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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 be

by 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.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  > 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. That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them? And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.
Black101 5y ago
> 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. I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.
- mycologos 5y ago
  You know this? As far as I can tell, it's still possible to find weird little sub-sub-sub-culture groups on the internet if you actually want to, and curious kids can do it. Maybe most kids aren't, but I don't think there was ever a time when most kids were exploring the full possibilities of the internet either. Put another way, maybe the fraction of internet-using kids doing stuff we'd think is cool was higher back in the day, but I think the fraction of kids in general doing stuff we'd think is cooler is higher now.
deeg 5y ago
I'm totally with you. Most of these lamentations are not people missing the old internet but their old selves, when everything was new and exciting. The OP rues the loss of Geocities but most of those sites were terrible and hard to read.
- hootbootscoot 5y ago
  I disagree. I miss Geocities, and, more recently, Myspace. Both let YOU, the user, customize and design your "home". So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS. The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.
emodendroket 5y ago
I completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid as what people are passing around today.
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  Have you ever lurked wallstreetbets? It seems (or seemed, before the Gamestop stuff brought many new people in) like a sorting function for the now-older SA/4chan demographic, and they're the most consistently hilarious people I've ever seen on the Internet (still toxic af, of course, but less-so than in the old days, like tastefully mellowed with age).
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Not for me but I probably would have liked it when I was younger.
jasode 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 [...] 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. Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  Time scales too. Remember how long the death March to Chicago was? It was 1993 and NT had finally shipped, Linux was slightly useful and this was OS/2’s era to shine as Microsoft had stagnated with no consumer releases of any meaning post Windows 3.1. 1993 finished, and 1994 came and went as well. IBM pushed out Warp as this was their chance to arrive early, and then it was late summer of 1995 that Chicago finally shipped. Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6 Time really telescopes
  - shrimp_emoji 5y ago
    I can't tell if this is a "getting older" thing or a "I got used to marking time with exponential growth in tech and tech-adjacent culture" thing. 2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online. Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding. 0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
trey-jones 5y ago
As far as I'm concerned it has nothing to do with joy. The internet enables a lot of things that can improve human knowledge and prowess. It also enables the opposite. This has always been the case, but I think the hindrances are progressing faster than the helpers. Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception: 1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging 2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years: I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue. Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media). There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  That free sharing of knowledge more or less destroyed the music industry, and commoditized many other things too. It’s extremely hard to make a living wage at many things now. We have a fake gig economy to replace middle class jobs
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Why do you say the music industry is destroyed? With streaming, music industry revenues are almost back to their late '90s peak, and the diversity of options today is incredible.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
hyperpallium2 5y ago
You used to be able to find high quality information, by people who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads; and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this. Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).
- andyfleming 5y ago
  The landscape has changed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone’s preferred medium to consume, but there’s definitely good and niche content.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    It’s weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with “the internet.”
  - keithnz 5y ago
    I think a lot of expert content is now mostly video content. A lot of the time I'm finding I'm just typing things into youtube rather than google if I'm after some kind of expertise.
    - hyperpallium2 5y ago
      The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video. Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either. Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.
  - deleted 5y ago
jiofih 5y ago
> 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. But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  BBS forums are still in abundance. Many of them seem relatively clunkier now and are niche, but they exist. And they all end up starting Discord servers.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Discord servers seem to be the place where it is happening right now. There are still some community forums, and maybe Facebook groups. On a more public scale, there are some well managed subreddits. Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.
- v_london 5y ago
  Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared. http://www.reason.so/ http://www.reason.so/
  - vort3 5y ago
    Make sure you post it to Show HM when it's ready, I would definitely check it out.
foobarian 5y ago
The thing that's even easier to forget is that back then, a much smaller fraction of people were online and thus we had a very special self-selected group. Going on the Internet basically guaranteed you'd find someone interesting. Then the commercialization happened (Al Gore remember?), AOL hordes came in, trolls came in, jocks figured out how to use it, and it went down the toilet from there.
- jghn 5y ago
  It's always September somewhere on the Internet ...
jakelazaroff 5y ago
This crystallized for me during a discussion about which websites people missed, when someone said “I would say Purevolume but there’s nothing that it did that SoundCloud or Bandcamp don’t do just as well”. I realized that it’s not the websites I’m nostalgic about — it’s the people, the culture and my younger self.
- timmytokyo 5y ago
  Nostalgia is not really about the places and things you're reminiscing about; it's more about remembering the positive way you felt when you experienced those places and things in the past. We miss those feelings and want to recapture them in some way, but we can't. That's why nostalgia is painful in a strange, indescribable way.
Black101 5y ago
This younger generation would be happy with an Internet that would constantly stream video content that they have ANY control over (AKA TV) ... that doesn't mean that it is better... WTF am I reading...
alerighi 5y ago
To me the main change that internet got is this: the old internet was like a parallel universe, you picked up a random username, and no matter who you were in real life, you could socialize and share interest with other people without any prejudice. This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook. In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people! In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason). The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long... Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.
derefr 5y ago
> 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. Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.) And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.) (Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)
- starshadowx2 5y ago
  Roblox also, maybe moreso - https://felipepepe.medium.com/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of-virtual-worlds-muds-mmorpgs-12e41c4cb9b https://felipepepe.medium.com/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of...
  - derefr 5y ago
    Roblox is indeed a MUD, but I would argue that Roblox contains too much varied niche "game content" to meet the needs of kids looking for a platform for mediated socialization. Not enough of the people who are playing Roblox are playing it just to socialize. You get more of the MMO experience (or, I guess, the "social multi-game lobby" experience, ala NeoPets), where no strangers want to stop and talk OOC; they only want to engage with the game elements themselves or with your character via RP. Everyone's there to see or do some novel-to-them thing. Nobody's treating it like an old, familiar place to hang out. Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden. (Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)
gentleman11 5y ago
Almost every blog I used to read 10–15 years ago has transitioned from a hobby to a form of content marketing or self-branding social media get-followers game. In that sense, a lot of the magic has disappeared. Maybe new people have taken their place and I just haven’t found them yet
TaupeRanger 5y ago
It's a bit of a downer response. I think there's plenty to get excited about on the internet still, and I'm in my 30s. You don't have to accept boredom/apathy as a consequence of aging, although the catalysts will change. I don't expect an adult to scream with jubilation about toy trains.
- thom 5y ago
  That’s not really what I was trying to say, but perhaps I’ve still not mastered the medium after all these years, eh? I founded a company with people I met on Twitter who were all doing the same hobby, scraping data from the web and trying to make meaning out of it. The company started as a blog (remember those!) So yes, still excited by the Internet. But I’m not going to beat myself up (nor the youth of today) trying to recapture the feeling of the 90s web through the eyes of a teenage me, because I think that’s impossible.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
I don't think I've seen a more succinct display of this as in The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart was lambasting Sean Hannity. "You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"
ashtonkem 5y ago
To paraphrase what an old boss said “they just happened to make the best music when I was the most emotionally vulnerable”.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
The internet had some different qualities when it was something that no-one had ever grown up with.
lwhi 5y ago
You have a point, but ultimately the internet is now almost entirely profit driven and largely controlled by a few key players. The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.

