Tell HN: I miss the old internet

You won't find as many 'home pages' as back then, in that sense the likes of Facebook have done real damage, true. The sheer expansion of the 'net means you'll find plenty of interest outside of the gardens anyway so instead of pining for days long past I'd suggest to gear up for the here and now and for days to come when the blight of Facebook and their ilk are nothing but bad memories.

Facebook and Google are not the Internet, they're just websites same as any other.

It's not just nostalgia. There's simply more control and oppression, and less spirit of free inquiry nowadays.

Individuals are pushing back (a little not consciously) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

People familiar with North Korea have noted a similar withdrawal there to one's family and friends. While big tech and social media companies are far from murderous, they are getting more authoritarian.

Perhaps the main difference between forums and modern sites like Reddit, or Facebook groups, is that forums were a natural fit for slower, longer in-depth conversations. It's normal to have a forum conversation that lasts days, if not weeks, and where the posts all consist of many paragraphs. A site like Reddit is designed for older posts to sink. Same with anything that employs a "news feed" page format. Yes, forums are still around, but they're a shadow of their former selves, and often seem to have an old userbase.

Everyone makes mistakes, and the sooner people realise that in this modern, lose your job because of a twitter post society, the better.

That's how it was growing up though, right? Avoid the popular stuff, find the group you feel accepted in, that's what the internet was to me growing up, found my place on it for some time being, hopped around here from there.

Sometimes I just pretend that astroturfers are the bullies of the internet, and I try to figure out new ways to be both lazy and smart in how to not succumb to that sort of influence. It's somewhat demeaning to basically be considered an information carrier to spread the message of some new shiny thing to buy. Ads. Ads make and break the internet.

When people push money around that way, I dunno. Seems short sighted. People purchase quality products and services, quality products and services are hard to make. Word travels naturally for things that are of intrinsically high value, overvalued things eventually have their bubble popped.

Even when things seem like the consensus though, I try to put on my 6th grader hat and remember what it's like to have an interest in the information people are offering, but also be skeptical and discerning and true to myself about my own feelings, before trying said service or product, and after.

Ads sort of treat people like once you get them hooked, you have them for good. And that's clearly not the case. Or it doesn't matter, because there's always another new set of people available to fool.

Internet has become the place to make money and find status. That's the opposite of what it was growing up and I think that is why it sucks. We all need to make a living, but all that stuff isn't life. Having the internet shift from being the place to escape to, to the place I want to run away from, eh. That's why I come here though. Reminds me of usenet and slashdot. I'm still on reddit, just, the only subreddit I'm subscribed to is programmerhumor.

In a weird way, reflecting on this, it really says a lot about who I am as a person to this day. Thank you for influencing this memory to come out of my repository tonight.

The proportion of geeks —and I mean as an entirely positive badge of qualification— has been very much diluted by all the other people who just want to take photos of their dinner and children in exchange for likes, shares, views, fame.

There still are geeks out there. They're still creating their own forums. Hell, the forum software we used as children 20 years ago is still out there. I refuse to believe that there aren't just as many miscreants chiselling out their own place on the web, eschewing Facebook and Snapchat and all the other dross that the rest of Generation Z are using.

It's impossible to quantify and so much harder to appreciate with all the noise on the internet these days but it's still there.

I miss Usenet :-) Back in the day, any FAQ posted to Usenet was gold. I always wondered, "How do these brilliant people know to make a FAQ and why do stupid people never make FAQs". And recipes. Every recipe posted to the internet was amazing.

Being older, I blamed forums for the demise of the internet :-)

I recall it was pretty easy for people to just friend each other on MySpace. And to a lesser extent Facebook, but most people treat FB like a digital rolodex of IRL personal contacts and were more hesitant to just add any randoms to their friend list.

The only way you can get to be part of a community that feels intimate is where it is niche and hasn't become part of the internet mainstream. Forums centered around highly popular web figures are often very big.

But you can still find good forums. Forums that are built around very specific interests are more intimate and it's more conducive to comfortably talking to strangers and develop online friendships.

Also, this is just from my very casual observation, but forums built around interests that are not typically associated with more mainstream geek culture or tech culture, that are not privy to highly polarizing social views seem to have the air and attitude of the older internet.

Some example topics for such communities may be bird watching, crocheting, trade jobs like plumbing or modding/tuning for very specific older cars. These have a different demographic (usually skew older) and attitude towards conversation with strangers than the demographics that attract more people on topics such as gaming computers, comic books, anime, etc.

A secondary factor was spam getting out of control IIRC.

In fact if you're not Vint Cerf, you shoudn't be allowed to post

Get off my lawn

I still feel the old web/Internet a lot. BBS still exists, and it's not popular but shit there weren't a lot of people on the web back then anyway. phpBB still exists and plenty of the sites are still active. Logging into Guild Wars 2 feels a lot like logging into GW1 or DAoC or my favorite UO shard. Playing Quake is still playing Quake. There's nothing stopping you from having a UT2004 LAN party other than you not wanting to have a LAN party. Hell, MUDs are still a thing, and they're just as popular as ever.

Perhaps it's not the web that's changed... perhaps it's us? As they say, you can't go home again. Stopping by my parents house is still the same home I grew up in, but Doug and Rocko's Modern Life aren't playing on the TV anymore, and there aren't any freezie-pops in the freezer. Not because they can't be, but because I don't really want it to be like that anymore.

Every experience you loved, you can find again. If it seems like you can't, then you probably don't actually want that experience. You're looking for something far less tangible than an MSN chatroom.

Sports, activity interest groups fill the void a little.

But there's so little downtime as an adult these days it's a chore.

Tried Reddit. It has some good content but omg so much noise. So. Much. Noise.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that. Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh, and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your soul to it.

Tried HN. That one works ok so far, a lot of smart people here. Content is mostly limited to specific domain, but that's OK.

Still, all those new things didn't make an impact on my life like the old internet things did. Maybe it's me that is different now.

I won't say internet is worse now than it was then. But it's different. Some for the better (working search! Wikipedia! free university courses!), some for the worse.

P.S. I got on the internet when Windows was sold on floppy disks :) I actually used gopher.

Looking back, I'd estimate that it took another 4-6 years before the usenet I met in those years died. Some obscure parts held on longer than others. It was an influx of trolls at the same time that legitimate traffic slowly died off. Back then, I blamed the web forums that were starting to divert and diffuse participation.

I hadn't yet come to appreciate the insatiable need for humans to form ranks and piss on things. To not only root their identity and self-worth in the exclusive, the new, but to try to salt the earth and deny others the use of unoccupied ground.

Now, I recognize more cycles and waves to everything. I have an almost, but not quite, Buddhist outlook on the nature of things. But, it doesn't bring me satisfaction nor clarity. It's hard to put to words, but is more defeatism or morose nostalgia. It's hard not to think that the imagined mountains of youth aren't really sand dunes that slip and flow to consume every step of a futile climb. All this activity and change may be the thin layer of growth on coral, or the irregular fringe of a petri dish.