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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends."

That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.

In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.

Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."

Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.

That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.

So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.

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I always hated the term "democratization" because last I checked there was never any consensus on what should be done, always MBA pricks shoving whatever they wanted down our throats.

In that case how about "Federation" at least?

If the timeline of things as you present them is taken as accurate, then I would say the www being killed was good, with FB opening up to everyone being the inflection point toward bad.

Webrings are nostalgic, but the old web sucked, and there was a dearth of information and fun to be had. I remember getting online and being able to confirm "nope, no new anime content worth looking at today" by quickly checking Usenet and Yahoo's index (which was updated manually) and a few webrings.

now, I'm able to watch a show that aired in Brazil the day after, with English subtitles.

People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"

If you judge the internet and the world by "no new anime content today" things have actually improved. But some would think that's not a healthy way to see things.

> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting.

Judged on an anime freshness scale, probably not.

I am one of the people that long for the old internet. I don’t long for it because there are too many normal people on it now.

The old internet was interesting, open, simple, un-gated, and relatively egalitarian with few corporate interests in commanding positions. The new internet is basically a predatory environment disguised as a library.

> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"

The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.

I think we still have many high-IQ people on the web. Its just they are not making tiktoks. However, they are harder to find since the pool got bigger.

The ease of use introduced the average individuals to the web and online gaming. When I was younger and online gaming was gaining traction my "clan" hosted servers. This is how I started dipping my toes into programming and server configuration. Literally, everyone that was in the clan was quite intelligent. We had debates and discussions on IRC, forums and teamspeak.

Now, gaming and the web is just trash full of brain rotted individuals. Communities have been destroyed by lack of self hosted or self owned servers. Forums have been destroyed by discord. Games are being destroyed by microtransactions.

> think we still have many high-IQ people on the web. Its just they are not making tiktoks. However, they are harder to find since the pool got bigger

Yeah, that’s what I meant. Even in Tik Tok there’s a lot of very interesting history, war, etc., stuff.

A quick read of any old usenet arguments should instantly disabuse you of this absurd notion. Or the old archives of stupid IRC conversations.

The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.

There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.

Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.

The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.

And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.

The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.

Being able to deal with “technical minutiae” is highly linked to intelligence. What you’re referring to is lacking social graces, which is different than lacking intelligence. Having a hobby that involved reasoning about abstract things like IRQ assignments is a pretty good proxy for IQ.

Similarly, back when computers were expensive, people on the internet generally were higher income, which is also quite significantly correlated with intelligence.

That's confusing content access with monopolised algorithmic promotion/curation of belief systems, using selected news and opinion pieces to modify beliefs and behaviour.

It's nice you can view (pirate) whatever content you want, but not so nice that algorithmic platforms pretend to be neutral social spaces when in fact they're being used to promote certain political and cultural beliefs while suppressing others.

I don't know about anyone else, but anybody who goes into a "1970s library" (I don't know what that is, but I guess it means a good old-fashioned library with like, books) and complains about the lack of 3D printers or that their obscure animated series catalog isn't wide enough would embody the definition of an uninteresting person to me.

I think when people say they miss the web of the 90s what they're really missing from the 90s is themselves.

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