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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

The internet of the 90s is still alive if you step outside the walled gardens.

It is and it isn't. Sure, you can run a website, forum, blog, whatever and host it yourself much easier than in the 90s. But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET. Nowadays, it's the opposite, the bias is in the other direction. Even hackers are on Slack and Twitter.

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>But people look for you and connect on the popular platforms they frequent: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Back in the day even normies would pick up some tech and talk to you on IRC or USENET

Is that true?

Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed.

Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.

Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).

~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.

Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.

You are counting 2 year olds in the denominator. IRC and Usenet were the internet. If you used a computer you used these. But yes, computers were less common then, especially amongst two year olds.

Sure, I also pretended that IRC users were all US based... I could have taken a figure of 3b. instead of 3m.

Also was careful to state "stats are lazy and blunt"

*300m

He’s also counting only Americans. There never was a time when normal people hanged out on IRC. Wikipedia has ~120 millions people on the Internet in 1997, and 10 millions IRC users at its peak in 2003. So 8% of Internet users on IRC is a wildly optimistic upper bound. 1% is probably closer to the truth.

You're right. Though I'd probably argue that a lot of people may be overly concerned with discoverability, follower counts, monitization, etc. You can blog/podcast/make videos/etc. as easily (or more so) as you could in the early 2000s. And you can always just link from Twitter or whatever. If you don't stress about maximizing your followers all the capabilities are still there.

But you're right that the bias has shifted, e.g. long twitter threads (with no real archivability) vs. a blog post.

I think there is a shifting baseline bias. There were plenty of "normies" who considered the internet just for nerds.

Really the question of the choice is "Do you care about the audience at large or the way you and your small niche want it more?"

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