Nerdy teen laments being born too late. I remember when I said I regret not being born in the 70s because I missed the 80s. Oh before that it was the 60s and I missed all those Dad Rock err Classic Rock acts.
Live your life, not the one you think you should have had.
Exactly... the whole point of the post is to elaborate on the problems of the modern internet (addiction, fakeness, shallowness...). It's not a subjective nostalgic rant but a good analysis of everything that's wrong with today's internet.
I don't wish I was born earlier. I wish I was born later to have had access to the much better mental, dental and healthcare in my childhood than what was available back then.
I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such. We had the Wii and other nice things. I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements. I talk about this in the second sentence.
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
The internet is different, I hesitate to say worse. Yes advertising is constant, but it's not like the old internet was free of it. We had banners and bullshit galore.
The monetary model has changed for sure but that was inevitable.
The 90s internet was slow. Stuff like IRC and email are a product of their time. Stuff was designed to work on 28 or 56k modems. The lucky few had ISDN.
I don't miss the old internet that much. I miss some of the apps and the stripped down low bandwidth UX of stuff.
What I really miss is th era of native desktop applications that had a consistent look and feel.
The problem now is not the visible aspect of advertising on the internet. It's the obsessive tracking and categorization of people to make advertising more effective that I'm upset with. There was no such apparatus in the 90s/00s. Most legitimate websites wouldn't be plastered with banner spam, but all legitimate websites now will attempt to track you.
> I generally like being born in 2006. Before iPad kids and such
I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
> I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements
Me too! This shift comes every few years. The first successful mass deployment of modern AI technology was in the 1970’s when the post office started using computer vision to route mail. The shift to AI that I got to see was Google. That was amazing.
Big fan of the current LLM shift too, of course, but it feels less magical than Google did. A little because I understand it better, a little because it benefits me less personally than Google did. Feels more like a marginal improvement whereas Google felt like omg everything is different now the olds are so behind the times they can’t even comprehend!!
But I think it’s more that the big shift happens with your newfound ability to grok things, leverage information, and get shit done in your late teens / early 20’s than the actual technology available. Whatever new tech happens around that age will feel like a profound hugely impactful change in the world (but it’s actually you, not the tech).
> I just think the internet is much worse than it was
It is. And also it isn’t. Depends where you go and who you talk to.
> I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
It was very exciting. Every year that followed seemed like a massive leap forward with smartphone evolution, 4G LTE market penetration, application improvements, etc.
It was a really fun time and I have fond memories of jailbreaking early iPhones/rooting Android phones.
>I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
It's definitely worse than it was, in some ways. In other ways it's better. TLS is everywhere now. uBlock origin exists. The bar for pwning web apps is much higher today because we learned collectively from our mistakes/our fun times defacing PHP-Nuke sites.
But I miss pirating warez on IRC and scoring game rips from FTP topsites, and LAN parties. Facebook and Twitter were really fun in the early years, but these days Big Social really sucks and "growth focus" in tech is exhausting.
The second sentence of TFA: "I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements."
Funny post, pining for the days of old that he never knew.
I was there and I'm glad its past.
The computers were slow.
Microsoft ruled the day, which was fine for me because I was a Microsoft fanboy back then.
The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
Things crashed - alot.
I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
I'm certainly glad I witnessed all that first hand since 1979 but wouldn't want to go back.
You had Macs, Linux and Unix workstations in the 90s. And before the graphical browser era anything with a terminal program (eg Amiga) worked fine for internet related things.
Not for mundane tasks, or not a whole lot anyways. Productivity software used to be optimized for the client. Today's equivalent is cloud-based, written in managed code and often actually slower.
> Microsoft ruled the day
I do agree here, this part sucked.
> The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
This varies by field and task. As a developer, it was easier to break through because there were not 35,000 competing partial alternatives. Without this "value puzzle" new stuff was a much easier sell.
> Things crashed - alot.
In my particular experience, things break a little more than they used to. OS's don't crash as much, though.
> I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
Same here, but only because I can emulate old platforms, otherwise I would. I still play old games and use old software I wrote.
the malware of the early 2000s was truly awful. It was auto-install or very close to that and would nearly brick the system . So glad those days are over.
At least it loudly announced itself (tough luck, you got pwned!). It is much more financially motivated and pernicious in spirit now, hiding its presence and infiltrating your entire network.
> Funny post, pining for the days of old that he never knew.
Agreed. I was born in '83. The author misses the things he never even experienced and is living in the 90s-00s "Highlights" reel.
5" floppy drives. 3" hard disks. Single core computers. 28k dial-up was almost torture. 56k was not much better. Waiting 5-10 minutes for a single picture to load one. pixel. at. a. time. CRT monitors. Trojans. Viruses.
> Things crashed - alot.
Ahh, the Windows Blue Screen of Death. "hello darkness my old friend."
