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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

The internet is still fun.

I was on bulletin board systems pre-internet as a kid and spent too much time on the web in the late 90s. I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better.

Though I don't like social media much anymore and worry about the effect of screens on kids, I still love the internet and value what it makes possible.

I don't buy into these arguments of things used to be better. It's the same argument that older generations used with younger generations for music, cars, or clothes. The list goes on.

It's subjective. Technology enables new possibilities. Everything grows or dies and life moves on.

It's not that the internet used to be fun. It's that the internet changed and people tend to stay the same and not want things to change around them.

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I also spent a ton of time on BBSes, pre Internet. A few of these developed into early dialup ISPs. One thing I really miss is the "community" aspect. Local message boards, etc. That is all gone now. The closest thing you can find is maybe a subreddit or Discord, but it's not the same. The community and locality aspect is gone. You can't even meet a weirdo on Craigslist anymore.

For many people, the Internet of today is basically interactive TV.

I can't really disagree and also miss the local aspect. But local city subreddits have more much more info and discussion on local news, history and politics than BBSs did. Less DIY and decentralized and more corporate and centralized. Not great but it's still there.

Mixed bag I guess.

Local message boards are gone because they end up becoming dominated by weirdos and the people who don't have anything else to do, so end up posting constantly. Think of the comments section of a local newspaper website.

I don't think this is entirely correct. The same weirdos are now posting on reddit.

It also says something that most of local newspaper websites already disabled their comments section few years back because of this exact reason. That's what at least happened to the few I was visiting. It was really bad though. Made you wonder that those are just regular folks walking the same sidewalks as myself and in their past time they just go on and express fantasies of violence under some "grassroots" politics column.

EDIT: this was largely just to strengthen one of your points.

Every single time something becomes big, the hardcore early fans of that thing will complain about the change.

This used to happen with bands. Early die hard fans enjoyed having their own tribe or clique built around the band, and then when the band became too successful they'd say that the band "sold out" and that the newfound fans aren't really fans and so on.

This happened with Linux where many people say Linux isn't fun anymore, or they lament that everything changed. I was an early Linux user, but I find that Linux is better than ever and I'm thankful I don't need to configure X anymore.

People of the early internet were in their own little clique, and then the entire world jumped in and they lost "their place." They will always lament this change, and they will always say it used to be better.

Humans are tribal and they forms tribes around anything and everything. Anytime their tribe is displaced they will become resentful even if that displacement makes the thing their tribe formed around better in every possible way. For me, I never had a solid sense of "tribal belonging" and therefore never really cared about these things, but I do understand the impulse as I get very vivid and strong experiences of it at sporting events, concerts, and so on. I suppose the strongest sense of tribalism I feel consistently is that of being a contrarian by impulse, and I feel some kind of kindred spirit with other contrarians... so maybe take everything I've said here with a grain or pound of salt.

I agree, tribalism of this nature has a huge effect.

With the internet, though, I think there's another factor that reduces its "fun level" -- the internet has also shifted to being a heavily commercialized environment, and commercialization has a very strong anti-fun effect.

Also the size of the platforms have an effect. If you are on Twitter, even if you mostly interact with people within a select niche, everything is essentially public and anyone can see it or come in and spoil the party so to speak. Twitter / Facebook / itself has a far wider reach than the niche forums or IRC channels of the past, so it is very easy for things to go off the rails with commenters outside of that niche coming in angry about something or changing the conversation etc.. this is largely true on Reddit now as well. The userbase is too broad so it loses that shared sense of community, this leads to misunderstandings, different values, and more arguments. Thus necessitating stricter rules / bans etc.. which can also put a damper on fun.

Humans may be tribal, but the universe is also entropic. Things decay in quality over time, and the only answer to this is cyclical rebirth.

The analogy of music here is telling because in fact the vast majority of bands are only truly good for an album or two in a small band of time, maybe even for just a song. People would be objectively right to say punk isn't what it was in the 80s in certain places like the UK.

Things really do sometimes get worse, or at least not stay the same style and quality forever. The repugnant conclusion alone pretty much guarantees niche things that are "good" to the niche that then get super popular and commercialized trend towards a worse for everyone steady state over time.

> I've seen it evolve from java applets and flash to something better.

With the advances in technology I wish it had. However, we now have Material Design, oversized UIs, autoplaying videos when you are immediately on the site, anti-adblockers, "Please Subscribe" crap, the desktop being an afterthought (hamburger menus), etc.

I don't like those things either.

But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.

Ublock Origin has no effect on email modals or cookie popups. Those have to be manually zapped.

Consent-o-matic handles cookie popups. Some sites do have login-walls, enforced or no. Someone ought make another extension!

https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic

UBlock Origin includes (but doesn't enable by default) several "Annoyances" filter lists that zap many cookie banners.

That's not really a counterargument. Having to do those things sucks in and of themselves. They just mitigate some of the other suckage.

