Tell HN: I miss the old internet | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I miss the old internet

391 pointsanon1253221 comments

This is more of a rant I guess. HN provides a text box, that's close enough for me.

I was born in 1988, I'm officially 30. While technically I never got to see the birth of the internet, I remember it differently sometimes. More nostalgically. The summer that never ended. When I was in my adolescent years, I chatted with dozens of people a day. Some I never got to meet in person. Some I did. People from all over the world. Our gateway drugs to the internet were things like IRC, MSN, AOL. Never was a big ICQ person, but I guess that counts. Adium was always on. I don't quite remember how I met these fleeting, ephemeral, personal contacts. Mostly through web rings, PHPbb forums, personal reference. We talked so much, about everything. "how's your day". "what do you think about Bush", "hey I saw your del.icio.us link". Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook. And at first, that was great. But it feels different now. So different, that I've removed myself from all social media. "social media". It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?

I miss those days sometimes. Maybe it's just rose colored glasses of my puberty years. But you know, nothing fundamentally changed about my lifestyle. The internet changed. I'm still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek, nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them? Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old internet.

Maybe this should just be named "how to make friends in your 30s" instead. It's different world out there, but I miss talking to people I've never met. Learn about their lives, be part of it somehow. And they, part of mine in return. I guess there's no turning back from the bots.

View on HN

Made me smile, I'm not too far behind. I think it was my rose colored glasses.

Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss and by comparison the nearest thing for kids these days is probably YouTube or Reddit. However they are nothing like Forums in ways.

How I'll miss spending months earning my way to become a mod, talking about the community or a user in private sub forums, joking/gossip threads with other mods, talking about real life issues with Mom-Mods and Dad-Mods in private forums, and eventually meeting them irl. Customizing my profile with weird ass sigs, animated avatars and coming home to an organized list unread threads interesting to me. Sounds strikingly like Reddit but nothing like it, how strange.

MSN was awesome, but I think kids these days have better options here. Snapchat come close in some ways and does well for the mobile platform.

I felt the Internet was a smaller simpler place with lesser influence from cooperate agenda, state sponsored ideas, and other influencing ideologies and actors. The Internet has become less transparent, commercialized (not just ads) blurring lines between genuine and insincerity.

Social marketing companies specialize in astroturfing places like Reddit making it almost impossible to spot sponsored content sometimes. Try doing that on a Forum and you'll be spotted miles away and made an example of.

Examples of propaganda factories in Russia or Israel with high influence on social media is an example of one big problem Reddit or YouTube has today. It's far too easy to game larger social media networks and make it seem like the consensus.

Your anecdote about forums really hits home. I went to a small, private elementary school with a class size of about 30. We were the only friends we had. When I was in fourth grade, I created a forum for my classmates to use when we got home and couldn't communicate with each other in person (this was before it was standard for kids of this age to own a mobile phone). It was a hit. I made separate boards (aka subreddits) for things like sports, video games, and even just general chat. It was a huge hit in my class. I had people begging to be moderators and asking for improvements. Delegating the moderator title was serious at that age, as everybody wanted to feel like they were contributing to our forum. I felt like a CEO of some fourth grade startup.

In a weird way, reflecting on this, it really says a lot about who I am as a person to this day. Thank you for influencing this memory to come out of my repository tonight.

Isn't Whatsapp/Snapchat today's alternative to that?

Sort of yeah. Semi-hidden/private groups on IM apps can be really good.

> It's far to easy too game larger social media networks and make it seem like the consensus.

That's how it was growing up though, right? Avoid the popular stuff, find the group you feel accepted in, that's what the internet was to me growing up, found my place on it for some time being, hopped around here from there.

Sometimes I just pretend that astroturfers are the bullies of the internet, and I try to figure out new ways to be both lazy and smart in how to not succumb to that sort of influence. It's somewhat demeaning to basically be considered an information carrier to spread the message of some new shiny thing to buy. Ads. Ads make and break the internet.

When people push money around that way, I dunno. Seems short sighted. People purchase quality products and services, quality products and services are hard to make. Word travels naturally for things that are of intrinsically high value, overvalued things eventually have their bubble popped.

Even when things seem like the consensus though, I try to put on my 6th grader hat and remember what it's like to have an interest in the information people are offering, but also be skeptical and discerning and true to myself about my own feelings, before trying said service or product, and after.

Ads sort of treat people like once you get them hooked, you have them for good. And that's clearly not the case. Or it doesn't matter, because there's always another new set of people available to fool.

Internet has become the place to make money and find status. That's the opposite of what it was growing up and I think that is why it sucks. We all need to make a living, but all that stuff isn't life. Having the internet shift from being the place to escape to, to the place I want to run away from, eh. That's why I come here though. Reminds me of usenet and slashdot. I'm still on reddit, just, the only subreddit I'm subscribed to is programmerhumor.

>People purchase quality products and services,

Sadly, I don't think that's true. The overwhelming drive behind most buying decisions is price. That's why there are entire categories of consumer goods where you literally can't buy something well-made. Try to buy decent aligator clips, thumb tacks, a well made oven - the list goes on. Cheap and shitty drives good and well-made out of the market every time.

I agree, but when I wrote this I did write it with the intent to say 'there exist some people who purchase quality products and services'; I honestly didn't mean it as a statement of the majority.

Maybe you're not appreciating how much more mainstream the internet is now compared to the late 90s, early 2000s. Sounds obvious but that has implications.

The proportion of geeks —and I mean as an entirely positive badge of qualification— has been very much diluted by all the other people who just want to take photos of their dinner and children in exchange for likes, shares, views, fame.

There still are geeks out there. They're still creating their own forums. Hell, the forum software we used as children 20 years ago is still out there. I refuse to believe that there aren't just as many miscreants chiselling out their own place on the web, eschewing Facebook and Snapchat and all the other dross that the rest of Generation Z are using.

It's impossible to quantify and so much harder to appreciate with all the noise on the internet these days but it's still there.

You should probably consider that there are plenty of geeks on Facebook and Snapchat and likewise 'dross', and that some of them even also take photos of their dinner and children. There are legit geeks in Generation Z. Probably, I don't even know what that is. Everything after X is just riding our trenchcoat-tails as far as I'm concerned.

One of the things the web has done is disassembled the social and cultural barriers separating subcultures. "Geeks" and "people with lives" and "young people" and "people who use social media" are not separate and isolated sets, they do overlap.

And sure, there are people creating their own forums. And people creating their own forum software. Both get posted here from time to time. But as with the anime community, we really need to get past the elitist attitude that one cannot be a "true" geek, nerd, whatever and still interact with the mainstream. At this point that's like saying you can't be a science fiction fan unless you only read books published before 1975.

While I think we ultimately believe the same things, you're arguing against things I don't believe and don't think I've said. I think you've misinterpreted the tone and content of my post. It's certainly a more aggressive reply on more points than I expected. I don't want to get in to an exhaustive definition argument but I feel I should say something.

I never discounted that Facebook (et al) users also include geeks. We have friends and family too. Never suggested that there aren't geeks in all generations. There are, that was rather my point! They still exist, they're just dilute. Didn't suggest that geeks can't also be popular. Never suggested anything about "true" geeks, that's between you and your anime community. I did actually stress that by "geek", I meant the sorts of people likely to be able to do and enjoy this sort of development.

If it's the only way you can read it, /s/geek/people willing to learn and get stuck in/i

I think it's also become normalized. I'm both very far on the geek-side of the spectrum in interests, but I also spend a lot of time with people on the other end. The kind of interests I can openly have today would have probably seen me ostracized in previous generations. I got a rug printed for my kid that's the floorplan of a 4004 - and nobody even mentioned how absurdly nerdy it is to be making ICs into furniture.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as combative, maybe I misread your comment.

These threads pop up every few weeks now and it's getting aggravating. Here we are living in the promised land, as far as geek and tech culture are concerned, and people keep complaining that it's not hip anymore.

> Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss

I miss Usenet :-) Back in the day, any FAQ posted to Usenet was gold. I always wondered, "How do these brilliant people know to make a FAQ and why do stupid people never make FAQs". And recipes. Every recipe posted to the internet was amazing.

Being older, I blamed forums for the demise of the internet :-)

>I miss Usenet :-) Back in the day, any FAQ posted to Usenet was gold.

Got to agree (or most were, anyway). In an early company where I worked (large Unix hardware and software vendor), when I first got to know about FAQs and had Internet access in the office (initially via long-distance dialup to the head office), I must have spent tons of hours poring over many FAQs that I got by doing "ftp rtfm.mit.edu" and then going to the FAQs section, downloading and reading them.

I even bought a book about using the Internet (I think it was Internet for Dummies :), also bought Modems for Dummies, to learn how to use my dial-up modem at home with my PC) and from one of those books, found this great resource called "Accessing the Internet by Email". It had ways of doing searches and downloads (of Archie, Gopher, and FTP, IIRC) via email - there were proxy / gateway sites that let you do that - and getting the results in your email inbox. I must have used up a lot of bandwidth (of both kinds :) trying out most of those techniques and getting (and reading) many of those FAQs and other interesting tutorials, documents, etc. For multiple programming languages and other software topics, as well as other topics. It was huge.

Many of those FAQs are still available at www.faqs.org .

Also, just googled and found that the "Accessing ..." doc is still around. May still be useful to anyone who has limited Internet access or only email access, anywhere in the world:

Accessing the Internet by Email:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Accessing+the+Internet+by+Em...

