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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of weird indie internet still exists. Unfortunately, most people can't stay away from corporate mega-sites. Even HN is run by such a company.

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Agreed that there is plenty of weird internet out there left to enjoy, but I think its a bit of a stretch to call YC a corporate mega-site.

YC is a billion dollar startup incubator. It gives birth to corporate mega-sites.

Whoever can solve discoverability of those indie sites will do very well. I parallel it to the “eat local” movement, where folks really go out of their way to find healthy food locally even when it costs more.

It shouldn’t take me crawling through the mud of social media to find them.

The fediverse is a large and diverse enough social media that you will not be able to traverse in your own lifetime. Follow the links to the artistic, human-made, not-for-profit, "authentic" content. There's more than enough to fulfil your needs.

As a heuristic, if it was made for earning money, it's probably safe to close the tab.

Just as we have the dark web for a certain class of subjects, I wish we had a "light web" to balance it

Perhaps a community index curated to contain only non commercial websites with no ads or trackers?

Sometimes I wonder if back when the Internet was "good", how many people were using it and much stuff was on it? Has the proportion of good stuff changed all the much, or is it just not in the same places it used to be, and aging millennials (proud cardholder) just haven't moved on to these new places?

I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.

> I'm curious...when do you think the internet was "good"? What period would you say defines the so-called "golden age" of the internet? Genuinely asking.

The period of time where friction and barriers to entry were high enough to filter out much of the chaff, and the parasites had not yet adapted to exploit everything.

Also I think the internet community itself may be parasitic on other institutions that it is simultaneously destroying. Specifically I'm thinking things like traditional journalism, which is being killed off even though the internet needs it for stuff like Wikipedia.

I think Facebook opening up to the general populace in 2006 or the release of the iPhone in 2007 are pretty good places to call the end of the golden age, or at least the beginning of the end. They represent pretty significant milestones in a trend away from "a subset of the population willing to traverse moderate technical challenges in order to communicate with others in mostly anonymous, highly customizable ways" towards "everyone on earth communicating through highly sanitized, advertiser-friendly platforms".

The modern internet undoubtedly started in the mid-00's. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, all were founded between 2005 and 2007.

The start of the Internet's golden age is a little harder to pin down, but the mid-nineties public release of PHP in '95, or the launch of GeoCities in '94, or the release of CSS in '96 is probably a fair estimate. That gives a good decade of prime World Wide Web.

Prince prognosticated the year we would peak.

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