I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet
rohan.ga
rohan.ga
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
We hate the internet today because it became mainstream.
The web is no longer a place for people to be able to interact freely with each other. It's a place to monetize or be monetized. That means that a lot of the value of the web is gone, because it's value that can't be monetized without destroying it.
If the web was not commercial then it wouldn't be mainstream. While they are different they are fundamentally linked.
One possible version of the internet/web is a global library.
Another is as a ubiquitous information utility.
In any case, my vision of a superhighway doesn't include video billboards every 3m in every non-toll lane.
I would argue that the highways are actually a counter-example of what you are saying. They exist to connect workers to businesses, businesses to other businesses, and businesses to consumers. While there is certainly an amount of traffic on the highway that is not doing those three things, we have a name for the first one in any populated area - rush hour. To say that the highway system was not intended to facilitate commerce is just historically inaccurate.
The difference between the highway system and the Internet is that the creation of the Internet was not intended to facilitate commerce - it in fact took several years (1991-1995 as best I can tell) for it to officially be allowed as the neolibs in government did not want to keep funding the network. That choice is why we are where we are with the Internet - the good and the bad.
But the vision of an information "superhighway" should be something that is better than regular highways. The good news is that network bandwidth is much easier to add than highway lanes, and is increasing at a much faster rate than human bandwidth.
Mainstreaming is a side effect of its broadening scope; as college students graduated and scholars took their work home with them, the NSFnet backbone was ceded to Sprintlink, and OS/hardware developers started working on consumer-grade interfaces.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/torture/2001-07/msg01915....
The problem with the internet today is it’s a bunch of disconnected privately owned silos.
Fun to think about.
In this context, “mainstream” may just be another way to describe Web 2.0.
Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
It's not that nobody cares, it's you're either rich and have influence, or you're a visionary like the rest of us.
I see all the coolest things get slapped behind a $50/m fee (or $ fee)
It's how it is, you hit it dead on.
We can try and fix it, but... all that's offered is running on hamster wheels. We lost. And we lost bad.
But, we can still create things and hope those things we create pave the foundation for things to be. That, that keeps us going.
Was it skipped, or was it spread over many decades with AI winters interspersed throughout?
In 2017 I thought I missed bitcoin, still managed to mine a meager amount on my parents computers. In the modern day I was proven wrong.
Perhaps, but these will be different people than those who miss the 90-00 internet.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.
The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
Maybe the fact that I recognize that the way things changed were unavoidable fuels my general disdain internet culture nowadays, and my skepticism to tech innovations in a broader sense. Oh well.
I'd also blame rampant cheating for that. It's damn expensive to keep up with pirates, but cheaters are an entirely different league... the most advanced cheats these days are using dedicated PCI cards to directly manipulate memory with barely any ability for the host to detect or prevent it [1]. From the grapevines, there are developers charging hundreds of dollars per month to develop and maintain these things.
On top of that, up until the late '00s no one cared too much about racist slurs, sexism or other forms of discrimination. Maybe you'd get yeeted off from a server if you'd overdo it. But nowadays? Ever since GTA SA and its infamous Hot Coffee mod, there are a loooooot of "concerned parent" eyeballs on gaming, there's advertisers/sponsors looking for their brand image, and game developers also don't want to be associated with such behavior. And so, they took away self-hosted servers so that they could moderate everything that was going on... and here we are now.
Do not mistake my tolerating slurs and other insults for enjoying Nintendo games with being okay with it or the people who did it, or the people who did it and still remember being able to do it without consequence as a better time.
You typically played with a small group of people. LAN houses with people that were there physically, or groups of friends (even if they were online friends).
Even for stuff such as bnet when I played Diablo 2 or WC3, you typically created a game instance, and over time you could recognize the people playing. You curated friends lists, so you would know to avoid the ones that behaved in a way that didn't jive with the rest of the group.
Perhaps it was not scalable, and a change for the worse was unavoidable. There was a simplicity in those interactions that is completely lost and may be impossible to capture again. An echo of a time long past.
Things are better now because you can find that group that aligns with your values. You aren't stuck with the shitty guild that tolerates your differences (at best) because there are enough people online and gaming to where there's probably another that fits better. And it's even better offline because you can connect with those few people in your nowhere little town who aren't butts.
edit: for example
There is no community, I am in a centralized server being matched against random people. And when there is a community, it's normally a cesspool where online interaction is at best meaningless. See Twitter for example (no matter if it before or after the retarded buffoon that acquired it, it was always a toxic dump).
Anyway, what is past is past. I talk about those times without much nostalgia (I was a broke teenager at the time, not really the happiest of times). I just rationalize about how things got worse since then.
I'm not an avid gamer, but it's not hard to notice that multiplayer games nowadays means "all the player in the world". Most games don't have a local version to either play with multiple controllers or through LAN. They don't even want to allow custom groups to play with. Cheating is way easier to manage at small scale.
How do they work? I know that in a game (Red Dead Redemption 2, for example) cheaters have infinite health and so forth. How? The server is responsible for validating all actions performed by players to prevent cheating, such as verifying movement, health, ammunition, and other game variables. It is not supposed to accept health values sent by the client without verifying against expected game logic. The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.
