Ask HN: What would a weirder internet look like to you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would a weirder internet look like to you?

I've heard HNers at times briefly mention that the internet could have developed into a weird, wonderful and experimental place, from the 1990s onwards.

What would that kind of internet have actually looked like today?

If I had to imagine it myself, it'd be a place with a lot more variety and competition, ie. niche communities, companies and services. I'd like to have seen time banks become super popular and an otaku (a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests) culture have sprouted up in conjunction.

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One where the nerds and outsiders find their projects and websites becoming super popular and the 'mainstream' types find their voices ignored and pushed to the background. One where say, the likes of pannenkoek2012 ended up where PewDiePie is now, and where all those 'influencers' have zero audience and appeal.

And yes, one where small communities about niche topics are the places to be for discussion, and where more and more have sprung up over the years rather than said communities ending up on the likes of Reddit or Discord or what not. Heck, imagine a world where Twitter and Facebook actually failed to catch on and social media died early.

In other words, the internet as it kinda was in the 90s and early 00s.

In my opinion, the internet did develop into a weird place. There's a plethora of [1] weird communities and people are still [2] experimenting and chucking stuff up on the internet to see what others think.

It doesn't seem that weird anymore, because people have clustered into major sites like Youtube, Reddit, Facebook .... but this was inevitable as people would rather be part of a large community than fracture off into isolated forums like the old days.

It's not that hard to find something weird online ...

[1] http://boards.4chan.org/b/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/show

I think what I miss the most was there was this idea at first that the internet could be a kind of digital Library of Alexandria, where all of the world's knowledge could be readily available to benefit society as a whole and especially those who are economically or geographically challenged. What we increasingly have on the WWW instead: Paywalls, misinformation, obfuscation and lowest common denominator drivel.

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