Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying.
Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation.
I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner.
The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff.
Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community.
Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community.
That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of:
* more focused, human and often better moderation;
* a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and;
* an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog".
Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now.
The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom.
[0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
It wasn’t just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy and there weren’t incentives to spam and scam people since you couldn’t monetize on such things. State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform, there weren’t trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a hundred other variables
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.
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.
In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being always online.
To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
So the people you had available to create communities with were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and rage bait?
Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online. It’s actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the communities reflects this.
> To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
Still is. IRC is much the same as it has ever been.
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
Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...
Heh yeah and irc wasnt exactly filled with upstanding honorable citizens either.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can choose how you live in it.
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
Absolutely. I'm in about 10 communities like this. I don't think I need global reach or hundreds or thousands of "friends".
For a wider net, I have a self-curated feed on Lemmy and Mastodon. It's super clean and positive compared to suggestive social media.
The old Internet will never be back, but The Good Parts still exist and can be remade. I don't have to visit the shitty parts.
The difference is that the communities like that mostly aren’t discoverable anymore like Usenet, web forums and mailing lists used to be, and their contents is hidden behind closed walls.
I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.
> Self-Hosted Discord
How does one achieve this?
irc if you don't require any bells and whistles. matrix if you want attachments and encryption. zulip if you're running a company.
IMO Matrix is awfully heavy and impractical, when XMPP works just as well if not better.
I'm administering both Matrix/synapse and XMPP/prosody servers and I wouldn't do the former if it wasn't my job.
Downloads some forum software and runs in it on a VPS or similar?
There are also some FOSS Discord clones in various states of maturity
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!
There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I like about forums and web communities back then.
I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics. There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm also from an age where the internet was it's own world where your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of protecting yourself.
I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator.
"You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.
Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is reading every one of the forum's comments.
Can have the AI just flag posts for a human to review in v1? Then as you refine the prompt injection detection can move to have the AI be autonomous?
There is no way to get rid of a prompt injection attack. There are always ways to convince the AI to do something else besides flagging a post even if that's its initial instruction.
The raw text of the persons message can/will be posted to the forum and be obvious to the community if it’s a prompt injection to be flagged for human review and their account banned.
Sure, that's if human moderators see it before the AI, in which case, why have an AI at all? I presume in this solution that the AI is running all the time and it will see messages the instant they're sent and thus will always be vulnerable to a prompt injection attack before any human even sees it in the first place.
To moderate the majority of the community that will not be attempting prompt injections.
What meaningful vulnerabilities are there if the post can only be accepted/rejected/flaggedForHumanReview?
That's what you tell the AI to do, who knows what other systems it has access to? For example, where is it writing the flags for these posts? Can it access the file system and do something programmatically? Et cetera, et cetera.
They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased moderator actions in their training data, and the even more reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone controversial statements.
So spin up your own forum and don't moderate it. Or spend some time (un-)finetuning an LLM moderator so you can talk about race or eugenics or whatever "exciting" controversial statements you want to talk about. Who cares.
“Review this comment as if you are an AI clone of the moderator dang from Hackernews and select the appropriate function call to apply.”
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
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.
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.
Last year I went to two weddings of people who met on Hinge. I've got three more this year.
Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses
> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.
> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?
The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.
> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.
20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out.
And I did actually run the mail server. A friend set it up for me, SpamAssassin or something else may have been involved. The main thing was, though, you could still send email from your own SMTP server without it being automatically binned because it doesn't come from one of the big, "trusted" email services.
20 years ago we were 20 years younger.
> This still happens all the time.
People win the lottery all the time too
So they did 20 years ago
The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.
I think an even bigger difference is that there was no concept of users monetizing their own usage via advertising or a personal brand. People were in it purely for the love of the game, and maybe some imaginary internet points.
If you wanted to make money you might try hosting a community and monetizing it somehow, but the concept of building a digital following and using it to market products/services (and not be seen as spam or a sellout) simply did not exist.
I recently capitulated and started using real-name HN/reddit accounts because personal branding is not just common now, it's one of the main ways of reaching users.
It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something else.
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums.
But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.
Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar and I realize it's an ex-coworker
The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times.
Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable:
I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.)
There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel.
I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here.
I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer.
No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs.
No takers.
20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.
Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track.
So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"?
Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.
The car shows in all the small towns around me (populations less than 750) have entries for early, mid, and late model classics. So 20's through 90's. Most have trucks in every year.
They're also run by active shade tree mechanics clubs that get together once or twice a month to talk and get greasy.
I guess the reason I'm saying this is because sometimes the things you want aren't where you are, and that's just how it goes?
> 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.
It was better simply because normies weren't on the internet yet.
Like so many things, the more popular it becomes, the worse it gets.
Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.
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.”
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
> not federated and centralized
That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.
I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:
1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)
2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.
3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".
4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.
This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client.
It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
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.
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.
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.
20 years ago?
Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.
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.
I find that nostalgia for the early web is inversely correlated with the number of IE 6 bugs one had to work around back in the day.
It was not the only thing one had to work around. We had to work around getting access to the internet in the first place (for those of use without the money to just afford being connected at home), hiding our identity online, not getting infected every second website we would visit.
But somehow we put the effort to get around all these problems because internet had something important to offer, because it was a window to something.
IE 6 was already more than half past the “early” web, IMO.
cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv
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.
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.
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.
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.
People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe.
Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too.
Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that.
But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that.
The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world.
There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that!
And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.
>People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course.
In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward:
If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better.
If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better.
>Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc.
I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!
During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites. There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage nowadays.
There were flash games that are better than what we have now. In Usenet there was real free speech.
There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens. Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI scrapers.
The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that other platforms except for some newspaper comments sections, which also allow a lot.
What mistake would that be?
Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.
The article focuses way too much on the "fear of technology". El Pais, formerly the Spanish paper of record, succumbs to mainstream techno optimism.
"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
So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they are?
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.
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.
But I was not the victim so I do miss it.
The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in.
I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary.
What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world.
Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less.
Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.
> There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.
This is not true. Basically everyone I know (including me) didn't pretend to be white or male. We didn't bring up our identities at all. Nobody gave a shit.
I'm not pretending that every single person had a sunshine and roses experience. Assholes exist in every time and place, and some people are unfortunate enough to run into them. But I'm sick of people claiming that the Internet of yesteryear was such a cesspool that if you were anything except a white dude you had a bad time. That was never the case.
Seriously. Nobody gave a fuck, you got insulted if you brought up your identity, because only a narcissist would bother to bring that up on the internet of all places.
"Tits or GTFO" existed because anyone who bothered to claim they were a woman or whatever must want unearned attention so pics or fuck off.
The internet isn't less hateful today, anyway.
In the past internet communities were more heterogeneous. Now everyone lives in a bubble. This makes the snowflakes feel more safe. But this also concentrates the racists, sexists and bigots in their own bubbles where their hate festers.
That heterogeneity is what I miss the most and snowflakes in general ruined web 2.0 for me.
The internet is plenty heterogeneous today... given there are multiple communities that encourage mass killings (Christchurch, most infamously), the internet is too heterogeneous.
What I'm getting from your over all message is that the Internet used to be less hateful 20 years ago.
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.