Or in racing games, extremely precise braking and steering assistance. Everything that a gamer can do, a cheat can also do.
As far as assistance goes: I despise it. Modern games have "aim assist" which is just a built-in aimbot. sighs
Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.
That doesn’t follow from the points you made. What follows is that you have to deal with whatever percentage of bad actors you get. If not, you have to contract someone to handle that part of the job or do the entire job. Plenty of opportunities on those sentences that look nothing like today’s feudalism.
For example, I have several sites I self-host on cheap VM’s with lighttpd and BunnyCDN. I can do anything I want with the whole site, including moving suppliers. They have no comments. I have both an email and Facebook messaging if they want to contact me.
For comments, the main problem is catching spam or illegal content. That just means a 3rd-party provider needs to see the content, make a decision based on customer’s needs, and customer’s server needs to post the edit they made. Disqus already implemented much of this concept but it could be modified for more owner control.
The stronger control some want over comment quality requires more time and controls. There’s tools to help with that. The Lobste.rs’s site had great moderation tools. MetaFilter added a cheap, paid system for account creation that filtered tons of spam. Most implementations just need laborers to enforce their view of social norms with might or might not be easy, and might not be right or worth keeping around either.
That leads to countering the last assumption some commenters have: the methods used should keep the sites around as long as Google or Facebook. Most, human activity is temporary. Much has little, long-term value. Many sites will serve their purpose for a specific time. Others might go up and down. These possibilities are fine for non-mission-critical uses. Life will go on.
Well, the "eternal september" problem... back in the '00s you could reasonably run a forum or a blog even if you're some high school kid, all you needed was your parents and 10 bucks a month for some shitty virtuozzo/UML VPS. No need to deal with stuff like setting up a CDN just to survive some random asshat thinking they can DDoS you off the 'net.
But also lots of commercial social media sites and forums disappeared, because the company got bust or changed its focus.
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids? They would have become adults too, so wouldn't you expect the "normal" to replace the previous and outgoing generation rather than this one particular minority?
Silent majority. It wouldn't surprise me if most "normal" kids simply minded their own "weird" business and waited for the winds to shift more in their favour.
What is mainstream today was counterculture 20~30 years ago, which coincidentally is about right for generational shifts in trends.
What happened is that in early to mid 2000s, careers that nerdy kids flocked to became desirable because they were well paid.
To this day I think there is something vaguely amusing regarding the push to get more girls to code, and how it is implied that women don't flock to it as some kind of conspiracy to keep them away from nice jobs or whatever.
By all means, I think this push is a good thing. Especially as I have a daughter and I'll certainly teach her the ropes when she is a little older, maybe try to code some silly games with her, that sort of stuff.
But in the 90s when I was a kid? Girls were absolutely repeled by anything nerdy. When my group of friends found a girl that had any remote interest in nerdy things, they would fall over one another to try to accommodate her. Fairly pathetic when I remember in hindsight. There was this active desire to feel less as outcasts by having our own tastes validated by someone from the outgroup, that sort of thing.
It was a different world. Weird to think that it was a mere 3 decades ago.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.
It's a difficult balance.
My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"
Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.
The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
This has been our priority as parents forming peer groups with other parents. But it's very hard to find the kids that your kids like and are friends with who aren't constantly inundated with tech.
Is it?
It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.
Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.
All my friends constantly joke about being addicted to x social media app
Its normalization of failure / suffering. in a village full of alcoholics, drinking with your family/neighbors was part of greeting, social contracts, or venting out frustrations. It was evident to everybody how things end up down the line without exception, but when all are in the suck, mentally it feels better.
Our herd social behavior which make humans such a successful species are showing its darker, and easy to abuse side.
From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time. Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.
I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964. Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.
It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.
[0]https://talker.news/2024/08/28/why-3-in-4-gen-z-blame-social...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16007
What I particularly like is that children seem to be quite interested in what it actually is that makes games addictive. So a 10yo might reason along the lines of "Dude, gaming 2 hours straight must be worse for my brain than gaming 45 minutes straight. This game's got too many flashing things, too. Don't want to get addicted. Must go out".
So, from personal experience as a parent, I'd say we adults should not underestimate the influence of educating our children about the dangers of too much gaming. Apparently, quite a bit can be done with very simple means (talking!) to keep things healthier for them. Consistency is key, as always.
For example, my parents never discouraged or curtailed my gaming in any way, yet I never had any trouble self-regulating — not because I'm just that good, but because the vast majority of games just don't scratch my itch.
To give you an idea, I tried super hard to get into WoW when I was a university student with a lot of free time, because that's what my friends were playing, but I just couldn't. There was just way too much grinding. I forced myself to play for about an hour a day, but I couldn't keep it and stopped playing altogether after two months. I made a few more stabs at trying to get into it of the next few years, but it never held my attention.
That game definitely had some really great gameplay moments (I LOVED doing instances with my friends, for example), but it was interspersed with so much grinding and fluff that it overwhelmingly felt like a chore to play.
This has generally been my issue with video games. Whenever I find a game that actually makes me want to play for 2 hours straight, I get excited and specifically set aside time to indulge myself as long as I want. It's such a rare and precious joy to get that much sustained pleasure out of a game.
When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.
Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.