This pretty much, not to mention that some sites break just by disabling JavaScript even though frontends for popular social media sites like Twitter (Nitter) and YouTube (YT2009, Invidious) prove that you don't need JavaScript or at least make the entire site rely on it just to view content.

> But a counter argument is that uBlock origin, Pi-hole, and Reader mode in Firefox go a long way to blocking those things and creating a nice reading experience.

Yeah, true. What I mean is that I miss when the web sites were still lighter pretty much and the desktop was still one of the main platforms (heck, one of the reasons of increased PC sales from the late 90s-early 00s was internet access). An example for me is that I had a better time viewing YouTube on a old computer and old OSes on VMs than YouTube today since back then, the site was still light enough and easy to use. Heck, back then you could even run it on Windows 98 and 2000.

Apologies I had to reply again. Been a while I actually used this so I forgot that there was an edit button.

> flash to something better

Please enlighten me on something better. Nothing has enabled me to create in the same way of creativity and fun than Flash did; for me at least.

It was so practical that my mother made her first website in Flash.

Flash was a nice tool for creators and it enabled some interesting ways to present information. Flash gaming was a very interesting niche.

But on the whole I think it made the web worse. Lots of sites had microscopic text that you couldn't enlarge, no bookmarking pages or maintaining state, no right click, never ending security holes, invisible to search, inaccessible to those with vision or hearing assistants. The list goes on and on.

I'm not saying Flash was the key to website design or the web as a whole but it was definitely a key to animation, visual creativity and the likes.

As FruitLoops Studio is for Audio.

If you want to do the same you have to now know JavaScript, some library and some UI frontend.

Flash enabled you to add interactive to other than just a straight up black text on a white page.

You can't even copy text now on some SPA sites nor head back in browser history without being hijacked to their home page.

What we got isn't it either.

Yeah, Flash had its problems but it at least you "build a thing" without a ton of overhead. The complexity of today's "modern" tooling is a bit crazy. SPAs are often used inappropriately, where a simple, server-side generated site would be more efficient, easier to develop, deploy, maintain.

Plenty of websites have similar usability issues today. Most sites will refuse to load content without Javascript. I stopped keeping bookmarks because most pages I had went to 404 Not Found.

For all these disadvantages, Flash had something modern webdev can only dream of: permanence. A Flash file from 2004 will work almost perfectly in Ruffle, 20 years later; video, audio, images, animation. A dynamic webpage or dataviz (the only interactive things made today) won't load on anything that doesn't have a full NodeJS server on a Virtualbox VM and untold number of npm dependencies.

Flash was not the problem, it was how people used it. Same as today.

Plenty of websites are implemented poorly, but 3/4 of the problems listed with Flash were inherent. Flash absolutely was a problem.

It did have a certain (imo over hyped) DX that people had a fondness for & that the web wasn't catering to. This was good for users in that they got a lot of experiences they might not have otherwise had. But the experiences were 99% things the web could do, and the web experience as a user was better.

I'm not unsympathetic to the passing of the flash age (even given the treasonous un-webful proprietary closed app-like rot that it was). But I mostly wish we'd had more people writing competitive authoring tools for the web; we could have made a Flash timeline like editor, with svg and smil/svg Dom/css animations/css transitions. The DX was largely recreateable. I think it's somewhat over hyped, but I definitely see & am sorry that there haven't been successful popular web-targetting ways of doing similar.

I don't think the web is as impermanent as you project. Many sites will run fine from an archive. Sure, datavis sites not being able to get data you didn't fetch the first time is an issue, but flash dataviz's are just as liable to fetch data on the fly rather than bake it all in. Flash doesn't have an inherent advantage, more a happenstance one, and web archiving will take one far further than one might believe. Alas "save page as..." doesn't work; the promise of tech like http bundled seems high, but then the archival community groups went & did their own thing instead of joining up, and http bundles became another bland anti-Google rallying flag. Alas.

It doesn’t matter how bad some tool was if the replacement is non-existant or even worse, even less used, etc…

No newcomer's tool will ever be as well used as an incumbent.

There haven't been a complete absence of Flash-like things, but on the web. There just wasn't much uptake. For all the people who swore Flash was the greatest, there weren't a lot of people willing to spend money or create a community around new attempts.

Flash was fun to dabble in, but it's unclear what value proposition similar tech has im todays world, besides being fun to mess around with (which I love but does not a market make).

What's the point? It clearly was destructive, if like I said, the replacement is non-existant or even worse, even less used, etc… so pointing out all the flaws of the original tool can't change that.

Doesn't Flash, the tool, export to JS now?

It was having Flash player, the browser plugin, that was an ongoing security and privacy problem for browsers.

Flash isn't even available anymore. It was discontinued in Dec 2020.

Adobe Animate, the descendant of Macromedia Flash authoring tool, still exists. It is Flash Player that went away.

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