Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying.
Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation.
I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner.
The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff.
Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community.
Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community.
That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of:
* more focused, human and often better moderation;
* a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and;
* an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog".
Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now.
The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom.
It wasn’t just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy and there weren’t incentives to spam and scam people since you couldn’t monetize on such things. State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform, there weren’t trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a hundred other variables
In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being always online.
To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
So the people you had available to create communities with were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and rage bait?
Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online. It’s actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the communities reflects this.
> To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
Still is. IRC is much the same as it has ever been.
Usenet pre-"green-card-spam" was a relative utopia.
Sure you had arguments. That's where 'flamewar' came from. But quickly people tired of that and created *.advocacy sub-newsgroups to let people vent in their corner of the net.
Then domains were opened up for commerce a few years later and eternal September became a thing... The net never recovered, it just used up more bandwidth.
I’m not sure there wasnt as much spam and scams back then. I fondly remember 99% of my AOL inbox was filled with porn…
But ppl were definitely much more open and trustworthy back then. You could start a conversation with any random stranger and they wouldnt immediately dismiss you as some sort of scammer. Try that today and people will immediately flag you as a scammer
Trolling used to be more about pranking each other than about organised scam or attacks, or manufacturing consent for governments or promoting political parties. It was more like an internet art form. I guess this is about what one can consider as the internet being more innocent back then.
> State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform
Security was awful for both the client and server. Who needs a warrant when all the user data is an SQL injection away? Broswers not fussy about https, Java Applets, flash, browser toolbars, XSS - the Internet must have been like an open book for anyone with access to backbone traffic.
Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...
It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.
The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.
There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.
So you missed one more: religion. If you were going to reappropriate the internet into existing - I take it that you mean, human - structure, then you might as well add religion here too. There have been no other factors beyond religion and national geographies, that have bound humans at a larger scale. IMHO, this is/was not the original intent when DARPA unleashed Internet beyond it's laboratory. Sure, we can reappropriate as we move along. But there is no precedence of a promised land here. The nation-states and/or religions have been at wars since the beginning of time. What's there to prove that a technology like Internet (throw AI of the future into it) would make things better for human nature to adopt. Just because we can scale does not mean that we may be scaling to something better.
The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily.
Small communities breed radicalization.
They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic).
As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.
I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?
The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.
They don't need to be. Web forums and mailing list are useful when you want to form a larger community with a central idea or project. A chat group is mostly an online hangout place, kinda an equivalent of a favorite bar or a reading club.
What I don't like is when people wants to use a chat group where a forum would have been more useful.
I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.
I don't mean to advocate for Discord (they sure don't need it!) but if the requirement is to host an exclusive space for a dozen people, Discord does that.. you just make a "server"/guild and only invite trusted friends.
This doesn't solve any of the other problems (what happens when Discord enshittifies? Is it acceptable that Discord updates basically every single day? Is it OK that they constantly advertise video games in the form of little notifications saying "stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!"?) but it does seem to solve the 'how do I have a platform for my friends and I to talk" one.
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.
> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.
Very well said. I struggled with a dearth of social skills in adolescence that persevered well into adulthood, a combination of extreme naivety and being a spoiled brat (and, potentially, some autism for good measure). Being online in forums and IRC helped me work on those a bit at a time, thanks to clear-cut and instant feedback on what was and wasn’t acceptable. What really boosted my abilities were my tenure as server administrator or moderator, though, something I never would’ve been given a position of in a real job. I learned the basics of power politics, how to lead a group of people (or at the very least, how to herd cats), and how successful authority derives respect (hint: by adhering to the rules and punishments it applies to others; yes, I banned myself on several occasions when I overstepped or broke rules, just as I did to anyone else). None of that is really feasible on such a large scale anymore, with centralized social media having centralized moderation (if any at all) that the average community member has no hope of reaching.
That said, I’d also echo what others have pointed out regarding the “barrier to entry”/“this tall to ride” mindset of the early internet. Good sites would block free email providers from signups to both preserve community standards and reduce spam accounts. IRC required some rudimentary understanding of ports and domains to join, along with some text commands if you really wanted to have fun. And everything was offline by default, requiring an always-online connection, a dedicated computer, or access to a shared server at a colo to run your own bouncer and remain online at all times. Even those of us who invested that time and effort to be online more often approached a point of diminishing returns as we moved to smartphones of the era and their meager data plans at extortionate rates (miss you, Nokia N80ie and my Symbian IRC client). The internet was a “destination” that required some degree of skill to engage with, and rewarded those who practiced and honed that skill with more freedom.
Ultimately, the nostalgia my friends and I have for those bygone days is twofold: the ability to disconnect entirely and be unreachable until we decide to hop online again, and the barrier to entry weeding out those who don’t really want to be there in the first place. An era of opt-in, rather than opt-out, and all the beauty that came from the types of people who were willing to put in the effort of going online in the first place.
Thanks for sharing this. Somehow it evokes images of travel to me.
Seeing the wonders of the world used to require skill, (sailing, flying, or) hiking/climbing up mountains to see the view. There were few people at the top and likely like-minded.
Since cable cars were installed, there's hordes of tourists at the top that take the place for granted and cable car operators eventually ruin the view by putting up ads billboards all over the landscape.
Some folks set-up their private viewing areas only accessible by hiking (some free, some rented, some purchased), and still hike to the top, but they'll take the cable car for convenience sometimes and there is the looming threat that the hiking path will become inaccessible some day.
Others find new mountains where they try to trailbreak with a few others, knowing they may be laying the groundwork for new cablecars down the line and will need to move on again.
There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I like about forums and web communities back then.
I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics. There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm also from an age where the internet was it's own world where your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of protecting yourself.
I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it :) So strange that there were people who actually knew what they were doing and studied problems with rigour and care! Rather than some SV techdude's idea of what is cool
I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator.
"You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.
Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
I think you’re overestimating how much moderation it takes to keep a community whole. HN is dang and a handful of other moderators and things are stable. If you could have AI even approach 90% of that then it will truly solve problems.
I have yet to see an LLM reliably push back against anything firmly, so I don't know how this would work if the first time a user says the LLM is wrong, it apologizes for the confusion and flips its script.
Also, LLM aren't unbiased, all data it trains on is biased one way or another. Ask any HR question and see for yourself how its answers lean to be HR BS that favours employers.
They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased moderator actions in their training data, and the even more reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone controversial statements.
So spin up your own forum and don't moderate it. Or spend some time (un-)finetuning an LLM moderator so you can talk about race or eugenics or whatever "exciting" controversial statements you want to talk about. Who cares.
There is no way to get rid of a prompt injection attack. There are always ways to convince the AI to do something else besides flagging a post even if that's its initial instruction.
The raw text of the persons message can/will be posted to the forum and be obvious to the community if it’s a prompt injection to be flagged for human review and their account banned.
Sure, that's if human moderators see it before the AI, in which case, why have an AI at all? I presume in this solution that the AI is running all the time and it will see messages the instant they're sent and thus will always be vulnerable to a prompt injection attack before any human even sees it in the first place.
That's what you tell the AI to do, who knows what other systems it has access to? For example, where is it writing the flags for these posts? Can it access the file system and do something programmatically? Et cetera, et cetera.
OpenAI doesn't allow write access to any file system. If you are recording posts to be reviewed, then you must necessarily store that information somewhere, at which point you will be allowing the AI to access some sort of data storage system, whether it be a file system or a database.
No it's not. Well, if designing the system in bad ways, it can be, but that can be said about anything.
There's no need to do this: (from GP)
> > at which point you will be allowing the AI to access
No need to allow the AI to access anything.
Send it the comment thread, what the forum is about, the users profile text, and then the AI outputs a number. Any security problem is then because of bugs the humans wrote in their code.
Prompt injection? Yes, so there still needs to be ways to report comments manually, and review.
CustomGPTs have write access to change their name and icon. OpenAI has a memory feature which persists between chat sessions. What are you talking about?
the term, nostalgia, was coined to describe a mental illness, specificaly a type of home sickness, experienced by 17th century mercinaries.
Nostagia is a poison, a little will give you a buzz
,but beware of more, as the results are all too
common, especialy in those, who mix,there poisons.
The only advantage in remembering
the past, is to sum up the things that worked, and
offer alternative actions for the things that didn't.
20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
20 years ago, you could go on Facebook, and see what your friends were up to.
Sure, many things didn't exist back then. But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
"couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement" - it was early days but DSL was a thing, though expensive. But you could get a static IP address (which I still have! though when, not if, I have to change ISPs I'll lose that - another "good old days" thing) and fulltime internet access from your own box was a novelty. That's why I registered a domain (which I still have) and a friend said hey, you can get yourname@yourdomain email address and I can help you set it up! That was around 2002, give or take. I used that until "google apps for your domain" came along and let me port yourname@yourdomain to a Google account.
It was such a novelty that I let friends and family have accounts on the box to host their own web stuff. The Google Maps hack wasn't exactly 20 years ago, possibly 2005-2006; I know that Gmaps (not Google Satellite) was a novelty, and still since "everything in the cloud" wasn't the default yet (as you point out, dialup was still the norm), a friend wanted to stitch together a big map of our area out of Gmaps tiles to use offline.
Facebook: I got on in 2007 and felt late to the game already. Possibly exactly 20 years ago it didn't exist but close enough.
As for online dating, that was just the thing! And here the date is spot on; I was active from 2003 to 2005. It wasn't just geeks any more. There were women. Lots of them. Just like a bit later everyone was on Facebook, at the time pretty much everyone who was single was trying online dating. But the "shareholder value" ensh*ttification was still in the future, and fake profiles weren't a significant factor. It was just lonelyhearts ads on steroids, and it worked. The other couples (20 years and going) that I know it worked for were "almosts" from my own dating that I stayed in touch with, simple as that. I was at a couple of the weddings!
> 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
I'm still doing that today, works fine. Incoming spam is much reduced these days though, it was worse 20 years ago.
I can't even get Proton emails to be received and not go straight to spam, I think rolling my own would be even more impossible. Hell, Google is sending my own iCloud emails to spam from a fresh account.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
You still can, you just have to be strategic about it due to a higher noise to signal ratio. I've helped a few of my friends and fellow HN'ers with it.
Each individual case differs, but it is always a variation of looking as your best self (or best photogenic self for online dating) and putting yourself out there a lot. You're looking for someone that you click really well with. So ultimately, it's a needle in a haystack thing.