A big part of what the author is lamenting for, and touches upon with his final paragraph, is the Internet of weirdos, before the cool kids and your mother also got online.
It’s gone. September happened. It also still exists, in niches and pockets here and there - but the Wild West days are done.
I could have sworn myspace was around ~2000/1, but apparently it wasn't founded until 2003.
There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.
I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.
Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.
Today, you can quickly get a shallow, superficial understanding of the domain that might impress some people who know barely anything about the respective domain.
> and learn while asking questions to an AI that [...] has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things.
ROFL
Bullshit. I've seen blind idiots kids pasting Solaris commands into Linux servers, without having any clue of what were they doing.
Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.
If any, we the older Millenials are trained to do hard tasks with just the manuals sitting on a table. The rest will be clueless.
This isn't going to happen. The literature on model collapse suggests it occurs when your model is fed on majority synthetic data, which is not how anyone is training models. Even if they were, do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?
Because the end users will use far more the output data from AI than feeding it from remote sources far from the original.
Disasters will happen, just wait.
This happens all the time. Once the first gen devs are off, the releases tend to alternate. A decline from the existing version and then an improvement that mostly fixes what they made worse in the prior release. e.g. Windows XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10
The nature of AI though may make it more difficult to distinguish the failings immediately which could result in an irreversible inflection point.
Yes. Capitalist software vendors do that all the time. Google search has been getting continually worse over the decades. Windows is more bloated than ever. AI is going to be no different.
Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi
There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.
I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.
Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.
Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.
Subreddits are okay, although I preferred the less centralised way of the past with the myriad vBulletin forums etc.
But Discord is built to replace IRC, not to replace forums, yet people use it for the latter.
I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.
Is it nostalgia, or is there something more? Who knows at this point.
I’m 30.
What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.
The internet has existed for longer than the web which is already 30 yrs at this point. Not sure I catch your point that it's 10 yrs old.
Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...
The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.
I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.
As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.
This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.
What time period are you even talking about?
In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. The internet only started growing exponentially with commercial services appearing in the late nineties. This was the time when people started to demand high speed Internet connections (ASDL) and were willing to pay for that. But this was not the case for its services. Google's primary business model way back in 2000 was already showing ads related to your search terms. Even back in 2003 Google introduced the free GMAIL service that showed ads based on your email content. That's 21 years ago.
IMHO it is your view on the Internet history that is being "revisionist" and "gaslighting". Take this from sb who had his private Internet access as early as 1998.
The adtech of today is nowhere near as invasive or pervasive as it was then - this is an extremely dishonest or ignorant framing of what is happening in today's internet vs the one of yesterday.
There are plenty examples of paid-for subscription services on the internet doing profitably without jamming adware/malware down your throat. Would you like examples?
Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and things were changing very rapidly in that time. By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic. Local ISPs for home users started popping up and AOL opened its access to USENET in 1993.
The push for residential broadband also started almost immediately; @Home was offering residential cable internet in 1996, it was the future at the time, just not very evenly distributed. This was well before PCs had the processing power to do standard-definition video.
Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.
The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.
(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)
Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.
I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
That's very plausible.
I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.
Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).
When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
According to this Reddit thread [1], you could easily install applications to a Palm from a memory stick. Additionally, I am not aware that Palm applications needed to be signed by the device producer (i.e. the device producer could not decide which applications are allowed vs forbidden on the device).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/tmvm9z/is_there_a_way...
Palm even provided the source code of the built-in apps like the calendar etc as sample code with their SDK, leading to a huge ecosystem of freeware or shareware "Calendar Plus"-type applications that just added small quality of life features
I learned 68k assembler in my teens for the purpose of cracking Palm apps for my Palm IIIe. I obviously had no credit card, and I had very little money.
So corporate profit over users.
Another acceleration was google turning to shit as well.
Not using the social parts (likes) etc. though. I'm using it as a way to share photos and what I'm up to with family without forced login. Like a homepage basically. It is not trying to distract visitors with pointing to other blogs either.
The birth of the iPhone changed a lot of things, but it took a few years to reach critical mass.
The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.
I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.
From my perspective, the only thing that changed is that most millennials grew up and realized that their quality of life mostly peaked in their teenage years and that most will never be able to provide even a fraction of that quality of life to their offspring.
It's honestly not really about the Internet itself, that's just a place where the same people ultimately communicate on. If they're hopeful in real life, they're gonna be hopeful on forums etc.
I make this statement under the expectation that millennials are even now the biggest fraction of Internet users. Though I'd expect that to change within the next few years. I doubt the sentiment would change however, as the zoomers/Gen alpha will ultimately come to the same conclusions, as their prospects are even worse
Precisely this. I grew up in a post-communist country and I can definitely say that the democratic transformation gave everyone a sense of hope. Sure, there was the ozone hole, but other than that, when people thought "the future" they imagined all the technological advancement that would not only make life comfortable, but also solve most of social issues.
And then we saw the opposite happening.
If the majority of people don't want to use this, but instead just want to yell about politics and the news cycle, that's their problem and doesn't really diminish the achievements of the web.
As long as you are willing to enter a legal gray area, you can get access to some interesting books; but these are still an insanely small fraction of "most of the books in existence".
