Maybe. Nature hates vacuum. I personally suspect that something new will emerge. For better or worse, some humans work best when weird restrictions are imposed. That said, yes, then wild 90s net is dead. It probably was for a while, but were all mourning.

There are still small pockets with actual humans to be found. The small web exists. Some forums keep on going, im still shitposting on Something Awful after twenty years and it’s still quite active. Bluesky has its faults but it also has for example an active community of scholars you can follow and interact with.

Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.

I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.

Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.

I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.

I'm not sure. Okay, lots of companies will use these automated blog generators that charge a few to automate content and posting. Fine. But who'll read that? Nobody. So I think the internet will eventually balance back to favouring actual human work, curated lists, etc.

I hacked in the 90s and 00s, wasn’t that great/golden if you took your profession seriously…

100%. I miss trackers and napster. I miss newgrounds. This mobile AI bullshit is not the same. I don't know why, but I hate AI. I consider myself just as good as the best at using it. I can make it do my programming. It does a great job. It's just not enjoyable anymore.