Hacker News Reader

I miss the world as it was before pervasive social media. Compared to back then, we are now utterly consumed by the opinions of people we don't know and will never meet. We spend time worrying unreasonably about what a disembodied hive mind thinks or how it might harm us if our opinions don't conform. We have research which shows that social media has added to the depression and anxiety in the world and contributed to a mental health crisis. This has nothing to do with my childhood or my middle or high school years, I was well out of college before Facebook was created.

Social media seems to be engineered to push people to extremes, and civil discourse seems almost impossible in many instances.

Facebook's original feed was kind of OK when it was just a chronological list of posts from your friends (though that still has some issues). But of course that doesn't make as much money as an algorithmic feed that pushes advertisements and outrage-driven "engagement".

Yellow journalism has been around forever, but now we have outrage media that is optimized for each person with an addictive feedback loop.

Somehow I don't think AI is going to improve the situation.

> Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

I loathed my childhood, and have far more freedom as an adult then I ever did then.

School, homework, chores, strict bedtime, dial-up Internet, shared desktop computers...

Yes, I spent a ton of time playing games, compiling the Linux kernel, and screwing around on the Internet back then. But outside of summer vacation (which I do miss dearly), I spend just as much or more online today as then.

I absolutely do miss the old Internet, not just that time period.

But, there's bright spots in the modern Internet too. The rise of online D&D via Discord during the pandemic was amazing. I play far more D&D thesedays then I ever did since the 90s. Discord also scratches the MUD/IRC itch. But, not sure Discord will survive the next decade either.

TBH, its not even middle/high-school era Internet I miss most either. While I have fond mid-90s memories, I think peak Internet is somewhere in 2008-2012 range.

The Internet was mostly additive up to that point. New tech, sites, services existed alongside what came before.

I can appreciate Slashdot, Reddit, HN, and even Twitter (it was huge for distributed systems/database community ~2009-15) at different points in time.

It was really the photo-first, later video-first, shift that happened mid-2010s + big tech dominance that strangled old Internet. No longer being additive, but shrinking the Internet into fewer properties, with everything just being "content".

D&D turned out to be a killer app for youtube, since game streams are fun to watch and also a great onramp for new players.

For online play though I have mostly used roll20 (occasionally fantasygrounds, and very rarely discord but just for audio.)

It can be true that what people miss most of all is the freedom of childhood and that the internet is on a decades long decline.

The commercialized centralized appified algorithm-fed web is inferior when it comes to community-forming. It creates the illusion of social cohesion but in reality interactions are too superficial for real communities (and friendships) to form.

This is such a lame argument that comes up anytime someone dares suggest that things might have been better in the past. It's lame because it is not an argument at all but a casual dismissal of the original claim without anything of substance to back that up.

> a casual dismissal of the original claim without anything of substance to back that up

I am not dismissing it. I miss the old internet too.

But what I’ve found is that I miss the free time to explore a lot more. When I find that, there is suddenly plenty of good people on the internet sharing interesting things. But usually in my busy life I scurry past without even noticing.

For example: there are entire corners of instagram devoted to people with a few hundred followers sharing daily chicken drama from their farms. Like a soap opera with daily updates … about chickens. Doesn’t get more “describe your favorite tree” than that

> there are entire corners of instagram devoted to people with a few hundred followers sharing daily chicken drama from their farms.

Difference is that when FishCam went live, it was "Wait. What? You can do that?" Now: "Of course you can share video on the internet."

We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?" moments — when we witnessed LLMs, for example — but we aren't inundated with them on a near-daily basis like we were in the age of the old internet, when everything about it was new and people were continually testing its limits.

In other words, it is mature now. There is no bringing back the magic.

> We still get the occasional "Wait. What? You can do that?"

1. From the perspective of a kid, everything is like that.

At 17 I was amazed by all sorts of things that my older peers yawned at and said "Yeah we could do that 10 years ago on desktop/mainframe/whatever". I now work with a lot of youngins. Their minds are blown by all sorts of things I find boring because we (the industry) started working on them 10+ years ago.

2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.

Right now I'm working on bringing bioinformatics tools to the web. It is blowing people's minds. To me the tech feels boring and obvious, to the biotech researchers it's like their whole world is revolutionizing (and they tell us as much).

> 1. From the perspective of a kid, everything is like that.

To some degree, but, for example, the car wasn't as mind blowing to my generation as my parents' and grandparents'. And the kids today don't seem to recognize it as anything special at all. I expect you can say that about any technology. The telephone (not to be confused with a pocket computer) meant nothing to me, but was one of the greatest inventions ever known to people from an earlier time. There seems to be a natural decline as something reaches greater and greater maturity. Who here is thrilled by, say, the threshing machine? Who here even knows what a threshing machine is...?

> 2. There's a lot of "wow you can do that!?" out there but it's locked in niches.

Like I said, we're not inundated with it anymore. There are still special moments here and there, to be sure, but they don't come around often, so it is not the same continual high we once lived when the internet was new. Again, I think you can say that about anything becoming more and more mature. Going back to the car, in the early days they quickly improved with new features and better technology. Cars too lived the same "Wait. What? You can do that?" period. Now? A slightly larger infotainment screen is the biggest selling feature. Boring.

Admittedly, the driverless car hype got us really excited for a while, but the ball was kind of dropped on that one. Quite possibly the greatest marketing blunder of all time, and as a result I'm not sure the emotions have been able to recover as we start to see the technology actually be realized.