Recently got into late 19th century Mexican literature, and I find virtually everything I look for. I can find books from small political presses who may have printed only 100 copies. Here's another kink that I have, which basically would have been my most self-indulgent dream as a child: I can look at the ads for other books that are in the backs of 50-200 year-old books, or listings of the rest of the books in a series, and find those books instantly.
Between shadow libraries, actual libraries, hobbyist public domain wranglers, etc, it's hard not to find a book.
This means I can go through all the literature I think could maybe be important and just check and read or move on. For scholarly work, this makes such a big difference that it makes me think the pre-internet PhDs are incomparable with post-internet ones.
What I highly overestimated was people's thirst for knowledge. I really thought that by this time I would be unemployable as the average young person would just be so learned that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The advantage of growing up with the internet would be just so huge.
I would have never guessed that the average young person instead almost has a type of learning disability from being addicted to political nonsense, stupid videos and gossip.
Everything is there from what I envisioned in 1995 though. It is just this useless, pernicious aspect dwarfs what I envisioned then in terms of popularity.
I do miss a simpler time. I run some very modern hardware, with modern games and hardware. But I also play around with my GameBoy, maintain a DOS VM for writing my novels, reach for Lynx as often as Firefox.
Simplicity isn't just an aesthetic though. I find it to be a requirement just for getting through life. I shouldnt need adblockers and popup blockers and consent optouts just to view a site. They're worse than the era of iframe popups.
Granted, I am prone to overstimulation and get seizures when it happens. But that just reinforces what I already want. A space to enjoy what little life I've got.
On social media: today it's no longer even about ordinary individuals sharing their ordinary lives online like they used to 15 years ago. It's about consuming content around your interests (which includes entertainment). Very few people on my instagram make personal posts anymore (myself included) and when they do, they're few and far in between. It's all brands and content creators. I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online. It was a new concept to many between 2006-2014 to be able to do it, and so many did. Now they're past it. It was interesting in 2008 to see that Johnny is currently sipping on a latte in front of his window. Now nobody gives a fuck unless Johnny is a celebrity.
On scrolling TikTok-like feeds: not to glorify the concept but it makes it easier for the anti-social-medias to accept if you think of it as the equivalent of when your parents would get home, turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels trying to find something interesting to watch. TikTok and Reels put the TV in your pocket. 80% of the content on them is of no substance but occasionally a valuable post does come up and provide me with something I need/enjoy. The other day, I had a spontaneous date night because a reel showed up for my wife about some food truck nearby and she shared it with me (we went there an hour later and it turned out to be a good one - we're going again next week). P.S. it didn't even cross my mind to bother posting a snap of my meal as a story on IG :)
I tend to disagree. I have a few hundred friends/people I follow on Instagram and I see people post stories and posts about their life all the time. People are generally trying to portray "Look at me! I have such a cool life!". This is how it is for young people.
As for TikTok, I find myself scrolling with no end in sight. I think the studies on the addiction level of shortform content and its long term effects is going to be extremely shocking.
I can watch an episode or two of a show, maybe 30m-1hr, and turn it off. But TikTok keeps me constantly stimulated and I can easily forget what I am watching and "doomscroll" for hours. With TV I make the conscious decision to watch it. With TikTok I have to make the conscious decision to not watch it or open the app. This may be a side effect of how my brain works, but a lot of young people have similar experiences.
I think the main difference in our experiences is a generational gap in how social media is used.
If friends want to share videos/tiktoks with me, they download them and then send them with another messaging app so I don't have to go to the platform. And that's not something I force on them but something they do because they really want me to see those videos I suppose.
I share your experience, but for me it is just the one of a millennial getting older.
Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.
Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.
The more people play with Gemini, the more they'll want to "extend" it... and the closer they'll bring it to HTTP, because it follows the exact same fundamental model once you strip off the extraneous document format specification. Hell, there's no reason you couldn't serve HTML over the Gemini protocol, along with Javascript and all the rest.
I've said before, if you want to pretend you're an undergrad in 1993, go play around on LambdaMOO or something else that actually dates from that time, something that's more interesting than shipping text files over "HTTP but the status codes are shorter". Hell, all anybody does on Gemini is write their "gemlogs" anyway, and if you want to publish short texts on a weird system that needs users to run a special client anyway...
> @create $note named "blog post 9/11/2024"
> write "This is the first line of my blog post" on blog
> write "And this is the second" on blog
> read blog
For computing and the internet I think the author is spot on. The late 80s to mid 2000s had that these kinds of features. For electronic, rock or punk it was probably the 60s to 80s. I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.
There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.
Maybe a little bit uncharitably put we went from young people writing Doom and PageRank to bored ape nfts being hustled on Discord servers.
AI (LLMs) represents a platform shift on a large scale and I feel the environment is similar to that which birthed Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs. I think in the next 5 years Gen Z will have its heyday in terms of tech startups... At least, that's what I tell myself.
Yeah, I agree the Web3.0 stuff was overhyped--not really a platform or thinking shift. There are a lot of black-hat hackers who are Gen Z, because generally only young people take risks like that while simultaneously having the skills to get paid a tech salary.