It's hard to prove either way, for or against, because behaviors are different in different countries, age groups, apps, and so on. Maybe it works for some segments, but not others.
But I've met countless people, of both genders, who swore that dating apps is a waste of time, and money. They're designed to be gambling machines. The house always wins, which in this case means the customers keep coming back.
That's a really interesting question. Pretty much everyone I know stopped posting on Facebook around 2014 (rough guess, but seems about right). It's not that they stopped posting altogether, but they cut down severally. The final year on Facebook I'd curated my feed to see only post made directly by friends, and I could pretty much catch up in five minutes every other week. Post was also never really stuff that I needed to know, it would just be silly things, which is nice, or something that we'd talk about anyway at some point. It feels like people got tired of keeping an online journal on Facebook pretty quickly.
It's interesting that some people travel in circles where Facebook, or perhaps more likely Instagram these days, just work for them and the people around them. Other, like myself, or my wife, are probably more often talking to friends on the phone or chatting on some type of chat/group chat.
It would be an interesting study, if someone where to find out why difference social circles gravitate towards different channels of communication. For me, the people I care about are clearly split in two, IRC or Snapchat (which is two really weird extremes).
I have a handful of friends who still post interesting stuff. I get shown maybe 50% of that, and yes, sometimes on the "throne of introspection" with my smartphone I [doom]scroll quite a way down so it's not like I never look.
FB still works for special interest groups and Marketplace. But the timeline is a morass of clickbait, scams, and borderline porn. And in my case, Coyote/Roadrunner clips and old comics.
The main timeline is so algorithmically generated - sometimes I get shown something, want to look at it a bit later, and never see it again.
Same experience. My friends and local community posts a lot, but facebook will only show me 1 connection for for every 7 rando reels / recommended / sponsored channels (aka ads), not counting the blocks suggesting new friends and such. Maybe 1 post i care about in 10 cards.
Not only that but the friends posts that do show up are shown several days later, meaning that anything like local event, yard sales etc are long wrapped up by the time facebook decides to make me aware of it. And I can't figure out why facebook prioritizes posts from highschool friends over recently added ones which may be more relevant.
Basically I only look at feeds of friend/group posts directly and ignore the main feed which is just the worst useless garbage i can think of.
Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses
> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.
> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?
The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.
> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.
20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out.
And I did actually run the mail server. A friend set it up for me, SpamAssassin or something else may have been involved. The main thing was, though, you could still send email from your own SMTP server without it being automatically binned because it doesn't come from one of the big, "trusted" email services.
I run my own mail server today for my family, and very rarely have deliverability problems. Bog standard Linux install, exim4, dovecot, SpamAssassin. It's basically set and forget. I've been doing so for over a decade, so I probably built up some pretty good IP reputation, but it's totally possible to run mail yourself.
From one forum or IRC channel, sure. But you could spin up another, there were plenty. You couldn't get banned "from email" - maybe from one email host if you really pissed off the guy at one ISP, but that would only be a tiny fraction of the people you wanted to email.
You also can spin up another social network, it doesn't work well the same way it didn't work very well spinning up another irc channel or server. And spinning up another HN doesn't work as well.
Spinning up another HN or Twitter is hard because the web is a lot more centralised these days. Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding, I saw it happen and even did it myself once or twice.
> Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding
Yes I agree. It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
> It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
The point is it's now quite easy to get banned from the whole platform. Whereas in the old days it was pretty hard to get banned from a whole IRC network (it would happen if you were DDoSing the network or insulting an ircop directly, but never just because you said the wrong thing in your own channels, and worst case even the IRC networks were less centralised than today's social networks) and virtually impossible to get banned from the whole web to the point that you couldn't make a new web forum.
Back around the most recent election I dug up Digg’s front page and some of the comments from it’s earliest appearance in the Internet Archive and jumped around reading the comments sections on news items related to the 2004 and 2008 elections.
I walked away feeling much like I did after reading some Ancient Roman Graffiti left in Pompeii: people are just people. What’s different now isn’t the web, it’s just there’s more people, we’re more connected across State and International borders, you can actually find people you know online and the people that were kids back then are in their 30s while a lot of people you once knew online are dead. But there’s still kids, there’s still people who remember the world before the ARPAnet and UNIX and CP/M and Apple and DOS.
Hacker News will be 18 this year. All the kids born in 2007 are turning 18 this year. Twitter passed that milestone a year ago and Facebook a couple of years before that.
Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
Now anyone that can afford a cheap phone can access the internet, and the user landscape has changed.
Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Those days are over and the internet is a much more hostile place.
That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries.
By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web.
> Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly.
Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005.
> Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.
>Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
I remember the sub-$1000 PC came about in the late 90s, you didn't have to be that affluent; lower-middle class was enough. I remember people in the BBS days that were barely middle class that had computers. Wealth wasn't really that much of an issue. It was more of an interest thing. Lots of people back then really didn't know how to use computers and they were pretty foreign to most people.
I remember pre-Windows 95, you had to know someone who had WinSock and install it, and you had to manually enter your IP address and gateway and all that. It wasn't an easy task. Once things like Internet in a box came out, it became easier. That's what AOL offered, easy access to the internet back when it wasn't that easy.
I think the biggest difference is how commercialized it has become and how the big companies have essentially taken it over. In all fairness, they did have a lot to offer; most websites were static documents.
The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.
I think an even bigger difference is that there was no concept of users monetizing their own usage via advertising or a personal brand. People were in it purely for the love of the game, and maybe some imaginary internet points.
If you wanted to make money you might try hosting a community and monetizing it somehow, but the concept of building a digital following and using it to market products/services (and not be seen as spam or a sellout) simply did not exist.
I recently capitulated and started using real-name HN/reddit accounts because personal branding is not just common now, it's one of the main ways of reaching users.
It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
Just reloading won't help, you need to actively train the algorithm by telling it what videos you don't like and why. It also lets you stop showing recommendations from a given channel altogether.
On Facebook I've trained the algorithm to never show me any ads because I keep marking every ad that pops up as irrelevant and then 'hide all ads from this advertiser', and by also not following any celebrity, corporate or brand pages.
Every few weeks I end up with a new video card with button that takes the place of the video and it asks if i want to see something other than what it usually recommends. It's not quite as out there as I'd like, but it did shake things up a bit.
I'll say it; the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
To paraphrase Matt Damon from a show only enjoyed by the true internet acolytes "the walking mozzarella sticks who think a three hundred android phone and a verizon contract give them the right to connect to every piece of information in the world..."
I disagree, at least as far as the entire internet is concerned. The internet should belong to, and be available to, everyone.
Individual sites on the internet can be as gatekept and elitist as they like, but keeping something as transformative and revolutionary as the internet locked away for a privileged technical elite goes against everything the hacker ethos is meant to stand for.
I can't comprehend how so many people can be so nostalgic for the past without understanding what the past was about. Yes, those walking mozzarella sticks have the right to connect to every piece of information in the world. Even if they're dumber and less cool than you. Everyone, everywhere, has the right to unrestricted information and communication, without qualifiers. That's the entire fucking point.
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
Did you start to use the internet before or after september 1993?
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion.
Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.
> hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them)
Well, talk for yourself, sir. As a teenager, I had hundreds of IM contacts across ICQ and MSN from all over the world, not only classmates.
> eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares)
A friend recommends a song, you can get it with a 2h download and you both can enjoy talking about it. There was _nothing_ like it at the time.
It's not about wanting to go back. We can't go back, even if everyone wanted to. It was something awesome that happened once and we don't know the formulae for it.
I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.
I've been on the internet as long as you and from my POV it changed a ton. The biggest changes to me are
(1) social media via smartphones - letting everyone trivially post to everyone else on the planet.
This use to be nerd activity (blogs) and the audience was other nerds. First social media sites, then the smart phone completely changed this.
(2) follows from 1, influencer culture, by which I mean, Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube all incentivize people performing to try to get as many viewers/followers as possible. Thinking back to the 70s/80s, even the top movie stars just got some fan mail. They didn't have 400-600 MILLION FOLLOWERS to whom they could say anything they wanted. A celebrity had a most a TV show with a crew and editors and a strong chance of getting fired/banned if they got to crazy. Now, any high school kid can have 100+ million followers
It's not just people with followers, 20% of my youtube feed is people trying desperately to have something to talk about. Some news happens, thousands of people "report it" on their "channel". The scale of it is insane to me.
been online since then as well; the arrival of ad-driven social media and "influencers" has changed the online landscape significantly. there's really no comparison.
> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved
Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.
i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)
I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam..
Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.
The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.
If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.
Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.
(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)
I know it's an old man comment, but there really was a time the internet was friendly. It just wasn't 20 years ago. It was before the general public got online, and the internet was a refuge for specialists and early adopters.
In the early 90s, the internet felt like a magical undiscovered wilderness. 90% of the people you met were excited to be there and eager to share. That was long gone 20 years ago.
In 2006-2007 someone walked me through step by atep how to assemble a computer in a newegg.com chatroom with the parts I had already purchased. That person changed my life. Thanks human.
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.
I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:
1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)
2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.
3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".
4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.
This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
If my teenage friends had been faceless alien monsters with no humanity whatsoever, it would have been pretty similar I guess. My friends were mostly just stoners and kids who liked to drink a little too much.
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
> You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change.
> definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens".
In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
No, that is a rose colored glasses view of the period. There are people today who still do multi network clients and Jabber transports and suffer the same issues that they suffered during the MSN era .
Heck, the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year. Skype was nowhere near to be the first.
> You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on.
Hahaha. Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap. Third party clients exist for both and they suck as much as they used to do in the past (unreliableness and lack of whatever new fancy useless feature the 1st party clients had just introduced but suddenly became indispensable for people on the network).
> the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year.
I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
> Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap.
You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else. Whereas with WhatsApp you can't even sign up without a phone, and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
> I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
_the same companies_ that were alive back then are still offering multiplatform clients as of today...
Plus the resurrection of Pidgin. Or the new Jabber transports...
No matter how you put it, today's situation with 3rd party clients is quite similar as in the past. If you think they're unreliable today, think how it was in the famous Trillian 0.7x era, when a couple days/week downtime waiting for a client upgrade was _the norm_ (and yes I was a paying customer). When support for features that today would be considered uttermost critical (e.g. server stored offline messages) was non-working or added years later than the 1st party client.