2nd hit:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/

I think one of the biggest changes has been the visual deemphasis on individual identity in modern social media over forums, even on HN. Forums that allowed user large user avatars, flair, and the rest made it possible to easily visually identify back-and-forth between people, as opposed to reddit which deemphasizes usernames. This basically means that it’s harder to identify users across threads, and harder to “get to know people”. You may or may not have read my comments before, but you don’t instinctively make the connection between my past behavior and my present behavior unless you go look at my comment history or unless I’m one of the HN super-posters who gets mentioned by name.

Come check out https://hackerforums.co ! We have a nice old fashioned phpbb forum for ya

After the tenth email from haveibeenpwned.com, I swore to never hand over a username and password to another forum system. Even one run by "hackers" (in the positive sense). This holds especially true for phpBB.

Let me log in through an external service where I can control my credentials and factor count. Ideally a pile of established OAuth providers and an open OpenID box.

Use a different password for each phpBB and other forums. Manage them all using LastPass or some other password manager.

If they get hacked and you lose that password, so what? They can only impersonate you on that forum.

Great until the password manager has security issues. They're still passwords so even after they fix up shop, you still have to [very manually] go from site to site replacing your passwords. Until you do that, you, your data and your online persona may be vulnerable somewhere.

If an identity provider has issues, the window of opportunity ends with the rollout of a fix.

Not to mention that I trust the security of my identity provider a lot more thorough than Mr Bobbins phpBB instance. Audits automatically instigated by changes in country, ISP, device, browser. Logs kept. Dynamic secondary and tertiary factors.

It's toxic and unnecessary data. Let somebody else handle it.

Then only use that password manager for PhpBB forum...

You care way too much for an account that you currently don't even have... is is really necessary? Worse case, you lose it and you are back a your current state, doesn't seems so bad to me.

> currently don't even have

And won't have with the current login method.

I'm not trying to convince you to follow my path here, I've just been trying to explain why I do what I do, in an effort that the guy advertising a forum I'm interested in might improve things enough to let me (and those like me) in. I understand that there are ways to do this, and that my way is an active choice.

If it comes to it, I'd rather go without.

That’s funny, I would never trust an unknown site like this with my real OAuth or OpenID account. Too much risk of compromise or marketing or whatnot.

I use a system of unique ids for these sites.

This is very well said. I made a ton of online-only friends with whom I've since met up with over the years. These were enabled by old school phpBB forums, gaming clans, things like that. I don't feel that any personal connection is enabled by Reddit, or even HN for that matter.

Before forums bbs meetups were a great place meet like minded people. There were so few of us outside friends happened more.

If you want to relive the dial-up days, cap out your phone's data plan till it busts you down to 2G speeds. Now it's 48K :D

I recall it was pretty easy for people to just friend each other on MySpace. And to a lesser extent Facebook, but most people treat FB like a digital rolodex of IRL personal contacts and were more hesitant to just add any randoms to their friend list.

The only way you can get to be part of a community that feels intimate is where it is niche and hasn't become part of the internet mainstream. Forums centered around highly popular web figures are often very big.

But you can still find good forums. Forums that are built around very specific interests are more intimate and it's more conducive to comfortably talking to strangers and develop online friendships.

Also, this is just from my very casual observation, but forums built around interests that are not typically associated with more mainstream geek culture or tech culture, that are not privy to highly polarizing social views seem to have the air and attitude of the older internet.

Some example topics for such communities may be bird watching, crocheting, trade jobs like plumbing or modding/tuning for very specific older cars. These have a different demographic (usually skew older) and attitude towards conversation with strangers than the demographics that attract more people on topics such as gaming computers, comic books, anime, etc.

Maybe you just got older? I have those same experiences today moderating subreddits.

As someone who is even older and has seen these types of threads, I can say with some confidence that this is called nostalgia (phpBB was never good). Not to say the internet is not ripe for another decentralization of power. Lack of patience is an issue.

Going back farther, it would be easy to feel nostalgic about the BBS scene.

There were less people and it had a higher barrier for entry, so better signal/noise.

Now there's everyone and it's easy to participate, and the noise is defenning.

smaller subreddit = less noise

Something Awful and Metafilter still exist in remarkably unchanged form, although both are now facing existential funding issues. Lowtax's spine is gone, the Mefi peeps have a huge shortfall...

I still hang out on Something Awful and Resetera (videogame oriented, the follow-up of Neogaf after it imploded). Forums are so much nicer than Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.

Me too. There's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. Just never ending, mind numbing consuming of mediocre content.

I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed online anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Our communities are no longer ours... we're now talking on the servers of billion-dollar companies. Sure, back in the day AOL was a big company, and now we have stuff like Discord servers. But it feels different now. Most of the conversation has been sucked into FB, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. Even this forum, which I do still like, is backed by a multi-billion dollar company.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most, there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it doesn't.

(You should read this article: http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...)

Car forums.

I don't know how many of you guys are on-the-side petrol heads, but it's one thing that strikes me with the facebook generation - all the years of lost knowledge when everyone pivoted from car forums to facebook groups.

No longer can you quickly search up 'what's the best gearbox oil to use in my T56'... Oh no. It's an almost-hourly repetition of shitpost threads that contain no useful information for anybody. Need to know what diameter bearing you need? What part # for that o-ring? Good luck. And if you do happen to stumble across the hidden knowledge of a now-defunct forum, you're likely to be met with the next peril - images that are no longer hosted or available to see without the original uploader paying for an image hosting account on photobucket etc.

I feel like all the collective knowledge from the years of 1999 - 2009 is basically lost to the sands of time.

Totally this. Most of the car forums I 'grew up on' 10 years ago are pretty much just wastelands these days. Where they were once a buzz with fantastic knowledge, insightful comments and advice, etc, they're now mostly filled with image-less posts (ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc), spammy posts, and crickets. The missing images is the biggest shame... "The issue is the hose circled in red"... no pic.

I think my brother getting me into cars and my subsequent delve into bimmerforums in the late-naughts is probably one of the big reasons my interest in Facebook started to wane around the same time. My interactions there were largely based on technical questions, but the humanity and humor contained in those interactions were so much more genuine, and indeed, kind, than anything I've seen on FB/tw/insta. I would be really interested in helping out on a project to archive all the knowledge on those types of sites.

An "Internet Archive" of sorts?

Im constantly amazed by the information that people have collected over on classiczcars.com for the anything Nissan/Datsun Z related. Even before that over on SOHC4, I ended up finding threads where an individual was testing out the characteristics of brake caliper grease, by conducting thermal tests to indicate what performed the best.

On /r/datsun all you really get is memes, and half-thought troubleshooting.

Old-car people inspire me to have a dedication to work-ethic, but also to thinking about the dynamics of how everything is operating. Its a whole different level.

A lot of car how-tos are being posted on YouTube. If you need to replace your alternator, for example, look no further.

I've found that when you're working along to a tutorial etc (and are covered in oil), a forum post that can be left on a certain diagram/image is far more convenient than youtube videos.

Internet content went from small forum where people were actively talking about a subject, asking questions and answering them, gathering knowledge together, to facebook pages where you just absorb content (usually memes).

People have become passive on the internet

But sister reply by Samon is saying even the same forums are basically how you described Facebook or they are dead.

You're certainly not alone, and there are some of us who miss when technology wasn't so biased towards harming you in some way, such as forcing you into a 'filter bubble', and more towards discovery.

Most social media seems actively geared towards making it harder for me to make friends like I used to, and the old IRC servers, though some are still active, are now either dead or filled with people who see all the changes as a 'good thing'.

I have noticed it, and my friends and I are slowly stumbling along in our own pursuit. Our own feeble exploration, if you will.

Our first step, has been the blog you can find in my profile. It is a blog... But it's powered by old .plan files that can sent through pandoc at regular intervals. Every user of the server I've set up has it happen. Or we can just use the ol' finger program to view them.

The shell, our shared shell, is becoming a place we can sit and experiment.

Other pieces of the puzzle are coming slowly too, I'm in the midst of writing two different messaging applications, and others have their ideas as well.

There are no bots... Because we all have our SSH keys, and know to invite each other. Hopefully it'll become more public, more inviting, but first we need to work out what exactly it is that we want.

I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common. Internet itself has changed but perhaps more crucially people with whom you've interacted with changed their habits or simply lack the time they used to have (their age groups are different so there's insufficient critical mass to maintain the old community).

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others with very specific non-majority interests.

Communities do still exist online although their flavor has changed. Group chat has essentially replaced the chatrooms and IRC channels of the mid 90s-00s. Pre 90s is too old for me, but I remember seeing pining for "days of gopher/usenet" etc during the 00's, so really everyone has always been pining for this or that. I don't mind it, people will always be nostalgic in some sense. I was nostalgic for high school in college, and I'm somewhat nostalgic for college now, so it's probably valuable to not take hindsight's insight too seriously.

That said, the internet has not been the democratizing force most of us believed it would become with curated and centralized social networks having arisen as dominant. I am convinced that this is still a fact that can be discerned distinct of the nostalgic pining. Individuals are pushing back a little (not consciously perhaps) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

There's definitely some nostalgia involved, but I feel some things from the previous Internet have been lost. Discord communities are at least a reasonable approximation of the old IRC channels, and there are other modern analogs to "old Internet" things, but the forum format is something that I feel has died, and I miss that a lot.

Perhaps the main difference between forums and modern sites like Reddit, or Facebook groups, is that forums were a natural fit for slower, longer in-depth conversations. It's normal to have a forum conversation that lasts days, if not weeks, and where the posts all consist of many paragraphs. A site like Reddit is designed for older posts to sink. Same with anything that employs a "news feed" page format. Yes, forums are still around, but they're a shadow of their former selves, and often seem to have an old userbase.

Reddit has slowly died though as it has become a much more popular site. The people I used to enjoy interacting with have slowly gravitated away, while the quality of the average comment has significantly degraded. HN isn't a great replacement either, but outside of a handful of small subreddits I have found myself frequenting it more.

