8 ms·
I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we wit
by SamPatt 3y ago
I don't know the whole story, but this seems very genuine. It echoes a sentiment I imagine many people my age feel, where the magic of the early internet we witnessed during our coming of age feels threatened.
I feel for him, and hope he's able to move onto other projects which aren't as stressful.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoIt’s possible to have multiple periods of “magic” as the internet improves in capability over time and people find new ways to use it.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoThat’s a good point. I remember when Facebook genuinely allowed people to connect with others whom they hadn’t seen for years. MySpace before it is the source of nostalgia for a lot of my peers. Twitter had many genuine interactions between popular celebrities and their fans. Any of these things are likely to be magical to someone. (Not sure what it means that these examples are all approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active users. That’s actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately; most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with the platform.)
- cortesoft 3y agoI find it interesting that the "magical period" seems to be determined by your age. For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009. For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up. In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there? It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything to do with the technology.
- paulcole 3y agoYeah it’s like how my dad says SNL peaked when he was 18 and I say it peaked when I was 18.
- johntiger1 3y agoYep, each generation thinks they're special. But I think the early internet was different since it had literally just went from 0->1
- adamomada 3y agoIMHO the early internet was different in one important way - you used to have to know how to use a computer that was fairly complex to even get online vs mashing glass on a touchscreen device that is always connected that you have approximately 0% idea of how it works That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today
- iopq 3y agoI went online in 1999 and it was almost always online DSL, so the idiots were just as bad back then. Those that didn't have DSL had AOL which is one click to get online
- fragmede 3y agoYeah but even then they had to work to escape AOL's walled garden, which mostly served to keep them in, rather than the rest of us out.
- ekianjo 3y ago1999 is not early internet by any measure...
- iopq 3y ago1999 is closer to the invention of the internet than present day TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs didn't exist until 1989
- joshspankit 3y agoSince you made your statement with quite a lot of condescension it’s morally difficult to seem to agree with any part of it. But, separately, my own experience is that there is a particular quality to those places where people need to pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still happening all over the place. I played against highly-skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds inside certain pay-only doors. I think the early internet was just that effect on a scale that was more impactful to the public where now everything is so siloed and fragmented. Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem like people are “idiots now” but humans are humans and I don’t think that’s changed in the last few decades.
- SamPatt 3y agoYou may be right. The author mentioned being in their 30s, and so am I, but I'm at the tail end and they're probably at the start. Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.
- sroussey 3y agoSame here. That’s when we were running a forum hosting site and it was great—until it wasn’t. Slowly then suddenly as they say.
- AddLightness 3y agoI agree and I think this era absolutely will be remembered fondly by kids who grew up with it. The streamer/YouTuber culture is massive and to many young people now that makes up a big part of their life. Many people are already waxing poetic about the "golden eras" of sites like Twitch.
- sroussey 3y agoOr JustinTV… ;)
- ethanbond 3y agoAlso would comport with the explanation that the Internet just gets worse and worse. Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our childhood form of the Internet. I do think there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.
- lazide 3y agoAnyone who thinks the internet ‘just get’s worse’ never had a full Usenet feed in the 90’s. shudder
- ethanbond 3y agoI don't mean "just gets worse" as in it gets worse on every dimension :)
- Mtinie 3y ago/ alt.binaries.* enters the chat
- lazide 3y agoAt one point I was doing support calls for a small regional ISP, and a customer called in about some alt.binaries. group with bestiality in the name. Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended. I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.
- Mtinie 3y agoThat was a definite trial by fire period of accessing the internet. I imagine there exist similar areas today but I’m experienced enough to know I don’t need to go in search of them.
- dragonwriter 3y agoHonestly, 1994-1996ish web was in some ways worse -- yes, there was horrible stuff on Usenet, but you could avoid the worst of the text stuff pretty easily, and to be assaulted by any media other than text you had to expend at least a little effort. In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.
- FullstakBlogger 3y agoI think this is essentially a false dichotomy. It's possible to experience the loss of both of those eras, as well as the current one whenever it passes. There's no inherent conflict in wanting them all back.
