A nostalgic look back at when the Internet still felt joyful

A large reason old internet was so fun is that nobody gave a damn about this identity nonsense, we were too busy playing Quake 2 with ninja ropes.

So it obviously selected for non-jocks, maybe even for geeks.

Now why didn't CNN feel the need to point that out?

Why did they choose to only comment on race, as if any participant chose gaming because other people behind screens might be <outgroup race>?

The early days of the internet was essentially a self-selecting group of individuals, the chances for finding like minded folks were that much higher. Just the excitement at being online at all is no longer an interesting experience to anyone - it was back then to much of this much smaller group. A shared exciting experience attracting likeminded people.

Now the entire planet is almost online, the distinction between a human and someone who uses the internet largely doesn’t exist anymore- it’s no longer a subset and has all the vagaries of real life, with its good, bad and in-between actors. Another example of this is that in the early 90s we didn’t care about identity fraud online nearly as much - today it’s a much bigger problem that many people have experienced.

Given that, is it any surprise people are now perhaps as guarded as they are in the “real world”? Back then the line between the offline world and the online one was much clearer, today it’s more and more a core feature of humanity’s daily existence, good and bad. My thoughts anyway.

Now I suddenly want be able to set my "Home Page" to some random quirky site.

I don't want just a "random" site, I want a random, small, overlooked, but lovingly hand-made site.

> Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions

This is the root of what sucks about everything on the Internet these days: Everyone measures the success of whatever they are doing using engagement crap like "number of likes" and "daily active users" and "number of GitHub stars." Junk metrics. Stop worrying about building an audience. Stop worrying about your follower count. Stop obsessing over pointless things like clout and karma. And, most of all, never use the word "monetize." Just tend your little garden, and if people happen to visit, great.

the efforts were different, sign up for webrings, word of mouth, whatever -- but it was still effort.

but as parent said : lack of an audience shouldn't be a reason to avoid doing a thing. Not every thing needs to find a market.

Even the biggest TV shows did not put out more than 24 episodes in a season. A solo blogger/artist is required to put out twice that many pieces of content in a year. Can't expect the quality of that to be very good.

It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since.

But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor.

Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink.

So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.

It's been said ad nauseam but the sort of things that people would put on a geocities page (pictures, political diatribes, even things like fan pages) has moved to social media. But even that is not a problem in and of itself. The early days of social media were fun as well.

The thing that killed the internet IMO is smartphones. The internet was better when it was a "place" (cyberspace!) that you consciously had to take time to visit. You sat down, you "got on the internet" and then you "left" when you got up. The ubiquitous internet that you carry around at all times, being constantly connected is what created the pervasive advertising that you're talking about because the internet captured more of people's attention which made advertising much, much more lucrative.

Not to mention the fact that it's a content creation device as well. You couldn't take a picture and instantly post it to your geocities page or bang out 288 character brain farts on a whim. Everything was much more deliberate.

IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.

I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.

Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.

Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.

It would be less impressive to say "LAN parties still exist. Two friends came over yesterday and we nerded out".

being disconnected from dialup because someone picked up a phone, being punted from a chatroom with racist shit because rate limits and a moderation staff don't meaningfully exist. File sharing where the main effort is to rename malicious executable into whatever the newest Britney Spears album is called for mass distribution. the pop-up wars, a new remote code exploit weekly..

I could keep going with the bad parts forever, but my point is that when people talk about geocities and napster they forget about what a shitshow the rest of computing was for the majority; this didn't stop them from partaking -- it was still amazing , but it was the Wild West in a lot more ways than it even is today, and I say that as someone who still views the net in that regard.