I really don't think users today would have the patience for that. But the situation is objectively better today where 3rd party clients, if anything, miss bells & whistles (e.g. "picture/voice/gif sharing" instead of simple file sharing) rather than core features such as presence tracking, offline messaging, etc. (of course they are core now: they have been there for 20 years....). My last proselytizing effort was moving people to Conversations (conversations.im), so this is based on my own experience. Just look at what the average Whatscrap user will complain when moving to Conversations (and yes there is a Whatscrap <-> XMPP transport).
> and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
"Mainstream"? When have third-party clients ever been "Mainstream"?
> You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else
You are still entirely subject to the whims of MSN and AIM, and you cannot migrate your contacts at all if they decide to do an Elon. Or a GTalk (when they closed down federation). Or an Apple (when they promised federation that never materialized).
I see what you mean now. In my rose-colored usage, I was only ever doing one to one conversations, so never had to deal with bridges between services, it didn't even occur to me that there would be such a thing as talking to people with an MSN account without having an MSN account myself. The idea of 'federating' such that different servers could exchange messages was not within my imagination in 2004. I was just happy I wasn't forced to use a particular client.
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums.
But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.
Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
There's a handful of users on the reddit gaming pages where I can distinguish their writing style and bad opinions well enough from other users that I recognize them. The site culture is opposed to referencing someone's post history, though.
The pseudononymous nature of the website was originally one of its selling points, being a nice inbetween of 4chan's anon chaos and Facebook's "your boss and grandmother are reading your posts" stiltedness. Nowadays, I'd rather have the personalization back. The new UI lets people upload avatars for their comments, which probably helps, but they'll have to pry the old UI from my cold, dead hands
The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times.
Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable:
I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.)
There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel.
I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here.
I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer.
No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs.
No takers.
20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.
Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track.
So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"?
Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.
The car shows in all the small towns around me (populations less than 750) have entries for early, mid, and late model classics. So 20's through 90's. Most have trucks in every year.
They're also run by active shade tree mechanics clubs that get together once or twice a month to talk and get greasy.
I guess the reason I'm saying this is because sometimes the things you want aren't where you are, and that's just how it goes?
For whatever it's worth I live in South Tacoma, Pierce, WA, USA. You're not going to find a working, greasy auto club at the flagship Lemay Museum (although it's worth a visit, as is Blackhawk in CA). However, the Lemay family is a local fixture / institution.
I drive by the family compound in Parkland maybe once a month. They own / owned Marymount, the former military boarding school; for lack of a better characterization they use it as a garage. There are auto and motorcycle shows there annually (and also gun shows). Walking one of those shows and talking to people is certainly on the table, but it's not a "need to do something now" option.
Meanwhile, talking to people (Burns Towing, the good people, as opposed to the sh*tshow on Hilltop which the City contracts for impounds) and making phone calls has generated some promising leads on the mechanic front anyway. I went and visited a guy a week ago who has a lift (and his old race car) in his garage and wrenches older US metal as a semi-retired pastime. He might find time to help me out if along with paying him decently I provide him with some home brewed beer.
We talk about "free beer", but in fact beer is not fungible on the internet.
Speaking of exploring the friendly a friendly web for a fun little project I made a qt based browser that blocks 500 of the world's most popular websites. It's a lot of fun to be able to explore the web without any fomo caused by the giant sites.
So this is essentially a list of things that were bad in the old Internet from the point of view of... a feminist collective? It looks like the writer is trying to universalize an essentially biased point of view, calling my point of view a mistake and suggesting that that point of view is actually an artefact of the passing of time. I'm sorry but that's not true. I'd take the old Internet any day, defects and all, very sorry for the feminist collective they interviewed.
A thought I had recently was that someone should try making a social media/forum platform that only allows non-mobile usage.
My theory (which is definitely not originally mine) is that mobile devices have driven a huge shift in usage patterns towards low-effort content consumption. Smartphones are everybody's go-to when they're temporarily bored, so social media on the phone is less of a deliberate destination and more of an idle snack to alive someone's boredom. Even when people do engage, because they're often doing so on-the-go in short bursts and don't have access to a real keyboard, the engagement is typically very low effort. TikTok is a perfect testament to this shift IMO.
I'm thinking that desktop-only requirements would lead to less engagement over all, but higher quality engagement when it does occur. If there were a ranking system or some other kind of algorithmic content serving, it would be less skewed towards content that you can fully engage with in two seconds. And the userbase would skew towards more intentional enthusiasts who deliberately seek out the site, rather than someone looking for a quick distraction while they're bored for 15 seconds.
Hacker news does probably the best job at this without actively trying to prevent phone usage, but it doesn't exactly do much in the way of fostering a community like old-school forums.
This is an amazing idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about how smart devices have changed the way we think and interact, reading books like Alone Together and other things from Sherry Turkle’s oeuvre, and remembering how I used to use my computer so differently when I didn’t have instantaneous access to low quality crap 24/7. I think making things desktop-only could be a heuristic that gets us back a lot of the things we lost in the transition to smartphones… definitely deserves more thought.
But how will people find out about it? Part of what we lost is the Google of back then when content was king. Can you rank a desktop-only website nowadays?
I guess I envision this kind of site not being super growth/profit-motivated because I think that's just fundamentally at odds with high quality communities. HN does rank sometimes but not that often, and it's pretty highly trafficked. Also I never saw reddit show up in SERP until the past few years and they still grew a lot in that time.
People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too.
Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that.
But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that.
The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world.
There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that!
And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.
>People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course.
In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward:
If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better.
If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better.
>Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc.
I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!
During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites. There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage nowadays.
There were flash games that are better than what we have now. In Usenet there was real free speech.
There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens. Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI scrapers.
The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that other platforms except for some newspaper comments sections, which also allow a lot.
I do not think internet was more friendly per se back then, and I am not sure this is the general argument or feeling on being nostalgic about that era either. If it is, then it is definitely wrong, but that does not mean that there are no reasons to miss the old internet. I think what made internet interesting back then was that it was much less monetised, more liberating as in providing opportunities and giving access to stuff that were just inaccessible before. Piracy was in its prime, and to a big extent it felt it was about pushing against or breaking whatever rules the world was trying to impose on people.
It was not friendly, paedophiles were praying on kids on IRCs, there was definitely sexism, people would get harassed online, you had to be careful as to what kind of information you were putting online, never put one's real name there and definitely not photos or bank info or anything that nowadays is common place. One had to know how to protect oneself online.
It was not free as in cheap or easily accessible either, it was actually quite expensive, but again somehow one found ways to get around stuff like that, through computers in public libraries, breaking through some neighbour's wifi, gathering at a friend whose father had internet for work reasons, getting access to a university's wifi and going around with a laptop to find a place with good signal or staying in internet cafes overnight when it was cheaper.
The point is that one would make all this effort needed to get access to it and go around these issues because it was a window to the world, esp for more introvert nerds. I definitely appreciate having such easy access to it nowadays and the internet being, generally speaking, safer. I just wish it felt less of a prison to escape from/fight against an algorithm or tightly controlled "platforms" that want to hook you up to show you more ads, and more as a means of liberation and it used to feel like.
History has shown that friendliness is a terrible goal to aim for in of itself - the modern approach to achieving 'friendliness' on Reddit for example, is to brutally crush any dissent by downvoting, removing content and banning users who go against the grain in any given subreddit.
The resulting discussions look like to outsiders like a happy community of friendly people who generally agree on most stuff, yet when you try to actualy participate in these discussions you'll find out just how crappily they are run.
Most people leave at this point and the only ones who stay are those whose desire for validation is greater than the desire to express their own opinions.
Well, that and reddit mods banning "uncomfortable" (to them) discussions and opinions. A few years ago reddit made an active decision to purge communities around topics that they decided were not good for the platform. The result was that a lot of nuanced communities and places for discussion disappeared from the internet because some people outside these communities decided that they were too "unfriendly" and offensive. They were not perfect, but there was a place for nuance to be expressed there that nowadays internet lacks.
Yeah, that too. Weird how easily these things get forgotten. That means they got away with it. Probably pissed off a lot of people too, who I'd wager didn't stick around. Wonder where they went though.
It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
From the communities I was around some went to discord, but most did not really stick and discord is not very suitable platform for stuff like that imo. There were also some reddit clones popping up at the time, but they were politically charged just to another direction of what reddit was taking, not really spaces to hold that diversity and nuance either. Some also moved on to some other subreddits that would draw less attention of specific kind. In time afaik the old communities faded away or broken to smaller pieces, fragmented into smaller echo chambers and the ones not fitting in any of them just moved on. There are not really places to hold nuance in the internet now. What I liked in reddit was that you would get all people coming from all these different references at the same place and sometimes indeed interesting things would happen in that intersection.
And thing is, the internet was already largely shit at that point. I guess there is no specific time point to point when the internet broke because it seems it can always break more.
> It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
Generally forums as in phpBB stuff are fine - they are usually run by a reasonable bunch of folks who are interested in the continued success of the site, since they own it - there are some (well known) bad communities but at least usually you know what you're getting into.
On the other hand, reddit mods can be forced upon a subreddit and they come and go - they get their fifteen minutes of power as they get to terrorize the denizens of another internet community, and they move on, anonymously too.
Back then it felt like people were trying to be useful and to make things/places that were useful in some way to other people.
Now it feels like people are making things/places mostly to use other people- they stopped viewing people online as "people"- now people are "data" to be "monetized"
The various art forms/entertainment has also become "content" to be "monetized"
All of this has made the modern internet very cold and boring- everything has been corporatized.
* It's a tiny and obscure thing but jumping into and chatting with people in Hyperfy(https://hyperfy.io/) worlds feels very much like early internet as you often chat with the builder of the world who is into some non-normie thing.
Well, however presumably unfriendly that world was, it definitely didn't have nagware content walls that wanted me to log in and subscribe to god knows what website.
There's a great comment on a breakcore video that says something like "remember that decade between 1999 and 2000". Maybe that decade is yet to happen.
I'd wager a guess that the friendliness, or at least the perception of such, came from not very many people using it, people being segregated into niche enthusiast groups, and people still intelligent and non-addicted enough to not merge it with their identity. However, the Internet was always destined to connect us in the worst ways.
It was not the only thing one had to work around. We had to work around getting access to the internet in the first place (for those of use without the money to just afford being connected at home), hiding our identity online, not getting infected every second website we would visit.
But somehow we put the effort to get around all these problems because internet had something important to offer, because it was a window to something.
In the past when you went to a community for a particular kind of enthusiast, that's what you'd find there. Now everybody is there. Enthusiasts, nonenthusiasts, people posing as enthusiasts, people trying to sell stuff to enthusiasts. So yes, the noise is much greater.
