I miss the old Internet of 10-20 years ago | Hacker News Reader

I miss the old Internet of 10-20 years ago

27 pointsmorpheos13719 comments

Now search sucks Organic engagement sucks Anything creative or thoughtful is driven out by slop or not intellectual content

Specifically I am interested in reading about news and geopolitics

With many traditional media sites both being paywalled and eliminating their comments sections it seems my option, only option is reddit which sucks. Is there anything else out there like and international politics forum that is NOT Reddit where I can read what real people think about a variety of issues facing the world today? Or does that not exist anymore. Maybe 4chan or a conspiracy site but again those all have their own bias. I am more interested in what normal people think and seeing free discussion.

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Look for text based media. As soon as images are introduced to a platform, memes take over and tank the quality of discourse.

I share your frustrations. I was hopefully for the relaunch of Digg, but it very quickly started to feel like Reddit, especially when people inject politics (with an heavy bias) into everything. I purposely didn’t follow the politics community, as I had a feeling that would be bad, but that mindset very quickly started infecting many other communities and discussions. It seemed impossible to have a good faith discussion of the actual issues. I gave up yesterday, deleting the app, logging out of the site, and deleting my bookmark. I’m too old to waste my time dealing with conversations like those.

Reddit has a meme problem as well. Also a bad mod problem.

It’s such a boon having such a large unpaid workforce but it’s kind of a Faustian bargain.

Real life is the new forum of 2026, just like Roman Forum 2k years ago. You can see, feel and communicate with the reality as it is. Go find people and talk to them, and maybe you will meet someone with whom you can have a discourse of your life. Observe how the emotions of yourself and the other person(s) change during discourse, because they reveal hot points: limits, pain points, dreams, un(knowingness) etc. Learn/listen and teach/speak.

If you start a link blog with an RSS feed and an email or some way to comment I will subscribe and participate if it’s good enough.

Start here:

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

https://bearblog.dev

Well, then, checkout mine

https://www.rxjourney.net/

I see this sentiment on here frequently. Yes, content delivery now sucks like it’s written by bots for consumption by bots solely with the goal of supplying mindless dribble for ad impressions.

However the technology is so much better. As a developer I can build web and media applications that you couldn’t ever imagine building 20 years ago. I am not talking about framework garbage like jquery or React. I am talking about things like WebSockets, HTML5 audio/video, Node/Deno, and more.

I agree that the technology is fine, and I also appreciate the breadth of tools I can fiddle with and how surprisingly approachable they've become for me (mdn docs are amazing to explore). But I miss the community spaces of the old internet. Different forums for the different games I played. The non-profit driven youtube / twitter. Truly the biggest pandora's box of the internet is the addition of profit incentives for posters. It was fine for a while, I liked it when video makers who put effort into their creations were compensated. But then it got gamed into becoming the worst self-fueling internet hate machine. Rewarding those who put out vapid and inflammatory content for the sake of serving ads to enraged (and engaged) viewers.

There are probably some very high quality mailing lists or discord servers out there, but I wouldn't know where to find them.

I have personally never seen a high quality discord server. The chaotic ui lends itself to noisy random conversations and dropped threads.

I don’t have any recommendations for you. A big part of the problem is that heavy moderation is necessary to keep forums from devolving into the slop that stands in for discourse these days. For example, even when there’s a fairly good question posted on reddit, the comments are just a string of one liners, snide quips, and snark. Few people know how to engage in thoughtful discussion anymore.

Check out https://cyberspace.online/

Wow. Can’t believe this is the first time in human history when someone thought things were better when they were younger.

Thank you for the thought-terminating comment. Progress is always good, and we should never stop to look back, thinking perhaps that we have taken a wrong turn along the way.

Yes, it is cliché at this point to complain about the Internet, but there is a reason people do complain and it’s not because of rose-tinted glasses.

You really think rose-tinted glasses is 0% of it?

Check out mine

https://www.rxjourney.net/

Twitter

Sorry, I tried. If you want to have good things you have to use them when you first see them.

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