7 ms·

A nostalgic look back at when the Internet still felt joyful

104 points by peutetre 3y ago

aksss 3y ago
The internet can still be joyful. Pay DO a pittance, make and tend a website, creating part of the internet you wish existed. Work at ignoring more of the major sites on a daily basis. Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions, just do you. Share what you’re passionate about, tend that garden for its own awesomeness (and back it up;). Build connections to others with shared interest, and who are also contributing to the Internet you wish existed. The internet kind of sucks now because everything must be huge or die, if it doesn’t “hit” it’s considered a waste of time. That is not the Internet I was captivated by in the nineties.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  Very much this. Also, connect directly with others, share honestly, be kind, and try to be helpful.
- wyclif 3y ago
  Start a blog (on your own domain). Write an essay. Stop doomscrolling. Provide RSS. Wean yourself from the news. Share your discoveries. Be weird.
- exitb 3y ago
  That easy to say, but it needs to be understood that nowadays, contrary to how it worked 20-25 years ago, if you don’t actively and continuously promote your content in some social media, no one, not a single person will ever find it. Google will never direct traffic to small websites unless you’re extremely specific. You might as well publish it in a HTML file on your hard drive.
  - bionsystem 3y ago
    You can still build tiny communities. I joined several discord servers when interested to certain topics in the past, with anonymous people still sharing about them. And a couple of phpbb forums with < 300 subscribers. I'm sure if I were into even more niche stuff I would find people interested in writing and reading about the topic. Also youtube is quite good for certain stuffs.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Then don't rely on Google to "direct traffic" to you. In fact, don't worry about traffic at all! Hence, OP's advice: > Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions This is the root of what sucks about everything on the Internet these days: Everyone measures the success of whatever they are doing using engagement crap like "number of likes" and "daily active users" and "number of GitHub stars." Junk metrics. Stop worrying about building an audience. Stop worrying about your follower count. Stop obsessing over pointless things like clout and karma. And, most of all, never use the word "monetize." Just tend your little garden, and if people happen to visit, great.
    - JoeJonathan 3y ago
      Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.
  - serf 3y ago
    this isn't new, we had to make efforts back then too. the efforts were different, sign up for webrings, word of mouth, whatever -- but it was still effort. but as parent said : lack of an audience shouldn't be a reason to avoid doing a thing. Not every thing needs to find a market.
    - exitb 3y ago
      As an early teenager, in late 90s, I built a crappy non-English website on a topic that was covered by only a few other sites in that language. It received a healthy amount of traffic for a few years, as anyone researching that topic was bound to end up visiting. As you say, I did add it to a few catalogues and exchanged a few banners, but that was it. And hey, I’m not angry about it. Anyone visiting Wikipedia nowadays is MUCH better served. But the vibe of being a “webmaster” has definitely changed.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Thats's correct, part of the reason the Internet feels low quality is because it is. Garbage content abounds because you need to put something out every day, or at least every week, so that the Gooogle/FB algos don't drop you from their discoverability index. Even the biggest TV shows did not put out more than 24 episodes in a season. A solo blogger/artist is required to put out twice that many pieces of content in a year. Can't expect the quality of that to be very good.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Social media had a built in feedback mechanism that personal websites don't. We can't even have a 'sign my guestbook' feature without having to deal with spam moderation.
yinser 3y ago
I thank Midnight in Paris for showing me how cringe golden age thinking is.
- sob727 3y ago
  Surely you can discern the aspects of the internet experience that have degraded vs those that have improved?
  - serf 3y ago
    i'm not oblivious to the improvements, but the nostalgia goggles always forget a lot of basic experiences. being disconnected from dialup because someone picked up a phone, being punted from a chatroom with racist shit because rate limits and a moderation staff don't meaningfully exist. File sharing where the main effort is to rename malicious executable into whatever the newest Britney Spears album is called for mass distribution. the pop-up wars, a new remote code exploit weekly.. I could keep going with the bad parts forever, but my point is that when people talk about geocities and napster they forget about what a shitshow the rest of computing was for the majority; this didn't stop them from partaking -- it was still amazing , but it was the Wild West in a lot more ways than it even is today, and I say that as someone who still views the net in that regard.