I'm a member of at least half a dozen phpBB forums right now. They do still exist. Even if Reddit is more popular, remember that forums in 1998 didn't have millions of members either.

I don't mind it, people will always be nostalgic in some sense.

It's not just nostalgia. There's simply more control and oppression, and less spirit of free inquiry nowadays.

Individuals are pushing back (a little not consciously) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

People familiar with North Korea have noted a similar withdrawal there to one's family and friends. While big tech and social media companies are far from murderous, they are getting more authoritarian.

One thing I appreciate about the internet, even nowadays, is learning about people I've never met. This isn't talking to them necessarily. It can just be someone I could imagine striking up an interesting conversation with if I did meet them someday.

As an American who grew up in a way that I felt was somewhat typically (but perhaps less so nowadays) suburban middle-class, I similarly appreciate reading thoughtful comments from people who grew up in different circumstances and didn't necessarily have it as easily as I did. Where I have most frequently encountered these voices is here and on Reddit and on Metafilter (which I first discovered here on HN). If I can dig up a good example, I'll add it to this comment.

Finally, when I think about that old spirit of the internet that I think you're talking about, and places where it still may prevail, I'd like to offer as an example Erowid. I'm not a contributor, I don't even read it that often. But it just comforts me that sites like this still exist:

https://www.erowid.org/

So I don't think the good old internet is dead. You just have to know where to look.

I think you're spot-on. The web didn't die, there's just more people on it now. And if you go where all the people are (Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc), places that didn't exist in the old web, of course you're going to get a different experience than you had back then. Even the difference between Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day. What you want may actually just be "fewer people on my web".

I still feel the old web/Internet a lot. BBS still exists, and it's not popular but shit there weren't a lot of people on the web back then anyway. phpBB still exists and plenty of the sites are still active. Logging into Guild Wars 2 feels a lot like logging into GW1 or DAoC or my favorite UO shard. Playing Quake is still playing Quake. There's nothing stopping you from having a UT2004 LAN party other than you not wanting to have a LAN party. Hell, MUDs are still a thing, and they're just as popular as ever.

Perhaps it's not the web that's changed... perhaps it's us? As they say, you can't go home again. Stopping by my parents house is still the same home I grew up in, but Doug and Rocko's Modern Life aren't playing on the TV anymore, and there aren't any freezie-pops in the freezer. Not because they can't be, but because I don't really want it to be like that anymore.

Every experience you loved, you can find again. If it seems like you can't, then you probably don't actually want that experience. You're looking for something far less tangible than an MSN chatroom.

>> Even the difference between Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day.

I'm curious, what are the differences? I'm not on lobste.rs except as a casual observer and it seems similar to HN.

I wish I were there for all that. I'm still a teen, but I like to hearken to older times. I voluntarily chose not to join any social media, because I can see how commercialized it is. In a world were smartphones and social media are dominant, the world seems like glass, where everyone can see everyone, and everyone's competing to be seen. I hate and reject such ideas, becuase they make daily interaction something of a contest. "How many likes can I get for this tweet?" and other such things turn what normally would be conversation into someone shouting at the top of a tower to see how many people shout in agreement. Forums, largely aren't that way. I've been a part of many different forums in my life, and I can see that they fostered conversation and community. It's sad to see them go the way of the dinosaur in favor of commercialized, mobile, "reactive" "apps".

I came of age in the AOL days, and fondly remember meeting random people in chat rooms and message forums. Some of the people I met back in the 90s I'm friends with on Facebook today. That came from frequenting the same N64 forum for like 4 years. We talked about everything including our personal lives and in some ways I feel closer to them than the people I actually went to high school with.

I have noticed, however, that despite the internet working better than ever in many ways (in terms of speed and capabilities), that it seems harder to make friends or meet random people. Let's take HN for example, I love this site, but maybe because the community is so big, it seems like I'm just an anonymous figure on here. I'm one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands that visit this site regularly. Do I learn a lot from HN? Of course! Do I enjoy the conversations and comments? Absolutely! Is the platform conducive to casual conversation among strangers in a way that facilitates getting to know someone else and how they think and view the world? No.

For that matter, neither is Reddit.

If I had to guess, it's the news feed mechanic that has killed real social interaction on the net. The news feed mechanic works, it generates clicks, it's constantly feeding you interesting and stimulating information and updates, but it's surface level deep. So much of making friends is being in a group that's small enough to promote shared intimacy and repeated interactions with the same people.

I was a member of a bustling forum with hundred, perhaps thousands of new users a day. If a new user would surface, it would not take long for them to leave an impression even with all the noise. As long as they were posting something interesting to me. I would remember small things about the user that would help me build a mental profile, things like fonts, sigs, avatars and badges, name.

That's been lost with Facebook, Reddit. There is a lack of personality from one comment to another, no distinguishable visual factor to aid distinction or a contrast . I think Humans appreciate the slight difference to tell people apart. Aside from a username, maybe it is not enough.

In my opinion it's due to the gargantuan number of people on this site and Reddit. On some of the smaller subreddits, you do learn to recognize people by username.

It's common, to the point of being an age-old popular culture trope, for people turning 30 to be very nostalgic about their late teens/early 20s.

You changed. So did I. The world did too, for sure, but the 17 year olds of today will miss the pure and uncorrupted world of 2018 when they turn 30.

I agree. All aspects of the world only stay the same or improve with time. When society changes the consequences are never a compromise. Instead the result is universally positive. So when someone expresses their appreciation of something from the past that no longer exists that opinion is invalid and the result of nostalgic delusion.

Furthermore there is nothing to be learned or gained from observations of past conditions. Why would we want to recreate something worse than what we have now?

Pretty sure plenty of things are objectively worse than they were before. Being able to afford a house in most western cities, for one.

I was attempting to point out the grandparents error by elaborating their argument in an outlandish way. I clearly failed. Sorry about that.

It's the full stop after "I agree." that makes the statement lose your intention.

You're completely right. I was on the fence as to whether it was sarcasm or not, decided not based on "I agree.".

Well done, internet intention interpreter dolessdrugs.

For the record, I caught and appreciated the sarcasm -- but it's very difficult to pull off in writing.

Exactly this.

Another classic example, the 30+ of today comment on YouTube videos from 15 years ago how amazing it was, and how shit the music of today is, forgetting that 15 years ago their parents said the exact same thing about the music of the day.

Ah, but teenagers comment on how amazing my music (80s-early 90s) was, and how shit their music is. So I feel a bit justified in saying my tunes were objectively better.

Some teenagers.

Who do you think is driving the music charts today?

I wonder for how long traditional style of music charts and albums sales hold up for when digital streaming and downloading is becoming the norm.

Today's music charts are already basically Spotify/Apple/YouTube streams.

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/06/kanye-west-ye-album-domin...

Music is, in the last 15 years, demonstrably homogenising though (in regards to what could be considered mainstream).

So at least in that regard it's arguably much worse than it was 15 years ago when many different genres were alive and well.

> Music is, in the last 15 years, demonstrably homogenising though

This is definitely a trend that isn't unprecedented: the popularity of grunge was in some ways a reaction to the homogeneity of music during the 80s. Rock was a rebellion against pretty much all mainstream music at the time it became popular. Our generation had indie rock. Music is definitely one arena where there are identifiable ebs and flows in terms of creative output and commercial dominance of a particular sound.

I suspect that a similar reaction to the ultra-commercialized nature of FB/instagram/reddit. There certainly seem to be enough dissatisfied people that we may see a 'kill your television' moment for social media in the next few years.

I agree that there is a bit of a cyclical nature to the homogeneity of music, but the homogenisation we've seen in the last 15 years has been unprecedented in modern times. It's not just the genres, it's also the people involved in the industry. The number of top flight producers is much smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and those producers are involved in almost all the mainstream chart music. The number of writers is smaller, and the music gets produced in a similar way, lessening the importance of musical ability by the artist.

My personal theory is that the movement away from 'record stores' has really killed discoverability of new music and genres, and most of the new platforms just feed you more of the same music you already listen to.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next decade, you may be absolutely right about a backlash against the ultra-commercialised nature of some of our modern toys.

As the internet gets bigger, it's been feeling increasingly "small" to me. The time I spend is concentrated on a few sites, which haven't changed much in years.

I used to find random forums and communities on a regular basis, and each had their own character. They were small enough that I'd quickly come to know various people in the community and establish a connection with them, whereas now posting always feels I'm broadcasting to nobody in particular.

Nowadays, I often write posts, think "wait, does this matter? why am I posting this?" and then just delete it. It feels like dumping words into the abyss.

I agree, it feels like most posting on the internet is just screaming into the void. There's no meaning behind it, no interactions to come of it. I'll never talk to the other commenters again or know anything about them. They could be bots for all I know, but the worst part is that it wouldn't even matter if they were bots because the interactions wouldn't be any different.

This [1] Reddit thread filled almost entirely by a single guy commenting to himself is the best illustration of this that I've found so far.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/comments/77d9ou/the...

The GIF itself is good too.

While I do think nostalgia plays a big part in this feeling, I also think a major contributing factor is centralization. Instead of fragmented forums and IRC channels where people would congregate for years, we generally have moved on to things like Reddit, and Facebook.

Dunbar's number states that the number of relationships someone can comfortably maintain is about 150 or so. Sense of community comes from connecting with small groups. I do not feel a sense of community by chatting with strangers on /r/funny.

Decentralized forums or IRC channels run by small groups were much more accessible, and allowed you to connect with people and form relationships.

That all said, IRC channels and independent forums do still exist. Hobby forums are great (I personally love the Small Form Factor PC forum, great community[1] ).