I lived through that time (was in high school and college). It was pretty neat to read about the Internet and web browsers in Newsweek, but we didn’t have it at home for a few years. Then it was just a 28.8 dial up connection that dropped randomly. It wasn’t until I got to university that I had a real broadband connection, and even that was slow compared to what I get on my phone today.
Programming (for me) was mostly basic and a bit of C, although I never totally figured out pointers. By the time I got to university, we had early versions of Java and HTML.
That time was fun, but right now is fun in different ways. The tools are much better. Computing is massively cheaper. Laptops weren’t nearly as good as desktops until the early 2000s. Also, you couldn’t do much with AI back then.
I miss the 00s internet. I miss IRC and geeking out for the sake of it. Maybe i'm just missing my younger years, but I think there was a distinct feeling back then, of wonder and being amongst the first to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.
I miss when "fed-pegged lightning side chains" peddled by Blockstream, Luke, Greg et al was the biggest load of buzzwordy self-serving bullshit in the space.
It did. I'm not sure AI has this energy. We quickly skipped the "early tinkering" phase of AI and jumped straight to the annoying "let's put this technology into everything" stage like the blockchain craze of ~2018+. Perhaps the difference is how "top-down" AI has been. Most of the push has come from massive companies trying to get people to use it instead of people finding it organically.
Early internet of 90s+ had a pretty easy learning curve. Think: HTML and a Javascript fart button. Whereas Machine Learning and Large Language Models aka AI have a pretty steep learning curve that I'm working on now. Bitcoin is kind of both, where one can easily interact with the coin trading and/or dive into the complex world of cryptography.
Yeah, we will fondly reminisce about the planet-destroying ponzi scheme which made it so convenient to pay for illegal goods, scams and ransoms to cryptolockers. What a nice unnecessary ecological catastrophe we managed to concoct out of nothing.
> ... to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
> Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I agree somewhat. There really was a sense of wonder. Whats coming next? Where will it go?
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
A lot of things got worse, it's not just nostalgia.
The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
On the other side, a lot of it wasn't sustainable. Just how many forums just vanished all of a sudden as the owner died, ran out of money or was simply fed up moderating bullshit and infights, not to mention the ever increasing compliance workload/risk (yeeting spam, warez and especially CSAM)?
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
I don't disagree that it was not really sustainable outside that small-ish timeframe of mid-90s to mid-00s. The change for the worse was perhaps an unavoidable change for the worse. And there are things that changed for the worse that neither you nor me talked about. For example, I really miss how online gaming worked back in the early 2000s (no matter how janky it was), qhen there was no real monetary incentive of companies trying to keep people playing on their online platforms.
Maybe the fact that I recognize that the way things changed were unavoidable fuels my general disdain internet culture nowadays, and my skepticism to tech innovations in a broader sense. Oh well.
> For example, I really miss how online gaming worked back in the early 2000s (no matter how janky it was), qhen there was no real monetary incentive of companies trying to keep people playing on their online platforms.
I'd also blame rampant cheating for that. It's damn expensive to keep up with pirates, but cheaters are an entirely different league... the most advanced cheats these days are using dedicated PCI cards to directly manipulate memory with barely any ability for the host to detect or prevent it [1]. From the grapevines, there are developers charging hundreds of dollars per month to develop and maintain these things.
On top of that, up until the late '00s no one cared too much about racist slurs, sexism or other forms of discrimination. Maybe you'd get yeeted off from a server if you'd overdo it. But nowadays? Ever since GTA SA and its infamous Hot Coffee mod, there are a loooooot of "concerned parent" eyeballs on gaming, there's advertisers/sponsors looking for their brand image, and game developers also don't want to be associated with such behavior. And so, they took away self-hosted servers so that they could moderate everything that was going on... and here we are now.
People certainly cared about racism, sexism, and other discrimination back then. They just put up with it because there was no movement to change it. It got worse any time I spoke up, so I learned to keep my head down.
Do not mistake my tolerating slurs and other insults for enjoying Nintendo games with being okay with it or the people who did it, or the people who did it and still remember being able to do it without consequence as a better time.
Back in the day you didn't typically play in massivevly populated online servers with matchmaking against complete anonymous strangers.
You typically played with a small group of people. LAN houses with people that were there physically, or groups of friends (even if they were online friends).
Even for stuff such as bnet when I played Diablo 2 or WC3, you typically created a game instance, and over time you could recognize the people playing. You curated friends lists, so you would know to avoid the ones that behaved in a way that didn't jive with the rest of the group.
Perhaps it was not scalable, and a change for the worse was unavoidable. There was a simplicity in those interactions that is completely lost and may be impossible to capture again. An echo of a time long past.
