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Comment by jonas21 | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.

It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

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It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.

This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.

Music becoming more commercial is a widely held complaint. It’s also mostly all the same chord progression so you could say sloppy as well

Music being too AI generated is the new "pop music is formulaic".

It is too AI generated, and pop music was formulaic. A common trope doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.

In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.

I've heard people describe this phenomenon in basically two ways:

- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.

- The past is another country.

The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.

Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.

I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".

This is an amazing comment. I'm old. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and miss those times so much. But that is because I was young, immortal, the world was mine to discover.

In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.

This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.

They're often not wrong though. Nothing ruins a city quite like a white collar industry boom. It normalizes everything down to the "globalhomo" (for lack of a better word) baseline. The bars, the stores, the government, the transportation, it's all the same. Unless you fixate on appearances like the local architecture (a reflection of local climate for the most part) or minutia like "this city has a park by the river" vs "this city has a park by the highway" they're nearly indistinguishable.

Whether it's an old industry town going to shit or a hippies and artists type place or a former the shit it goes to seems to be the same every damn time.

> "globalhomo" (for lack of a better word)

(alt-right, anti-LGBTQ slur, Internet slang, 4chan slang, derogatory) The supposed promotion of homosexuality, neoliberal economics, and progressive values coupled with the paternalistic curtailment of freedoms by corporate and political interests. [from 2016] [1]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/globohomo

UrbanDictionary is far more woke to these vulgar definitions, and offers several unique definitions, but NSFW in most cases.

You meant what? Urban Dictionary's definitions were similar mostly.

I like the forums of the old way better than what we have now, Discord and reddit suck I mean, even back button on reddit does not work 50% of the time, lol. Hacker News is the only thing that we have left that's similar to what we had from forums of the old. And even then, I think I like those forums better. Remember Deja News before Google bought them. Shit like that, that was good.

old.reddit.com is still ok. Don't tell anyone or they'll take it away.

I have an auto-redirect userscript set up in Firefox so I never see reddit.com.

The statement "[thing] is worse now than it was X years ago" is not something that can only be true at a single point in time.

What if [thing] is just contiguously getting worse? What if that statement has always been true regardless of when it's been said?

Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…

Are they wrong though? Are there any metrics people today can look at and see things were indeed better in the past when they weren't around?

At my first Burning Man in 1998, I met a guy in his 3rd year who told me, "It's changed, man."

Burning Man may have peaked by now. But looking back, most would agree it still had a lot of good years left in it in 1998.

That's when you ask what exactly was better and then you can tell whether it's just typical nostalgia or if there are genuinely things to miss.

You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.

I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.

As Ia genz I can say that the internet help me learn english, programming and before that I got an advertisement freelance business that took me out of poverty. What got me into these were videos recommended by youtube or something.

This was true even 30 years ago.

What changed is how the mainstream internet looks like. I could find spaces where there were every kind of people (like my home country’s subreddit) due to their size, and money didn’t drive anything. Now these are even actively manipulated. I haven’t found a single new space in a decade which is generic (different kinds of people from every segments of the populace), it’s content not driven by money, and its topic is not focused, but generic. In other words mainstream spaces without the influence of money.

Nowadays, I can find such spaces only which are very limited in size or reach. And this means that it’s way more difficult to find them.

Also, there was an obvious exodus of smart people from public spaces. Who I followed on Twitter a decade ago, almost nobody left on the public internet. And no, most of them left before Musk. Or they went anonymous, but from my viewpoint it’s the same: there is no way to know what they think, what they know.

> millenials got the birth of social media

..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.

It was still an extremely exciting period of time that everyone was enjoying at the time. Mostly because it was augmenting existing friendships rather than replacing them with algorithmic content.

The monetization of every platform has killed the internet. It's hard to find genuine posts anymore. It's all engagement bait.

I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).

I believe it was “Eternal September”.

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