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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

All nostalgia is just a longing for youth.

I think that's a fine way to characterize nostalgia, but it seems like a needlessly reductive, even perhaps dismissive, way to respond to the author's point of view. I think there are plenty of reasons to dislike the direction the Web has taken since its inception, and many of them are more substantial than just nostalgia for times past.

No, some things really were just that much better back in the day. Gaming for example, is now a science and extracting as much attention as possible from the equation. Every interaction, every button press, every design choice is made to get your dollars and grab your attention for as long as possible. Watch a few years worth of GDC top talks to get sick to your stomach.

Someone once pointed out to me that Transformers cartoons are essentially toy commercials. I know this now but my twelve year blissfully did not. So maybe you are just referring to the loss of innocence that comes from biting a fruit from the tree of knowledge, because corporations have always been scamming to separate you from your money.

The "old internet" was before commercialization so you're supporting the argument it was better before.

It was good because it didn't boil down to a few utility sites. Everything was creative, not corporate.

Maybe, but it also really sucked. You could only get to it from a desktop when the phone line wasn't tied up. The best possible connection was crazy slow. There would be days-long outages for no apparent reason, with no way to figure out what was going on. There was no wikipedia, no stack overflow, no GitHub, no cloud hosting, no readthedocs, no dockerhub.

It was bad.

It honestly amazes me that we wrote so much code before Stack Overflow existed.

Imagine writing a web browser when the only reference you have on the HTTP and HTML standards is a book.

Someone had to write the first TCP/IP implementation without the help of the Internet.

How was the first debugger written without a debugger?

Gaming is far too big to categorize in to one group. There are more classic non micro transaction games than ever before. There are also a separate group of online money suck games which could be considered closer to a slot machine than a video game.

Similar to the internet, there is more of the content the OP post wants than ever before and there are whole communities like neocities dedicated to it. This is all just complaining that there is now other stuff to consume as well and that the majority prefers it over their nostalgic gif based sites.

AAA gaming, yes.

But Indie games are a thing, and some of them are incredibly good. My favorites are Hades, Factorio, Undertale, Rimworld, and Oxygen Not Included. But also popular are Stardew Valley, A Hat in Time, Terraria, Hollow Knight...

I could go on. Look on the top rated games on Steam [0] and you'll find plenty of amazing games that aren't designed to extract as much money as possible from you via microtransactions.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&...

I miss buying a game and having a full, completed game.

I miss not having to install games on consoles, or patch them day 1.

I miss expansion packs that were basically a full length additional game with the same mechanics, as opposed to DLC which always feel short and underwhelming and still cost a lot.

I miss offline games. I mean games that never ever connect to the internet even once.

I miss unlocking stuff in-game with accomplishments in-game instead of microtransactions.

I miss dedicated servers for multiplayer instead of crappy peer to peer that we have in every game now.

Gaming really just isn't the same anymore. Once some company finally makes Cloud gaming work for everyone it will truly be dead.

So everything everywhere through history only improves over time, forever? Nothing is ever lost? The tragedy of the commons is a myth? Any memory I might have of something having been better in the past is false?

The tragedy of the commons as an inevitable phenomenon is a myth!

Doesn't contradict the thrust of your comment, just an interesting thing to know.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

Not sure. I am nostalgic about a lot of things, but don't feel like I'm longing for youth. Like, I want the world to be about like it was as a teenager, but I don't want to be a teenager again. I want to be me now in that world, if that makes sense.

I do not agree. I just think people truly don't know what they have until it's gone. And I also think our minds are good at forgetting the bad parts when we are thinking back.

I'd modify that to be "a longing to be younger" or just in general an earlier time. You can be young and have nostalgia for when you were really young.

… a longing to be hopeful (again).

To perhaps have more of your future be before you rather than behind you.

Almost all generalizations are wrong. Some are useful. This is not one of them.

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