The Day the Good Internet Died

- A webring at the bottom of every website

- Websites having "awards" pages, full of random little picture awards given out by other random websites

- Hand-curated directories of everything imagineable

- When internet ads were just static 468x60 banners placed on individual sites by individual advertisers

- "Guided tours" in AOL chat rooms, where a host guided everyone in a live chat on a split-screen tour of their favorite websites

- MUDs

- Stumbleupon's stumble toolbar

The 2012 era was when we really started to see the weaponization of attention take off. Smartphones weren't that terrible (Crackberry jokes aside) pre-2012, at least in terms of being attention vampires. In app purchases had become a thing a year or two before, and people were figuring out how to make it work - with 2012 being around the time they figured it out.

The variable reward "drive your users crazy" stuff hit around then, and with it, the wave of "algorithmic feeds" - not just chronologically ordered stuff.

Facebook moved to a more heavily algorithmic feed in 2011, mobile apps stared more actively driving their users crazy, etc.

So that timeframe was when the internet went from "Everyone sees the same thing on the same site, and you easily hit the end of new content if you care" to "It's a slot machine, and it's in your pocket, and there's a notification to get you back into the slot machine."

And it's just been downhill from there. :(

Confirmation bias for the win. Upvoted.

I know people mourn the ‘decentralised’ web of the blogosphere but I really think people forget some of the failure modes of that world. Much of the conversation was driven by ‘A-listers’ who in many cases were garbage human beings. It was hard to get eyeballs and interactions on your stuff without them though. Most of the time you were writing for half a dozen friends. Hint: that’s what you miss! You can still do it though. You used to have your corner of the Internet and now most people hang out in a busy mall, but there’s nothing stopping you going back. There are all sorts of niche sites or corners of other platforms out there (many of which still have RSS if that’s your actual problem). But I think if most people are honest, deep down they find these venues a bit parochial now and avoid them while simultaneously lamenting their loss. Many of them are also run by young people you no longer have much in common with.

I’m as much of a curmudgeon as anyone but I find these increasingly regular articles about how the Internet is rubbish now absolutely baffling. The pie got much bigger, it’s flavours more diverse. Yes you maybe have to work harder to find your place in it. In exchange, everyone now has a place in it. That’s good.

It's not Google Reader, but it's a clean interface for reading RSS, Twitter, and newsletters. And there's a view of the latest post from each feed, so I don't get lost in the firehose and miss out on updates from people who post less frequently.

There must be more sites these days I’d imagine but it sure doesn’t feel that way. All roads seem to lead back to Rome/ major platform.

That’s also what makes hn so nice. It’s maintained some of that old vibe somehow not just in atmosphere but also in the links.

1. Still around

2. Still independent (and run by Tom Fulp)

I'm a proud paying member on two accounts (one from '05, one from '07, though I lurked as early as '02) and I hope it never, ever goes away.

Eternal September started in 1993. I think it is the first time the "good internet died". I wasn't there, I really started to use the internet somewhere in the late 90s, with a home dial-up modem, making me one of the people who "killed the good internet".

The author of the article, and many people here are probably eternal September kids too, so internet killers accusing other, younger ones of killing the internet. The youngest ones are already from a lineage of internet killers and are getting ready to designate the next in line.

My opinion: despite everything we like to complain about, today's internet is the best internet, and tomorrow's internet will be even better. I have my nostalgia too, and some things really became worse, but there is so much we can do with it now, a lot of it we take for granted that I don't think I want to go back in time. Let memories be memories.

Oh no, it's someone lamenting the loss of a program which didn't even exist until 2005.

Things were always better in the past, that's because we don't remember the bad things. Apart from Punch the Monkey.

The internet is what you make of it. There are risks to it in the future (centralisation of DNS and requirements on centralised SSL being the current ones), but there always have been. Some things are easier (running your own server, or multiple servers, on multiple contents, with tons on bandwidth), some things are harder (getting other people to accept your email), but the internet is what you make of it, and there's far more you can make of it today if you want once you stop worrying what other people do.

Larry Rodriges chronicles his life as a blimp jockey in Geocities. His daughter keeps this running after he passed away. This is the good internet.

If this predates you, imagine the content of your favorite subreddit or HN, where membership itself was curated by people credible in a topic, where you could read sincere conversations and arguments between knowledgable (or perhaps just enthusiastic) indviduals, with a defacto Chatham House rule around opinions and pseudonymity, and read it at your leisure without the risk of missing anything, without ads, cookies, popups, or PII hoovering, and with a real-time responsive threading interface (via mutt or even pine) where you could use simple / or vi-like commands, where you could index and pile the whole thing into a database if you wanted to.

What made the old internet good was it was mostly a privilege to be a part of it, granted and revoked by the communities themselves, and not by a back end layer of unskilled governance activists.

I managed news servers back in the day, and I'm tempted to just spin up an NNTP server again with my own damn cabal (TINC!LLTC!) and to hell with everyone else. The main change I would make is limit the binaries hierarchy, strip any and all markup for anything that isn't code, provide support only for an open pyCurses client, provide a robust killfile interface for filtering low energy shitposts, facilitate reasonable pseudonymity, no idiotic picture profiles, and probably apply some modern ML moderation tools.

HN already does about 40% of this today, but the idea of starting something that emmulates the platforms today only with a different political flavour is predicated on the same fundamental problem that it is for the public instead of being for people who can pass a basic skills and literacy bar.

The fediverse is based on real time addictive interaction, whereas time in news threads was measured in days and weeks. Discord seems to be for people who really want to talk to you, but you don't really want to talk to them. Blockchains appear mainly to be a market for matching money launderers with people nurturing untreated mental illness. (together at last!), and one-off radical political sites are just honeypots for patsies to get set up to justify law enforcement budgets.

As far as I can tell, an influencer on a social platform is just someone who shares pictures of their butt, and twitter seems to have found their sweet spot as a broadcast system for people united in their shared predicament of having nothing challenging to say.

The text based internet solved a lot of problems platforms struggle with today using simple rules, because the platforms have scaled beyond their use cases, and their future looks a lot like that of AOL/Compuserve. The good internet is still ahead of us, and probably using tools we have neglected.