But today, small groups are the exception and not the norm of the internet of the 90s and early 00s.

[1]: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/

I'm a little older and am nostalgic about BBS's. It brought people together in a specific city. I've still got friends whom I might never have met in real life if it weren't connecting with them first on the BBS.

My experiences online also gave me a big jump over most people on understanding the potential of the Internet. Despite my sermonizing a lot of my friends didn't see any value in getting online for a good three to five years.

When I got a Palm Pilot phone in 2003(?) and showed them I had Internet access on it they were incredulous. These same people who were late to the Internet laughed and said why would you ever want the Internet on your phone?

Back in the mid-1980s in Champaign-Urbana, one of the most vibrant BBSes in town (Tranquillity II) had no downloads - conversation was its specialty. There were even real-life gatherings of the participants. That sort of thing is hard to do when almost everyone you interact with could be halfway around the world.

Was it run out of the U of I?

This was more early-1990s, but my first internet was a BBS out of Bradley University in Peoria. Ah, the sweet scream of ZTerm on a Performa.

That board was run from a private home (originally on a TI 99/4A with the expansion box, and a 300 baud modem). It later moved to an Amiga.

I miss those days as well. Felt like the people online then were somewhat more interesting than those now, and were likely to get involved in stuff because it was a fun hobby rather than a way to make money or 'build a career' or what not.

Still, there are communities like that out there now, and quite a few of them are where they always were. Forums are less popular, but active ones do still exist, and some have good communities. Same with IRC and mailing lists and chat rooms and whatever else.

And while it's unfortunately centralised, I guess Discord has become the 'place' for many of these communities too, with the better ones being basically an old school forum in chat room form.

There are places out there.

One answer to “What happened to the old internet?”

We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.

I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.

If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to use the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general public. You can see it reflected across the web now in ways that have caused real, lasting damage.

And while I agree that we're the first digital natives, I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

Who knew a textarea and a notification system could become so troublesome?

> I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to use the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general public... I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

See, I think this is where we didn't apply lessons that we should've learned. A good moderation policy and good moderators are arguably essential to the life of a good forum, but Twitter is and always has been disastrous at it. It's a global forum thread or IRC channel where the trolls have completely free reign.

>If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

Reckless, "greed-is-good" neoliberalism.

I suspect there is some truth in this, in the same way we are commercialising everything in real life we are doing it online as well.

(I guess, everyone in this thread is ranting about the same. Here's my anger:)

We have slowly morphed from "users of the internet" to "a product of the internet".

The internet, today, is so interested about what I do every second. This made every common man a celebrity. A friend recently said she's aware of her data being used to snoop on her, but she refrained to stop it citing that it gave her "momentary happiness" to stay on social networks. I practically couldn't deny what she said.

While I follow ('ed) a few discussions over internet, the moment I turn my phone screen on, I get disrupted by the numerous feeds from social apps ending up forgetting what I had to look at. I keep confining me to the same space eventually.

The internet is following the greatest blindfold of democracy: "Set strict boundaries for individuals of the society and let them argue within those limits infinitely. Keep them busy with controversies within those boundaries so that there isn't time left to think beyond the limits"

You may have changed more than you realize. I like to think I'm as open to social connections as I always was, but the reality is that I'm older and wiser and quicker to recognize that a lot of people who want to talk to me are not really innocently trying to befriend me in some mutually beneficial squeeing over common interests kind of way. They usually have an agenda and it's often not a nice agenda. They are usually looking to take advantage of me in some way or to force a particular narrative onto me driven by some internal psychology of theirs, and don't confuse them with the facts.

I have learned to have my own agenda of looking out for my own needs and husbanding my time to invest it in things that matter to me. This turns out to not be conducive to the kinds of conversations I used to have.

I'm lonelier than I used to be by quite a lot. But my life overall works better.

I don't know how to get both things. I wish I did.

I think they’re saying they miss not having to worry about being used by randos. if you were around in the early days of the web, there were definitely a lot of people trying a lot of things (I tried on more than a few different personas when I was a young teen in the mid nineties), but almost none of it was for profit, it was just people trying things.

I'm a woman. A high percentage of the time, when people are looking to use me, it's for sex or "emotional labor." A very high percentage of people who expect me to care about them and their welfare have a "Giving Tree" mental model of what love looks like and they very much expect it to be a one way street.

This has mostly always been true in my life, both online and off. I'm just much more aware that I am merely being bled by people who will do absolutely nothing in return for me and who will, in fact, shit all over me if I bring up my needs and wants at all. They explicitly expect a woman to do nice things for free for them. Expecting something in return offends them in the extreme.

I'm quicker to cut people off than I used to be. It doesn't lead to the kinds of mutually beneficial relationships I desire, but I spend far less time feeling bled for my time, energy, expertise and wisdom by people who explicitly think women should give those things away for free and who saw zero problem with that abusive expectation even when I was literally homeless and going hungry. That was not their problem and how dare I suggest they should care about that.

I'm 27, but here's some recent experiences:

You can still participate in IRC! It's still alive and kicking. Look at the channel in list in freenode.net, it's huge! Most of it is focused on tech, but there's plenty of non-tech channels as well.

Try checking out communities using Discord. I started participating in a couple anime-related groups and I met tons of interesting people through that. I eventually got invited to a private Discord where many members hang out, but it's more casual and personal than the public server, and it's been a blast. I've learned tons of things about their different cultures, and I'm hoping to meet some of em at events later this year or next. Although I haven't met with anyone in real life yet, it turned out one member actually lives live like 20 mins, so we actually planning on meeting soon, when we don't have any big real-life issues on our plates.

It turns out a few of the people I've been talking to recently are Muslims, and I didn't know much about their beliefs, so it has been a highly enlightening experience. They recently stopped fasting and were celebrating being able to eat during regular hours again.

One of the people I've been talking to is from a middle-eastern country but had family in Qatar, so he's visiting. Did you know that apostasy is illegal there? Oh, and they also block porn sites! This is an image of what you get when you try accessing a porn site in Qatar [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/1a9lDDi.png

"We grew up with IRC. Let's take it further." https://irc.com/

I agree with this; IRC is underrated now. Download irssi or something like that and use it every day. I think if you do you'll find that there are corners of the internet that haven't changed that much in a good way. People still make friends there, talk a lot, have debates, etc.

I'm few years older than you but I had a similar experience. However, I'm not sure the "old internet" is gone so much as it's moved a few doors down.

There still are communities: Some on Facebook groups, more on Twitter or Tumblr, but increasingly found on Discord. Find a Discord related to some topic (a game, a fandom, a hobby, a city), and you'll find that casual chatting, meeting new people, people arranging to meet up, etc.

"Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them?"

Discord, a Facebook group, maybe a Twitter group chat. Seriously. There's more people doing what you miss today than at any time in the past, but they're not doing it in the same places.

That being said...keep in mind it's much easier to make friends in your teens and early 20s than in later life. I struggle a lot to make connections, not because the opportunity isn't available, but just because I'm a lot more closed off than I used to be. Some of your nostalgia is for the internet of yesteryear, but some of it is for the you of yesteryear, and that's not going to be recoverable by installing a new chat client.

This seems to be the zeitgeist lately -- folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling. I think some of the different "fediverse" takes are trying to do just that. I'll throw out the typical Mastodon plug.

I've spent the last four or so years hoping around dead phpBBs and empty IRC channels trying to find a community that reminded me of the pre-Facebook communities.

So far Mastodon reminds me of a kind of async-IRC for the 30+ crowd who don't have time to idle in an empty channel all day. Plenty of conversations, and If feel like I'm starting to recognize repeated posters and strike up conversations again.

> folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling

Agree. The problem for me is that if I happen to find a small community, I still wonder if I'm missing out on something else.

Back then if you found an nicely made forum in your language, that was it. A couple 100 people and no real alternative to them.

Maybe that's why dating seems to be so hard. It's possible to meet a partner from literally all over the world. Where is in old times you were more or less limited by the village you happened to live in.

I don't want to chose good people... I want to have them slightly "forced" on me and learn to live with them. :/

+1 for Mastodon. It's pleasantly weird and small. I very much enjoy the instance(s) I'm on. Check out joinmastodon.org to find one that suits your interests and needs!

Weren't there a previous Tell HN about this very same topic ?

I'm older than you. I spend half my time trying to explain what is this feeling. It's so ironic that every golden age is killed by itself in a way. We're all pushing for 'better' until we realize that it was just as neat as it should before.

Maybe it's just relativism from psychology, call this general roots. At periods of your time you imprint signals. Minute details that will always make you feel at home. Whenever I run win95, winxp, linux 2.4 I feel so chill. Even though on paper, linux 4 / systemd have 320 extremely valuable features... still there's a 'better' effect. The other day I registered on a phpbb website .. felt cool. No php7 generators or DI based modules .. but I couldn't care less.

It's probably not all nostalgia, you can really tell how internet became a social business from a fun on the side, everyside is monetized, full of warnings, hyper complex. And very rarely so for the benefits of the user, mostly to avoid harm from stupid businesses.

Thank god IRC (and others) are still the same.

I miss old phpbb forums. I still occasionally chat with people who's email addresses I got in the late 90s, early 00s. I never met any of them in person, but still feel a really close connection with lots of people that i "met" in that era.

Writing phpBB articles, was my first clue of what programming was. Oh, the shame, but still, was quite fun

You can never go back. The place you remember now exists only in memories, and it's doubtful it ever existed quite how you recall it.

I moved around a lot between 18 and 30 - About 30 different properties, 15 different towns, five major cities, a few countries.