    - dada78641 3y ago
      It's good to take off the nostalgia glasses and to be honest about how things were far from perfect in the past, but I feel like people sometimes overcompensate when doing so. Frankly, things weren't that bad most of the time. I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today. Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost. You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.
grishka 3y ago
The internet can still be joyful as long as you make the necessary effort to avoid algorithmic content.
- elric 3y ago
  I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is. We used to make websites for fun. We could host them for free on platforms like Geocities. The only cost to us, the webmasters, was our time. We weren't out to make money. Then came ubiquitous advertising. And affiliate links. And paid content. Suddenly every website was a potential moneymaker. SEO became a thing, so we could drive more traffic and increase ad revenue. Back in the early 2000s, I got weekly emails from ad companies offering money to inject banners on my websites. Free web hosting that's as easy as Geocities was is hard to find these days. But web hosting has become dirt cheap (so cheap that I shut down my hosting business, as I can't compete on price, and no one cares about service). I wish websites could go back to being labours of love, rather than being side hustles.
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    Some people still do blogs, youtube channels, or website for fun. It's just increasingly difficult to find them. Bypassing the algorithmic feeds is hard. Youtube has made it even harder for people to share their assessment of videos by suppressing the dislike count. It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    The cracks were already showing by 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since. But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor. Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink. So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.
carabiner 3y ago
All nostalgia is a longing for youth.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  What if a young person wants the old internet back?
  - vaylian 3y ago
    This. There is something timeless about the '90s internet. Personal websites were invitations to visit someone's digital home and have a look around. The designs were quirky and personal, not standardized and sleek.
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      except everything is this way now too... design post iPhone is a lazy subconscious push toward boring, in the guise of culture, but is really just greed stripping culture out of everything to maximize profits.
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    Then that isn’t nostalgia
  - sublinear 3y ago
    The "old internet" definitely had the same feeling of malaise hanging over it.
    - UberFly 3y ago
      It had hopeful excitement hanging over it. A lot of wonder too. The malaise came later.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    What does a young person know about the old interney to want it back?
walterbell 3y ago
NeoCities hosts free sites and can be used with your favorite static site generator, https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=featured https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=featured We are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations. This allows us to base all our decisions on making the best possible web building experience for you, rather than on appeasing ad companies.
HermanMartinus 3y ago
The community on Bear is amazing and weird and thoughtful and joyful. There are still enclaves where this is true online. https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev
- Sn0wCoder 3y ago
  Wow, thanks for the link.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  Hello Herman, I like your project! I noticed that you are working on LLM tutoring projects for parts of Africa. Do you have a link to more information for that? Want help?
tlarkworthy 3y ago
In my house we have minecraft Lan parties for 8 year old girls. Minecraft is quite good for this because it's such a deep game that realtime help is very useful and the girls are not really able to research on the net, So the social aspect becomes more important to them. Also minecraft is quite cooperative anyway. Also VR parties are sorta similar in vibe to LAN parties too. I feel this stuff is sorta alive still and it was niche in the 90s too.
- OccamsMirror 3y ago
  Do they bring their own computers or do you supply them? This is great and something I would love to do with my kids once they’re old enough.
  - doublepg23 3y ago
    The nice thing about Minecraft bedrock is it runs on many platforms that can all play LAN together, like phones, tablets, or consoles.
  - tlarkworthy 3y ago
    they bring laptops. We play Java and we have a server (which is a VM I toggle up and down so only pay storage long term)
renegat0x0 3y ago
Some places where you could search for personal blogs https://nownownow.com/ https://nownownow.com/ https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/ https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/ https://nekoweb.org/ https://nekoweb.org/ https://blogs.hn/ https://blogs.hn/ https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/