The only thing I miss about the internet from 25 years ago is people took themselves less seriously. "Don't feed the trolls" was a thing. But it also wasn't that great either. People weren't nicer. The tech was limited. Things are objectively better now.
I remember the web was full of trolls (just look at old Slashdot posts), and newsgroups could be pretty toxic back then. Just the web was more niche back then and not as many people were exposed to it.
Internet is a proper noun, with a capital I. The Internet was a better place, would it only be for the fact that kids didn't have access to it. And less offendable people.
What we didn't have 20 years ago was interaction bait/rage bait. I mean, I guess rage bait still existed, but it was FAR less common.
Don't feed the trolls, we used to say.
Now, everyone with a room temperature IQ and a massive ego can't help but correct people. So many videos of people deliberately doing things wrong that they HAVE to comment. Or poorly worded questions that make people argue over the correct answer when they can't even agree on what's being asked.
Not to mention that social media has given a bullhorn to every moron conspiracy theorist, and now we have a greater number of Flat Earthers than any time in recent history, not to mention political issues.
Meh, the internet today is mostly boring. Everything's looking the same, sounding the same, all in service to impressions for ads and probably follower count. Additionally AI slop fills everything with more of the same corpo garbage and algorithm optimizations that makes number go up. What the internet back then had was a charming weirdness which has become rare. It wasn't better back then, but it was more interesting and strange in a not so kaputt way as today.
This article is blindly equivocating on "friendly"!
People were the same assholes in forums twenty years ago.
The platforms as such were more friendly. They were not enshittified toward extracting value from the user, and attracting new users at the expense of becoming less usable for the current ones. Or not as much.
It's saying that people shouldn't be nostalgic about the early internet because it stops them solving the perceived problems with today's internet. It's also implying that people's nostalgia is for sexism and racism.
I've been hanging out on the same forum pretty much daily since 1998. Looking back through threads from 20+ years ago is a great antidote to nostalgia - just a crowd of immature know-it-alls spouting utter shite (and very often being very unfriendly to one another)
Why would we possibly yearn for small forums and channels populated with only our friends and people we want to connect with instead of massive social networks full of every conceivable idiot with algorithms designed to push their idiocy in my face.
In the old days a user was forced to block hostile actors, whilst now evverone urges some admin to block the hostile actor. Platforms are gardens, before they were open spaces, with lots of spam.
Censorship and deplatforming demands are now all over, esp. by the traditional press, and the left. Esp. worrying are the continuous demands in the press to censor hatespeech or lies. Young Gen-Z folks are crying loud when I call them weak. Next they call HR.
Stalin rears his ugly head again.
And academic freedom is gone. They even let in police now.
Yes, internet was better before. All the bad stuff author describes was confined to fringe spaces like Omegle and 4Chan, where anonymity was the selling point. On private forums, however, you’d quickly get banned for this shit.
Funny how the internet turned what used to be the “village fool” — the guy everyone ignored when he rambled about nonsense and conspiracies — into a global phenomenon.
Now, instead of fading into the background, they find each other online, amplify the noise, and suddenly the whole world has to deal with it.
The same tools that connected people for good also made it easier to spread misinformation at scale.
The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in.
I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary.
What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world.
Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less.
Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.
> There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
This is not true. Basically everyone I know (including me) didn't pretend to be white or male. We didn't bring up our identities at all. Nobody gave a shit.
I'm not pretending that every single person had a sunshine and roses experience. Assholes exist in every time and place, and some people are unfortunate enough to run into them. But I'm sick of people claiming that the Internet of yesteryear was such a cesspool that if you were anything except a white dude you had a bad time. That was never the case.
Seriously. Nobody gave a fuck, you got insulted if you brought up your identity, because only a narcissist would bother to bring that up on the internet of all places.
"Tits or GTFO" existed because anyone who bothered to claim they were a woman or whatever must want unearned attention so pics or fuck off.
You disagree that "if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse" and your counterargument is....that anyone who claimed to be a woman would be subjected to sexual harassment?
It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see how it plays out.
You don't have to expect pics for someone asking for pictures of your tits to be harassment.
If I yell at a random woman "show me your tits" I do not expect her to do it, but I'm harassing her.
And no, I'm not missing the joke. I first was online in 1998. I saw this stuff in games and forums. It wasn't funny then either.
It's also not narcissistic to talk about things that are important to you or your characteristics. It can provide context and it can help people understand and make connections. Your argument is similar to other people who say "why does (Group) have to throw it in my face" regarding things such as holding hands in public - which isn't throwing anything in your face any more than what those people perceive as "normal" is being thrown on everyone around them involuntarily.
> And no, I'm not missing the joke. I first was online in 1998. I saw this stuff in games and forums. It wasn't funny then either.
Do you know what also wasn't funny? The invasion of people wanting to make everything about them. No one gave a fuck about who you were until you made it about who you were. That was the point. If you're willing to reduce yourself to being X you will be mocked for being X. It was a great way to insure people stayed behind their usernames and it worked well until the "normies" showed up. I seriously doubt your actual claimed history on the internet.
> It's also not narcissistic to talk about things that are important to you or your characteristics.
It is when you weren't asked, were never going to be asked, and attempted to use your characteristics to gain undeserved attention. "Tits or gtfo" was simply one iteration of several that mocked people for using any number of other characteristics to get undeserved respect. I remember several memes especially around gymbros and veterans that also were used to mock people into staying anonymous. Trolling these people was the immune system of forums, IRC, and games and it worked wonderfully.
> It can provide context and it can help people understand and make connections
This statement alone makes me doubt you ever actually spent time on the old internet. In 1998 I never had problems making solid connections, some still existing today, without knowing what particular physical characteristics my friend had. In some sense it's the purest form of connection - one that was never swayed by what normally might turn you away or towards someone.
In the past internet communities were more heterogeneous. Now everyone lives in a bubble. This makes the snowflakes feel more safe. But this also concentrates the racists, sexists and bigots in their own bubbles where their hate festers.
That heterogeneity is what I miss the most and snowflakes in general ruined web 2.0 for me.
The internet is plenty heterogeneous today... given there are multiple communities that encourage mass killings (Christchurch, most infamously), the internet is too heterogeneous.
most inspiring piece of content I've read in weeks and it comes from the pessimizer, thanks for that. also first time I've come across the term buttbuttinating but I like it, captures the zeitgeist.
What I miss from those days is that the money was easy on the web. You could throw up some Google Adsense code on a site, show a single unobtrusive banner, and make enough to cover your costs and then some.
Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying.
Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation.
I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner.
The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff.
Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community.
Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community.
That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of:
* more focused, human and often better moderation;
* a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and;
* an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog".
Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now.
The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom.
[0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
It wasn’t just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy and there weren’t incentives to spam and scam people since you couldn’t monetize on such things. State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform, there weren’t trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a hundred other variables
In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being always online.
To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
So the people you had available to create communities with were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and rage bait?
Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online. It’s actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the communities reflects this.
A bit late to this discussion, but your comment really reminded me of this Stewart Brand quote from his 1985 interview with KQED Focus magazine:
"Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."
> To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
Still is. IRC is much the same as it has ever been.
Usenet pre-"green-card-spam" was a relative utopia.
Sure you had arguments. That's where 'flamewar' came from. But quickly people tired of that and created *.advocacy sub-newsgroups to let people vent in their corner of the net.
Then domains were opened up for commerce a few years later and eternal September became a thing... The net never recovered, it just used up more bandwidth.
I’m not sure there wasnt as much spam and scams back then. I fondly remember 99% of my AOL inbox was filled with porn…
But ppl were definitely much more open and trustworthy back then. You could start a conversation with any random stranger and they wouldnt immediately dismiss you as some sort of scammer. Try that today and people will immediately flag you as a scammer
Trolling used to be more about pranking each other than about organised scam or attacks, or manufacturing consent for governments or promoting political parties. It was more like an internet art form. I guess this is about what one can consider as the internet being more innocent back then.
Trolling is still essentially that, it's just that state actors and media decided to call scam and attacks trolling.
truly we have lost teh lulz :(
> State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform
Security was awful for both the client and server. Who needs a warrant when all the user data is an SQL injection away? Broswers not fussy about https, Java Applets, flash, browser toolbars, XSS - the Internet must have been like an open book for anyone with access to backbone traffic.
I remember when IE actually warned you when you went to HTTPS!
Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...
Heh yeah and irc wasnt exactly filled with upstanding honorable citizens either.
[dead]
There weren’t even trillion dollar companies at all back then
The trolling was epic. sigh
It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.
The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.
There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.
So you missed one more: religion. If you were going to reappropriate the internet into existing - I take it that you mean, human - structure, then you might as well add religion here too. There have been no other factors beyond religion and national geographies, that have bound humans at a larger scale. IMHO, this is/was not the original intent when DARPA unleashed Internet beyond it's laboratory. Sure, we can reappropriate as we move along. But there is no precedence of a promised land here. The nation-states and/or religions have been at wars since the beginning of time. What's there to prove that a technology like Internet (throw AI of the future into it) would make things better for human nature to adopt. Just because we can scale does not mean that we may be scaling to something better.
The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.
They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.
I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?
The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
Absolutely. I'm in about 10 communities like this. I don't think I need global reach or hundreds or thousands of "friends".
For a wider net, I have a self-curated feed on Lemmy and Mastodon. It's super clean and positive compared to suggestive social media.
The old Internet will never be back, but The Good Parts still exist and can be remade. I don't have to visit the shitty parts.
The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.
They don't need to be. Web forums and mailing list are useful when you want to form a larger community with a central idea or project. A chat group is mostly an online hangout place, kinda an equivalent of a favorite bar or a reading club.
What I don't like is when people wants to use a chat group where a forum would have been more useful.
I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.
> Self-Hosted Discord
How does one achieve this?
irc if you don't require any bells and whistles. matrix if you want attachments and encryption. zulip if you're running a company.
IMO Matrix is awfully heavy and impractical, when XMPP works just as well if not better.
I'm administering both Matrix/synapse and XMPP/prosody servers and I wouldn't do the former if it wasn't my job.
Downloads some forum software and runs in it on a VPS or similar?
There are also some FOSS Discord clones in various states of maturity
I don't mean to advocate for Discord (they sure don't need it!) but if the requirement is to host an exclusive space for a dozen people, Discord does that.. you just make a "server"/guild and only invite trusted friends.