I think you would enjoy reading up on the Gartner hype cycle. It’s basically what you’re describing

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

Web and possibly mobile are deep into plateau of productivity

Definitely a case of missing new tech, plain and simple. We don't seem to create much anymore.

There are glimmers of hope here and there. I'd say LLMs brought the same sort of wonderment as the internet for a short period, but we quickly pushed them to their limits. They're a bit too much of a product, not the basic lego building block that the internet was for them to offer long-lasting effects. Granted, perhaps they are the BBS of our time, with an evolutionary, but game changing, step on the horizon?

But in the last 30 years, the smartphone might be the only game changing tech we've gained. And, sure enough, I'd say the early smartphone era was just as fascinating and fun as the early internet era. However, by now it too has grown long in the tooth. We really just pine for another automobile/airplane/space rocket/internet moment; something that changes everything.

When you follow niche interests like velomobile construction (just the example I thought of first), you find most of the useful stuff is from before 2006, and the best discussion venues old-school forums that have barely changed in at least 15 years, but are sometimes still alive.

(Older sites rot less, too; but even when you find archives of somewhat newer stuff, on average the content wasn’t so valuable.)

I miss the old web.

No, we still had responsibilities then.

I think the real answer is that we never thought what we had would change, or go away.

I think I described it in another comment from a wee while ago, but the old Internet was split. It was like there was a giant wall up between the serious business side of the Internet and the fun meme side of the Internet. "Pssssh, nobody is gonna make money from this stuff, that's not the point."

And then the serious business side realised that everything on the other side of the wall was monetisable. And so they broke the wall down, to offer us t-shirts and mugs with our memes on them. And then the denizens of the fun loving side realised that money could indeed be made from memes. And now you have it, the modern Internet where it's all purely about clout, creating an image/brand for yourself, monetising going viral, engagement farming.

It's ironically biblical, in a way.

> Whenever you pine for the old internet stop and think: Do I just miss the freedom of childhood?

This rings very true for video games. I cut my teeth on MUDs then MMOs and find myself craving pleasant social environments. It's easy to blame Discord or other social tools that gobbled up the gaming I enjoyed, but I'm old and all my peers are old, and the truth is I don't have 4 hours to roleplay about werewolf vampire monks.

That said, sometimes things really do change. I do get excited when I find a cool hobby website from a passionate nerd, or something like the MMOndrian game shared here a few days ago. There's more cool stuff than ever, but it does represent less of the general web experience.

It's partly true, the world is managed for you as a kid. But I don't think it's more than that. I wanted the fast web, I talked about ajax at length, saving resources, and time for everybody. The cobra effects are now too numerous to count.

I miss the old internet and for me I consider that to be before the smartphone. I don't especially miss the internet of middle school and high school, I have some fond memories of it but I found the local BBSes far more interesting.

IMHO, modern society critically undervalues the importance of open-ended play in all aspects of work and life.

Reminiscent of the push to make kindergarten more like upper grades or workplaces, rather than vice-versa.

The push to transform learning, or any form of productive activity, into drudgery, and humans into joyless (and often sedentary) robots, is regrettable. And the irony is that in the long run robots will be better robots than roboticized humans anyway.

I do not miss anything about my childhood and you truthfully could not pay me to be any younger than 29 again, but the internet I remember from late high school/early university (before social media and the monetization of everything) was better than the internet we have now.

There is something to what you are saying, but there's also the truth that an increasing amount of software has been shifted into web browsers. Now the web is full of places where you can't control your own data by default, news is locked behind paywalls and an unbelievable number of ads, and the most successful websites like Facebook have replaced blogs with Skinner boxes. Maybe you can contrast the ways you used to talk with your friends online with the popular options now and see some of the differences - all of the dominant options mandate a closed source client and federation isn't even a joke to laugh about.

You‘re assuming a certain age range where kids already had internet access. This wasn’t the case for the slightly older “piners”.

I am old. The time of the old Internet corresponds to my Ph.D. years, so I was very much an adult. I still miss it ;-)

> “the old internet” is always whatever was available when they were in middle/high school.

This is a really bad, lazy, thought-terminating meme. If you think the internet isn't net worse today, support your position. The existence of nostalgia isn't evidence that the quality of the world remains constant.

You're refreshingly verbose, considering the quality of your argument.

Ironically, one of the biggest point raised against this Brave New Internet is its infantilizing and "managed" way of treating the user. You should probably read the original article -- it makes this point very clearly.

People miss the old internet because the new internet is getting worse in tangible ways every year: adtech, AI-generated slop (and SEO slop even before that), manipulative algorithms, and ever-more-intrusive monetization.

The iron law of encrapification dictates that almost any web platform (youtube, reddit, etc.) will keep pushing the "degrade the end user experience to make more money" button until it stops working.

A slightly more charitable take is that people miss the "loss leader" versions of platforms before the inevitable monetization push (demanding continual growth even in a saturated market) took hold and started making them worse every year.

It's the old internet. I started having meaningful interactions again when I deleted most my social media accounts and rediscovered IRC and other platforms alike.

I started consuming quality content again when i replaced youtube with a FOSS wrapper that allows me to avoid the algorithm and ads, started torrenting books and getting my news through RSS feeds.

I started having fun again when I stopped using Steam and replaced it with oldschool LAN parties with my friends.

And before you accuse me of nostalgia, I never went to a LAN party when I was young, nor did I use IRC that much (the internet was expensive!).

Yes, the old internet was and still is better.