- mrd3v0 3y ago
  https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ is one of my favourites too.
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  To add some: https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://uses.tech/ https://uses.tech/ Taking the time to add some /about, /ideas /now, and /uses to be on these directories doesn't take very long, can recommend.
- rpastuszak 3y ago
  The list I use for my research and weekly newsletter: https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content I also made a small browser extension for exploring / binging on indie web content: https://untested.sonnet.io/Aye-aye https://untested.sonnet.io/Aye-aye
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    You seem to have captured a lot of the links in these replies on your page. Now I suddenly want be able to set my "Home Page" to some random quirky site.
    - Kye 3y ago
      Maybe this is close enough: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
knorker 3y ago
There are still LAN parties. So much easier to go now that CRTs are gone. Biggest one is https://dreamhack.com/summer/lan/ https://dreamhack.com/summer/lan/
- xandrius 3y ago
  Never liked huge LAN parties. The best is when you are 20-30 people, everyone knows someone of the others but almost nobody knows everyone (yet). 2-3 nights over a weekend at a third location. That's gold to me.
  - knorker 3y ago
    Sure, I didn't mean to imply that the bigger the better, but only that "it's still a big thing". It would be less impressive to say "LAN parties still exist. Two friends came over yesterday and we nerded out".
    - xandrius 3y ago
      I would actually find it rather impressive if you told me you played a game from the last 5 years with said 2 friends.
bionsystem 3y ago
My mum dug out last year some 20yo pictures (actual pictures on glass paper) of me and my friends at a LAN party, we used to do several of those every year. I was never much into pictures but damn that felt crazy to see them.
0dayz 3y ago
Technically this article doesn't touch upon the internet and instead Lan parties... Which honestly is fine. I think what is missing in today's web is the feeling of independent "cooperative" communities.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  LAN parties are actually semantically closer to the internet than websites are
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Nothing wrong with LAN parties but they were a tiny subculture back in the Counterstrike days, not comparable to the web that many more people were engrossed in years before social media.
wheresmyshadow 3y ago
This brings some memories. I still remember LAN party we had where we played first Red Faction game... in an internet cafe! Cray times.
sob727 3y ago
The article brings back fond memories. We had the feeling of being part of something new and exciting. This was also a good way to combine fun and learning. The skills I developed then set me on a path to (relative) success which I'm not sure I'd have found otherwise. Weird that CNN couldn't help inserting a race comment in a story that has nothing to do with it (case in point: we had a black kid in our group of friends doing LAN parties, and we never thought of him as black, he was just one of us, a human being whom you'd define across infinitely many dimensions, and definitely not just skin color).
- beardedwizard 3y ago
  Does this single anecdote change the actual data evident in the photos? I'm sure you didn't wake up and think of excluding anyone, but clearly this selected for white males as many activities do. Nobody is asking anyone to feel guilty about it, cnn is just reporting the facts.
  - Wolfenstein98k 3y ago
    True, it's a fact. It's also a fact that few of these people were jocks. So it obviously selected for non-jocks, maybe even for geeks. Now why didn't CNN feel the need to point that out? Why did they choose to only comment on race, as if any participant chose gaming because other people behind screens might be <outgroup race>?
    - commentenjoyer 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 23B1 3y ago
    It's CNN selectively reporting the facts because most of the MSM now looks at everything through a culture war lens. Plenty of other lenses to pick from. A large reason old internet was so fun is that nobody gave a damn about this identity nonsense, we were too busy playing Quake 2 with ninja ropes.
tekla 3y ago
Avoid HN, Reddit, and Meta adjacent sites. You'll be fine if you do.
- criddell 3y ago
  How do you feel about Tik Tok?
  - tekla 3y ago
    Trash dump.
shever73 3y ago
This reminds me of playing Duke Nukem 3D on a LAN in 1997/8. Me and some friends were in our 20s, had just set up a company together and had a few PCs linked together in a converted garage. After work on a Friday, we’d get beers in, invite other friends over and have a Dukefest. Great times!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nonbirithm 3y ago