Something I learned over that time is when you return to a location you once lived in, it never matches up to whatever memories you have. People have moved on (a particularly stark lesson in university towns, which churn ~30% every single year), businesses have shuttered, public spaces have been redeveloped. Even the road/path networks have changed. So it's not possible to turn those fond memories back into a current experience. Of the things that DO match, a significant number of them will be negative elements that your memory had kinda hidden away. We tend to frame memories of our environment as fixed, with a sense of timelessness that doesn't match how those spaces evolve over time.

The same thing applies to Internets. There's a BB I posted heavily on in the late nineties that's still active and largely unchanged. But having recently started posting there again, it's just not an enjoyable experience. All the personalities are in a different phase of life (as am I), the central theme topic has aged badly, and the level of activity is low enough that there's rarely any point checking in daily. Worst of all, as someone that gets flighty at the first whiff of stagnation, going back to something so far in my past brings up a strong negative reaction. Even though it's just a bloody forum.

I guess all of this is obvious and not hugely insightful, but it leads me to the conclusion that it's not worth pining for the Internets that was, because the reality of returning to that would not be as awesome as our memories suggest. If anyone wants a taste of that today, stuff like TOR, freenet, and I2P echo a lot of the Web 1.0 feeling and community.

The summer that never ended.

In relation to the internet, summer never ending was never a thing.

Eternal September¹ is a thing.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

As a freshman at UC Berkeley in September 1993, I got a front-row seat to this experience. It was my own awakening to this amazing small-world of academics and amateurs that extended beyond the reach of the physical analogue where I had just started attending classes.

Looking back, I'd estimate that it took another 4-6 years before the usenet I met in those years died. Some obscure parts held on longer than others. It was an influx of trolls at the same time that legitimate traffic slowly died off. Back then, I blamed the web forums that were starting to divert and diffuse participation.

I hadn't yet come to appreciate the insatiable need for humans to form ranks and piss on things. To not only root their identity and self-worth in the exclusive, the new, but to try to salt the earth and deny others the use of unoccupied ground.

Now, I recognize more cycles and waves to everything. I have an almost, but not quite, Buddhist outlook on the nature of things. But, it doesn't bring me satisfaction nor clarity. It's hard to put to words, but is more defeatism or morose nostalgia. It's hard not to think that the imagined mountains of youth aren't really sand dunes that slip and flow to consume every step of a futile climb. All this activity and change may be the thin layer of growth on coral, or the irregular fringe of a petri dish.

Yep that's what I meant from memory, thank you for providing the correct reference :-)

You were 5 when this occurred.

I’m 33 and share a similar experience, except that I’ve found Instagram in particular to be an even better social experience than the old days of IM.

I regularly meet people I follow in person if they come through my town, or if I come through theres. And, when I make a new acquaintance, we stay in touch and learn more about eachother in preparation for our next chance encounter. My group of friends is lager than ever, though we don’t meet in person as often as a traditional local relationship.

I have the same experience with Instagram, but it's still worse, than in older days, because there is no desktop client. Discussing anything deep is practically impossible.

Having grown up with BBSs and getting on information super highway in 92, I miss the crazyness and "decentralization". Also stuff like IMs and IRC I find a lot better than what has replaced them, since you had your choice of programs to use with them, not web page that kind of just lock you down to a browser or a closed off app that is really just a web app. Why cant I have Facebook messenger just part of trillian or pidgen or what ever?

> What happened?

I think it's due to the popularity contest that has taken over our communication mediums. Everything is based upon likes, stars, upvotes/downvotes, retweets, and shares. This social influence leads to herd behavior and conformity.

I too greatly miss the tight communities I used to participate in across IRC, chat rooms, and topic-specific forums where people simply voiced their opinions and had discussions. They still exist in pockets but the communities are much smaller today. If people were out of line, they were kicked out. If they continued, they were banned. Discussion manipulation was generally limited to bumping forum threads to the top. Today a malicious actor just needs a small bot network to complete control opinion on upvote-based discussion platforms.

I was born in 1946. I miss acoustic couplers and I miss The Well.

The WELL technically still exists.

I was thinking of joining to assuage some of OP’s comments.

Are you a user? Is it worth joining to have Community - driven conversation?

Joined LongNow and it has a nice series of seminars and hints of community, but no chat or comment culture.

MindVox FTW!

> The internet changed

It got a heck of a lot cheaper for home users. People forget just how much online access used to cost. It also got a lot more users, and many services seem to want huge numbers of users, rather than being happy to serve their niche well. Finally, when you're dialing up at 33.6 or slower you make an effort because every second counts.

Here's a page from 1988. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7

Compuserve charged $11 per hour and had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source charged $8 per hour and was popular for its conferencing system "parti".

Delphi charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

BIX charge $9 per hour.

> Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook.... It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?

I hadn't heard it put quite so clearly before: First, Tech Cos turned conversation into big-business by corralling everyone into their platforms, then the the second wave came and turned these "walled-gardens" into game reserves. I can't imagine how little of twitter's volume is not bots, ads, self-promotion, and trolls - paid or otherwise.

Online we're already living in a dystopian future.

I think it is caused by two major changes:

1) Everything has been commercialized.

Even in the tech world most posts aren't to inform, illuminate, or even just show off something cool. A huge number of tech blog posts are really just ads to build a company or personal brand.

2) Propaganda

Propaganda infects pretty much every semi-political discussion on the web and it has lead to most sites having a single accepted viewpoint on major discussion points and serious hostility towards the out-group.

The water has been muddied so much that the average person cannot dig down and find the truth.

I've personally had to take a holistic counter-examples based approach.

Everyone misses what they used to live for, I'm only 23 and I've noticed the pattern. Look up "Eternal September" or the "September that never ended" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. During this period AOL aggressively marketed Usenet access, saturating what was once a University grade Network for educated users, steering the path towards the consumer focused Internet we now have today. People longed for the old 70's-80's era of the Internet back in 1993, nothing new, nothing old. Because of my age, I miss the 2006 Web 2.0 era of the internet, before the access was even more expanded to the smartphone generation. When having a blog or a website was still relevant, before everything became encapsulated into social media. Yes, I'll admit, I don't like this new wave of illiterate image based Snapchat and Instagram morons that express through emojis and selfies, but they'll too as community environments become even more abstracted.

I'm the same age and feel similar. I wonder how my and others actions differ now that my name is tied to everything. Back in those days, it was rare to know even the first name of my friend, only their handle. Now we just craft our posts carefully hoping it's not used against you in the future.

I grew up on forums, and began programming with php on them. I'd love to see something similar to them take over slack.

Protip: stop caring. Just post it and own it.

Everyone makes mistakes, and the sooner people realise that in this modern, lose your job because of a twitter post society, the better.

I'm a little older and it was quite normal to have your real name in usenet

> The summer that never ended

1993 was the September that never ended, when AOL invaded usenet and the world fell apart. At least if you talk to those who were on the internet before then.

People have always longed for the good old days. Those days weren't much different to now, it's often just your perspective that's changed, and you don't miss the good old days, you miss being a carefree teenager

Completely agree. Fragmented communities run by mods meant that reputations were built on time and trust rather than #s of followers. Influence in that sense was built by long-term commitment to a group organized around a specific topic. That dynamic disincentived bad behavior and diminished its effects in ways that mimic real human relationships. The same isn’t true on social media.

I think there is a community problem out there that remains unsolved in a nice way - particularly in real life spaces.

Church used to be a source of it for people, but it has a lot of obvious negatives and there are limited options without religion involved.

Children probably also take a lot of people off the map, but I think that doesn’t have to be true either given the right solution.

This times many.

Sports, activity interest groups fill the void a little.

But there's so little downtime as an adult these days it's a chore.

>I'm still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek, nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days?

Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, and 4chan a bit only now they're talking about Firefly, the Expanse and Star Wars.

SF and anime fandom is bigger, more diverse, more involved and more complex than its ever been, but you're going to have to go where the people are to find it and engage with it, and you've already admitted you avoid going where the people are.

You need to accept that everything that used to be hip and exclusive to subculture is now mainstream and infested with millennials and normies and social media and that it's ok. They love their stuff just as much as you and I do.

edit: and Discord. I forgot about it because I'm old, but Discord is also a thing.

The average IQ of the Internet user population has dropped at least two standard deviations from the pre-commercial days to now. As a result the quality really truly has dropped. I suspect that whatever eventually displaces Facebook is going to accomplish that by somehow dumbing things down even more.

>It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you.

I think the first two words are your problem. "It's all". The internet isn't "all" anything. It's incredibly diverse. If all you see is that stuff, you need to change your approach.

I spend lots of time on Twitter having very productive discussions in my field. I rarely if ever see bots, "influencers", hate speech. Occasional bickering, a bit of "identity politics", I guess - but that's because I chose to opt into it.

And there are lots of great Slack channels, and StackOverflow, and Github Issues for conversations about things that interest me.

I think the things you want on the Internet are still there, you just aren't finding them for some reason.

For me at least, telegram largely has replaced both IRC, and AIM/Yahoo/ICQ/MSN/whatever.

My social circle is full of people like you - but I'm a furry - maybe you should seek out the local scifi or furry community around you - I promise you, that you'll feel right at home.

This is exactly why I setup https://hackerforums.co ! It’s a small community, but humming along fine so far. I have a long post with details of our first month getting posted tomorrow!

To many of us, the old Internet died in 1993, also known as "eternal September"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

This may be just nostalgia talking, but I think a big part of it is that these days there is much more of a 'commercial' nature to the internet. 'Back in the day', it seemed like there were a lot more 'community' focused sites, that were primarily there to serve the community, rather than to actually make a profit. Forums, blogs, etc where communities of people with similar interests would share information, collaborate, or just 'hang out'. Forums in general seem to have almost died out, and most blogs have some kind of commercial intent.

