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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.

Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.

As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.

Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.

I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).

Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.

Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.

> Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se.

Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.

> They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.

IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.

It's funny, being someone who was terminally online then and now, back then I had immediate access to orders of magnitude more information than I did a few years prior as well as a normal person. These days the amount of information I can pull at the drop of a hat is so much more than back then it is mind boggling. Also a normal person isn't that much different in capability vs a terminally online person such as myself.

Yes, and that imo kind of cheapens the whole effect of it. We're witnessing something similar now with genAI and slop people produce with it. First few moments it was wow, look at all of this and now it's noise.

In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001.

Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.

It felt bigger because of a few things:

1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there.

2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.

Yeah, the internet felt more like an unexplored place then. Now it feels like a service to access some other services, but back then, it felt like a real world that could contain anything.

It totally felt bigger because so many experiences required access to specific physical objects and getting those took forever.

35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.

It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.

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