Recently I've tended to look at mid-2000s Web 2.0 as a source of nostalgia. It was back in the day when twttr felt like people were optimistic about building a new community for the future and the possibilities were still unexplored. Poring through all the dense skeumorphic design trends of the era is like unearthing a time capsule.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Back then, not everything had been flattened to fit the needs of the app stores. Dedicated hardware existed for portable music, movies, games and photo/video. Each of these had their own particular design language and fanbase that made the world feel larger and more varied than the one-device-fits-all reality we havetoday.
  - davidmurdoch 3y ago
    What are the needs of app stores?
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Hoover up as much market space, user data, and transaction revenue as possible.
rchaud 3y ago
This article is marketing for the LAN Party photobook. It doesn't touch on the web at all, just 2000s online gaming.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I am forever in search of this incredible experience I had one summer in my late teens. It’s an indescribable feeling of freedom and wonder. School was over, I could stay up late, and I had a computer in my room with broadband. The window was open, there was a slight moist breeze flowing in, combating the cooking heat of the AMD Thunderbird 1200. A train whistles in the distance. A car passes by on occasion. I’m on IRC and the Web, discovering new communities and websites. Finding some clever flash video that I bookmark to share with my friends later on MSN Messenger (we were Canadian so we congregated on MSN, not AIM). It’s 2am and I just discovered people make total conversions for Diablo II. I won’t be sleeping this night.
nickdothutton 3y ago
It turned out that having the whole of society on the Internet, made it as sh*tty as, well, …the whole of society is. I’d love to see a chart of “IQ of an average Internet user, 1990-2024”.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
Bullshit. I first got online in about 1984, via JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network). Then Bitnet, then corporate networking via DECnet, added in UUCP, finally IP in about 1987. I say all this not to show off, but to add context to what I find myself saying so often: it wasn't better back then, you were just younger.
- azinman2 3y ago
  You didn’t have social media that ruined a generation and completely disrupted trust in institutions.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Institutions did that to themselves back then, too, without the aid of the Internet.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Agreed. And there were plenty of ugly aspects to early Internet (and BBS etc) culture. And it was much smaller and in some ways even kind of claustrophobic compared to now. My teens extract their own content from it. What's more curious about today is that it's not "The Internet" that is the focus -- it's so ubiquitous and not-novel that it's just a fact/part of life and blurs in with just daily socializing and consumption. Almost mundane.
- jackcosgrove 3y ago
  I think it can be both. Pop culture is never as meaningful as when you're fourteen years old, and there can be secular trends where things get better and worse. For example, I grew up in the US during the 90s. It was a great time because I was a teenager and because the 90s were a local maximum of life in the US being good. Do teenagers in the US now have as good a time? I don't think so, in general. Did teenagers in Russia in the 90s have as good a time? Probably not Russia was having problems in the 90s. (I hope my examples don't inflame national or generational passions; I didn't mean it that way. They were just the first examples that came to mind and they could be broadly relatable.)
nuc1e0n 3y ago
"Being anonymous online can inspire the worst in people." That's certainly true. Some people have no self control and rely on authority figures to keep them in line. My view is that it's a temporary phenomenon until members of society learn to regulate themselves better. In the UK, the sales of alcohol were deregulated a few years back. Afterward there was a period of more alcohol consumption but now the country consumes less than before. If you treat people like children they'll act like them.
Swizec 3y ago
I love reading discussions about how the internet has become stale and ruined. It was best in the 90’s. No the 80’s! Obviously the 00’s. No-uh the 10’s were best. Always the internet was best when the commenter was young with lots of free time and no responsibilities. Funny how that happens
- hackable_sand 3y ago
  It seems so. Part of growing up is accepting change. I would say that the internet is the best it's ever been. We have a wealth of knowledge that is easily shared, I can make friends in a variety of shared communities much easier now, and playing games together is more accessible than ever before. All from consumer hardware that requires very little knowledge to set up. It's great!
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Related: More anecdotes and discussion of the book LAN Party from it's early stages Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678 And more recently a review last year: Berlin Review: LAN Party https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833
p3rls 3y ago
They say a raider dies twice, once when he becomes a casual and the first death is more painful
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Obligatory share of Stop Talking To Each Other And Start Buying Things. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

