I miss the old internet. The beautiful people are in charge | Hacker News Reader

I miss the old internet. The beautiful people are in charge

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The old internet is actually still around. There's just so much noise and Google isn't going to direct you to it.

Neocities is a platform that promotes those quirky personal homepages.

There are chat room/irc platforms like matrix and libera chat that still go on.

A lot of Neocities pages are full of JS...

It's better to seek out pages at http://wiby.me

I find myself missing the creativity and passion of the old internet, rather than the specifics of how they were built. Is it really so bad that these sites have some scripting involved?

I miss Netscape on Windows 3.1 on a 4:3 CRT monitor in 256 colors with red on yellow Comic Sans bold italic H1 blink tag marquee with an unnecessary trail of ellipses scrolling left to right with 3 iframes with Java and Flash applets with a redirect to goatse.

But seriously, I miss Pythonline, gopher, finger, IRC, and sunsite.

IRC is still up, from Libera.chat (ex-Freenode) to efnet and so on. Gopher has lots of usage at gopher://sdf.org, gopher://magical.fish and gopher://floodgap.org.

On Sunsite, Ibiblio it's still up. And Slashdot.

Without VRML97, we wouldn't have PNG. Ah the bad old days. Netsplit!

Why is JS mutually exclusive to the old web?

AI recommendations are a blessing and a curse on YouTube.

More satisfaction from word of mouth (hand curated search index, effectively) hits than AI lately for me.

For me they're annoyingly self referencing. I rarely ever get recommendations outside my recent watch history so it feels like there's nothing to discover on-site outside of stretching the "my mix" playlist until it starts improvising.

Isn't Substack.com like the old "blogosphere" and hence like the old internet? There certainly are many quirky people publishing on Substack who are writing, creating and talking (via video and podcast) about anything and everything. I myself publish essays about the life lessons found in movies, and I'm creating a four-panel comic strip on Substack. Others are putting up original music, poetry, fiction etc. And of course there are many technical Substacks, covering economics, politics, research, etc. Many of these are large enough to have their own communities. Can't you get what you liked from "the old internet" on Substack?

> Isn't Substack.com like the old "blogosphere"

No.

The old blogosphere would be stuff like wordpress.com or blogger... which mostly are still there.

Also tumblr (now with 100% less porn) and the now defunct myspace.

I know some people that got into web development just because they wanted to customize their homepages on tumblr/myspace.

But nowadays people get on twitter/facebook and all they get is the same shade of blue, same as everybody else.

EDIT: before that there were websites that would give away free hosting space... Like 100MB or something like that.

I'm now 47 and I can empathize with her. I'm old enough to also fondly remember a vastly different internet.

I still use some of "the old internet" like IRC and even some forums, and it's wonderful to see how much of it thrives. but it's definitely much, much smaller. I fear that in a few years, the ones maintaining some of it will have moved on.

I dislike this mentality. Sure, there are a lot of things that were "more fun" when the internet was new / smaller, but losing the "intimate and cozy" aspects was the cost of bringing the internet to the masses.

The expansion of internet access literally allowed me to speak to our family on another continent. Sorry I'm not sorry my presence made "being on the internet no longer special"...

You could do that pre 2k as well, so moot point.

Long distance phone calls were like $5/minute so yes and no

Bullshit, talking to someone over the phone internationally used to cost tens of dollars per conversation. Now I can do a VIDEO call with my friends and family across 5 different countries for free, or a few dollars per month.

It is technically true that one could use voice over IP to talk to someone long-distance over the internet before y2k. There were demos of this in the 1970s and 1980s starting on the original ARPANET. There were commercial software products to do this. By the mid 1990s there were open source tools like vic and vat to do audio and video conferencing over multicast. In 1999, the SIP protocol standard was released, and this represented working technology that had multiple implementations.

In the mid 1990s, the telcos in the US were lobbying hard to ban VOIP because it was already obvious that this was going to disrupt their traditional long-distance toll business.

So, I think this argument just reduces to the basic statement that you don't appreciate this nostalgia if you were not yourself enjoying the early internet.

It is ironic that the article writer is thinking of an "old" internet from 2007 and later. I was among the horde who ruined the internet after Endless September, which references a turning point in 1993 when the old, rarified internet got sullied by the masses.

Being a kid has changed drastically in the last 5 years. A combination of the pandemic and technological change I think. Even five years ago the 10 year olds would meet in groups with mixed gender at the playground. I was playing with my small children while reminiscing on how I used to play outside like that.

Nowadays, not so. All I see is smaller groups (2-3) of one gender hugging phones. So the trickle down of all things smart has reached the bottom now. This is changing society. Off course, I know that complaining about change and youth is as old as Socrates. But still, reading is gone, making music is gone, the social interaction between sexes is gone. You know that image of all machines transplaced by the smartphone? The same has happened for all things cultural. I'll play Socrates here and refuse to believe that consuming on TikTok is a cultural good. This time it's different.

IRC and old home pages were better. You found out weirdos like you, with cool series, scientific content, fantranslated game ROMs, indie/libre software games, endless discussions at Slashdot...

Indeed, the internet is like a foreign country to me now. What's an Amouranth, anyway?

Sorry fellas, the old internet is like the old BBS scene. There are people here and there keeping some semblance of it alive for old times' sake, but it will never again be like it was. It's effectively dead.

A female streamer on Twitch that was pimped out by her husband, allegedly.

It's basically big boobs attract viewers.

Archived: https://archive.ph/o1Xa5

Internet died when Totse shut down

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