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Comment by boh | Hacker News Reader

This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.

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> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.

Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.

I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:

* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.

* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.

* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.

Indeed. I was trying to sell a loft bed a couple years ago and Craigslist is essentially dead for that sort of thing now, killed by Facebook (I deleted my account in 2021 and I have to say that eschewing that corner of the internet has been a net positive for my mental health). The only replies I got were obvious scams (“I love this! I’ll pay you $100 more than you’re asking for it!”)

Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).

I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.

A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.

* The site still exists but has been taken over by Tapatalk, snuffing out what little remained of the original community.

  the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason

Billions have been spent building walls around niche and small sites to funnel people into major platforms. Pretending this ad/discoverability infrastructure doesn't exist is very naive.

Care to provide some examples?

It's almost preferable for sites to die than for them to be captured by the various ideological extremes that it seems necessary for them to subscribe to these days.

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