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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference.

That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.

Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.

So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.

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20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook/Twitter/etc.

That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.

You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.

The internet was TINY in 2004 compared to today.

There was about a third as many users worldwide and about 70% as many users specifically in developed countries.

Traffic has increased dramatically with broadband expansion and the streaming that soaks it up, and the number of connected devices exploder, but the number of users are actually only a modest change and the distribution of traffic has decreased tremendously as traffic consolidated onto the few "winning" brands.

When you use "tiny" in all-caps, I imagine you to mean an order of magnitude difference in users or well-visited services. It's nothing like that.

Many “orders of magnitude” qualitatively.

Today is the 11150ᵗʰ of September 1993.

20 years ago was 2004 my guy not 1994

Time flies.

Star Wars came out 30 years after World War II.

The time from today until when Star Wars came out has been 46 years.

Time sure flies.

woof

Maybe this goes like usenet - spam technology improves to the point where the old open platform is unusable...

I'm more of a proponent for small community hosted nodes that require manual approval to join, and federate in a larger network.

That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.

I think that's the most succinct explanation of the problem that I've ever seen.

>So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.

Ive long accepted low quality users focused on easy consumption. I'm not as welcoming of the realization of the Dead Internet theory. If I'm going to take time to engage with someone, they should at least have the good graces to be sentient.

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