It's not a relativism as applied to a specific technology, it's a relativism as applied to development as a whole. The 60s-80s represented a flowering of semiconductor applications, before which we had a huge period of radio and telephony experimentation. Each era had its low-hanging fruit ripe for innovation which became a mature, hard-to-innovate technology in the future.
There's new trends out there now. On the creative side of things, bloggers, artists, and influencers are toppling the old ideas of media empires and stodgy publishing houses. A Soundcloud god can sell out a stadium and virtual avatars are filling concert halls. Non-web-tech fields like climate tech are seeing crazy investment throughout the globe. It's true that webtech now is seen as a safe, stable, lucrative career but there's always something on the bleeding edge. It just might not be your thing and that's okay, that's what the kids are for. Or, pivot your career and try something new if that's what you want.
If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.
A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.
I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.
This post made me reminisce about learning web development when I was 11. Finding resources online was tricky, especially since I didn’t always have access to the Internet. I got books from my parents, and not very good ones either, but I loved them all the same.
I miss those days, when everything was more of an adventure.
Live your life, not the one you think you should have had.
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
The monetary model has changed for sure but that was inevitable.
The 90s internet was slow. Stuff like IRC and email are a product of their time. Stuff was designed to work on 28 or 56k modems. The lucky few had ISDN.
I don't miss the old internet that much. I miss some of the apps and the stripped down low bandwidth UX of stuff.
What I really miss is th era of native desktop applications that had a consistent look and feel.
The problem now is not the visible aspect of advertising on the internet. It's the obsessive tracking and categorization of people to make advertising more effective that I'm upset with. There was no such apparatus in the 90s/00s. Most legitimate websites wouldn't be plastered with banner spam, but all legitimate websites now will attempt to track you.
I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
> I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements
Me too! This shift comes every few years. The first successful mass deployment of modern AI technology was in the 1970’s when the post office started using computer vision to route mail. The shift to AI that I got to see was Google. That was amazing.
Big fan of the current LLM shift too, of course, but it feels less magical than Google did. A little because I understand it better, a little because it benefits me less personally than Google did. Feels more like a marginal improvement whereas Google felt like omg everything is different now the olds are so behind the times they can’t even comprehend!!
But I think it’s more that the big shift happens with your newfound ability to grok things, leverage information, and get shit done in your late teens / early 20’s than the actual technology available. Whatever new tech happens around that age will feel like a profound hugely impactful change in the world (but it’s actually you, not the tech).
> I just think the internet is much worse than it was
It is. And also it isn’t. Depends where you go and who you talk to.
It was very exciting. Every year that followed seemed like a massive leap forward with smartphone evolution, 4G LTE market penetration, application improvements, etc.
It was a really fun time and I have fond memories of jailbreaking early iPhones/rooting Android phones.
It was all new and very entertaining.
It's definitely worse than it was, in some ways. In other ways it's better. TLS is everywhere now. uBlock origin exists. The bar for pwning web apps is much higher today because we learned collectively from our mistakes/our fun times defacing PHP-Nuke sites.
But I miss pirating warez on IRC and scoring game rips from FTP topsites, and LAN parties. Facebook and Twitter were really fun in the early years, but these days Big Social really sucks and "growth focus" in tech is exhausting.
TLS is a racket. The protocol is important, it's required, sure.
The companies who issue the certificates however have been printing money ever since SSL came to exist. Each certificate issued is a money note.
LetsEncrypt only exists now and only because the internet is an heap of security mess. And caused by the same SSL certificate companies.
Domains are too.
Let'sEncrypt has been providing service for nearly 10 years now
The funny thing is I'm still on IRC, with about the same size channel, but everyone is "new" and we're all old. I don't have any contact with the peeps from IRC back then.
The rest like indymedia, libera, oftc are mostly to stay updated on tech and ask questions about tech.
They all essentially work the same as IRC did but with modern bells and mobile support.
Also, it would be helpful if Google hadn't steadily degraded their product. +words +that +must +be +included +should +have +those +words +in +the +search. Not "fuzzy search". Not "can't find my result even when I explicitly tell you". Which includes surfacing of more obscure sites (like what wiby/marginalia do now).
(Which also includes censorship but that's a different story)
There are more niche places, but it does get strange seeking out this tiny communities online
And so on.
Now I just want to wake up, have my coffee, and not read about some new machine learning framework.
1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.
2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.
3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.
4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.
5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.
6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.
7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.
8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!
9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.
If I did have some appropriate physical reference books to look in, it might still take 15 minutes to an hour. But if not, I'd have to travel to a library (weather permitting) while/if it was open, find the appropriate section of books, read through the index or chapter titles, etc. and scan - in hopes the answer was there.
Today, in some spheres (except e.g. those where the answers are still hidden) I'm much -much- freer to ask many more questions and deep-dive into subjects that, back then, I could only dream of learning about. Yes, I could read a book, if I knew the book existed. And where to order it from. And wait for it to arrive in 2 to 6 weeks.
If only I'd had this 30 years ago. Hell, I imagine, what if I'd had this power as a child in a small town.
And still, this kind of messages make me uncertain about what to really think. There is a nostalgia for the authenticity of the earlier web, and I have felt that myself. Things were hard in the 90s, but maybe that is what made it feel more worthwhile. It is also true that a lot of the current internet is dominated by financial and corporate interests.
