[HN Gopher] The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online wo...
___________________________________________________________________
The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years
ago
Author : geox
Score : 152 points
Date : 2025-01-12 14:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (english.elpais.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (english.elpais.com)
| goalieca wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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".
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back
| alleys.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger
| exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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..
| lmm wrote:
| > 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| 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).
| lmm wrote:
| > 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > 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).
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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.
| m3047 wrote:
| > 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.
| Eumenes wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "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
| dijit wrote:
| 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...
| mentos wrote:
| 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..."
| elpocko wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.
| hibikir wrote:
| 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?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is
| reading every one of the forum's comments.
| mentos wrote:
| 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?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| mentos wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| mentos wrote:
| 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?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| mentos wrote:
| The same way OpenAI offers its service to hundreds of
| millions of users without compromising any other systems
| it's running on.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| cutemonster wrote:
| 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.
| mentos wrote:
| 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?
| deadbabe wrote:
| "Review this comment as if you are an AI clone of the
| moderator dang from Hackernews and select the appropriate
| function call to apply."
| webwanderings wrote:
| 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.
| rexer wrote:
| 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?
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| > Self-Hosted Discord
|
| How does one achieve this?
| coldtea wrote:
| 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
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| irc if you don't require any bells and whistles. matrix
| if you want attachments and encryption. zulip if you're
| running a company.
| seszett wrote:
| 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.
| robrtsql wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| beej71 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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...
| mongol wrote:
| 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.
| smitty1e wrote:
| 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!
| Triphibian wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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.
| skydhash wrote:
| 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.
| jaapz wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| > 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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 ;)
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| 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
| mingus88 wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| > _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.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| 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...
| chasd00 wrote:
| Heh yeah and irc wasnt exactly filled with upstanding
| honorable citizens either.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| 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
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| truly we have lost teh lulz :(
| sangnoir wrote:
| > 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.
| p_l wrote:
| I remember when IE actually warned you when you went to
| HTTPS!
| srmarm wrote:
| 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.
| metalman wrote:
| 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.
| gxs wrote:
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv
| alganet wrote:
| > 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.
| seneca wrote:
| 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yup a random guy taught me guitar online in 2006 even,
| painfully drawing tabs by hand.
| cisrockandroll wrote:
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you
| haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something
| else.
| johnny22 wrote:
| 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.
| willywanker wrote:
| 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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| antigeox wrote:
| What I'm getting from your over all message is that the
| Internet used to be less hateful 20 years ago.
| let_me_post_0 wrote:
| 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.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The internet is plenty heterogeneous today... given there are
| multiple communities that encourage mass killings
| (Christchurch, most infamously), the internet is _too_
| heterogeneous.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| tekla wrote:
| 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.
| Arainach wrote:
| 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.
| tekla wrote:
| Clearly you were never on the early internet. No one
| actually expected pics. It was a "fuck off you goddamn
| narcissistic DUMBASS"
| Arainach wrote:
| 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.
| zer8k wrote:
| > 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.
| raytopia wrote:
| 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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!
| thsag wrote:
| 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.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| What mistake would that be?
|
| Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.
| m3047 wrote:
| 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.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| 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
| m3047 wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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?
| m3047 wrote:
| 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.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| ncruces wrote:
| 20 years ago we were 20 years younger.
| emn13 wrote:
| Certainly helped!
| droidist2 wrote:
| > This still happens all the time.
|
| People win the lottery all the time too
| Almondsetat wrote:
| So they did 20 years ago
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > 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
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| owebmaster wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > 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.
| lmm wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Last year I went to two weddings of people who met on Hinge.
| I've got three more this year.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| 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
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| Could just be a bot ad for that app though.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Beep boop.
| jjav wrote:
| > 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| Every time I go on Facebook, Instagram and twitter, I see what
| my friends are up too. What happened to your social feeds?
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 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).
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| melvinroest wrote:
| > 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.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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?
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| "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!
| jappgar wrote:
| 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.
| cgh wrote:
| Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.
| thsag wrote:
| The article focuses way too much on the "fear of technology". El
| Pais, formerly the Spanish paper of record, succumbs to
| mainstream techno optimism.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| johnea wrote:
| So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they
| are?
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| IE 6 was already more than half past the "early" web, IMO.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| dismalaf wrote:
| 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.
| Arubis wrote:
| 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."
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| But I was not the victim so I do miss it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| tines wrote:
| 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.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| 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?
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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.
| havaloc wrote:
| 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.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| 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.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| 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.
| ajoseps wrote:
| every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar
| and I realize it's an ex-coworker
| dmonitor wrote:
| 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
| brianstorms wrote:
| 20 years ago?
|
| Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on
| the PLATO system.
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| freehorse wrote:
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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..."
| x-complexity wrote:
| > 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.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I've made a complete 180 on the subject. I don't think you
| can build and maintain a solid online community without
| gatekeepers.
| owebmaster wrote:
| That's true but the internet should be the place where ever
| human being is allowed. Then it segregates into multiple
| well-protected communities.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > 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?
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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._
| BonoboIO wrote:
| 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.
| Deprogrammer9 wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| > 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.
| DoodahMan wrote:
| 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 :)
| Groxx wrote:
| 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_)
| nox101 wrote:
| 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.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > 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.
| steve_taylor wrote:
| > this nostalgia is preventing us from focusing on finding
| solutions
|
| We're gatekeeping nostalgia now. How sad and pathetic.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| How is that gatekeeping? Isn't it an observation?
| steve_taylor wrote:
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| 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.
| bmitc wrote:
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| veltas wrote:
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| 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.
| ratg13 wrote:
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| > 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.
| soygem wrote:
| 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.
| floppiplopp wrote:
| 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.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| 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)
| imaginationra wrote:
| 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
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
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