The old internet was so much fancy and weird at the same time. It was not mainstream, no one was talking about, security was a hilarious joke and you were feeling like some kind of an ultra combo hacker like those in the movies. I remember there was no router with a basic prebuild NAT "security" and you could just hack anything and almost everyone. I remember when I was a kid, I got hacked just by entering an IRC chat filled with hackers. If someone had your IP address and you had windows with netbios enabled you were a joke back in the days.

That time is coming back. We are all on IRC. Come chat!

how to discover new irc channels/servers?

There are some nice irc networks listed on http://irc.netsplit.de

I actually use /list and join new channels from time to time!

> ... of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook

Twitter was always useless for me for having a conversation. It's just shouting short phrase into the void hoping someone will shout some other short phrase back. It's roughly equivalent of ICQ status message. Little text you could attach to information whether you are online or not. Technically you could have conversation through that but it is more like passive-aggressive shouting match in a large room full of other people than actual conversation. Twitter is exactly that for me and I refuse to participate.

And Facebook forces you to have one exposed identity and glues it to your face and your mom. So it's useless for conversation purposes because you won't dare to say there anything ever. I still have an account if only to see what my family and friends are doing with their lives and using messenger because nobody installs even skype anymore.

Pretty much old conversation systems from my point of view faded away into their most limiting and stupid parts.

Bye bye ICQ or your local equivalent of that experience.

And forums got digg treatment. In the old days you could say whatever you thought and you only risked that some people will mute you or you get kicked out of that forum right away. Now everything is gamified, you get downvoted, you are loosing karma, your post fades away for everybody, gets buried. And it hurts much. To much to risk expressing any opinion you might think is controversial. Because cost is loosing points you learned to care about, loosing standing on a platform, the only platform. There's no second HN, no second reddit.

Instead of providing personalized tools for muting trolls and their feeders forums transformed into gamified, mob-policed states that keep everybody in check with self-censorship. The only people that break through that are straight up racist, sexist trolls that don't care about anything and anybody. People with most extreme views. And then everybody else can say: "See? That's why we can't have nice things. That's what we have downvoting for."

Modern internet is different. It's better in many aspects. Youtube is modern marvel for hands-on learning. But freedom of expression definitely suffered.

Well said. The thing I miss the most about the early 00s is the IM networks. I still have a few close friends that I chat with regularly, but so many have just ditched the idea of chatting altogether.

Sitting down after dinner and having a few deep, interesting conversations with friends and random strangers was enlightening, and so rare these days.

This is very interesting and I have the same felling. I think it is due to expansion of smartphones and mobile internet around us. Before smartphones everyone typed with their keyboard on the table and you were sure, that the person who is connected have time to answer. Today you are basically reachable everywhere and when you don't respond immediately the other side of conversation think what could go wrong. It was not used to be like that before. It was more letter oriented conversation where you had time to write response properly and check your answer or modify it. Today on smartphone there is no time, you have to write answer in few seconds even when you walk or you are in hurry. You can not easily disconnect, because now by default they see that you received message and that you read it. That's probably the biggest difference between now and then.

The quality takes time and to respond 10 conversation at once is really exhausting. It's not anymore about joy of internet, what I feel is there is too much of it. Everyone is instantly connected and about 40% of new generation is basically addicted to smartphones and to internet, that's totally different feeling than before when you do it out of curiosity. The old generation recognize it and probably try to limit their time online, that's the reason why forums and blogs are not maintained today's, it takes time and effort to produce something valuable and this days not many people have even time to read it...

I hear you. I feel like the internet is kinda hostile nowadays. Most folks are only consuming, and its clear (here for example) that I should mostly not contribute, unless I have something really insightful to say.

Is there a place on the internet for personal relations? Not for politics, not for hooking up, not for seeing who has the most informed opinion about something. Just for talking to the same people every day, help them out and be helped. I see some of that on smaller Discord servers.

The really odd thing I've been noticing though: that outside (real life) its much easier to expose yourself to that kind of "random world" that the internet felt like in those times. Like, walking in the streets and seeing what people are talking about in bars I can expose myself to more interesting[1] (to me of course) opinions than the front page of the biggest subreddits.

But, if you are an introvert like many of us, you probably won't say hello and make new friends that easy. And its not about joining the chess/dance/coding club either, because I don't want to hang out with people just like me. I'd rather hang out with strangers actually.

[1] Also, the factor that it is in my city makes this relatable, local, etc. Now that I mention, BBSes were also a local thing.

I miss the voice people had with blogs. Now it's gated circle jerky communities (fb/medium/Twitter for hate/etc) rather than independent thought and ideas.

I can't stand Medium or understand at all how it has become so popular.

Facebook is constantly trying to outgrow what it should be, and the more it does this the less nice it becomes.

Twitter I have little issue with though, amazingly.

From the blogging point of view, twitter is nothing but for making announcements on new content, or targetting them for outrage. There is very little conversation around the message.

I see what you mean. Back then, the internet was an exciting place with rules you had to learn to be accepted at all in certain communities. The internet was smaller then and required a certain level of technical knowledge to properly navigate it. This level acted as a filter against the most mundane most of the internet has become now. I remember sites like hell.com that were basically web experiments meets digital art installation. There used to be lots of trashy little pages and everything felt like the whole web was trying to find its identity.

The feeling of meeting real people went away for me after my FidoNet days. You had to wait up to two days for a message from Canada to Germany to arrive. It was frustrating but it was great. Dial-up BBS' were all the rage before a regular geek could access it from home. Even FidoNet-Email-Gateways existed.

So I guess every generation has its own frontier stories. For you, it was the internet, for me, it was dial-up BBS', for others it was disk swapping, building a simple computer from scratch or feeding paper strips to a warehouse-sized monstrosity.

Still, it's pretty obvious that we as a whole of humanity are not prepared to converse civilly on a global scale.

There are still old phpBB forums that are still going strong, but that sort of thing depends enormously on having a committed core of people keeping it going and weeding out the trolls and spammers. Keeping a public forum running these days is beyond a full-time job, and a lot of people just don't have the time for that, especially in today's environment with hostile states, scammers, and general jerks trying to ruin everything.

When it was difficult or expensive to run a forum, and someone had to pay the bills, it incentivised the owner to have an opinion about what the forum should be and appoint mods to enforce it.

It also incentivised the participants to play nice within those rules because splitting off and starting a rival forum was kinda expensive and a pain in the arse.

By making things cheaper, and paid for by some big company somewhere, we've lost that.

I grew up with phpBB forums. They sucked in many ways, but you could easily find niche communities and be a part of them.

I think Twitter is an inadequate replacement, because on Twitter you don't just sign up and post a thread for everyone to see. You have to convince people to follow you first. Once you have done that you get exposed to many parts of Twitter beyond just your niche -- politics and memes tend to spread like wildfire. Twitter has other strengths but it's targeted to a wider group of people, not just young men with narrow interests.

Reddit is a great place for talking about hobbies, but it is fairly anonymous. Maybe it would be different if you could have animated GIF avatars and massive signatures! I'm mostly a lurker there but I'm sure you can make great friends on Reddit, especially if you reach out.

These days a lot of nice communities seem to be forming on Discord, for things related to games, programming and similar nerdy interests.

There are more people than ever on the internet, and not everyone hangs out on Twitter. I'm sure you can find your channels if you just look.

I miss it too. I really miss IRC. I used to have a large group of amateur radio operators I chatted with for 5-7 years (the IRC channel is still up & somewhat active!). We used to do meetups for ARRL Field Day & Dayton Hamvention. We were all great friends, we all just shot the shit & had fun. Unfortunately everyone found something else or moved to different software to communicate and we slowly drifted apart.

All of my transgender support communities have been gutted and destroyed by hate speech and people going "YOU HAVE A MENTAL DISORDER, FREAK". I really used to enjoy my PHPbb & other forums for real groups of caring people. Anonymity let the hate flow. I feel those communities have since moved to Reddit -- just like mostly everything else.

The centralization & ease of access (it's in everyone's pockets) is really what turned the tables.

It's fun to do internet archeology. https://wiby.me/ is a fun search engine.

> Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old internet.

Don't get me wrong but isn't this the whole problem? Previously forums were run for fun. People were not worried about pumping out ads to make money. And if everything is about grabbing eyeballs for the ads...why not argue just for the sake of arguing to grab attention?

I've seen this same opinion, and similar ones, posted across a lot of the boards I like to visit. Social media can probably be done right, but not by dragging people into an advertising market like facebook does.

I have come to the conclusion that two factors are necessary to a social media site truer to the original feel of the internet. One is smaller communities, in which individual posters can recognize one another, whether they are named or pseudonymous; another is categorization by interest, rather than preexisting social connections.

Reddit nearly manages this, but, being motivated by profit, has failed to stem the tide of idiots onto its platform. Solving the problem of overpopulation while bringing many users to a site is something I'm not aware of anyone having done.

I don't have a lot of interest in implementing yet another social media site, but if anyone knows about such a place, I would love to hear about it.

I feel like this kind of post is starting to become much more common as of late, wondering where everyone - including the internet of the past - has gone. There's one currently up for maintaining a social life, there was one maybe a week or so ago about someone grappling with how to improve their social life, and I'm pretty sure there was a thread before that which was the exact same subject but just about how to make friends past 30. The irony that others have seen before me but that I will repeat is that social media isn't very social.