BUT ! everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so. Access to technology and software has never been easier, neither has the opportunity to learn about pretty much any topic. We have access to the output of so many people in an instant.
This can be liberating, but it can also be paralyzing. An ugly mix of FOMO and impostor syndrome making many of us paralized on most days and scroll for a quick dopamine hit instead.
But what if we consciously choose to focus on the positives by focusing on what we feel truly engaged by, and to ruthlessly ignore the rest ?
We can only make that choice ourselves.
People there aren't chasing for social recognition or karma and genuinely want to share their opinion.
And back then website were still chasing for advertising money, the popups and ads were absolute cancer. More than today. IMO the tool (internet) hasn't changed, it's the people using it who changed for the worst.
This is only true in a narrow technical sense. But the Internet is not only the technology, it's its users. Many social interactions that were possible in the 90s are not possible today because, even if the infrastructure that facilitated them is still there or can be built, the people are not there.
I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade
Compared to today, I really wish that you could've had the creativity and general attitude of the 00s web with the tech of today.
But I guess this is why I don't regret spending so much time on the 00s web.
Maybe paying for Spotify which is dirt cheap and satisfies what most people are looking for
What makes you think piracy is worse nowadays? We have more legal obtions but piracy is absolutely booming with high quality rips. Young me would have killed to have the whole Nintendo ROM library a click away and now I can just download it in 2 minutes.
High quality: I don’t miss the old days of searching for music > no ID3 tag just file names > turns out my wholenight download was a peruvian pipe band not the one I was looking for. Every single torrent tracker has now better in quality options and absolutely no fakes
During the 90's, I set up and maintained my own Linux machine at home, pushing my 28.8k modem connection into service to put my little 486 on the Internet as a dedicated host, running Majordomo and mailman list-servs devoted to topics I was interested in - mostly music-making technology and the like.
Those listservs (and also, of course, USENET) gave me access to a vast and awesome array of folks around the world, some of whom were my early guru's, some of whom became my nemeses, but most of whom were a part of a worldwide community of folks I knew I could rely on for an entertaining and educational hour or two, each day, of reading. (Some of those listservs still exist, but have gone into comatose, dormant state with the last decades' rise of social media..)
Without question, I feel that the quality of the community is directly related to the involvement of that community in the methods used by the community to sustain itself - as the "AOL'ization" of the Internet occurred, the quality when way, way down. Yes, I was there that fateful September when the Internet was invaded by the hoards of unwashed masses. I still feel that phenomenon was a turning point in social community - it went from being a community, to a media.
I also still think there is a place for these kinds of locally-built and run communities. I often wonder how viable it would be for me to set up and run another little box, locally, and invite some friends to join me on it, discussing whatever we want, through a shell-only account, or at the very least, using only email/listservs for distribution ... I think there's still a lot of room for that style of community building, personally, since: technology doesn't get old - only its users do.
The internet has sadly become synonymous with the web for the majority internet users and this web is infested with middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, that refuse to honour that any internet user would ever imagine their own possibilities for usage of their netwwork subscription, e.g., non-commercial usage. These middlemen purport to determine how the network should and will be used. There is nothing left for the internet subscriber to imagine, no decisions to make. All usage is predictable, pre-determined by the so-called "tech" companies. They want internet subscribers to believe an internet subscription alone provides no value; all value resides in the middlemen that wait for subscribers on the network, lure them in, surveil them and serve them ads. To add insult to injury, they coerce internet subscribers into "subscribing" to websites!
With internet speeds today, those possibilities some of us imagined in the 90s and 00s are now possible. The problem is so-called "tech" companies stand in the way. Attempting to intermediate anything and everything.
not to be pedantic, but how do you miss something you never experienced to begin with?
What I did love though was getting on IRC, sitting in front of an amber VAX terminal late at night till morning, talking to people across the world. Reading NEWS and discussing things with people around the globe. What an eye opener for me.
And even something similar from the technological side is done, catching a critical, and big enough, and diverse community may be something short lived, as we live with the rest of internet, that is trying to grab our attention and set our agendas
Dialup sucked, search engines sucked, it was easy for random stuff to brick your computer and it was hard for anything you published to reach an audience. If you think ads now are bad, they were even worse back then.
What people miss is the slower sense of community. Social media has removed all boundaries between smaller local communities and many people aren't interested in finding one. So a lot of people have local friends, and then the amorphous blob of people on social media that they throw posts into. But these things still exist. You can find forums with only a couple hundred users, or circles of blogs. There are IRC channels dedicated to niche interests.
I haven't engaged with proper social media in years because I realized the above and just...left.
Programming (for me) was mostly basic and a bit of C, although I never totally figured out pointers. By the time I got to university, we had early versions of Java and HTML.
That time was fun, but right now is fun in different ways. The tools are much better. Computing is massively cheaper. Laptops weren’t nearly as good as desktops until the early 2000s. Also, you couldn’t do much with AI back then.
https://tonyedwardspz.co.uk/blog/im-glad-i-miss-the-old-inte...
