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Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

I was on the 'net pre-WWW and wrote my first web page in 1992.

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.

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I joined in 2003, so I'm probably around 10 yrs younger (born 88).

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

> The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.

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.

For me, that hope was realized, we have access to most of the books in existence, incredible projects of knowledge sharing, and countless other resources to learn any subject you want.

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.

> For me, that hope was realized, we have access to most of the books in existence

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".

Libgen is great. :P

Looking up arbitrary ebooks from my library of a couple thousand physical books (accumulated over 40 years from obscure places) on shadow libraries, I get something like a 90% hit rate. They're almost all English, however, but there are enough nonenglish illicit sources to make me think that "most" is probably right on the money. Also, tbh, from the 10% I can't find maybe 1/5 of those is worth reading. Unfindable stuff tends to be the dregs, although plenty of the dregs are also findable.

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.

For example, I can read Baumgarten's metaphysics in original Latin on archive.org, before the internet people had to take months to reserve and arrange for the libraries to send them books, if it was possible at all.

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.

Exactly. I got online in 1995 and the promise was kept by the internet. I have taken so many free classes from Ivy league schools along with all the books, pdfs, tutorials, physical books I would have never found otherwise.

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.

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