This doesn't solve any of the other problems (what happens when Discord enshittifies? Is it acceptable that Discord updates basically every single day? Is it OK that they constantly advertise video games in the form of little notifications saying "stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!"?) but it does seem to solve the 'how do I have a platform for my friends and I to talk" one.
> stream 30 minutes of _____ to a friend and unlock an avatar for your profile!
Sounds like enshitifications has begun already
By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can choose how you live in it.
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.
> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.
> did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines
Certainly, that is what call center robot calls trying to sell unwanted stuff are all about.
> Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail?
Certainly, it comes on stamps.
I think this is why I enjoy Mastodon at the moment. Not so many people, and self-selecting geeks.
If it gets popular I'll have to look at blocking all the popular non-geeky instances ;)
Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the technology has increased in every way.
The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
Very well said. I struggled with a dearth of social skills in adolescence that persevered well into adulthood, a combination of extreme naivety and being a spoiled brat (and, potentially, some autism for good measure). Being online in forums and IRC helped me work on those a bit at a time, thanks to clear-cut and instant feedback on what was and wasn’t acceptable. What really boosted my abilities were my tenure as server administrator or moderator, though, something I never would’ve been given a position of in a real job. I learned the basics of power politics, how to lead a group of people (or at the very least, how to herd cats), and how successful authority derives respect (hint: by adhering to the rules and punishments it applies to others; yes, I banned myself on several occasions when I overstepped or broke rules, just as I did to anyone else). None of that is really feasible on such a large scale anymore, with centralized social media having centralized moderation (if any at all) that the average community member has no hope of reaching.
That said, I’d also echo what others have pointed out regarding the “barrier to entry”/“this tall to ride” mindset of the early internet. Good sites would block free email providers from signups to both preserve community standards and reduce spam accounts. IRC required some rudimentary understanding of ports and domains to join, along with some text commands if you really wanted to have fun. And everything was offline by default, requiring an always-online connection, a dedicated computer, or access to a shared server at a colo to run your own bouncer and remain online at all times. Even those of us who invested that time and effort to be online more often approached a point of diminishing returns as we moved to smartphones of the era and their meager data plans at extortionate rates (miss you, Nokia N80ie and my Symbian IRC client). The internet was a “destination” that required some degree of skill to engage with, and rewarded those who practiced and honed that skill with more freedom.
Ultimately, the nostalgia my friends and I have for those bygone days is twofold: the ability to disconnect entirely and be unreachable until we decide to hop online again, and the barrier to entry weeding out those who don’t really want to be there in the first place. An era of opt-in, rather than opt-out, and all the beauty that came from the types of people who were willing to put in the effort of going online in the first place.
Thanks for sharing this. Somehow it evokes images of travel to me.
Seeing the wonders of the world used to require skill, (sailing, flying, or) hiking/climbing up mountains to see the view. There were few people at the top and likely like-minded.
Since cable cars were installed, there's hordes of tourists at the top that take the place for granted and cable car operators eventually ruin the view by putting up ads billboards all over the landscape.
Some folks set-up their private viewing areas only accessible by hiking (some free, some rented, some purchased), and still hike to the top, but they'll take the cable car for convenience sometimes and there is the looming threat that the hiking path will become inaccessible some day.
Others find new mountains where they try to trailbreak with a few others, knowing they may be laying the groundwork for new cablecars down the line and will need to move on again.
There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I like about forums and web communities back then.
I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics. There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm also from an age where the internet was it's own world where your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of protecting yourself.
I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it :) So strange that there were people who actually knew what they were doing and studied problems with rigour and care! Rather than some SV techdude's idea of what is cool
I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator.
"You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.
Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
I think you’re overestimating how much moderation it takes to keep a community whole. HN is dang and a handful of other moderators and things are stable. If you could have AI even approach 90% of that then it will truly solve problems.
I have yet to see an LLM reliably push back against anything firmly, so I don't know how this would work if the first time a user says the LLM is wrong, it apologizes for the confusion and flips its script.
Also, LLM aren't unbiased, all data it trains on is biased one way or another. Ask any HR question and see for yourself how its answers lean to be HR BS that favours employers.
They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased moderator actions in their training data, and the even more reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone controversial statements.
So spin up your own forum and don't moderate it. Or spend some time (un-)finetuning an LLM moderator so you can talk about race or eugenics or whatever "exciting" controversial statements you want to talk about. Who cares.
Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is reading every one of the forum's comments.
Can have the AI just flag posts for a human to review in v1? Then as you refine the prompt injection detection can move to have the AI be autonomous?
There is no way to get rid of a prompt injection attack. There are always ways to convince the AI to do something else besides flagging a post even if that's its initial instruction.
The raw text of the persons message can/will be posted to the forum and be obvious to the community if it’s a prompt injection to be flagged for human review and their account banned.
Sure, that's if human moderators see it before the AI, in which case, why have an AI at all? I presume in this solution that the AI is running all the time and it will see messages the instant they're sent and thus will always be vulnerable to a prompt injection attack before any human even sees it in the first place.
To moderate the majority of the community that will not be attempting prompt injections.
What meaningful vulnerabilities are there if the post can only be accepted/rejected/flaggedForHumanReview?
That's what you tell the AI to do, who knows what other systems it has access to? For example, where is it writing the flags for these posts? Can it access the file system and do something programmatically? Et cetera, et cetera.
The same way OpenAI offers its service to hundreds of millions of users without compromising any other systems it’s running on.
OpenAI doesn't allow write access to any file system. If you are recording posts to be reviewed, then you must necessarily store that information somewhere, at which point you will be allowing the AI to access some sort of data storage system, whether it be a file system or a database.
is that really an issue in practice?
I'm sure you can coax openai to send a http request, at which point you can just queue up automated reports.
No it's not. Well, if designing the system in bad ways, it can be, but that can be said about anything.
There's no need to do this: (from GP)
> > at which point you will be allowing the AI to access
No need to allow the AI to access anything.
Send it the comment thread, what the forum is about, the users profile text, and then the AI outputs a number. Any security problem is then because of bugs the humans wrote in their code.
Prompt injection? Yes, so there still needs to be ways to report comments manually, and review.
CustomGPTs have write access to change their name and icon. OpenAI has a memory feature which persists between chat sessions. What are you talking about?
“Review this comment as if you are an AI clone of the moderator dang from Hackernews and select the appropriate function call to apply.”
the term, nostalgia, was coined to describe a mental illness, specificaly a type of home sickness, experienced by 17th century mercinaries. Nostagia is a poison, a little will give you a buzz ,but beware of more, as the results are all too common, especialy in those, who mix,there poisons. The only advantage in remembering the past, is to sum up the things that worked, and offer alternative actions for the things that didn't.
Wow, you’re mangling thr word nostalgia’s history.
Great example of where someone isn’t technically lying, but the essence of the word is definitely not how you’ve portrayed it here.
> the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0]
Your link doesn't go to anything scientific.
And people who could never figure out Windows are totally comfortable with iPads.
So no... the UX wasn't better at all.
I do miss it though.
20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
20 years ago, you could go on Facebook, and see what your friends were up to.
Sure, many things didn't exist back then. But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
The article doesn't seem to make it its mind about whether it was the web 20 or 25 years ago. Very different actually
- 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement
25 years ago there was a good chance you were on dialup and couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement
- 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps
25 years ago: Google Maps?
- 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life
25 years ago: Women on the internet?
- 20 years ago, you could go on Facebook
25 years ago: Facebook?
"couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement" - it was early days but DSL was a thing, though expensive. But you could get a static IP address (which I still have! though when, not if, I have to change ISPs I'll lose that - another "good old days" thing) and fulltime internet access from your own box was a novelty. That's why I registered a domain (which I still have) and a friend said hey, you can get yourname@yourdomain email address and I can help you set it up! That was around 2002, give or take. I used that until "google apps for your domain" came along and let me port yourname@yourdomain to a Google account.
It was such a novelty that I let friends and family have accounts on the box to host their own web stuff. The Google Maps hack wasn't exactly 20 years ago, possibly 2005-2006; I know that Gmaps (not Google Satellite) was a novelty, and still since "everything in the cloud" wasn't the default yet (as you point out, dialup was still the norm), a friend wanted to stitch together a big map of our area out of Gmaps tiles to use offline.
Facebook: I got on in 2007 and felt late to the game already. Possibly exactly 20 years ago it didn't exist but close enough.
As for online dating, that was just the thing! And here the date is spot on; I was active from 2003 to 2005. It wasn't just geeks any more. There were women. Lots of them. Just like a bit later everyone was on Facebook, at the time pretty much everyone who was single was trying online dating. But the "shareholder value" ensh*ttification was still in the future, and fake profiles weren't a significant factor. It was just lonelyhearts ads on steroids, and it worked. The other couples (20 years and going) that I know it worked for were "almosts" from my own dating that I stayed in touch with, simple as that. I was at a couple of the weddings!
> 25 years ago: Women on the internet?
This kind of reaction is (partly) why the women on the internet that I knew rarely disclosed their gender 25 years ago
> 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
I'm still doing that today, works fine. Incoming spam is much reduced these days though, it was worse 20 years ago.
I can't even get Proton emails to be received and not go straight to spam, I think rolling my own would be even more impossible. Hell, Google is sending my own iCloud emails to spam from a fresh account.
Last year I went to two weddings of people who met on Hinge. I've got three more this year.
Good to hear. In my country there are too many MLMers or insurance agents that agree to a date then come to sell you things
Could just be a bot ad for that app though.
Beep boop.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
You still can, you just have to be strategic about it due to a higher noise to signal ratio. I've helped a few of my friends and fellow HN'ers with it.
Each individual case differs, but it is always a variation of looking as your best self (or best photogenic self for online dating) and putting yourself out there a lot. You're looking for someone that you click really well with. So ultimately, it's a needle in a haystack thing.
It's hard to prove either way, for or against, because behaviors are different in different countries, age groups, apps, and so on. Maybe it works for some segments, but not others.
But I've met countless people, of both genders, who swore that dating apps is a waste of time, and money. They're designed to be gambling machines. The house always wins, which in this case means the customers keep coming back.
Maybe the problem is paid dating aps?
Also enshitification is real there too, I don't think I'd find anyone now on the same dating app I met my spouse on years ago.
Every time I go on Facebook, Instagram and twitter, I see what my friends are up too. What happened to your social feeds?
> What happened to your social feeds?