by thom 5y ago

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.

JasonFruit 5y ago
> 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. That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them? And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.

Black101 5y ago

> 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. I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.

mycologos 5y ago
You know this? As far as I can tell, it's still possible to find weird little sub-sub-sub-culture groups on the internet if you actually want to, and curious kids can do it. Maybe most kids aren't, but I don't think there was ever a time when most kids were exploring the full possibilities of the internet either. Put another way, maybe the fraction of internet-using kids doing stuff we'd think is cool was higher back in the day, but I think the fraction of kids in general doing stuff we'd think is cooler is higher now.

deeg 5y ago

I'm totally with you. Most of these lamentations are not people missing the old internet but their old selves, when everything was new and exciting. The OP rues the loss of Geocities but most of those sites were terrible and hard to read.

hootbootscoot 5y ago
I disagree. I miss Geocities, and, more recently, Myspace. Both let YOU, the user, customize and design your "home". So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS. The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.

emodendroket 5y ago

I completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid as what people are passing around today.

shrimp_emoji 5y ago
Have you ever lurked wallstreetbets? It seems (or seemed, before the Gamestop stuff brought many new people in) like a sorting function for the now-older SA/4chan demographic, and they're the most consistently hilarious people I've ever seen on the Internet (still toxic af, of course, but less-so than in the old days, like tastefully mellowed with age).
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Not for me but I probably would have liked it when I was younger.

jasode 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 [...] 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. Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792

scruffyherder 5y ago
Time scales too. Remember how long the death March to Chicago was? It was 1993 and NT had finally shipped, Linux was slightly useful and this was OS/2’s era to shine as Microsoft had stagnated with no consumer releases of any meaning post Windows 3.1. 1993 finished, and 1994 came and went as well. IBM pushed out Warp as this was their chance to arrive early, and then it was late summer of 1995 that Chicago finally shipped. Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6 Time really telescopes
- shrimp_emoji 5y ago
  I can't tell if this is a "getting older" thing or a "I got used to marking time with exponential growth in tech and tech-adjacent culture" thing. 2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online. Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding. 0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

trey-jones 5y ago

As far as I'm concerned it has nothing to do with joy. The internet enables a lot of things that can improve human knowledge and prowess. It also enables the opposite. This has always been the case, but I think the hindrances are progressing faster than the helpers. Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception: 1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging 2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years: I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue. Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media). There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.

gentleman11 5y ago
That free sharing of knowledge more or less destroyed the music industry, and commoditized many other things too. It’s extremely hard to make a living wage at many things now. We have a fake gig economy to replace middle class jobs
- jefftk 5y ago
  Why do you say the music industry is destroyed? With streaming, music industry revenues are almost back to their late '90s peak, and the diversity of options today is incredible.
  - gentleman11 5y ago

hyperpallium2 5y ago

You used to be able to find high quality information, by people who loved the topic. Now the top search results are SEO commercial sites; the old sites are gone or filled with ads; and the new sites... there aren't any new sites like this. Maybe stackexchanges are the closest (recently sold).

andyfleming 5y ago
The landscape has changed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone’s preferred medium to consume, but there’s definitely good and niche content.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  It’s weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with “the internet.”
- keithnz 5y ago
  I think a lot of expert content is now mostly video content. A lot of the time I'm finding I'm just typing things into youtube rather than google if I'm after some kind of expertise.
  - hyperpallium2 5y ago
    The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video. Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either. Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.
- deleted 5y ago

jiofih 5y ago

> 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. But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.

