Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanShook | Hacker News Reader

Was the internet better back then or am I just old?

When a new island is formed, usually it is first inhabited by algae and moss. As the ecosystem matures, plants, birds, insects, and all sorts of organisms populate it. You can still usually find the early algae and moss. They are just harder to spot due to the thriving and abundant ecosystem.

I think the Internet is a lot like that.

This is a beautiful way to see it, thank you for leading me to it.

Guess I'll have to consider myself a bryophite of the information age from now on.

I think that this analogy is really fitting. The old internet was way less organized, which means that it was less useful, but it also gave this fantastic sense of exploring something new. It was highly personal, the lack of common standards meant that everyone had to reinvent the wheel in their own way. Its dangers were more direct and "in your face". Yes, you could stumble upon a pedofile on an open forum and ordering a taxi online was wrong on so many levels, but there was no systematic explotation of human weaknesses like we have nowadays. The phrase "global village" captures the experience really well, as opposed to the megacity we have now.

I think it's a curse of progress. Once you get the taste of a highly developed, efficiently functioning society you can't go back and live in a cave again. At the same time you can't deny that living in a cave has its charm.

There is also the effect of sharply concentrated power in a few hands. Antitrust shouldn’t let individual tech powers get too strong.

To keep the analogy going, mankind introduced a few invasive species to the island.

Unfortunately, most of the island has now been buried under fast food joints, car parks and factories.

And one platform has, arguably, been infested with rats!

You were young and not working. The world was full of new frontiers and possibilities.

Young people today are on Minecraft, Roblox, VRchat, Discord, and YouTube. That's their frontier internet, and they probably feel the same way about it as you do.

A Geocities website, phpBB or EZBoard, webring, Xanga, and AIM/IRC has a similar analogues today. The pieces just have different names and shapes.

I get this argument from a lot of people but it is not true. There was a much higher spirit of sharing and just cool shit back in the day. Now everyone is trying to make a buck, and shit is slow, like Slack.

There still is amongst the users on Discord, e.g. in some gamedev Discords, etc. - it's even easier to do things together ad-hoc with screen sharing built-in.

It really is just that we're old now so we don't interact with them.

Although I agree the grindset culture has harmed Internet culture.

I'm in my 30s and I am interact a lot with discord. I agree gamedev is one last large scale space where interesting things happen.

But overall people are just trying to optimize total compensation and bend over backwards to get into FAANG. Imagine telling us to get into IBM back in the day.

So things have definitely changed. The punk spirit has also been lost. Normies have arrived. It's good for the normies, but we won't get a Napster again.

And different monetization strategies.

That’s not the point. Modern crap doesn’t hold a candle to what we had back then.

And no, this is not the rambling of getting-older-man.

Rampant corporate control, completely sanitized internet by default, “social” networks that literally give kids https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/urj/chapter/2022-first-place-inst... mental disorders, political agenda pushed from every hole, disinformation campaigns, bots to the point where you don’t even know if you’re talking to a real person. Internet became a weapon.

Back then we an intranet within local ISP (additionally to internet access) that had a sense of community, local services, file sharing, chats, meetups which generally self moderated themselves and everyone knew each other. What do you have now? Proprietary discord chat rooms filled with degeneracy? Good luck going through that.

Say what you want, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September is real.

I think there is great stuff on Discord and people do the same things they did then and enjoy similar tomfoolery.. they just don’t own it and are monetized, and don’t have viable alternatives (none of which was true back then).

I think the big reason why social media is toxic is because going online is no longer a choice and it follows you around. Some decisions by social media providers aren’t helping, but mobile is more guilty than social itself.

It's still like that. There's a lot of weird things you're gonna find on the tail end of Github repositories, or Pastebin uploads, Imgur, or YouTube... it's just hard to find unless you crawl the whole thing or otherwise come into the possession of the underlying database (as this person did).

The difference is that nowadays you have to shift through orders of magnitude more monetised manure in order to find the sprouting gems.

Sift

It might be somewhere between the two. The internet was messier back in the day. It didn’t feel as corporate and there was a strong spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun. Nowadays, it seems like everyone is just trying to get paid. And that’s fine because getting paid is fun too, but the spirit has changed.

On the other hand, my eight year old is a big fan of a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief. We just watched a documentary on the Gimli Glider and when we talked about it after, it was apparent that she has learned a tremendous amount about flying from that channel.

So for my kid, that spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun is still going strong. And when I experience her experiencing things like that, I’m reminded that that spirit is still out there but I’m just old.

The old internet is harder to find, which means its harder to ruin by normies. You just have to know where to look. ;)

Indeed.

I am enjoying actively participating in mailing lists and USEnet these days. The S:N ratio is pretty good now.

It was better and you're old

It was certainly more decentralized, less corporate, and a lot messier.

I say forget about the internet and bring back the BBS culture, the demo scene, LAN parties.

Yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com