5 ms·
When the Internet Was a Place (2025)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pixelpoet 6mo agoThe article seems to repeat its thesis almost verbatim three times.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoThanks. Glad I'm not the only one who felt that. I think the author just learned the word panopticon.
- userbinator 6mo agoIt doesn't have the usual giveaways of LLM text (except for the rather prominent dashes) but definitely has a similar verboseness and repetitiveness. Human writing can be like that too, if its author wanted to pad it out to a word quota.
- dwedge 5mo agoAnd the title/concept seems mostly copied from this YouTube video from a mouth earlier: https://youtu.be/oYlcUbLAFmw?si=T1AIE4w49qF1u7ul https://youtu.be/oYlcUbLAFmw?si=T1AIE4w49qF1u7ul I think about that video quite often
- nonameiguess 5mo agoI have no idea how she generated the text, but whether LLM or not, it isn't a recounting of direct experience. The author graduated high school in 2019 and never experienced the Internet of the 90s and doesn't remember pre-2006 because she was a toddler.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoThat's not necessarily disqualifying. One can be a historian even if not a reporter. Every article on the Roman Empire is written by people too young for direct experience.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoThe thing that kills me is how serious it's gotten. Can't joke around anymore, not unless you're doing it ironically.
- userbinator 6mo agoMemes are still a thing.
- dwedge 5mo agoAre they though? I realised a couple of weeks ago that meme culture seems to have died. Obviously not to zero, we still see them, but there seemed to be two meme times - the advice animals time of around 2014, and another time since, but they don't seem popular now
- squigz 5mo agoThe kids are memeing heavily with AI. I don't understand it, but then again, my parents wouldn't have understood rage comics or other memes from back in the day. Really not sure what GP is referring to - lots of humor still going around - but I can probably guess.
- esseph 5mo ago> Are they though? (...) meme culture seems to have died This is how I know you're out of touch. The kids and their memes are alive and well, you just don't know where they are and what that looks like.
- hattmall 5mo agoIf it's that easy to miss then the culture has comparatively died. Memes are still around, but there was a period where they were everywhere. Like the gas station would have a bad luck Brian meme if the bathroom was out of order. You walked in Kohls and there were three different variations of "Know Your Meme" type games on an end cap. The average person would see and hear multiple memes daily in the course of everyday non-internet related activities, then they fell way off. 6-7 was the meme culture dead cat bounce.
- Ayaan2004 6mo agoi love those days where we uses visit internet cafes to play games and enjoys the internet through searching in google.com
- altern8 5mo agoaltavista.com
- bandrami 5mo agoWebcrawler
- richsouth 5mo agoDon't you mean www.altavista.com ?
- roryirvine 5mo agoOriginally altavista.digital.com - the sheer length of the URL was a frequent source of complaints!
- qsera 6mo agoAnd a little while before that, the desktop computer was a mystical thing that could take you to wonderlands. I was truly an intriguing machine, instead of just another home appliance.
- yazantapuz 5mo agoExactly. Thats it what i most miss, the sense of wonderful misteries and possibilities that the computer had.
- sunir 5mo agoI have a text book called Hamlet on the Holodeck about how the machines could take imagination to greater heights. Now it’s all about dopamine. Lower gutters. Humans never change so I have hope things will correct and we dream again.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoI don't think that's fair to the wonderful people using the computer for imagination, they're called game developers and there are so many wonderful experiences out there. A lot of the AAA stuff is kinda trash nowadays, but you still have some older stuff and indie games. Off the top of my head, some really great experiences I've had: Persona 3, probably any game in the series belongs here but this one's my personal favorite Fallout New Vegas, last good fallout game Undertale, really good indie rpg that flips rpgs on their head. Also has really good music Deltarune, not finished but is a pseudo-sequel to undertale Celeste, lovely little platformer with a good soundtrack. Trying to 100% it will make you want to rip your hair out
- yazantapuz 5mo agoShadow of the Colossus and Ico.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoI've played a bit of Shadow of the Colossus (got through the first colossus fight). I enjoyed it, I just haven't picked it up since I got it haha
- smrtfckrr 5mo agoI too am waiting for the pendulum to swing from clean corporate cookie cutterism back to dumb fun and I believe it's up to us to make that change. It probably won't happen on its own.
- jareklupinski 5mo agoi wrote a zine on how to set up your own server / website and left free copies of them around some friendly indie bookstores and libraries hopefully we'll see something new soon
- Uncle_Brumpus 5mo agoI am interested in setting up my own site to contain my random musings and silly photography. Currently in the "collecting resources and knowledge" phase. If you're into zine trading I can mail-trade you the first issue of my photo zine (shot with a PDA camera module). There are seemingly unlimited other resources out there, but having it in short-form physical format is an attractive premise.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoIt's slowly happening in more counterculture-y spaces
- spaqin 5mo agoYeah sure, but it doesn't explain why. If I were to point out to anything, it would be monetization - starting from early ads ruining everything with pop-ups, through corporations gathering data, bad actors exploiting every little vulnerability to get some leverage, to users themselves aligning themselves with money; less and less people doing what they want just for fun, but rather adhering to corporate guidelines and ad strategies to get as much as they can out of this system. So much that other internet users who don't get anything out of it would also start behaving that way, maybe with hopes of getting a slice of the pie at some point. Maybe their next tweet will be a hit? And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.
