, with the big system as a base?
• FireInsight 5y ago
  It is still possible to find great communities outside of the corporate monopolies and fun websites, you just have to dig and spend time on the internet. Sometimes it is hard to escape your bubble of watch-time-increasing or addiction-inducing algorithms of giant ad-filled sites. Some sites cause addiction due to community and some due to algorithm.
• Sr_developer 5y ago
  I miss web directories, like old Yahoo or Altavista. Does anyone still use or miss those ones?
• cortexio 5y ago
  Many people here mentioned it's notalgia. I dont think its the case. The internet was actually very different. It was WAAAAY more social than today. It revolved alot more around small communities. Even in gaming, we had dedicated servers in pretty much any game. Now, everything is automatic and you almost never meet the same people twice. It's just sad. We have reddit, but it's just a pool of people caring a tiny bit about everything instead of caring alot about 1 thing. The entire internet is over run by ads. It's all about bussinesses now, while back then, it was about communities and information. Im happy with the current internet, it's great. But we have lost alot of amazing things from the past. The old internet had things the new internet could only dream of. That's life.
• mdoms 5y ago
  For me, it's Reddit which has killed the internet. It (along with Facebook Groups) has sucked the oxygen out of internet communities. It favours recency, but only at the thread level, so new comments in old threads will never be seen but new threads with the same conversation will always pop up. This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot to offer.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 5y ago
  Missing it other times too: I Miss the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518 - Oct 2019 (306 comments) Tell HN: I miss the old internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552 - June 2018 (221 comments)
• carapace 5y ago
  The metaphor I came up with (and am proud enough of to flog here) is, "The Internet was Burning Man, now it's Bangkok."
• eecc 5y ago
  To each it’s own Eternal September
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  OK Boomer. You might remember this one: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet.html https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet... "Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast. Or just over played your part. Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of town. Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
• mymythisisthis 5y ago
  Any groups/clubs that engage in slow html? I like hand written html pages / don't like css.
• luke2m 5y ago
  I’m 14, and internet wise, I wish it was the 90s. I coded my website, blog occasionally, and get noticed once in a great while. I chat on open platforms, and like decentralization and freedom from corporations.
• Black101 5y ago
  Every time they add a new law to control the Internet, it more then likely is a bad day for everyone. (Except for the Gov. and corporations, of course.)
• diydsp 5y ago
  I haven't seen anyone mention my observations yet: The internet used to be a place we visited. Now we live there. Life was the abundant, fun thing, and like any mild intoxicant, 30-60 minutes of internet enhanced life. We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments. And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves grateful and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news). Now everyone is there (...Here!) all the time. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired. It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke. That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now nature becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.
• exabrial 5y ago
  In a rare moment of unity, blue + red is ready to (rightfully) break up the companies that destroyed the old internet.
• aziom23 5y ago
  I understand where the author is coming from. I run a Ministry website (Industrial music website), and have since 1994. Used to be, and still is the place to go for information, however it doesn't even show up in google searches, and yet generic lyrics sites, or other non-detailed sites do. It's a completely different time.
• stakkur 5y ago
  I miss the pre-Internet and especially the Time Before The Web. I can still hear the sound of my dial-up modem connecting to local BBSes. Telnetting into a MUD. Porn at 2k/second. Compuserve. Nostalgia? Yes. Was it better? No, just different. But the Internet and Web’s advent felt like waking up to see a freeway had been run through my residential street. And there was no going back. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of those days to someone who has only known the Web and Internet.
• sanmak 5y ago
  OP here: I didn't thought that this story will blow up. That's great. To clarify, I didn't wrote the article https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-internet.57195/ https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern.... A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it. I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-griffin-5f9e3316eb4e https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-... (not sure if it's him).
• xhfloz 5y ago
  I agree, and I think some comments are apt to note that we have as (grown, adult) people changed, and what we're seeking is really, on some level, a lost part our former selves (cc: In Search of Lost Time) —- at the same time, however, it _is_ pretty difficult to make these "garish" (as op puts it) spaces today. (Whether or not it's important that the internet is "garish" is a separate argument —- my short argument is I prefer, and would encourage, a greater ecodiversity in the internet landscape.) Anyway -- I think, despite HTML + CSS + VPS services still existing, the alternatives —- the Well-Styled & Gridded Squarespace sorts, and the plug-n-play platforms like Twitter/Facebook —- are so easy to use that we've come to have disproportionately more cleaned up, mall-like spaces than not. I think. About a month ago, I did a Show HN for https://mmm.page https://mmm.page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424) that was my (small) attempt at creating a platform/tool to help people more easily create these spaces. It's still in alpha, but the Discord (link on homepage) is quickly growing with ppl who have this same frustration. I have a feeling we'll see more and more counter-2010s-platforms platforms emerging over the next few years... platforms that try to correct our overcorrection toward cleanliness and order and optimization and profit, etc. etc.