That's a really interesting question. Pretty much everyone I know stopped posting on Facebook around 2014 (rough guess, but seems about right). It's not that they stopped posting altogether, but they cut down severally. The final year on Facebook I'd curated my feed to see only post made directly by friends, and I could pretty much catch up in five minutes every other week. Post was also never really stuff that I needed to know, it would just be silly things, which is nice, or something that we'd talk about anyway at some point. It feels like people got tired of keeping an online journal on Facebook pretty quickly.
It's interesting that some people travel in circles where Facebook, or perhaps more likely Instagram these days, just work for them and the people around them. Other, like myself, or my wife, are probably more often talking to friends on the phone or chatting on some type of chat/group chat.
It would be an interesting study, if someone where to find out why difference social circles gravitate towards different channels of communication. For me, the people I care about are clearly split in two, IRC or Snapchat (which is two really weird extremes).
I have a handful of friends who still post interesting stuff. I get shown maybe 50% of that, and yes, sometimes on the "throne of introspection" with my smartphone I [doom]scroll quite a way down so it's not like I never look.
FB still works for special interest groups and Marketplace. But the timeline is a morass of clickbait, scams, and borderline porn. And in my case, Coyote/Roadrunner clips and old comics.
The main timeline is so algorithmically generated - sometimes I get shown something, want to look at it a bit later, and never see it again.
Same experience. My friends and local community posts a lot, but facebook will only show me 1 connection for for every 7 rando reels / recommended / sponsored channels (aka ads), not counting the blocks suggesting new friends and such. Maybe 1 post i care about in 10 cards.
Not only that but the friends posts that do show up are shown several days later, meaning that anything like local event, yard sales etc are long wrapped up by the time facebook decides to make me aware of it. And I can't figure out why facebook prioritizes posts from highschool friends over recently added ones which may be more relevant.
Basically I only look at feeds of friend/group posts directly and ignore the main feed which is just the worst useless garbage i can think of.
As nobody else is actually using it all I get is spam got investment scams.
Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses
> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.
> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?
The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.
> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.
20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out.
And I did actually run the mail server. A friend set it up for me, SpamAssassin or something else may have been involved. The main thing was, though, you could still send email from your own SMTP server without it being automatically binned because it doesn't come from one of the big, "trusted" email services.
I run my own mail server today for my family, and very rarely have deliverability problems. Bog standard Linux install, exim4, dovecot, SpamAssassin. It's basically set and forget. I've been doing so for over a decade, so I probably built up some pretty good IP reputation, but it's totally possible to run mail yourself.
> 20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out
20 years ago a mod would do that and today they still do for example here in this forum
From one forum or IRC channel, sure. But you could spin up another, there were plenty. You couldn't get banned "from email" - maybe from one email host if you really pissed off the guy at one ISP, but that would only be a tiny fraction of the people you wanted to email.
You also can spin up another social network, it doesn't work well the same way it didn't work very well spinning up another irc channel or server. And spinning up another HN doesn't work as well.
Spinning up another HN or Twitter is hard because the web is a lot more centralised these days. Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding, I saw it happen and even did it myself once or twice.
> Back in the old days you could spin up an alternate IRC channel or web forum and have a decent chance of succeeding
Yes I agree. It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
> It is like creating a new whatsapp group or a new instagram profile nowadays, which also has higher chances of succeeding, inside the walled garden of someone else.
The point is it's now quite easy to get banned from the whole platform. Whereas in the old days it was pretty hard to get banned from a whole IRC network (it would happen if you were DDoSing the network or insulting an ircop directly, but never just because you said the wrong thing in your own channels, and worst case even the IRC networks were less centralised than today's social networks) and virtually impossible to get banned from the whole web to the point that you couldn't make a new web forum.
20 years ago we were 20 years younger.
Certainly helped!
> This still happens all the time.
People win the lottery all the time too
So they did 20 years ago
Back around the most recent election I dug up Digg’s front page and some of the comments from it’s earliest appearance in the Internet Archive and jumped around reading the comments sections on news items related to the 2004 and 2008 elections.
I walked away feeling much like I did after reading some Ancient Roman Graffiti left in Pompeii: people are just people. What’s different now isn’t the web, it’s just there’s more people, we’re more connected across State and International borders, you can actually find people you know online and the people that were kids back then are in their 30s while a lot of people you once knew online are dead. But there’s still kids, there’s still people who remember the world before the ARPAnet and UNIX and CP/M and Apple and DOS.
Hacker News will be 18 this year. All the kids born in 2007 are turning 18 this year. Twitter passed that milestone a year ago and Facebook a couple of years before that.
The type of people are different.
Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
Now anyone that can afford a cheap phone can access the internet, and the user landscape has changed.
Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Those days are over and the internet is a much more hostile place.
> The type of people are different.
That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries.
By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web.
> Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly.
Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005.
> Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.
Minor nitpick.. Netmeeting came pre-installed with windows.
All anyone had to do was open the software.
It looked like more setup required than that, but I’ll defer to you. :)
>The type of people are different.
>Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
I remember the sub-$1000 PC came about in the late 90s, you didn't have to be that affluent; lower-middle class was enough. I remember people in the BBS days that were barely middle class that had computers. Wealth wasn't really that much of an issue. It was more of an interest thing. Lots of people back then really didn't know how to use computers and they were pretty foreign to most people.
I remember pre-Windows 95, you had to know someone who had WinSock and install it, and you had to manually enter your IP address and gateway and all that. It wasn't an easy task. Once things like Internet in a box came out, it became easier. That's what AOL offered, easy access to the internet back when it wasn't that easy.
I think the biggest difference is how commercialized it has become and how the big companies have essentially taken it over. In all fairness, they did have a lot to offer; most websites were static documents.
The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.
I think an even bigger difference is that there was no concept of users monetizing their own usage via advertising or a personal brand. People were in it purely for the love of the game, and maybe some imaginary internet points.
If you wanted to make money you might try hosting a community and monetizing it somehow, but the concept of building a digital following and using it to market products/services (and not be seen as spam or a sellout) simply did not exist.
I recently capitulated and started using real-name HN/reddit accounts because personal branding is not just common now, it's one of the main ways of reaching users.
It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
Just reloading won't help, you need to actively train the algorithm by telling it what videos you don't like and why. It also lets you stop showing recommendations from a given channel altogether. On Facebook I've trained the algorithm to never show me any ads because I keep marking every ad that pops up as irrelevant and then 'hide all ads from this advertiser', and by also not following any celebrity, corporate or brand pages.
I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something else.
Every few weeks I end up with a new video card with button that takes the place of the video and it asks if i want to see something other than what it usually recommends. It's not quite as out there as I'd like, but it did shake things up a bit.
I'll say it; the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
To paraphrase Matt Damon from a show only enjoyed by the true internet acolytes "the walking mozzarella sticks who think a three hundred android phone and a verizon contract give them the right to connect to every piece of information in the world..."
The fundamental problem of the internet was that it was full of nerds - from a monetization perspective, they are a loathsome bunch.
They barely buy anything, preferring to make their own stuff, and they incessantly complain about the things they do buy.
They resist and effectively fight back against all attempts to control them.
They hate pandering, they don't click on ads (and in fact block them), they smell scams a million miles away.
I disagree, at least as far as the entire internet is concerned. The internet should belong to, and be available to, everyone.
Individual sites on the internet can be as gatekept and elitist as they like, but keeping something as transformative and revolutionary as the internet locked away for a privileged technical elite goes against everything the hacker ethos is meant to stand for.
I can't comprehend how so many people can be so nostalgic for the past without understanding what the past was about. Yes, those walking mozzarella sticks have the right to connect to every piece of information in the world. Even if they're dumber and less cool than you. Everyone, everywhere, has the right to unrestricted information and communication, without qualifiers. That's the entire fucking point.
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
Did you start to use the internet before or after september 1993?
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion.
Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.
I’ve made a complete 180 on the subject. I don’t think you can build and maintain a solid online community without gatekeepers.
That's true but the internet should be the place where ever human being is allowed. Then it segregates into multiple well-protected communities.
Every human yes, every thought would be no in my opinion.
> hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them)
Well, talk for yourself, sir. As a teenager, I had hundreds of IM contacts across ICQ and MSN from all over the world, not only classmates.
> eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares)
A friend recommends a song, you can get it with a 2h download and you both can enjoy talking about it. There was _nothing_ like it at the time.
It's not about wanting to go back. We can't go back, even if everyone wanted to. It was something awesome that happened once and we don't know the formulae for it.
Today the few file sharing networks left are full of high quality sound, well organized and take less than a minute per song.
I didn't know until recently either, but that literally got way better.
I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.
I've been on the internet as long as you and from my POV it changed a ton. The biggest changes to me are
(1) social media via smartphones - letting everyone trivially post to everyone else on the planet.
This use to be nerd activity (blogs) and the audience was other nerds. First social media sites, then the smart phone completely changed this.
(2) follows from 1, influencer culture, by which I mean, Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube all incentivize people performing to try to get as many viewers/followers as possible. Thinking back to the 70s/80s, even the top movie stars just got some fan mail. They didn't have 400-600 MILLION FOLLOWERS to whom they could say anything they wanted. A celebrity had a most a TV show with a crew and editors and a strong chance of getting fired/banned if they got to crazy. Now, any high school kid can have 100+ million followers
It's not just people with followers, 20% of my youtube feed is people trying desperately to have something to talk about. Some news happens, thousands of people "report it" on their "channel". The scale of it is insane to me.
> Absolutely nothing has really changed
been online since then as well; the arrival of ad-driven social media and "influencers" has changed the online landscape significantly. there's really no comparison.
> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved
Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.
i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)
I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam..
Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
Yea, I lean this way too.
The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.
The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.
If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.
Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.
(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)
I know it's an old man comment, but there really was a time the internet was friendly. It just wasn't 20 years ago. It was before the general public got online, and the internet was a refuge for specialists and early adopters.
In the early 90s, the internet felt like a magical undiscovered wilderness. 90% of the people you met were excited to be there and eager to share. That was long gone 20 years ago.
Yup a random guy taught me guitar online in 2006 even, painfully drawing tabs by hand.
In 2006-2007 someone walked me through step by atep how to assemble a computer in a newegg.com chatroom with the parts I had already purchased. That person changed my life. Thanks human.
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
> not federated and centralized
That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.
I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:
1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)
2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.
3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".
4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.
This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
If my teenage friends had been faceless alien monsters with no humanity whatsoever, it would have been pretty similar I guess. My friends were mostly just stoners and kids who liked to drink a little too much.
