4 ms·

Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people.

• anal_reactor 1mo ago
  > You could meet cool new people My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.
  • abixb 1mo ago
    Username checks out. /s
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• elmomle 1mo ago
  This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being. This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.
  • spicyjpeg 1mo ago
    The internet is still full of individuals sharing deep passion for all sorts of things, but only within the walls of invite-only communities you have to go out of your way to find (Discord servers, private forums) and/or make a financial commitment towards (Patreon). Or at least it was, before LLM "enthusiasts" started leaking into these otherwise hermetic communities and overrunning formerly safe spaces with mass-produced low-effort content nobody wants to see, particularly when anyone else could prompt the exact same thing into existence.
    • sodapopcan 1mo ago
      For me the difference today is that most people sharing their passions are now doing for The Algorithm. It's a far cry from the scrappy days of the early web where people just posted stuff because they thought it was cool. I'm not saying their passion is any less, more just that is so much noise. People are now "creators" and are pressured to constantly create.
      • ndriscoll 1mo ago
        Don't go on sites with "creators" then. When people say this they're talking about like 5 websites. They're not "the Internet" at all.
        • TFNA 1mo ago
          Why do you assume a hobby or interest still has a significant presence on the non-algorithmified open web? For travel-related hobbies, for instance, there is no longer any kind of significant open-web scene where people just share stuff to help others or because it is cool. (Yes, you can set up your own blog, but pretty much none of your peers will ever see it.) The community might be using a variety of apps beyond your "like 5 websites", but all those apps are designed around phones and minimize text content, and so they are just as pathological as "sites with 'creators'".
          • ndriscoll 1mo ago
            I'm not sure what exactly a travel-related hobby app might even be for (other than e.g. a map and a calendar, but there are FOSS ones), but isn't this exactly demonstrating the "creator" mentality? You can make your blog as you like it with text, images, videos, etc. Share it with people in your social circle who are interested. Maybe others will find it too some day if you want it to be open. But if you can't send them a link, they're not really your peer, are they? And if they won't click a link, they weren't interested.
            • TFNA 1mo ago
• dilyevsky 1mo ago
  Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative
  • TFNA 1mo ago
    It wasn't purely negative for everyone. I still maintain ties with several people I hung out with on an IRC channel in the 2000s, and a couple of fellow heavy commenters on one blog in the same decade. Granted, this was aided by the fact that we were all in Europe and all traveled regularly, so we could do the IRL interaction that solidifies friendships. Today, if one is heavily online, many platforms no longer offer a space where one can tell a fellow user, "I'll be in your town soon, let's meet up", or even if it does, the general culture has changed away from that.
• tacostakohashi 1mo ago
  Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet. Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.
  • ssl-3 1mo ago
    I use the Internet about how I used to 30 years ago. I chat with friends. Sometimes, I make a new friend or lose track of one. On rare occasion we get together to do whatever it is that we have a common interest in. That used to be IRC. I learn new shit by interacting with people I don't know at all. Sometimes, that means hanging out in much more anonymous places (like HN) and sharing ideas. That used to be Usenet. I learn other stuff by Googling things and otherwise conducting research. That used to be AltaVista; nowadays, it's often an LLM. I order pizzas. (I just ordered pizzas, in fact.)
    • TFNA 1mo ago
      How do you make new IRL friends now in 2026? Where are you hanging out online where there is a culture of people not only revealing their location and age (which platforms and individual internet users have become more guarded about), but even meeting up with other users?
      • ssl-3 1mo ago
        How I do it: My local IRL friends are some folks I met during my days as a BBS sysop ~35 years ago. My far away IRL friends are folks online where we felt motivated to treat eachother as friends instead of dangerous randos. (Risky? Perhaps. We're all simply too old to give a shit.)
        • TFNA 1mo ago
          That's still not answering my question. Where do you make those "far away IRL friends"? Most commercial platforms today discourage (because it is bad for engagement) users from building close ties with individual other users even if said users are willing to let their guard down. The user base of open and easily findable non-commercial platforms has collapsed. Your posts are dangling some kind of 2026 Shangri-La before HN readers, and you can understand my skepticism.
• efdee 1mo ago
  Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement. It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school. Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.
  • queenkjuul 1mo ago
    I was staying up till 3 am listening to my iPod and reading books without internet then going to school at 7 I do think the internet was less bad back then (but still bad) and i also think sometimes teenagers just be teenagers
    • efdee 1mo ago
      You kids and your iPods. ;-)
• Aurornis 1mo ago
  > Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time. 4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too. I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.
• psma_egeliaa 1mo ago
  > so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.
  • TFNA 1mo ago
    Discord servers skew towards a very young demographic. One of the striking things about the early-millennium blog scene was how much quality long-form-text interaction it facilitated among relatively older people: the average age around a lot of blogs on topics like the arts or literature was like 40 or 50. I think for people that age now, the internet is a much lonelier place.