This alone makes me wonder how people can just say "oh, it's not the internet that has changed, it's you" when people clearly remember a better and more social time which seems to have a cutoff point around the hyper-growth of Reddit. I remember my super-early teens being defined by phpbb forums via Invisionfree for video game clans, browsing Newgrounds, 4chan, and ytmnd, and just being a part of the given community. Not to mention just hanging out in Star Wars Battlefront/Team Fortress/Battlefield (194)2(142) public servers and just chatting & blasting, eventually settling down to either one or two servers where you feel most at home. "Where everybody knows your name."

Now forums are Reddit and Facebook. "Niche" forums are huge ones like RPGCodex and what used to be Neogaf (awful place) and SomethingAwful. Sociability in video games means you have to constantly roll the dice in terms of 9 to 11 other humans because matchmaking and MMR is the new normal; who knows who you'll get and if they're not enjoyable to be around, maybe you'll be stuck listening to them whinge because you're both on the same MMR level. I could go on, but I can tell you for sure that while there were definitely awful things back then, they're nothing in the face of the current web.

I don't miss IRC anywhere near as much as I thought I would, though. Going back recently made me realize that some things have changed for the better.

Modern format prevents creation of social bonds. I'm not exactly sure why - probably because discussions die very fast + upvotes/likes turn interactions into a quasi-economic game. On normal forums you can have the same thread going for years even.

Overall I think the idea of voting on comments and submissions has made the world a much worse place.

Ones of the reasons you feel nostalgically is, of course, the fact that that was your childhood. And the other, I think, is that Internet itself was still quite a novelty those days, which made people use it just for the sake of using it. You can still log on to an IRC server and find event those who had been sitting there for all these years, and you can still make friends with people you never met in person. I did that for a test a couple of years ago. But later I realised, that it's just like a MOM game – you have to spend all your free time there or it won't work. And there's so much more interesting and useful things that I can invest my time in instead of just chatting with strangers! I used to feel nostalgic about that too. But after a couple tries like that I never looked back )

I never got to experience the legitimately old times, but still managed to see some of it around 2010.

I find a lot of joy in a restricted, slow network with people who actually care to be there (have no money to gain, have to go through some effort).

I find this in the deep web. I think it resembles the early internet a lot.

In the last few months I've been spending a lot of my life in tech discords. I'd like to invite anyone interested to join the reddit /r/webdev discord and hang out with me

https://discord.gg/H9Jkc7p

Completely agree with your opinion. Although I would say I found a good substitute using Discord Massively.

Some steps 1. Find some interest in something: a game, an art, etc. 2. Find some discords that are active with some people 3. "Meet" a lot of people, discuss, etc.

This reminded me of the sweet memories of meeting interesting and new people all the time. My medium was Warcraft III, I was a kid and remember buying that game on 3-4 different occasions (lost the hard disk that many times, yes). Interesting people in the right amount every day, and we played and had similar interests together. It was worth staying up all night long to catch that guild event, and everybody was as enthusiastic as me. The people, the community, and the environment. We need something like this today. There's nothing really equivalent except maybe community discords (the voice chat people). Thanks for reminding me!

In the mid-eighties, you could ask any BITNET machine, anywhere in the world, who was logged on. You could then send any of them a message. I did, and had interesting correspondence thereafter with people thousands of kilometers away.

I wrote a very similar entry not too long ago: https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/

I used to be a CompuServe forum manager 25 years ago and got started with dialup BBS using Qmodem at 2400bps. Sent mail via FidoNet and loved it. Got my first internet access when IBM offered accounts to the general public. Our small office of 15 had a Class C service provided by PSINet for $1100/month. Even though I'm still active building sites and managing networks it seems... boring. The old stuff took a bit of fiddling to optimize but now it is all so homogenized it seems... boring and I notice myself avoiding online stuff.

When I got on the internet in 1992, every person you met there actually had a valid and very good reason to be there. Nowadays, not so much. In fact most people shouldn't be there at all.

Babylon 5? Okay. It's a classic, though mostly I think because so much of the SF competition has been garbage. How do you feel about Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

It's awesome. Watched it on cable TV together with Charmed. But Buffy was always the better one. Still sad Angel got cancelled though.

Just couldn't get past the first season despite being told that it gets better.

I always skip the first season when I rewatch it. You don't really miss anything.

I do the same thing for Parks and Rec and the Office (US), both of which had subpar first seasons in my opinion.

Discord communities are the new IRC, MSN, AOL, whatever. Find a few discord servers of your interest, and you might find a bit of that old magic again.

I agree, I have found myself speaking to more people than ever whilst using Discord.

> Maybe it's just rose colored glasses of my puberty years.

I think you nailed it. All these things you mentioned can still be found, and can give the same feelings to teenagers now. The channels used are different, because these evolve with each generation, but I bet the young people who are going through the same stage now will be nostalgic about it decades later as things will definitely be different.

I just turned 34 so a few years older than you but I get what you are saying. I know it wasn't that long ago but I miss the days of getting home from school and chatting with friends on Yahoo! Messenger and then MSN (British so AIM was not a big thing for me). Before Yahoo! Messenger was Yahoo! Chat and ICQ. One of the strongest memories I have from when I was 16 was when my parents told me they were separating. The first person I spoke to was a random guy on ICQ I had made friends with somehow. From what I remember he was maybe 10 years older than I and he gave me a lot of great advice. I think about him, b@dac1d I think was how he spelt his name, from time to time. Although I don't even know what country he was from he was a good 'friend'.

Part of what I miss is the wonder that was the internet. Everything that happened was happening for the first time. Real time chat, online gaming, etc. as well as learning the fundamentals of many things such as programming and computer science. Now when I sit down to learn a new language it doesn't feel like it did when I first learn VB, C, Java 2, Perl, etc.

The last "new" thing that I remember being truly excited for was when virtualisation became something you could do on consumer hardware (VMware, Virual PC) in the early/mid-00s. Now I see new things like VR but I don't really get so excited for it.

Hardware is amazing now (I am writing this on a laptop with a six-core/twelve-thread i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a GPU with 4GB RAM to itself and 2TB of solid state storage) but it is just better hardware, it doesn't have that exciting new factor to it.

I remember feeling so damn excited when I upgraded my old desktop to 768MB RAM. Everytime I booted it up and saw the RAM check in POST scroll up to 768 I got giddy with excitement. Almost a little adrenaline rush. Now not so much. I guess I really am just getting old!

I regularly go on Slack and Discord servers (and still some IRC) but they feel different to me. I think it is the 1000+ members whereas back in the 90s/early-00s you had maybe 100-150 members in a channel and you would know most of them to some degree. Same with USENET in that you would often have conversations with the same people, it didn't matter how many people read that newsgroup it was only those that were active and that was usually a lot smaller in number. Often a couple of dozen in the newsgroups I frequented.

OP if you fancy a chat pop along to cpplang.slack.com and join us in #off-topic, doesn't matter if you're not a C++ programmer. We welcome mostly anyone in that channel and they are a nice bunch.

I get the same rush if I fire up older hardware. Installing some random old OS onto real hardware is still as thrilling as it ever was.

Far more thrilling than having Windows 10 invade itself onto some modern soulless fucking lounge bar. I mean hardware.

Yeah I miss it too. I used to run a few forums way back when. The most popular one I ever had was Forge Hub (gaming site). It still exists. I could go back and start posting but I think its best to leave that memory in the past. After all, there's a reason we left message boards in favor of aggregators and social networks. Best to leave our memories as rosy as we can.

There used to be more barriers to entry. The signal:noise ratio has steadily deteriorated as those barriers fell and more of the general population got online.

Now that the internet and the devices for accessing it are fully mature it's the new television.

Maybe VR is the next niche where mostly geeks will converge until fully matured with a headset in every household. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I echo your rant.

Looked up effnet stats the other day to find out there's only 20k users there these days. Not sure how many it was back in the day, and I was more of an undernet guy... but seems small today.

Contact details are in my profile... we can reminisce via email (which is effectively going the way of the Old Internet, especially as the millennials take over).

Have similar feelings, am 32. I miss the old days of ultima online, vanilla wow, shadowbane, can you tell I was a gamer :)

There is something very nostalgic to dialing up to your aol account and opening up a chat with random people. Playing conquest for the first time... wow. I don’t normally live in the past but had to fire up UO playlist this morning.

> you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days?

A lot of us are hanging out in person at the local hackerspace/makerspace, physically building and sharing and teaching, because the online experience no longer holds the magic it once did.

I still remember the black terminal screen con the DEC Apha that we used un the lab.

Alas, telneting to freenet finland where de could get a free email address... ... And discovering stuff inside ftp servers that mirrored shareware, and GNU software you couldn't use at home because you ran windows 3.51

It felt like the wild wild west, ir the ultimate frontier.

I'm 31, and I found an even better Internet experience than the old phpBB forums in the form of modern image boards.

I regularly visit Lainchan and a couple of boards at 8chan, and everything's like the communities of the 90s. I actually met some people IRL and it was great. You guys should try finding some of these small communities.

Rose colored glasses. You remember all the good stuff with none of the bad stuff. Remember programming in that time? HTML, CSS, JS? Internet Explorer 6?

As to how to make friends in your 30s - pick up dancing. Salsa, bachata, salsa cubana, kizomba all are build on idea of social dancing. You go to a party and dance with random people. Try it.

Hello fellow 30 year old!

I just climbed over that hump a little less than a month ago and have similar feelings. My tech/internet journey started where lots of others probably began, with games. I remember picking up the magazine Maximum PC and being awed at the stories and reviews of different computers, video cards and games. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 at the time and was just beginning to understand how computers functioned and could be built, piecemeal, so the magazine felt like a major discovery.

And at about the same time I learned that a game called Diablo 2 was in development by the company whose games I already adored, Blizzard. I learned that there were websites that speculated on and followed the game's development, so I started to visit those sites (namely diabloii.net) to satisfy my curiosity. That ultimately led me to the forums and to creating my first website, which I put together well before the game ever came out, devoted to a guild I wanted to create.