I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client.
It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
> You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change.
> definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens".
In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
No, that is a rose colored glasses view of the period. There are people today who still do multi network clients and Jabber transports and suffer the same issues that they suffered during the MSN era .
Heck, the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year. Skype was nowhere near to be the first.
> You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on.
Hahaha. Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap. Third party clients exist for both and they suck as much as they used to do in the past (unreliableness and lack of whatever new fancy useless feature the 1st party clients had just introduced but suddenly became indispensable for people on the network).
> the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year.
I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
> Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap.
You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else. Whereas with WhatsApp you can't even sign up without a phone, and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
> I did hear about AIM having a cat and mouse game with third-party clients, but that was before the MSN era, and they eventually calmed down. I don't know about any lawsuits, but the fact that there were companies openly offering multiplatform clients (heck, Trillian even sold a "pro" version) suggests they weren't particularly effective.
_the same companies_ that were alive back then are still offering multiplatform clients as of today...
E.g. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/im-instant-messenger/id2856889... for Whatsapp and many others
Plus the resurrection of Pidgin. Or the new Jabber transports...
No matter how you put it, today's situation with 3rd party clients is quite similar as in the past. If you think they're unreliable today, think how it was in the famous Trillian 0.7x era, when a couple days/week downtime waiting for a client upgrade was _the norm_ (and yes I was a paying customer). When support for features that today would be considered uttermost critical (e.g. server stored offline messages) was non-working or added years later than the 1st party client.
I really don't think users today would have the patience for that. But the situation is objectively better today where 3rd party clients, if anything, miss bells & whistles (e.g. "picture/voice/gif sharing" instead of simple file sharing) rather than core features such as presence tracking, offline messaging, etc. (of course they are core now: they have been there for 20 years....). My last proselytizing effort was moving people to Conversations (conversations.im), so this is based on my own experience. Just look at what the average Whatscrap user will complain when moving to Conversations (and yes there is a Whatscrap <-> XMPP transport).
> and the third-party clients are unreliable enough that they're non-mainstream.
"Mainstream"? When have third-party clients ever been "Mainstream"?
> You needed an MSN account but you could sign up once, log in with your usual messenger program that you use for every other network, and then forget who was on MSN, who was on AIM and who was on whatever else
You are still entirely subject to the whims of MSN and AIM, and you cannot migrate your contacts at all if they decide to do an Elon. Or a GTalk (when they closed down federation). Or an Apple (when they promised federation that never materialized).
I see what you mean now. In my rose-colored usage, I was only ever doing one to one conversations, so never had to deal with bridges between services, it didn't even occur to me that there would be such a thing as talking to people with an MSN account without having an MSN account myself. The idea of 'federating' such that different servers could exchange messages was not within my imagination in 2004. I was just happy I wasn't forced to use a particular client.
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums.
But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.
Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar and I realize it's an ex-coworker
There's a handful of users on the reddit gaming pages where I can distinguish their writing style and bad opinions well enough from other users that I recognize them. The site culture is opposed to referencing someone's post history, though.
The pseudononymous nature of the website was originally one of its selling points, being a nice inbetween of 4chan's anon chaos and Facebook's "your boss and grandmother are reading your posts" stiltedness. Nowadays, I'd rather have the personalization back. The new UI lets people upload avatars for their comments, which probably helps, but they'll have to pry the old UI from my cold, dead hands
It was better simply because normies weren't on the internet yet.
Like so many things, the more popular it becomes, the worse it gets.
Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.
The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times.
Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable:
I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.)
There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel.
I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here.
I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer.
No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs.
No takers.
20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.
Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track.
So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"?
Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.
The car shows in all the small towns around me (populations less than 750) have entries for early, mid, and late model classics. So 20's through 90's. Most have trucks in every year.
They're also run by active shade tree mechanics clubs that get together once or twice a month to talk and get greasy.
I guess the reason I'm saying this is because sometimes the things you want aren't where you are, and that's just how it goes?
For whatever it's worth I live in South Tacoma, Pierce, WA, USA. You're not going to find a working, greasy auto club at the flagship Lemay Museum (although it's worth a visit, as is Blackhawk in CA). However, the Lemay family is a local fixture / institution.
I drive by the family compound in Parkland maybe once a month. They own / owned Marymount, the former military boarding school; for lack of a better characterization they use it as a garage. There are auto and motorcycle shows there annually (and also gun shows). Walking one of those shows and talking to people is certainly on the table, but it's not a "need to do something now" option.
Meanwhile, talking to people (Burns Towing, the good people, as opposed to the sh*tshow on Hilltop which the City contracts for impounds) and making phone calls has generated some promising leads on the mechanic front anyway. I went and visited a guy a week ago who has a lift (and his old race car) in his garage and wrenches older US metal as a semi-retired pastime. He might find time to help me out if along with paying him decently I provide him with some home brewed beer.
We talk about "free beer", but in fact beer is not fungible on the internet.
It was such a different world.
I still remember a pithy description of IRC from the early aughts: “Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.”
Speaking of exploring the friendly a friendly web for a fun little project I made a qt based browser that blocks 500 of the world's most popular websites. It's a lot of fun to be able to explore the web without any fomo caused by the giant sites.
So this is essentially a list of things that were bad in the old Internet from the point of view of... a feminist collective? It looks like the writer is trying to universalize an essentially biased point of view, calling my point of view a mistake and suggesting that that point of view is actually an artefact of the passing of time. I'm sorry but that's not true. I'd take the old Internet any day, defects and all, very sorry for the feminist collective they interviewed.
A thought I had recently was that someone should try making a social media/forum platform that only allows non-mobile usage.
My theory (which is definitely not originally mine) is that mobile devices have driven a huge shift in usage patterns towards low-effort content consumption. Smartphones are everybody's go-to when they're temporarily bored, so social media on the phone is less of a deliberate destination and more of an idle snack to alive someone's boredom. Even when people do engage, because they're often doing so on-the-go in short bursts and don't have access to a real keyboard, the engagement is typically very low effort. TikTok is a perfect testament to this shift IMO.
I'm thinking that desktop-only requirements would lead to less engagement over all, but higher quality engagement when it does occur. If there were a ranking system or some other kind of algorithmic content serving, it would be less skewed towards content that you can fully engage with in two seconds. And the userbase would skew towards more intentional enthusiasts who deliberately seek out the site, rather than someone looking for a quick distraction while they're bored for 15 seconds.
Hacker news does probably the best job at this without actively trying to prevent phone usage, but it doesn't exactly do much in the way of fostering a community like old-school forums.
This is an amazing idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about how smart devices have changed the way we think and interact, reading books like Alone Together and other things from Sherry Turkle’s oeuvre, and remembering how I used to use my computer so differently when I didn’t have instantaneous access to low quality crap 24/7. I think making things desktop-only could be a heuristic that gets us back a lot of the things we lost in the transition to smartphones… definitely deserves more thought.
But how will people find out about it? Part of what we lost is the Google of back then when content was king. Can you rank a desktop-only website nowadays?
I guess I envision this kind of site not being super growth/profit-motivated because I think that's just fundamentally at odds with high quality communities. HN does rank sometimes but not that often, and it's pretty highly trafficked. Also I never saw reddit show up in SERP until the past few years and they still grew a lot in that time.
People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too.
Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that.
But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that.
The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world.
There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that!
And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.
>People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course.
In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward:
If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better.
If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better.
>Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc.
I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!
During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites. There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage nowadays.
There were flash games that are better than what we have now. In Usenet there was real free speech.
There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens. Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI scrapers.
The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that other platforms except for some newspaper comments sections, which also allow a lot.
One thing I loved on the early internet was finding online communities for people who shared a niche interest or hobby with you.
For instance, I was interested in plant propagation as part of a gardening hobby, but didn't know anyone else experimenting with it.
Before the internet, you could find information in bookstores or libraries, but making new friends with common niche interests was much less likely.
I do not think internet was more friendly per se back then, and I am not sure this is the general argument or feeling on being nostalgic about that era either. If it is, then it is definitely wrong, but that does not mean that there are no reasons to miss the old internet. I think what made internet interesting back then was that it was much less monetised, more liberating as in providing opportunities and giving access to stuff that were just inaccessible before. Piracy was in its prime, and to a big extent it felt it was about pushing against or breaking whatever rules the world was trying to impose on people.
It was not friendly, paedophiles were praying on kids on IRCs, there was definitely sexism, people would get harassed online, you had to be careful as to what kind of information you were putting online, never put one's real name there and definitely not photos or bank info or anything that nowadays is common place. One had to know how to protect oneself online.
It was not free as in cheap or easily accessible either, it was actually quite expensive, but again somehow one found ways to get around stuff like that, through computers in public libraries, breaking through some neighbour's wifi, gathering at a friend whose father had internet for work reasons, getting access to a university's wifi and going around with a laptop to find a place with good signal or staying in internet cafes overnight when it was cheaper.
The point is that one would make all this effort needed to get access to it and go around these issues because it was a window to the world, esp for more introvert nerds. I definitely appreciate having such easy access to it nowadays and the internet being, generally speaking, safer. I just wish it felt less of a prison to escape from/fight against an algorithm or tightly controlled "platforms" that want to hook you up to show you more ads, and more as a means of liberation and it used to feel like.
History has shown that friendliness is a terrible goal to aim for in of itself - the modern approach to achieving 'friendliness' on Reddit for example, is to brutally crush any dissent by downvoting, removing content and banning users who go against the grain in any given subreddit.
The resulting discussions look like to outsiders like a happy community of friendly people who generally agree on most stuff, yet when you try to actualy participate in these discussions you'll find out just how crappily they are run.
Most people leave at this point and the only ones who stay are those whose desire for validation is greater than the desire to express their own opinions.
Well, that and reddit mods banning "uncomfortable" (to them) discussions and opinions. A few years ago reddit made an active decision to purge communities around topics that they decided were not good for the platform. The result was that a lot of nuanced communities and places for discussion disappeared from the internet because some people outside these communities decided that they were too "unfriendly" and offensive. They were not perfect, but there was a place for nuance to be expressed there that nowadays internet lacks.
Yeah, that too. Weird how easily these things get forgotten. That means they got away with it. Probably pissed off a lot of people too, who I'd wager didn't stick around. Wonder where they went though.
