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Comment by racemic | Hacker News Reader

I've lurked on HN for years, but I had to create an account just to respond to your post. I operated these servers – perhaps my handle is still familiar. I remember you for sure! I'm touched that you and so many others still have fond memories of that time.

It was such a gratifying experience to build out that server network and the accompanying integrations that attracted so many and built such a great community. I miss the days in college when I had time to work on stuff like that just for the love of it. I hope you are doing well!

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Wow! Of course I remember you! I've actually tried to hunt you down in the past to say hi and thank you for all the good times. I thought I found you on Steam recently. If you see a friend request from a Stealth Penguin (https://steamcommunity.com/id/stealthpengu1n), that's me.

I'm doing great these days and hope you are too! That was such a fun time. If you want to get in touch, my gmail address is rimunroe. I'd love to catch up!

This kind of interaction is what makes me miss the "old internet" the most...

People just made stuff for the fun of it

That still happens. You just have to look a bit more for it.

Agreed. I think we probably even have better tools to search for things now, but there's just so much more that in some ways it's harder to find that kind of stuff.

We’re all still here. Build communities. Find, join, and support existing ones.

My intuition is it still exists.

This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.

But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.

Honestly, this is partially why I actually love a lot of what's on Hackernews. This site still seems to have a big proportion of old school geeks within it's population, and it feels like one of the only places left for good discussion that i've found on tech.

It’s kinda funny right? You’d expect the number of comments to rise with the number of users, but aside from a few highly controversial topics we still have posts on the front page that barely get to triple digits comments, if even.

I mean partially, i've still not really noticed a post that has more than 1000-3000 votes on a daily. As a comparison to other social media, that's miniscule

I don't meh. This site has had a huge change now that it's become a sort of GenXer geek culture icon. I had originally come to this site to escape the stupid Natalie Portman sliding my bowl of grits Weird Al worship that was on Slashdot but it came back here and everyone who was into that culture joined this place too. A particularly uncharitable part of me wonders why folks who are so displeased with the state of greater social media are willing to override norms of other sites just to chase their particular idea of social media but of course that is the basis behind Eternal September.

There's a name for this phenomenon, it's called the Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Never heard of that until now so thank you so much for sharing!

Not really, the internet is fundamentally different now due to the amount of "attention" and resulting pressure it got.

I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.

I think you're right

My son spends most of his time in small closed Discord servers.

The niche areas still exist, but a lot of them are hidden and invite only, or just intentionally or unintentionally not easy to discover.

Seems it is not just about geeks VS general population but rather the classical case where success (ease of access) & popularity inevitably bring failure. Few open (loosely or not actively moderated) "spaces" left. No wonder given the general attitude of the, lol, "invaders". :D In the past - you pick an IRC server and a room and 4 out of 5 times you'll learn something interesting, have actual fun with ppl you don't know and just enjoy the interactions. Now similar experience can happen only in closed/invite only or hard-to-find groups. The mainstream ones (different "social media" services) seem filled with people who want only to show off while remaining as alienated (and as consequence hostile) from one another as possible. Good or bad - the old Net is dead. The new one is predominantly for making money and BS. The same trend can be observed virtually anywhere. In the past - people experimented with games, lots of cr@p titles but also pure gems, games that last. Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again. Anyway - it is what it is, the good thing is there are still meaningful places and people worth reading/listening to, just way harder to find through the noise. News.y seems one of the few remaining and open islands.

To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.

> Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again.

Nope. Maybe that's what you see because you don't have the time to check for diamonds in the coal mine but there are a ton of indie games being released every day. Many trying random concepts.

Yes modding is not en vogue nowadays but frameworks like rpg maker, godot etc allow a lot of people to experiment and materialize their ideas (good or bad). And that's without factoring in what LLM will allow when some get trained on those tools and related tutorials.

I'm just basing my views from what is available on Steam. I think there are a lot more experimental games and genres being developed and shared in those channels I don't have the time to discover and enjoy.