104 points by peutetre 3y ago

The internet can still be joyful. Pay DO a pittance, make and tend a website, creating part of the internet you wish existed. Work at ignoring more of the major sites on a daily basis. Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions, just do you. Share what you’re passionate about, tend that garden for its own awesomeness (and back it up;). Build connections to others with shared interest, and who are also contributing to the Internet you wish existed. The internet kind of sucks now because everything must be huge or die, if it doesn’t “hit” it’s considered a waste of time. That is not the Internet I was captivated by in the nineties.

manuelmoreale 3y ago
Very much this. Also, connect directly with others, share honestly, be kind, and try to be helpful.
wyclif 3y ago
Start a blog (on your own domain). Write an essay. Stop doomscrolling. Provide RSS. Wean yourself from the news. Share your discoveries. Be weird.
exitb 3y ago
That easy to say, but it needs to be understood that nowadays, contrary to how it worked 20-25 years ago, if you don’t actively and continuously promote your content in some social media, no one, not a single person will ever find it. Google will never direct traffic to small websites unless you’re extremely specific. You might as well publish it in a HTML file on your hard drive.
- bionsystem 3y ago
  You can still build tiny communities. I joined several discord servers when interested to certain topics in the past, with anonymous people still sharing about them. And a couple of phpbb forums with < 300 subscribers. I'm sure if I were into even more niche stuff I would find people interested in writing and reading about the topic. Also youtube is quite good for certain stuffs.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Then don't rely on Google to "direct traffic" to you. In fact, don't worry about traffic at all! Hence, OP's advice: > Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions This is the root of what sucks about everything on the Internet these days: Everyone measures the success of whatever they are doing using engagement crap like "number of likes" and "daily active users" and "number of GitHub stars." Junk metrics. Stop worrying about building an audience. Stop worrying about your follower count. Stop obsessing over pointless things like clout and karma. And, most of all, never use the word "monetize." Just tend your little garden, and if people happen to visit, great.
  - JoeJonathan 3y ago
    Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.
- serf 3y ago
  this isn't new, we had to make efforts back then too. the efforts were different, sign up for webrings, word of mouth, whatever -- but it was still effort. but as parent said : lack of an audience shouldn't be a reason to avoid doing a thing. Not every thing needs to find a market.
  - exitb 3y ago
    As an early teenager, in late 90s, I built a crappy non-English website on a topic that was covered by only a few other sites in that language. It received a healthy amount of traffic for a few years, as anyone researching that topic was bound to end up visiting. As you say, I did add it to a few catalogues and exchanged a few banners, but that was it. And hey, I’m not angry about it. Anyone visiting Wikipedia nowadays is MUCH better served. But the vibe of being a “webmaster” has definitely changed.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Thats's correct, part of the reason the Internet feels low quality is because it is. Garbage content abounds because you need to put something out every day, or at least every week, so that the Gooogle/FB algos don't drop you from their discoverability index. Even the biggest TV shows did not put out more than 24 episodes in a season. A solo blogger/artist is required to put out twice that many pieces of content in a year. Can't expect the quality of that to be very good.
rchaud 3y ago
Social media had a built in feedback mechanism that personal websites don't. We can't even have a 'sign my guestbook' feature without having to deal with spam moderation.

yinser 3y ago

I thank Midnight in Paris for showing me how cringe golden age thinking is.

sob727 3y ago
Surely you can discern the aspects of the internet experience that have degraded vs those that have improved?
- serf 3y ago
  i'm not oblivious to the improvements, but the nostalgia goggles always forget a lot of basic experiences. being disconnected from dialup because someone picked up a phone, being punted from a chatroom with racist shit because rate limits and a moderation staff don't meaningfully exist. File sharing where the main effort is to rename malicious executable into whatever the newest Britney Spears album is called for mass distribution. the pop-up wars, a new remote code exploit weekly.. I could keep going with the bad parts forever, but my point is that when people talk about geocities and napster they forget about what a shitshow the rest of computing was for the majority; this didn't stop them from partaking -- it was still amazing , but it was the Wild West in a lot more ways than it even is today, and I say that as someone who still views the net in that regard.
  - dada78641 3y ago
    It's good to take off the nostalgia glasses and to be honest about how things were far from perfect in the past, but I feel like people sometimes overcompensate when doing so. Frankly, things weren't that bad most of the time. I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today. Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost. You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.