If you use Social Media sites sometimes, I recommend at least getting rid of "recommendations"/"sponsored" boxes. To see what that looks like e.g. on Twitter without installing an extension and keeping it up-to-date (cause Twitter keeps changing their stuff), you can try a bookmarklet like this:
(javascript:document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-label="Trending"]').forEach(function(v) { v.remove() }))
Note: the YouTube of the 00s was very low-resolution and the comments often were really bad! (https://xkcd.com/202/)
Around 97-98 was really when I went deep into it mostly because of Starcraft. That led to battle.net which led to IRC and the rest is history.
It’s not about looking back, though—it’s about bringing that same spirit into the future. We’re still here building towards that, even if the landscape looks a bit different now.
On the plus side we're never bored. But I'll tell you, man. Back then we'd comment with our real names on random blogs. And shit like that. Privacy and stuff wasn't really a big deal.
Have fun with the ever-worsening Anthropocene, kid. I mean, we both will.
Nowadays you have every idiot spouting off half-baked opinions with horrible grammar and spelling, everyone arguing just to be right and not to test their own ideas, being ridiculously tribal, calling anything that disagrees with them fake news, etc etc.
When there was a little more barrier to entry, the net was vastly better. As someone that cares about truth, fact and good faith discourse, I miss that time terribly.
https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-nostalgic-web-episode
The post's author also talks about how social media is different from the web of the past. This is a good time to point out the difference between operating on the Web and operating on the Internet. The Internet is just a client-server technology. The Web is about hypertext and making connections. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are on the Internet but not on the Web, because they penalize linking to the wider web. Blogs, search engines and Reddit are "Web".
There are dozens of sites today that try to cover emerging technology companies, none do it nearly as well.
I was there and I'm glad its past.
The computers were slow.
Microsoft ruled the day, which was fine for me because I was a Microsoft fanboy back then.
The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
Things crashed - alot.
I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
I'm certainly glad I witnessed all that first hand since 1979 but wouldn't want to go back.
The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown.
> The computers were slow.
Not for mundane tasks, or not a whole lot anyways. Productivity software used to be optimized for the client. Today's equivalent is cloud-based, written in managed code and often actually slower.
> Microsoft ruled the day
I do agree here, this part sucked.
> The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
This varies by field and task. As a developer, it was easier to break through because there were not 35,000 competing partial alternatives. Without this "value puzzle" new stuff was a much easier sell.
> Things crashed - alot.
In my particular experience, things break a little more than they used to. OS's don't crash as much, though.
> I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
Same here, but only because I can emulate old platforms, otherwise I would. I still play old games and use old software I wrote.
https://youtube.com/@danooct1 shows off some old malware.
Agreed. I was born in '83. The author misses the things he never even experienced and is living in the 90s-00s "Highlights" reel.
5" floppy drives. 3" hard disks. Single core computers. 28k dial-up was almost torture. 56k was not much better. Waiting 5-10 minutes for a single picture to load one. pixel. at. a. time. CRT monitors. Trojans. Viruses.
> Things crashed - alot.
Ahh, the Windows Blue Screen of Death. "hello darkness my old friend."
We need a Net 2.0 where we can go and be weird again.
It's refreshing to see - I think the web got boring once bootstrap hit and everything started looking that way.
Perhaps start here https://youtu.be/hVWlgh8QP5s?si=z4RD6FnMpPGQYuem&t=1523 And feel free to email (see bio) if you want to connect in there
The other thing I miss from that time is USENET. So damn great, until it got swamped by noise. Some parts of it remain active today.
Threaded conversation is fantastic. And it's searchable. So damn much can be found in the USENET archives. The modern tools we have today aren't the same at all, mostly super functional silos. Not bad. Also, just not very good!
Finally, mailing lists. Those are still a thing, and like USENET, are searchable, high value communication exchanges.
Reddit is a lot like USENET. And the original charter around the Aaron time was similar, basically by users, for users kind of thing. Now the enshittification is happening everywhere near constantly devaluing online discourse.
The way I see it, those of us who do miss the great things about this early Internet time can keep talking about it, and one day, one of us, or one we talk to, will figure out how to reboot USENET for all of us to enjoy just as was done back in the day.
The real good and fun Internet still exists, it is just much harder to find it.
> What’s the ratio of followers to following you have? Are your story highlights organized and “aesthetic”? What reels are you liking? [...]
> It has become so shallow, you can tell almost nothing about who someone actually is through Instagram or tiktok. You can only tell how they want to portray themselves to the general population and, by how they organize their profile, if they are eligible to be a part of your social circle.
> [In the past,] There was little incentive to lie, to manipulate truth, and each blog entry or piece of information was tied to identity. (except in the cases of anonymity).
Lying on a speed running forum about a time you got in a game. Making things online, just to dog pile on hating 1 particular person. The mean shit people said to each other on any IM platform. Cyber bullying was a word I remember being tossed around a lot in the mid 00's.
The corpo vibe of things today sucks. Totally agree. But it's not like the internet of 2005 was this utopia of good vibes and positivity. It's never going to be that _universally_. Find your tribe eh?
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However,
> Also, websites just simply looked cooler.
The trope of old man yells at cloud should have the dual of young person thinks they have discovered something new. It takes a while to learn there is nothing new under the sun.
