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Comment by RiverCrochet | Hacker News Reader

> but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies

This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).

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AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc had isolated content and communities.

The internet at large (web, gopher, http, ftp, email, etc) existed and was available at universities and through regional ISP's and a smattering of local BBS's but for a very long time there was very little shared traffic between this common "internet" of services and those proprietary services.

The propriety services were delivering convenience, curation, cohesion, and features that the internet-at-large hadn't matured enough to deliver. Consumers liked that.

That's the "dark" time the author, and myself, generally see us trending back towards.

AOL only started allowing access to the Internet at large in 1993 (thus leading to the "Eternal September" that greybeards complain about to this day). Before then, AOL users were limited to what AOL provided. And there were other such services such as CompuServe and GENIE that were similar.

AOL didn't provide Usenet access until 1994. Eternal September started when dialup ISPs started providing access in 1993.

Right. Because AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Excite, Yahoo, MyNetscape, etc held more sway per capita than Google alone holds ? We moved from a world with many “portals” to a world with effectively one.

Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.

The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.

>And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey

Quantity is a quality of its own. In moderated forums there has been a distinct rise in moderation load because of AI generated "not quite" crap and bots that still do not contribute to the quality of discussions. This is what the death of the internet is about. It's turned into an ocean of piss and pollution that is and will continue to drive people away.

AOL wasn't a "portal." It was the whole site. Companies advertised "AOL keywords" instead of domain names, and the content on AOL was specific to AOL. AOL didn't become what you'd think of as an ISP until later. You could think of it more like a really big BBS that charged hourly.

I think they mean the actual dark ages, as big tech has effectively created feudalism where users are trapped on their platforms/software/hardware generating profits for these companies. Much like serfs stuck farming for their lord/vassal/king.

No one is trapped on any social media platform. Zuck and Musk aren't sending armed goons to kill anyone who dares to leave, in fact people have been leaving Twitter in droves.

Nowadays, for the average Internet user, content is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube...

And back then, the "Internet" was AOL for a while - look at old ads, they often had their "aol keyword" in large type than their URL.

But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.

> "aol keyword"

i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while

It's really weird for me, because it was such a huge thing at the time, and I was there and never used it - even though my friend's connection to the Internet was through his mom's AOL account; it was just something you did and then minimized.

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