grishka 3y ago

The internet can still be joyful as long as you make the necessary effort to avoid algorithmic content.

elric 3y ago
I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is. We used to make websites for fun. We could host them for free on platforms like Geocities. The only cost to us, the webmasters, was our time. We weren't out to make money. Then came ubiquitous advertising. And affiliate links. And paid content. Suddenly every website was a potential moneymaker. SEO became a thing, so we could drive more traffic and increase ad revenue. Back in the early 2000s, I got weekly emails from ad companies offering money to inject banners on my websites. Free web hosting that's as easy as Geocities was is hard to find these days. But web hosting has become dirt cheap (so cheap that I shut down my hosting business, as I can't compete on price, and no one cares about service). I wish websites could go back to being labours of love, rather than being side hustles.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  Some people still do blogs, youtube channels, or website for fun. It's just increasingly difficult to find them. Bypassing the algorithmic feeds is hard. Youtube has made it even harder for people to share their assessment of videos by suppressing the dislike count. It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The cracks were already showing by 1994. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie... The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since. But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor. Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink. So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.

carabiner 3y ago

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

manuelmoreale 3y ago
What if a young person wants the old internet back?
- vaylian 3y ago
  This. There is something timeless about the '90s internet. Personal websites were invitations to visit someone's digital home and have a look around. The designs were quirky and personal, not standardized and sleek.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    except everything is this way now too... design post iPhone is a lazy subconscious push toward boring, in the guise of culture, but is really just greed stripping culture out of everything to maximize profits.
- bowsamic 3y ago
  Then that isn’t nostalgia
- sublinear 3y ago
  The "old internet" definitely had the same feeling of malaise hanging over it.
  - UberFly 3y ago
    It had hopeful excitement hanging over it. A lot of wonder too. The malaise came later.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  What does a young person know about the old interney to want it back?

walterbell 3y ago

NeoCities hosts free sites and can be used with your favorite static site generator, https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=featured https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=featured We are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations. This allows us to base all our decisions on making the best possible web building experience for you, rather than on appeasing ad companies.

HermanMartinus 3y ago

The community on Bear is amazing and weird and thoughtful and joyful. There are still enclaves where this is true online. https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev

Sn0wCoder 3y ago
Wow, thanks for the link.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Hello Herman, I like your project! I noticed that you are working on LLM tutoring projects for parts of Africa. Do you have a link to more information for that? Want help?

tlarkworthy 3y ago

In my house we have minecraft Lan parties for 8 year old girls. Minecraft is quite good for this because it's such a deep game that realtime help is very useful and the girls are not really able to research on the net, So the social aspect becomes more important to them. Also minecraft is quite cooperative anyway. Also VR parties are sorta similar in vibe to LAN parties too. I feel this stuff is sorta alive still and it was niche in the 90s too.

OccamsMirror 3y ago
Do they bring their own computers or do you supply them? This is great and something I would love to do with my kids once they’re old enough.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  The nice thing about Minecraft bedrock is it runs on many platforms that can all play LAN together, like phones, tablets, or consoles.
- tlarkworthy 3y ago
  they bring laptops. We play Java and we have a server (which is a VM I toggle up and down so only pay storage long term)

renegat0x0 3y ago

Some places where you could search for personal blogs https://nownownow.com/ https://nownownow.com/ https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/ https://curlie.org/ https://curlie.org/ https://nekoweb.org/ https://nekoweb.org/ https://blogs.hn/ https://blogs.hn/ https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/

mrd3v0 3y ago
https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ is one of my favourites too.
TheCapeGreek 3y ago
To add some: https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://aboutideasnow.com/ https://uses.tech/ https://uses.tech/ Taking the time to add some /about, /ideas /now, and /uses to be on these directories doesn't take very long, can recommend.
rpastuszak 3y ago
The list I use for my research and weekly newsletter: https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content I also made a small browser extension for exploring / binging on indie web content: https://untested.sonnet.io/Aye-aye https://untested.sonnet.io/Aye-aye
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  You seem to have captured a lot of the links in these replies on your page. Now I suddenly want be able to set my "Home Page" to some random quirky site.
  - Kye 3y ago
    Maybe this is close enough: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
marginalia_nu 3y ago