It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
From the communities I was around some went to discord, but most did not really stick and discord is not very suitable platform for stuff like that imo. There were also some reddit clones popping up at the time, but they were politically charged just to another direction of what reddit was taking, not really spaces to hold that diversity and nuance either. Some also moved on to some other subreddits that would draw less attention of specific kind. In time afaik the old communities faded away or broken to smaller pieces, fragmented into smaller echo chambers and the ones not fitting in any of them just moved on. There are not really places to hold nuance in the internet now. What I liked in reddit was that you would get all people coming from all these different references at the same place and sometimes indeed interesting things would happen in that intersection.
And thing is, the internet was already largely shit at that point. I guess there is no specific time point to point when the internet broke because it seems it can always break more.
> It's often quoted that 80% of content is made by 1% of users, and usually those people are the first in, and if you lose them, it's over for you.
Maybe why meta pushes ai content creation so bad.
Generally forums as in phpBB stuff are fine - they are usually run by a reasonable bunch of folks who are interested in the continued success of the site, since they own it - there are some (well known) bad communities but at least usually you know what you're getting into.
On the other hand, reddit mods can be forced upon a subreddit and they come and go - they get their fifteen minutes of power as they get to terrorize the denizens of another internet community, and they move on, anonymously too.
"The internet hasn’t made us bad, we were already like that"
Is merely an application of
"Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals" -Robert Caro
cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv
Back then it felt like people were trying to be useful and to make things/places that were useful in some way to other people.
Now it feels like people are making things/places mostly to use other people- they stopped viewing people online as "people"- now people are "data" to be "monetized"
The various art forms/entertainment has also become "content" to be "monetized"
All of this has made the modern internet very cold and boring- everything has been corporatized.
* It's a tiny and obscure thing but jumping into and chatting with people in Hyperfy(https://hyperfy.io/) worlds feels very much like early internet as you often chat with the builder of the world who is into some non-normie thing.
* Hyperfy v2 is now open source btw https://github.com/hyperfy-xyz/hyperfy
So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they are?
Well, however presumably unfriendly that world was, it definitely didn't have nagware content walls that wanted me to log in and subscribe to god knows what website.
There's a great comment on a breakcore video that says something like "remember that decade between 1999 and 2000". Maybe that decade is yet to happen.
The article focuses way too much on the "fear of technology". El Pais, formerly the Spanish paper of record, succumbs to mainstream techno optimism.
I'd wager a guess that the friendliness, or at least the perception of such, came from not very many people using it, people being segregated into niche enthusiast groups, and people still intelligent and non-addicted enough to not merge it with their identity. However, the Internet was always destined to connect us in the worst ways.
I find that nostalgia for the early web is inversely correlated with the number of IE 6 bugs one had to work around back in the day.
It was not the only thing one had to work around. We had to work around getting access to the internet in the first place (for those of use without the money to just afford being connected at home), hiding our identity online, not getting infected every second website we would visit.
But somehow we put the effort to get around all these problems because internet had something important to offer, because it was a window to something.
IE 6 was already more than half past the “early” web, IMO.
In the past when you went to a community for a particular kind of enthusiast, that's what you'd find there. Now everybody is there. Enthusiasts, nonenthusiasts, people posing as enthusiasts, people trying to sell stuff to enthusiasts. So yes, the noise is much greater.
The only thing I miss about the internet from 25 years ago is people took themselves less seriously. "Don't feed the trolls" was a thing. But it also wasn't that great either. People weren't nicer. The tech was limited. Things are objectively better now.
I remember the web was full of trolls (just look at old Slashdot posts), and newsgroups could be pretty toxic back then. Just the web was more niche back then and not as many people were exposed to it.
Doubt that author really lived in that era for multiple reasons. And if you don't like corp AI slop, maybe you should leave the silo'd internet?
Internet is a proper noun, with a capital I. The Internet was a better place, would it only be for the fact that kids didn't have access to it. And less offendable people.
What mistake would that be?
Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.
20 years ago?
Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.
I'm curious how old the writer is?
What we didn't have 20 years ago was interaction bait/rage bait. I mean, I guess rage bait still existed, but it was FAR less common.
Don't feed the trolls, we used to say.
Now, everyone with a room temperature IQ and a massive ego can't help but correct people. So many videos of people deliberately doing things wrong that they HAVE to comment. Or poorly worded questions that make people argue over the correct answer when they can't even agree on what's being asked.
Not to mention that social media has given a bullhorn to every moron conspiracy theorist, and now we have a greater number of Flat Earthers than any time in recent history, not to mention political issues.
I do not remember the Internet of 20 years ago, as being "friendly."
I was one of the "unfriendly" ones, and I liked it.
These days, I'm trying to atone for that.
I was there. I helped build it.
It was better.
Meh, the internet today is mostly boring. Everything's looking the same, sounding the same, all in service to impressions for ads and probably follower count. Additionally AI slop fills everything with more of the same corpo garbage and algorithm optimizations that makes number go up. What the internet back then had was a charming weirdness which has become rare. It wasn't better back then, but it was more interesting and strange in a not so kaputt way as today.
This article is blindly equivocating on "friendly"!
People were the same assholes in forums twenty years ago.
The platforms as such were more friendly. They were not enshittified toward extracting value from the user, and attracting new users at the expense of becoming less usable for the current ones. Or not as much.
> this nostalgia is preventing us from focusing on finding solutions
We're gatekeeping nostalgia now. How sad and pathetic.
How is that gatekeeping? Isn't it an observation?
It's saying that people shouldn't be nostalgic about the early internet because it stops them solving the perceived problems with today's internet. It's also implying that people's nostalgia is for sexism and racism.
I've been hanging out on the same forum pretty much daily since 1998. Looking back through threads from 20+ years ago is a great antidote to nostalgia - just a crowd of immature know-it-alls spouting utter shite (and very often being very unfriendly to one another)
Why would we possibly yearn for small forums and channels populated with only our friends and people we want to connect with instead of massive social networks full of every conceivable idiot with algorithms designed to push their idiocy in my face.
Yeah sometimes we were meanies. Damn. You got us.
In the old days a user was forced to block hostile actors, whilst now evverone urges some admin to block the hostile actor. Platforms are gardens, before they were open spaces, with lots of spam.
Censorship and deplatforming demands are now all over, esp. by the traditional press, and the left. Esp. worrying are the continuous demands in the press to censor hatespeech or lies. Young Gen-Z folks are crying loud when I call them weak. Next they call HR. Stalin rears his ugly head again.
And academic freedom is gone. They even let in police now.
Yes, internet was better before. All the bad stuff author describes was confined to fringe spaces like Omegle and 4Chan, where anonymity was the selling point. On private forums, however, you’d quickly get banned for this shit.
Funny how the internet turned what used to be the “village fool” — the guy everyone ignored when he rambled about nonsense and conspiracies — into a global phenomenon.
Now, instead of fading into the background, they find each other online, amplify the noise, and suddenly the whole world has to deal with it.
The same tools that connected people for good also made it easier to spread misinformation at scale.
But I was not the victim so I do miss it.
The good old days you could ping of death those win9x lusers!
The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in.
I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary.
What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world.
Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less.
Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.
> There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
This is not true. Basically everyone I know (including me) didn't pretend to be white or male. We didn't bring up our identities at all. Nobody gave a shit.
I'm not pretending that every single person had a sunshine and roses experience. Assholes exist in every time and place, and some people are unfortunate enough to run into them. But I'm sick of people claiming that the Internet of yesteryear was such a cesspool that if you were anything except a white dude you had a bad time. That was never the case.
Seriously. Nobody gave a fuck, you got insulted if you brought up your identity, because only a narcissist would bother to bring that up on the internet of all places.
"Tits or GTFO" existed because anyone who bothered to claim they were a woman or whatever must want unearned attention so pics or fuck off.
You disagree that "if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse" and your counterargument is....that anyone who claimed to be a woman would be subjected to sexual harassment?
It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see how it plays out.
Clearly you were never on the early internet. No one actually expected pics. It was a "fuck off you goddamn narcissistic DUMBASS"
You don't have to expect pics for someone asking for pictures of your tits to be harassment.
If I yell at a random woman "show me your tits" I do not expect her to do it, but I'm harassing her.
And no, I'm not missing the joke. I first was online in 1998. I saw this stuff in games and forums. It wasn't funny then either.
It's also not narcissistic to talk about things that are important to you or your characteristics. It can provide context and it can help people understand and make connections. Your argument is similar to other people who say "why does (Group) have to throw it in my face" regarding things such as holding hands in public - which isn't throwing anything in your face any more than what those people perceive as "normal" is being thrown on everyone around them involuntarily.
> And no, I'm not missing the joke. I first was online in 1998. I saw this stuff in games and forums. It wasn't funny then either.
Do you know what also wasn't funny? The invasion of people wanting to make everything about them. No one gave a fuck about who you were until you made it about who you were. That was the point. If you're willing to reduce yourself to being X you will be mocked for being X. It was a great way to insure people stayed behind their usernames and it worked well until the "normies" showed up. I seriously doubt your actual claimed history on the internet.
> It's also not narcissistic to talk about things that are important to you or your characteristics.
It is when you weren't asked, were never going to be asked, and attempted to use your characteristics to gain undeserved attention. "Tits or gtfo" was simply one iteration of several that mocked people for using any number of other characteristics to get undeserved respect. I remember several memes especially around gymbros and veterans that also were used to mock people into staying anonymous. Trolling these people was the immune system of forums, IRC, and games and it worked wonderfully.
> It can provide context and it can help people understand and make connections
This statement alone makes me doubt you ever actually spent time on the old internet. In 1998 I never had problems making solid connections, some still existing today, without knowing what particular physical characteristics my friend had. In some sense it's the purest form of connection - one that was never swayed by what normally might turn you away or towards someone.
What I'm getting from your over all message is that the Internet used to be less hateful 20 years ago.
The internet isn't less hateful today, anyway.
In the past internet communities were more heterogeneous. Now everyone lives in a bubble. This makes the snowflakes feel more safe. But this also concentrates the racists, sexists and bigots in their own bubbles where their hate festers.
That heterogeneity is what I miss the most and snowflakes in general ruined web 2.0 for me.
The internet is plenty heterogeneous today... given there are multiple communities that encourage mass killings (Christchurch, most infamously), the internet is too heterogeneous.
most inspiring piece of content I've read in weeks and it comes from the pessimizer, thanks for that. also first time I've come across the term buttbuttinating but I like it, captures the zeitgeist.
What I miss from those days is that the money was easy on the web. You could throw up some Google Adsense code on a site, show a single unobtrusive banner, and make enough to cover your costs and then some.