- mightybyte 3y agoThis is an interesting idea. For me the magical period of the internet was also the nineties to mid-naughts. But I'm not sure. It doesn't seem entirely age-relative to me. It seems like something changed. I really have no way to say for sure. In fact, I was recently talking to someone a couple decades or so younger about similar topics and he indeed seemed to have more of the age-relative view. I plan on talking to him more at some point to get a better understanding of his view. But I don't think the two ideas are mutually exclusive. I'm sure many people have a magical period of wonder where their world is expanding. To be perfectly honest, in some ways I've continued to have that even in recent years. There's a really cool corner of YouTube that has tons of incredible content that IMO is revolutionizing education. But I also feel that as a species we humans haven't figured out how to handle the powers of communication that the internet has made available to us. In an age of unprecedented access to the world's information, misinformation still abounds (no matter which side of the political aisle you happen to be on). I don't know that anyone has any really compelling ideas about how to deal with this, but I think it's a significant issue that we all collectively need to work on. The question is, will we be able to come together and do so or have we already been irrevocably torn too far apart?
- flkiwi 3y agoNon-technical, non-idealistic, non-visionary (pick two of three) people starting putting glossy red ribbons on websites with pink lettering and called it Web 2.0. A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit has done damage. And that’s a range that encompasses everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.
- rexpop 3y agoThis is a common sentiment echoed regarding many different topics across the human experience, so I want to, for the sake of discussion, try and articulate exactly what are the two sides of this scale that might be worth debating. David Putnam defined "intra-" and "intercohort" like this in Bowling Alone. > Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change—from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers—is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change “intracohort,” because the change is detectable within each age cohort. > The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change “intercohort,” because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable. I almost want to say that you're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one's life and not, conversely, an intercohort phenomenon through which generational attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us. On second thought, I don't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist. Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.
- iopq 3y agoBack then you could post to Craigslist for an anonymous hookup and play poker online for money. Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and successfully shittified them. Social media in general has been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API access since they don't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda
- thegrim22 3y agoAlso back then every other post wasn't full of political echo chamber warfare like your jab about russian propaganda you just couldn't resist throwing in.
- iopq 3y agoTwitter owners did not engage in promotion of conspiracy theories back then
- pauldenton 3y agoIf we look at the Durham Report all the claims that Trump was colluding with Russia were infact a Conspiracy Theory. Like Iraq having WMDs in 2003 was a Conspiracy Theory.
- iopq 3y agoConspiracy and conspiracy theory are not quite the same. Some things are just false claims. A conspiracy theory usually refers to something that has a semblance of consensus. The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco for the protest I went to.
- ekianjo 3y agoFunny how some conspiracy theories end up actual being factual conspiracies. Remember when your news sources told you that 100% covid did not come from a lab?
- hanzmanner 3y agoYou are right, people have the same sentiment in regards to many other things. A great example is music. The golden age is often the music you and your generation grew up with. Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.
- lettergram 3y agoTbf on a downward decline, 2009 might still be the highlight, just because someone didn’t experience 1995. For what it’s worth, I always point out that my parents fondest pre-30s memories we’re drinking, smoking and blasting music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in prison…
- amerkhalid 3y ago> For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up. > In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there? I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us. So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.
- joshspankit 3y agoI heard something similar: that nostalgia is mostly what was popular when you were 12
- ajmurmann 3y agoIt's the eternal September and regular nostalgia
- dotnet00 3y agoWhile you have a point there since certain aspects of the internet experienced by each generation were different, I think a shared part of it is just the sheer sanitization of the 'open' internet that has happened since the mid/late-2000s. That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you. This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option. So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.
- cool_dude85 3y ago>That aspect is not coming back in any way for the generation growing up on the current internet, unless they go deep into techie circles to 'frontier' places like certain corners of the fediverse or matrix, the only internet they'll know is the heavily sanitized corporate-run advertiser friendly side where everyone's walking on eggshells because a power-tripping moderator or AI has complete power over you. Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.