"the old internet" seems to still exist. Today they're the semi-private discord/slack/mattermost/matrix servers that mostly replaced IRC. Some are large enough that separate channels on them are their own communities - for example like Hangops.

Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.

I have a few amazing signal groups to add to that.

The OP comment itself is funny because Counter Strike itself still has a server browser lol.

It does but most games don't

The server browser is deliberately hidden, neglected, and full of spam on the modern versions of CS.

It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.

There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.

Yeah, I (a teenager) have been lucky enough to find a community like this. It's amazing but it's hard to find communities like that.

Pre-monetization. Would this come back if money was made useless?

I was part of a group of high schoolers that found each other on IRC and ICQ. We built out what became Day of Defeat-another HL mod. We followed CS-were early adopters of their betas and realized we could also mod. We were fortunate that we had parents that let us build on a very wild internet . I know a few from the group made it with Valve-I kept in touch with a couple- and my parents stayed involved but I dropped it before Valve moved a few out to an apartment. If there was a way to find those channels/chats again… awesome time to come of age while being completely naive to how the world operates. To have that level of dumbness and overly eager confidence again

> We built out what became Day of Defeat

Thank you for that. This mod was awesome in LANs.

There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.

Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.

You'll love this. I teared up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y

Yeah I loved it so much. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing :)

This kind of interaction happens many times a day on various social media platforms. The internet is how a lot bigger and more private which means that it is harder to see such people reconnecting.

Any particular reason why? This interaction just happened on the "current Internet".

We used to all have our nice own gardens. If anyone was happening by we might say hello, and invite them in.

It was easy to walk around your neighborhood, and find someone with a nice garden, who was having a garden party. You could present yourself by your handle (which was probably, or at least possibly globally unique), and join in, and maybe have fun at their garden party.

It was difficult to find gardens that you didn't care about.

When you found someone in the "gaming" garden, and then found them again in the "rally driving" garden (and you know they were the same person due to the nearly globally unique handle), it was fun and exciting.

Now there are a handful of giant gardens that I don't really want to go into for the most part. They're owned by old royalty, they're uncomfortable (for me), the only reason the garden owners want me to be there is so that they can make me look at ads, not appreciate the garden. Maybe my friends are there too, but all I see are people yelling about their small section of the (private) garden.

Sure I may still find my old friends in these weird giant gardens, but ben3212 is probably not my friend Ben who happens to have the favorite number 3212.

Hacker News is a relatively "smaller" community that is closer to the old internet.

Also the top streamer on tik tok / youtube shorts / ... are not likely posting here trying to get massive up votes on their content, as there aren't very many ways to monetize having the top post on hacker news, so while this interaction happened on the "current Internet" I know of one or two places like this on the current internet. I used to know of more, and I think I liked that better.

I know this isn't so different than "Also the clouds used to be different. They used to be whiter, and puffier! It was better then!", but here I am.

I spent many a weekend on your servers as a teen. Thank you for running them!

(I was MethodMan)

Hah, I remember your gamertag! I (gognog) would've been the 180 ping player on your team you wanted to kick, playing from NZ cause there weren't any servers here. Small world, those WC3 servers were the real deal.

Oh, I remember you (for your ping, not your gamertag lol).

For real, though. After years of playing CS the WC3 plugin revived the game for me. De aztec was amazing when you could teleport all around the map.

Your name seems familiar, and I distinctly remember one regular who would frequently rubber band around due to their ping.

I remember you! I was Stealth Penguin. I made annoying squawking noises over my mic

The fact that people still remember those servers all these years later? That's legacy-level stuff

They were so good. The owner really put a lot of work into them. There were a lot of WC3 mod servers, but these ones were much more fully featured than most. I've always wanted to ask rACEmic how much of the features I remember were custom. The forums were extremely active. I don't know how accurate my memory was, but I think there were around 3000 registered users. I was active in the community in my mid-late teen years, so it was a formative time I remember pretty clearly.

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