Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilovecookies | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion it's too much "american" media and societys individualistic culture that has spread like a disease on the internet and kind of destroyed much of the original 90s internet culture. And thereby also the safehaven for the hacker people. The one place where many people felt at home has been stripped from them though this "capitalization" of the internet in my opinion. I loved playing around with the net before it got big. Remembering the times I played age of empires with random Chinese ppl and build websites with html where i uploaded my favorite games for people to download (had almost 1000 downloads at one of my sites!) or when I "hacked" games by alternating attributes in their config files and posted results on various forums... This was when the net was free and interesting today most of the landscape is dominated by commercials and Hollywood/media brainwashing.

View on HN

I think that you are absolutely right that the web has changed, but I think that it's pretty easy and cliche to blame 'Murican media on it. It's inevitable that things like the internet are going change for a multitude of different reasons - to blame any one seems shortsighted. People were making the same claims about Endless September and the AOL invasions; but the internet adapted and became something else. In one case, it turned into the internet you remember as the "original".

The internet has changed, but to try to make a claim that there ever was an "original internet culture" is to miss what the internet is and always has been, an amorphous mass of people, constantly changing and evolving into something else based on the technologies available to it.

I loved the net of the 90's and even the early 2000's as well, and I miss it and remember it fondly. But to try to say that it was the original internet; you might as well just be yelling "Get off my lawn". And even then, the BBS folks might want a word with you.

Well yes I realize that you cannot blame america for capitalism, capitalism didn't even originate in america. It has been around for several centuries.

However the output of the american media in the 2000s and 2010s, a media that is heavily influenced by capitalism has definitely shaped the internet and the worldly culture into its current form.

The internet is an amorphous mass of people, yes. But in the earlier days not everyone participated like you are "programmed" to do in our current society. Comparisons could be made with the early aviators or sailors, it is true that these things existed and were new in their relative eras and that everybody knew about them. But that doesn't mean everybody felt the need to explore these technologies. So, as the type of people changes that usually uses the internet, (from students, software people and mostly male teenagers that have an urge to explore it, to more corporate people and just about anybody) the content also naturally changed and the mental/emotinal rewards those original people once got when they visited 'teh intehrnetz' are not the same as they once were.

Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online games like farmville and candycrush it's nothing the same and the types of people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact.

> Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online games like farmville and candycrush it's nothing the same and the types of people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact.

Have you never seen Eve Online? There's as much calculation and cooperation and backstabbing as in anything I've seen, it's just prettier now. And if subscribing to a game isn't your thing, there are a lot of deep web-based strategy games out there. Picking shit like candycrush is disingenuous; I could just as easily say that the early Web was useless because it had so many shitty Pokemon fan pages.

Well sure but it the net was definitely more oriented to ppl that was into hacking / coding back then compared to now. Mainstream wasn't the net back then.

I think it is part of the opposite.

I think that the "hacker" ideal permeated American media, rather than the other way around, with everything from books to movies (Matrix, Hackers, etc). It became something that was not limited to the intellectual elite anymore.

Oddly enough, this is exactly how a 1940's Superman radio program is attributed for being a major player in bringing down the Klu Klux Klan. They would air the KKK secret codes as part of the kids program, and it took away part of the "exclusiveness" of the KKK community.

More American capitalist ways of market control.

With regular products, you buy something good. When it ceases to be good, you stop buying.

With telecom in general, you buy when it's good, and when it stops being good, it's already an entrenched oligopoly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com