knorker 3y ago

There are still LAN parties. So much easier to go now that CRTs are gone. Biggest one is https://dreamhack.com/summer/lan/ https://dreamhack.com/summer/lan/

xandrius 3y ago
Never liked huge LAN parties. The best is when you are 20-30 people, everyone knows someone of the others but almost nobody knows everyone (yet). 2-3 nights over a weekend at a third location. That's gold to me.
- knorker 3y ago
  Sure, I didn't mean to imply that the bigger the better, but only that "it's still a big thing". It would be less impressive to say "LAN parties still exist. Two friends came over yesterday and we nerded out".
  - xandrius 3y ago
    I would actually find it rather impressive if you told me you played a game from the last 5 years with said 2 friends.

bionsystem 3y ago

My mum dug out last year some 20yo pictures (actual pictures on glass paper) of me and my friends at a LAN party, we used to do several of those every year. I was never much into pictures but damn that felt crazy to see them.

0dayz 3y ago

Technically this article doesn't touch upon the internet and instead Lan parties... Which honestly is fine. I think what is missing in today's web is the feeling of independent "cooperative" communities.

Almondsetat 3y ago
LAN parties are actually semantically closer to the internet than websites are
- rchaud 3y ago
  Nothing wrong with LAN parties but they were a tiny subculture back in the Counterstrike days, not comparable to the web that many more people were engrossed in years before social media.

wheresmyshadow 3y ago

This brings some memories. I still remember LAN party we had where we played first Red Faction game... in an internet cafe! Cray times.

sob727 3y ago

The article brings back fond memories. We had the feeling of being part of something new and exciting. This was also a good way to combine fun and learning. The skills I developed then set me on a path to (relative) success which I'm not sure I'd have found otherwise. Weird that CNN couldn't help inserting a race comment in a story that has nothing to do with it (case in point: we had a black kid in our group of friends doing LAN parties, and we never thought of him as black, he was just one of us, a human being whom you'd define across infinitely many dimensions, and definitely not just skin color).

beardedwizard 3y ago
Does this single anecdote change the actual data evident in the photos? I'm sure you didn't wake up and think of excluding anyone, but clearly this selected for white males as many activities do. Nobody is asking anyone to feel guilty about it, cnn is just reporting the facts.
- Wolfenstein98k 3y ago
  True, it's a fact. It's also a fact that few of these people were jocks. So it obviously selected for non-jocks, maybe even for geeks. Now why didn't CNN feel the need to point that out? Why did they choose to only comment on race, as if any participant chose gaming because other people behind screens might be <outgroup race>?
  - commentenjoyer 3y ago
    [flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
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- 23B1 3y ago
  It's CNN selectively reporting the facts because most of the MSM now looks at everything through a culture war lens. Plenty of other lenses to pick from. A large reason old internet was so fun is that nobody gave a damn about this identity nonsense, we were too busy playing Quake 2 with ninja ropes.

tekla 3y ago

Avoid HN, Reddit, and Meta adjacent sites. You'll be fine if you do.

criddell 3y ago
How do you feel about Tik Tok?
- tekla 3y ago
  Trash dump.

shever73 3y ago

This reminds me of playing Duke Nukem 3D on a LAN in 1997/8. Me and some friends were in our 20s, had just set up a company together and had a few PCs linked together in a converted garage. After work on a Friday, we’d get beers in, invite other friends over and have a Dukefest. Great times!