- torben-friis 5mo ago>And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it. It absolutely is, because everything is adversarial. Every piece of advice is a hidden ad, every friendly person an attempt to lure you into parasocial relations, every teacher a course seller. We went from a community to normalizing psychopathy.
- prox 5mo agoHear hear. It seems so innocent. “Just an ad” but the whole influencing industry is kind of a nice word for “manipulation” When the cost of manipulation is so low, and the repercussions for lying and cheating are not there, everything gets skewed.
- krabizzwainch 5mo agoWe simply exist as vessels to be advertised to.
- shevy-java 5mo ago> In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet was a deeply physical thing, a location. One “arrived” at the internet with purpose and intention. It was an embodied experience. As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true. For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites. I remember when Wikipedia was founded in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995. Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).
- roryirvine 5mo agoThe BBC News website was actually a relative latecomer - an early variant of the platform was used for the May 1997 general election (parts still online at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/ ) and reused for the coverage of the death of Princess Diana that August, but the full service didn't go live until the end of the year. I agree that a lot of this nostalgia is unrealistically misty-eyed. The window during which independent sites ruled the web was extremely narrow, essentially the time between the release of NCSA Mosaic 2 and the launch of Hotwired. Consumer internet hype took off from the beginning of 1995, and by the end of that year the web was already overwhelmingly commercialised.
- sixtyj 5mo ago“This has resulted in fractured attention, anxiety, and sadly, a diminished sense of place and belonging even with the connectivity the internet could offer.” Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing? Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…
- _egtx 5mo ago[dead]
- schnitzelstoat 5mo agoI think the big change has been a shift to massive platforms for everything - so before you'd have hundreds of little vBulletin forums, IRC servers etc. Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc. It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.
- rileymat2 5mo agoIt’s not that big a change these forms have existed for a long time, AOL was a giant closed Goliath for a large number of users.
- AlfredBarnes 5mo agoOne could even argue that Google Search was/is THE platform of the internet. If you're not there you're not anywhere.
- pjmlp 5mo agoAnd before that, specific BBSs, for those that could afford the dial ups to them.
- TFNA 5mo agoI think that even if there were a wide array of forum websites, the discussion culture would be very different than the old days. The majority of people's default device now is their phone, and that discourages the kind of longform text posts that were once common. You'd just have a million little Reddits. And that's not to mention the deleterious effects on discourse of an upvote/downvote functionality, which wasn't part of old forum websites but today's forum software lets you implement it.
- luckyandroid 5mo agoEvery single discussion around UI is now laden with "this isn't 100% optimized for user interaction" like there's some rulebook dictating exactly what you have to do for your website to be useable. There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.
- AlfredBarnes 5mo ago"Everything's a product, nothing's an experience." - Love that!
- memonkey 5mo agowas just thinking how I'd like to have multiple chat boxes like for AIM vs a tabbed experience like with all chat clients now
- firmretention 5mo agoAs an aside - anyone else really dislike the typeface used on this page? I find it difficult to read.
- PeterWhittaker 5mo agoI guess I am showing my age, but no, the Internet was never "a place", for me and my ilk. The Internet was just another network, albeit one that worked more reliably (most of the time) and with less configuration effort (most of the time) than UUCP. I didn't "go to the Internet", it was just another path to the computer on my desk, the most convenient way to get USENET. If I "went anywhere", it was deliberate, using Gopher or WAIS to find things then "visiting" a place with ftp. Or telnet. The only "other place" I had then was the VT220 (? It's been a while) in the basement with the Gandalf (? ditto) modem, eventually replaced with a PC and a Hayes (? ditto bis). I had to physically go somewhere to access work, but then again, I had to physically go somewhere to access work even without remote/home access. My then-me would say that the author confuses the Internet with "the world wide web as accessed from a personal device". Perhaps if one was just the right age at just the right time, the Internet Was a Place, but for anyone before and anyone after it was just was and just is.
- RiverCrochet 5mo ago> Perhaps if one was just the right age at just the right time, the Internet Was a Place, but for anyone before and anyone after it was just was and just is. This is well put and I agree. I think there was a unique set of factors that made 1998ish-2006ish the prime time for the Internet to be a "place." The prevailing techno-optimism borne of the 90s was one of those factors.
- MarkusWandel 5mo agoThe internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere. Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years. Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that. Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.
- RataNova 5mo agoThe phone in your pocket did not necessarily destroy that. What changed more was the disappearance of legible ownership and locality
- satiated_grue 5mo agoHow the world has changed, repeatedly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremvax
- beej71 5mo agowuarchive.wustl.edu, ftp.funet.fi!
- RataNova 5mo agoThe old web was not necessarily better in every way but it had a clearer boundary: you sat down, went online, did something and then left
- euroderf 5mo agoQuick quiz! Who remembers off the top o'their head what Yahoo is an acronym for ?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kkfx 5mo agoInternet is not the web... And we do need to destroy boundaries to break walled gardens not creating new one for the joy of giants who knows their "oligopoly power"...
- tokkkie 5mo ago[flagged]
- hbogert 5mo agoI remember my first time having a laptop with bluetooth and having created a PAN in something like 2001-2002, that was magical taking your laptop to bed and surfing the web. Now i think the pervasiveness of the internet is just a nuisance. I'm probably growing old.