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Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol. Twenty years ago, the norm w

Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol. Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers. Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC). Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules. Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between. Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit. Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized. True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily. Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.

Barrin92 2y ago
>Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now? If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  No, the "normal guy" was downloading Napster and Limewire and 100 other applications from fly-by-night publishers, following folklore suggestions on how to get everything they could for free, getting into messy encounters on Craigslist, visiting independently hosted warez sites, infecting their PC with all kinds of crap, etc, exactly because it was easy and exciting and inviting to do so. Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes. Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.
  - TylerE 2y ago
    Were you by any chance in college 20 years ago? Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world. PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.
    - swatcoder 2y ago
      I was very much not. And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines. Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.
    - thowawatp302 2y ago
xarope 2y ago
and another 20 years prior to that, we had mixed tapes, from a friend who had one of those dual deck tape recorders, or VHS copies (alas poor Betamax) from that friend who worked in the video store that had access to multiple video recorders. Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).
anthk 2y ago
Twenty years ago you would use IM protocols and forums; IRC and Usenet were for die hard hardcore nerds/geek/academics.

Barrin92 2y ago

>Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now? If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.

swatcoder 2y ago
No, the "normal guy" was downloading Napster and Limewire and 100 other applications from fly-by-night publishers, following folklore suggestions on how to get everything they could for free, getting into messy encounters on Craigslist, visiting independently hosted warez sites, infecting their PC with all kinds of crap, etc, exactly because it was easy and exciting and inviting to do so. Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes. Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Were you by any chance in college 20 years ago? Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world. PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    I was very much not. And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines. Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.
  - thowawatp302 2y ago

xarope 2y ago

and another 20 years prior to that, we had mixed tapes, from a friend who had one of those dual deck tape recorders, or VHS copies (alas poor Betamax) from that friend who worked in the video store that had access to multiple video recorders. Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).

anthk 2y ago

Twenty years ago you would use IM protocols and forums; IRC and Usenet were for die hard hardcore nerds/geek/academics.