Sure, normies have invaded the internet, but there are plenty of niches in various fields that are sufficiently avant-gard that even the most dissenting hipsters can still find a home. But it’s never easy, almost by definition such places are defined by their difficulty of entry.
There's a line in "Leave the world behind" [0] where Rose says about Friends that it's feel is "nostalgic for a world that never happened"
It's called "anemoia" [1] It's many things. One is that it's a way of expressing latent values that don't fit into the current culture.
"Small fish have no place to go" is a comment on a perceived reality that misses (and so reveals) two important points; the Internet didn't change [2], people did. It's not a place you go, it's a thing you do and the attitude you bring to that.
But ultimately the Internet is nothing but people connected by wires. People have moods we call "culture". Back then it was unbelievably optimistic and giddy. People wanted to reach out. Everything was ripe with possibility and fun. The OP is justified to wonder what it was like to live then.
Now we know what kind of things are at the other end of that wire and it feels more like a dark forest.
It's more than that people like me "just get older", the culture has palpably changed for the worse. Climate change maybe. It's become objectively more pessimistic and neurotic. Sure there's a few hold-outs, but that takes a lot of Prozac to keep up.
Anyway, the future of the Internet is all about "small fish". That's all it's ever been about.
[0] book: Rumaan Alam screen: Sam Esmail
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/anemoia-nostalgi...
[2] Of course the Internet did change technically, it got much bigger, faster, cheaper, more reliable etc.
I'm not so sure about that: in the 90s, there was no social media.
and it's not just the internet. the 90s and even more so the 80s were for sure the better time to be young (at heart).
there was a real utopian feeling of the early internet. one i remember. this was lost due to the commercialization and corporatization of the web.
the internet began as a place for creativity, freedom, exploration andlater became dominated by profit-driven platforms, surveillance capitalism, and monopolies like google and facebook.
neoliberalism turned the internet into a tool for consumption and data extraction, stifling the initial sense of openness and possibility, and replacing it with controlled, market-driven environments.
this shift eroded the hope for a radically different digital future. and that is (part) of the reason i miss the 90s - 00s internet.
the other side of it is the emergence of the complex web. where things that used to be simple are now endlessly complicated, and working on the web feels like building a jenga tower on a plane in turbulence.
— Kool G Rap & DJ Polo.
I now file them in my head alongside the same sort of mindset of the Amish - i.e. a rejection of modern technology and centering on some perceived "better times" in the past (for better or worse)
I was there in the early-/mid-90s. Yes there was more "authenticity" but there was also a lot of crap (probably 50-75% of the self-published sites were essentially empty "welcome to my website! I'll add more soon!" type things) and critically there was a lot of stuff we take for granted today that simply was not there. It was shit compared to the modern internet when you think about what we can do now Vs what you could do then.
Yes there were more frequently found self-published kooky websites, but even "professional" sites were done as second-thoughts and the quality/freshness was often low, and there was a whole raft of things that make our lives easier today that simply could not be done or were terrible (decent search engines, decent high-quality news sites, chatgpt, wikipedia, book flights or hotels, watch videos, github, stream music, order groceries, turn your lights on, view online maps, attend university, talk to your friends/family on the other side of the world in crystal clear HD video, have Amazon deliver something to your house on the same freaking day etc etc etc etc).
A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption.
> A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption.
Isn't this the point the original article is trying to make? All the good old simple stuff is still there (neocities) but now it's relatively undiscoverable to the average internet user, because big money interests exploit fundamental weaknesses in human nature for attention.
> Be selective in your consumption.
I feel like you're not really considering the nature of addiction.
I agree with you these posts are getting a bit tiresome too. But I'd much rather they get more tiresome, and maybe lead to change vs letting the problems they're highlighting get worse.
I was there in the 90's too, let's not pull up the ladder behind us.
The vast majority of geocities were essentially empty sites. The ones that were interesting and with decent content were not from the same sort of people shit-posting on twitter today. It takes time and effort and dedication to curate something and put something useful and interesting together - people who are in that category will still be doing that even with or without tiktok (and indeed if someone wants to host their collection of cat pictures on tiktok and not geocities then why not?). The content is still there, but the internet is a whole lot better today - there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today.
Nobody missed out on anything apart from a whole load of GIFs.
Also, the time spent across the web has changed as do-it-all companies like Google or Amazon came along: why go find 5 different perfect services, when Google has an alright implementation of them?
Sure, you can say "well just discipline yourself to go look at it", but like I said, that's not how human nature/addiction work. And even if I as an individual am some sort of dopamine-free superhuman immune to manipulation (I'm not) the average human isn't, so this means the average conversation about the web is more focused on fewer centralised services, as that's what people spend more of their time on.
All of this makes it a lot harder to "just go and browse some personal websites" compared to the early internet.
I agree with you that there are many services on the web that weren't around before, and lots of things we could do now that we couldn't before. But that's not the point of the post, the point is specifically saying they preferred the compromise of personal, slightly rustier, less featureful web, compared to the modern, sterile, polished, depersonalised web.
> there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today.
That's your opinion, and the upvotes and frequency of these posts suggests it's an unpopular (although still valid!) opinion. It's clearly not a fact though.
You know there are also an increasing amount of people who had smartphones who now have dumb phones? It's not unheard of for people to want to step back in preference of simplicity.