- tinycombinator 3y agoThere's definitely a bunch of crazy unmoderated stuff going down in those places, but it does seem more underground and out of the way unless you specifically look for it. Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.
- 3y ago
- generationP 3y agoHow much was there to find on the internet in the 90s? I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no shortage of good ones). As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It's only recently that I see most "culture production" locked in perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I wish I could point to some places still on the rise other than arXiv and LibGen... What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Swizec 3y ago> What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s? IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation with folks in your area. That was cool. I’m too young for usenet, but I’ve been hearing about how cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently the web never quite managed to capture that magic.
- generationP 3y agoAh, IRC. Yeah, I came too late to make new friends there (though it was still good for keeping in contact with old ones). Still managed to enjoy the usenet, although the "big" groups were already full of spam.
- bawolff 3y agoAnd before that people were pointing to 1993 as the date the old internet died https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"
- baby 3y agoI don’t think it has been determined by your age. Internet freedom and its wild wild west aspect has been vanishing gradually since its creation. Everybody has witnessed it.
- yashasolutions 3y agoIt's also a question of what we call "magical" The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different from how the Internet was in 2010. I enjoyed both. I could call both of them "magical periods". Just different. One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.
- taneq 3y agoAnything before you were ~10 is "old", things between ~15 and ~20 are natural and right, things between ~20 and ~35 are modern and exciting, and anything that occurs after that is proportionately unnecessary and annoying. :P /shakes-cane-at-cloud-infrastructure
- nandhinianand 3y agoI think it comes down the exploration vs maximization/exploitation instincts that grows and changes as a human being grows. For ex: teens/early adults has more exploration instinct.(it's a hypothesis that's true for at least some sections of human society, not sure how far it generalizes). For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got filled with bots) The real question is what will a teenager/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives?? I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.
- MiddleEndian 3y agoI'm sure that's partially the case, but not entirely here (IMO). I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as one is wont to do. But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out "Spy Mode" some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two other random people would talk about it. It was fun and chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites that used to be more fun. The random matching combined with the private one-on-one conversation structure had an advantage of not having a popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in their conversation. Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular Omegle. (I've never used the video chat so I have no insight there) Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was going to collapse soon anyway. I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in real life, and honestly I don't think we would get along in person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are better for it. But I think that this truly is a material loss for the internet.
- pxoe 3y agothey might, either about pre-ai internet, or the early ai / early widespread ai, when it was widely available and accessible, and not (yet?) legislated into oblivion or hasn't yet destroyed entire industries
- shusaku 3y agoThis is kind of revisionist history though. The early 2010s were not so long ago. Nobody talked about Omegle as some magical safe place of real human connection. It was always viral because of the edginess and danger. There were genuinely good stories you would see about it, but the impact was strong precisely because everyone knew the dark side.
- CSMastermind 3y agoI had that same feeling with the AOL chatrooms of the early 00s and to a lesser extent forums around that time and after. So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.
- bloaf 3y agoI think you can see the same thing about many sites that got popular around that time. People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist. For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity. My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible. It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.
- eddiewithzato 3y agoThe magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> The magic died when majority of the population got access thanks to the iPhone and androids that came. ...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- animitronix 3y agoSo that's what Green Day was signing about
- lwhi 3y agoIt was when people learnt how to make money from the internet. The corporatisation of net ruined it. Not much can survive the incentive of profit.
- duxup 3y agoJust today I was dreaming of how awesome it would be if you could just somehow filter "good sports" and just open a game up for online play without having to think about all the bad behavior. How amazing would that be? In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and enjoy how cool everything was.
- bendbro 3y agoTry skiing or hiking. Basically anything with high enough effort bar or cost bar is a sufficient proxy for this filter.
- fragmede 3y agohiking is an interesting one to choose. wherever I've gone hiking, I've come across garbage which had to have been left by a fellow hiker. or a bear, I suppose. but which is to say, that effort level bar isn't high enough.
- fortran77 3y agoI remember the magic of USENET! I'd posted a question about how do do some basic piano repair, and got an answer from Marvin Minsky! Who knew he played the piano?!
- wredue 3y ago[flagged]