And then I started to follow Warcraft 3, which led me to more forums and IRC. IRC was the big one. It was like stepping into an entirely new universe. A universe of people from around the world that could talk in groups and communicate instantly about any topic. That was a real eye opener, which led me to just about everything else in nerddom. I co-created websites, setup servers, worked on a game mod, talked with programmers and artists, learned about linux, dabbled with scripting... The floodgates were open!

There's no question that the internet played a major formative role in my life and has had a huge impact on what I believe, who I've become and how I understand the world. But when I look at today's internet I see a very different place. Since 2016 I've been giving a lot of thought to how its popularity has changed the way that it operates. The promises of commercialization and politicization have brought many elements to bear that simply didn't exist to the same extent when I was growing up. The ongoing war for users and messaging seems to encourage cloistered spaces and inner-facing pairings (ie: exclusive instead of inclusive).

Then again, maybe I'm just joining the ranks of old dudes yelling at kids to get off their lawn and reminiscing about the good old days. I'd love to hear from the people that are growing up online today. I'd like to know what their experience has been like and if they've found their own fonts of wisdom and information that I have never seen.

So much nostalgia today bro. 30 years old here, similar story, check what else is on hackernews today. https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution

I definitely spend an unproductive amount of time on web.archive.org.

I am very nostalgic of the early 2000 internet (I'm also 30). I spent a majority of my free time making anime websites. I met a lot of friends through affiliating with their sites.

Not only that, but on all the various forums I participated in and later (2004) through World of Warcraft.

I miss it all.

Anyone go on pcpitstop? Used to love benchmarking my custom computer rig and chatting it up on the forums.

I'd check out scuttlebutt [https://www.scuttlebutt.nz], a decentralized social network based off of the secure scuttlebutt gossip protocol. It feels like the internet and bbs days that I remember.

Every generation has its own "I miss the old XXX". You're just getting old.

Discord is pretty close to the “old internet” from my POV, OP. Chat rooms full of random people are straight out of the AOL/IRC days. It has all the humor and pointless drama you’d expect. I’ve been enjoying the rebirth of chatting!

I'm in the same boat as you my friend. Mid thirties guy, hit adolescence right as the net was blowing up mid 90s. I still remember the first mp3 I found on a computer in the library at school and it blew my freakin mind how small it was (I had experimented with ripping CDs before resulting in huge, huge wav files...)

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries) there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet", just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did 33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days); just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those "create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

You hit on something that I really relate to. It used to be that I could say, "I'll see you online later." But that doesn't mean much now.

Instant messaging was engaging. It meant that I was sitting there, actively logged onto AIM with my status set as available. Now, with present-day alternatives on mobile, that level of presence seems like it's missing.

Others are always available but not. I could receive a reply on Messenger immediately or in a few hours. It definitely goes the other way, too. I may reply immediately or not. People are always available for conversation but conversations seem harder to have.

i'm a few years younger, but i get the same feeling from modern social media sites. i don't really like the "broadcast" mentality, but i get caught up in to too.

fediverse[1] is a great escape from the modern internet. it has its problems, but it feels a lot like my early experiences with the internet.

[1]: https://fediverse.network/

How to meet friends in your 30s: as long as people are kind, sincere, etc, then it doesn't matter if we have anything in common.

I used to be on Trillian which let you log into MSN and AIM I believe.

Anyone remember SmarterChild, the original chatbot?

Yes, I remember SmarterChild on MSN.

Did it inspire your username?

I was lucky enough to work on some of this technology across the 1980s. I don't claim to "own" any of the running systems because what I did was OBE and peripheral at best, but none the less, I have never felt "I wasn't there".

Something I think isn't said enough, is that despite everyone understanding what "convergeance" meant (it was actually the topic of one of my first lectures at university in 1979) it's one thing to understand, and it's another to actually experience it and get some deep sense.

For instance, I knew the flatter protocol design implications of TCP/IP meant "same everywhere" which was a huge relief after living networks with a distinction between LAN and WAN in protocol terms: But I didn't really think "everywhere" meant built into the doors of fridges.

Mentally, I think a lot of us made unnecessary, arbitrary distinctions between systems which felt like toys and were sold as such, and systems bought to "do work" -in fact several universities deliberately went out and got amigas and did both low level coding, GUI design, and just banged the bejesus out of them as cheap terminals to Vax 11/780s.

TL;DR being there was more than just being alive at the time. You had to learn to think in new ways too.

Nostalgia: It ain't what it used to be.

I think the internet just got a lot bigger.

Yes. And I miss asking people their ASL!

Why did the USENET have to disappear?

Because Google made a popular interace to USENET called Google Groups, then added a non-USENET component and discontinued the USENET part. By doing so, a lot of people ended up on the non-USENET part.

A secondary factor was spam getting out of control IIRC.

Usenet still exists!

Yeah but free usenet servers with binaries are rare.

Binaries were the ( second ) death of Usenet. It went from being a social medium to the poster-child of copyright infringement.

I wish uuencode had never been invented.

me too buddy

haha. Its really sad and funny

yeah, I miss having 16 too

The internet is a walled garden now, that desires a pound of flesh from everyone for every little thing.

It is no longer an egalitarian happy place for the exchange of ideas

This is a silly notion, and almost every "Show HN" submission proves that. Anyone can stand up any website they want for free or for a very low cost and say/do anything they want.

Facebook and Google are not the Internet, they're just websites same as any other.

The problem is searching through all the blogspam to find that nugget of good content.

Curation and discovery have been a problem with the web since day one, which is why Dogpile and Yahoo and AOL and Google became so popular.

It can be that place, if you want it - just stay away from the walled gardens, use free software, don't fall for the ephemeral gratification of having the newest and latest and fastest gadget. Use a PC running a free unix or a mobile device running a Google-free AOSP-derivative and you'll zip around the 'net at speeds unimaginable in 'those days'.

You won't find as many 'home pages' as back then, in that sense the likes of Facebook have done real damage, true. The sheer expansion of the 'net means you'll find plenty of interest outside of the gardens anyway so instead of pining for days long past I'd suggest to gear up for the here and now and for days to come when the blight of Facebook and their ilk are nothing but bad memories.

I do all of these things. The main problem is that other people do not. Good content is hiding behind the walls.

Just look at how Youtube and Spotify captured everyone's attention despite torrent infrastructure being easier and better than ever to use

Are we absolutely sure it's the internet that has changed? I think more than anything, we have changed the most in the sense that our modern minds are encountering many times the number of ideas that previous generations did.

Discord is the new old internet. There are thousands of servers to discover, and to surf. Whether it’s anime or games or programming, there’s a niche server that has interesting people to chat with.

If you’re missing the old internet, try hopping on some discord portals (basically “meta servers” that you can find other servers through) and just see where they take you.

Sounds like you don’t even remember the old internet. The old internet was Usenet, telnet, gopher, etc.

If you didn't use UUCP you shouldn't be allowed to post

In fact if you're not Vint Cerf, you shoudn't be allowed to post

Get off my lawn

I agree. I had a UUCP node in 1992.

I had a pigeon

What's the point of this condescending snarky remark? You're not helping.

Welcome to the internet. Sounds like you don’t remember the old one either!

I’m going to be harsh here.

I’m 43. I got on the internet in 94.

The internet now is much better in every way than it was at <insert point x>.

Most of the discussions and sharing you seem to miss is now in the very platforms you have rejected. Twitter in particular is great for communities like Babylon 5. You just need to choose who to follow.

The key thing is don’t be the guy who hates new things. New things are different but they really do work. Try them!

Tried Twitter. It's terrible and awful. I mean, there are some wonderful people there, but it boggles the mind why they choose to use platform that limits them to short grunts and which they have to share with so much awfulness.

Tried Reddit. It has some good content but omg so much noise. So. Much. Noise.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that. Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh, and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your soul to it.

Tried HN. That one works ok so far, a lot of smart people here. Content is mostly limited to specific domain, but that's OK.

Still, all those new things didn't make an impact on my life like the old internet things did. Maybe it's me that is different now.

I won't say internet is worse now than it was then. But it's different. Some for the better (working search! Wikipedia! free university courses!), some for the worse.

P.S. I got on the internet when Windows was sold on floppy disks :) I actually used gopher.

I agree completely that there is a lot of awfulness on Twitter. And when it came out it amazed me too that people would limit themselves to such a short form.

And yet it works. And intellectually it makes some sense too: it is very rare that a single thought actually takes more than 280 characters (and maybe a picture) to express.

(Hey, I think FriendFeed was the greatest social network ever built. But there are good reasons it lost to Twitter, and they make a surprising amount of sense)

> And yet it works.

I don't see what happens on Twitter as "it working". Tastes differ I guess.

> it is very rare that a single thought actually takes more than 280 characters (and maybe a picture) to express.

I guess that depends on the thought. Twitter is full of the kind that take a short grunt to express. But do I really want them? I've found I can do very well without them.

So in this conversation, the only paragraph which is longer than 280 characters is this:

That can be pretty easily split into two thoughts anyway.

If it doesn't work for you that's cool.

I usually try to keep paragraphs small because it's more easily readable and helps me structure my thoughts without getting too longwinded. Joyce could afford multi-page sentences, but I have no hope to keep the reader engaged for so long.

But that doesn't mean it would be better split by some weird interface into separate pieces, each paragraph floating around detached from the next. When I see people trying to fit their good thoughts into that format and then resorting to all kinds of third party tools in order to reassemble the resulting mess back into coherent text - I can't help pitying them. Why would they subject themselves and their thoughts to this kind of torture?

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