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nonbirithm 3y ago

Recently I've tended to look at mid-2000s Web 2.0 as a source of nostalgia. It was back in the day when twttr felt like people were optimistic about building a new community for the future and the possibilities were still unexplored. Poring through all the dense skeumorphic design trends of the era is like unearthing a time capsule.

rchaud 3y ago
Back then, not everything had been flattened to fit the needs of the app stores. Dedicated hardware existed for portable music, movies, games and photo/video. Each of these had their own particular design language and fanbase that made the world feel larger and more varied than the one-device-fits-all reality we havetoday.
- davidmurdoch 3y ago
  What are the needs of app stores?
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Hoover up as much market space, user data, and transaction revenue as possible.

rchaud 3y ago

This article is marketing for the LAN Party photobook. It doesn't touch on the web at all, just 2000s online gaming.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I am forever in search of this incredible experience I had one summer in my late teens. It’s an indescribable feeling of freedom and wonder. School was over, I could stay up late, and I had a computer in my room with broadband. The window was open, there was a slight moist breeze flowing in, combating the cooking heat of the AMD Thunderbird 1200. A train whistles in the distance. A car passes by on occasion. I’m on IRC and the Web, discovering new communities and websites. Finding some clever flash video that I bookmark to share with my friends later on MSN Messenger (we were Canadian so we congregated on MSN, not AIM). It’s 2am and I just discovered people make total conversions for Diablo II. I won’t be sleeping this night.

nickdothutton 3y ago

It turned out that having the whole of society on the Internet, made it as sh*tty as, well, …the whole of society is. I’d love to see a chart of “IQ of an average Internet user, 1990-2024”.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

Bullshit. I first got online in about 1984, via JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network). Then Bitnet, then corporate networking via DECnet, added in UUCP, finally IP in about 1987. I say all this not to show off, but to add context to what I find myself saying so often: it wasn't better back then, you were just younger.

azinman2 3y ago
You didn’t have social media that ruined a generation and completely disrupted trust in institutions.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Institutions did that to themselves back then, too, without the aid of the Internet.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Agreed. And there were plenty of ugly aspects to early Internet (and BBS etc) culture. And it was much smaller and in some ways even kind of claustrophobic compared to now. My teens extract their own content from it. What's more curious about today is that it's not "The Internet" that is the focus -- it's so ubiquitous and not-novel that it's just a fact/part of life and blurs in with just daily socializing and consumption. Almost mundane.
jackcosgrove 3y ago
I think it can be both. Pop culture is never as meaningful as when you're fourteen years old, and there can be secular trends where things get better and worse. For example, I grew up in the US during the 90s. It was a great time because I was a teenager and because the 90s were a local maximum of life in the US being good. Do teenagers in the US now have as good a time? I don't think so, in general. Did teenagers in Russia in the 90s have as good a time? Probably not Russia was having problems in the 90s. (I hope my examples don't inflame national or generational passions; I didn't mean it that way. They were just the first examples that came to mind and they could be broadly relatable.)

nuc1e0n 3y ago

"Being anonymous online can inspire the worst in people." That's certainly true. Some people have no self control and rely on authority figures to keep them in line. My view is that it's a temporary phenomenon until members of society learn to regulate themselves better. In the UK, the sales of alcohol were deregulated a few years back. Afterward there was a period of more alcohol consumption but now the country consumes less than before. If you treat people like children they'll act like them.

Swizec 3y ago

I love reading discussions about how the internet has become stale and ruined. It was best in the 90’s. No the 80’s! Obviously the 00’s. No-uh the 10’s were best. Always the internet was best when the commenter was young with lots of free time and no responsibilities. Funny how that happens

hackable_sand 3y ago
It seems so. Part of growing up is accepting change. I would say that the internet is the best it's ever been. We have a wealth of knowledge that is easily shared, I can make friends in a variety of shared communities much easier now, and playing games together is more accessible than ever before. All from consumer hardware that requires very little knowledge to set up. It's great!

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Related: More anecdotes and discussion of the book LAN Party from it's early stages Just a bunch of idiots having fun: a photo history of the LAN party (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680678 And more recently a review last year: Berlin Review: LAN Party https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36898833

p3rls 3y ago

They say a raider dies twice, once when he becomes a casual and the first death is more painful

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

Obligatory share of Stop Talking To Each Other And Start Buying Things. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...