Apocryphon 5y ago
BBS forums are still in abundance. Many of them seem relatively clunkier now and are niche, but they exist. And they all end up starting Discord servers.
GuB-42 5y ago
Discord servers seem to be the place where it is happening right now. There are still some community forums, and maybe Facebook groups. On a more public scale, there are some well managed subreddits. Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.
v_london 5y ago
Hey, I'm currently building a website that I think would fit well with what you're looking for. It's called Reason, and it's designed to help find small (3-10 users per chat or so) group chats about the topics you're interested in. I started working on this specifically because the casual, small places to meet like-minded people on the internet have kind of disappeared. http://www.reason.so/ http://www.reason.so/
- vort3 5y ago
  Make sure you post it to Show HM when it's ready, I would definitely check it out.

foobarian 5y ago

The thing that's even easier to forget is that back then, a much smaller fraction of people were online and thus we had a very special self-selected group. Going on the Internet basically guaranteed you'd find someone interesting. Then the commercialization happened (Al Gore remember?), AOL hordes came in, trolls came in, jocks figured out how to use it, and it went down the toilet from there.

jghn 5y ago
It's always September somewhere on the Internet ...

jakelazaroff 5y ago

This crystallized for me during a discussion about which websites people missed, when someone said “I would say Purevolume but there’s nothing that it did that SoundCloud or Bandcamp don’t do just as well”. I realized that it’s not the websites I’m nostalgic about — it’s the people, the culture and my younger self.

timmytokyo 5y ago
Nostalgia is not really about the places and things you're reminiscing about; it's more about remembering the positive way you felt when you experienced those places and things in the past. We miss those feelings and want to recapture them in some way, but we can't. That's why nostalgia is painful in a strange, indescribable way.

Black101 5y ago

This younger generation would be happy with an Internet that would constantly stream video content that they have ANY control over (AKA TV) ... that doesn't mean that it is better... WTF am I reading...

alerighi 5y ago

To me the main change that internet got is this: the old internet was like a parallel universe, you picked up a random username, and no matter who you were in real life, you could socialize and share interest with other people without any prejudice. This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook. In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people! In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason). The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long... Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.

derefr 5y ago

> 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. Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.) And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.) (Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)

starshadowx2 5y ago
Roblox also, maybe moreso - https://felipepepe.medium.com/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of-virtual-worlds-muds-mmorpgs-12e41c4cb9b https://felipepepe.medium.com/roblox-is-a-mud-the-history-of...
- derefr 5y ago
  Roblox is indeed a MUD, but I would argue that Roblox contains too much varied niche "game content" to meet the needs of kids looking for a platform for mediated socialization. Not enough of the people who are playing Roblox are playing it just to socialize. You get more of the MMO experience (or, I guess, the "social multi-game lobby" experience, ala NeoPets), where no strangers want to stop and talk OOC; they only want to engage with the game elements themselves or with your character via RP. Everyone's there to see or do some novel-to-them thing. Nobody's treating it like an old, familiar place to hang out. Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden. (Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)

gentleman11 5y ago

Almost every blog I used to read 10–15 years ago has transitioned from a hobby to a form of content marketing or self-branding social media get-followers game. In that sense, a lot of the magic has disappeared. Maybe new people have taken their place and I just haven’t found them yet

TaupeRanger 5y ago

It's a bit of a downer response. I think there's plenty to get excited about on the internet still, and I'm in my 30s. You don't have to accept boredom/apathy as a consequence of aging, although the catalysts will change. I don't expect an adult to scream with jubilation about toy trains.

thom 5y ago
That’s not really what I was trying to say, but perhaps I’ve still not mastered the medium after all these years, eh? I founded a company with people I met on Twitter who were all doing the same hobby, scraping data from the web and trying to make meaning out of it. The company started as a blog (remember those!) So yes, still excited by the Internet. But I’m not going to beat myself up (nor the youth of today) trying to recapture the feeling of the 90s web through the eyes of a teenage me, because I think that’s impossible.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

I don't think I've seen a more succinct display of this as in The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart was lambasting Sean Hannity. "You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"

ashtonkem 5y ago

To paraphrase what an old boss said “they just happened to make the best music when I was the most emotionally vulnerable”.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

The internet had some different qualities when it was something that no-one had ever grown up with.

lwhi 5y ago

You have a point, but ultimately the internet is now almost entirely profit driven and largely controlled by a few key players. The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.