Even then, it had the same problem you still face with in-person tabletop groups. If you find a good group that does a session 0 where everyone respects what's laid down, it's fantastic. If not, it's no better than a matchmaking lobby with the worst teenagers. In-person or online or with a small group makes no difference if the norms they all agree on are trash.
Things are better now because you can find that group that aligns with your values. You aren't stuck with the shitty guild that tolerates your differences (at best) because there are enough people online and gaming to where there's probably another that fits better. And it's even better offline because you can connect with those few people in your nowhere little town who aren't butts.
Eh, I think things are much worse now. It's the reason why I seldom play online, and when I do I have absolutely no desire to communicate with anyone (when I play online the first thing I do is muting everyone else. I don't want to read what they write and much less listen to their voices).
There is no community, I am in a centralized server being matched against random people. And when there is a community, it's normally a cesspool where online interaction is at best meaningless. See Twitter for example (no matter if it before or after the retarded buffoon that acquired it, it was always a toxic dump).
Anyway, what is past is past. I talk about those times without much nostalgia (I was a broke teenager at the time, not really the happiest of times). I just rationalize about how things got worse since then.
> I'd also blame rampant cheating for that. It's damn expensive to keep up with pirates, but cheaters are an entirely different league
I'm not an avid gamer, but it's not hard to notice that multiplayer games nowadays means "all the player in the world". Most games don't have a local version to either play with multiple controllers or through LAN. They don't even want to allow custom groups to play with. Cheating is way easier to manage at small scale.
How do they work? I know that in a game (Red Dead Redemption 2, for example) cheaters have infinite health and so forth. How? The server is responsible for validating all actions performed by players to prevent cheating, such as verifying movement, health, ammunition, and other game variables. It is not supposed to accept health values sent by the client without verifying against expected game logic. The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.
Say you have a shooter with support for surround sound and immersive sound effects aka "an enemy comes from behind, so make the sound appear from rear left". For that to render properly the client needs to know where the enemy is positioned, which is information a cheat can read out from RAM and display it as an alert for the cheater. Or your average aimbot - the precise position of the enemy is (by definition) known to the client, so a cheat can "take over" keyboard and mouse when it sees an enemy and achieve a perfect headshot.
Or in racing games, extremely precise braking and steering assistance. Everything that a gamer can do, a cheat can also do.
> The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.
Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.
“ And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds”
That doesn’t follow from the points you made. What follows is that you have to deal with whatever percentage of bad actors you get. If not, you have to contract someone to handle that part of the job or do the entire job. Plenty of opportunities on those sentences that look nothing like today’s feudalism.
For example, I have several sites I self-host on cheap VM’s with lighttpd and BunnyCDN. I can do anything I want with the whole site, including moving suppliers. They have no comments. I have both an email and Facebook messaging if they want to contact me.
For comments, the main problem is catching spam or illegal content. That just means a 3rd-party provider needs to see the content, make a decision based on customer’s needs, and customer’s server needs to post the edit they made. Disqus already implemented much of this concept but it could be modified for more owner control.
The stronger control some want over comment quality requires more time and controls. There’s tools to help with that. The Lobste.rs’s site had great moderation tools. MetaFilter added a cheap, paid system for account creation that filtered tons of spam. Most implementations just need laborers to enforce their view of social norms with might or might not be easy, and might not be right or worth keeping around either.
That leads to countering the last assumption some commenters have: the methods used should keep the sites around as long as Google or Facebook. Most, human activity is temporary. Much has little, long-term value. Many sites will serve their purpose for a specific time. Others might go up and down. These possibilities are fine for non-mission-critical uses. Life will go on.
> That doesn’t follow from the points you made. What follows is that you have to deal with whatever percentage of bad actors you get. If not, you have to contract someone to handle that part of the job or do the entire job. Plenty of opportunities on those sentences that look nothing like today’s feudalism.
Well, the "eternal september" problem... back in the '00s you could reasonably run a forum or a blog even if you're some high school kid, all you needed was your parents and 10 bucks a month for some shitty virtuozzo/UML VPS. No need to deal with stuff like setting up a CDN just to survive some random asshat thinking they can DDoS you off the 'net.
I remember when admins of phpBB boards asked for PayPal donations to pay server bills every 6 months! I feel like running the same forums now should cost almost nothing for infrastructure. The moderation is still a killer though.
> On the other side, a lot of it wasn't sustainable. Just how many forums just vanished all of a sudden as the owner died, ran out of money or was simply fed up moderating bullshit and infights, not to mention the ever increasing compliance workload/risk (yeeting spam, warez and especially CSAM)?
But also lots of commercial social media sites and forums disappeared, because the company got bust or changed its focus.
>When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream,
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
That's not how it works. If a minority of people like Thing A when they're teenagers that doesn't mean suddenly when they're adults everyone will like Thing A. It just means a minority of adults will like Thing A.
Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids? They would have become adults too, so wouldn't you expect the "normal" to replace the previous and outgoing generation rather than this one particular minority?
>Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids?
Silent majority. It wouldn't surprise me if most "normal" kids simply minded their own "weird" business and waited for the winds to shift more in their favour.
What is mainstream today was counterculture 20~30 years ago, which coincidentally is about right for generational shifts in trends.
Nah, in the 90s nerdy kids were definitely the minority, even among kids.
What happened is that in early to mid 2000s, careers that nerdy kids flocked to became desirable because they were well paid.
To this day I think there is something vaguely amusing regarding the push to get more girls to code, and how it is implied that women don't flock to it as some kind of conspiracy to keep them away from nice jobs or whatever.
By all means, I think this push is a good thing. Especially as I have a daughter and I'll certainly teach her the ropes when she is a little older, maybe try to code some silly games with her, that sort of stuff.
But in the 90s when I was a kid? Girls were absolutely repeled by anything nerdy. When my group of friends found a girl that had any remote interest in nerdy things, they would fall over one another to try to accommodate her. Fairly pathetic when I remember in hindsight. There was this active desire to feel less as outcasts by having our own tastes validated by someone from the outgroup, that sort of thing.
It was a different world. Weird to think that it was a mere 3 decades ago.
I miss the 90s internet and I think even though some things have objectively gotten worse (most people interact in proprietary networks, as opposed to using open standards), as a parent, I think part of that feeling is still there, since my kids are doing some of what I was doing back then, only that instead of irc they're mostly using discord now.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
When it comes to technologies or cultural periods there's usually a Goldilocks zone where new developments open up possibilities for people to participate but complexity and the usual market capture hasn't yet set in. Basically points where ideas are up for grabs and the culture is especially dynamic and the barrier to entry is low.
For computing and the internet I think the author is spot on. The late 80s to mid 2000s had that these kinds of features. For electronic, rock or punk it was probably the 60s to 80s.
I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.
There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.
Maybe a little bit uncharitably put we went from young people writing Doom and PageRank to bored ape nfts being hustled on Discord servers.
> There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.
AI (LLMs) represents a platform shift on a large scale and I feel the environment is similar to that which birthed Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs. I think in the next 5 years Gen Z will have its heyday in terms of tech startups... At least, that's what I tell myself.
Yeah, I agree the Web3.0 stuff was overhyped--not really a platform or thinking shift. There are a lot of black-hat hackers who are Gen Z, because generally only young people take risks like that while simultaneously having the skills to get paid a tech salary.
> I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.
It's not a relativism as applied to a specific technology, it's a relativism as applied to development as a whole. The 60s-80s represented a flowering of semiconductor applications, before which we had a huge period of radio and telephony experimentation. Each era had its low-hanging fruit ripe for innovation which became a mature, hard-to-innovate technology in the future.
There's new trends out there now. On the creative side of things, bloggers, artists, and influencers are toppling the old ideas of media empires and stodgy publishing houses. A Soundcloud god can sell out a stadium and virtual avatars are filling concert halls. Non-web-tech fields like climate tech are seeing crazy investment throughout the globe. It's true that webtech now is seen as a safe, stable, lucrative career but there's always something on the bleeding edge. It just might not be your thing and that's okay, that's what the kids are for. Or, pivot your career and try something new if that's what you want.
I would imagine Doom and PageRank was the right person finding the right problem to work on at the right time in the right domain.
If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.
A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.
I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.
I’m not that much crazy older than you, but I do remember well being a teenager at the peak of the dotcom craze, being a heavy internet user, and even back then having a vague feeling that the ad riddled, desperately monetized (and shitty) websites built on the back of mostly investment capital run amok felt a little shitty as an end user. It’s hazy now and lost to time (the internet is not actually forever it’s like ~10 years old at most now) but i vividly remember pages that became harder and harder to navigate because of invasive ads, and sites that’d somehow embed malware on your computer that’d spam you with weird porn popups when your parents used the machine - it all feels vaguely similar to now, albeit much sleeker. Adware in my opinion is bordering on malware to the point I find the definitions indistinguishable. It collapsed then for good reason, and IMHO similar conditions as to now. I don’t want to live through that as a fully grown adult with a tech career now, and it worries me a lot.
What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.
Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...
> I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.
The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.
I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.
Blaming consumers for the state of things and for “not spending money” is a common refrain, and honestly is gaslighting and revisionist. The internet functioned fine for over a decade, profitably, without invasive adware like we see now, which is to the point of total degradation of the core service itself - this is not the cause of consumers, but rather the current mindset of the wall street landscape.
As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.
This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.
> The internet functioned fine for over a decade, profitably, without invasive adware like we see now
What time period are you even talking about?
In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. The internet only started growing exponentially with commercial services appearing in the late nineties. This was the time when people started to demand high speed Internet connections (ASDL) and were willing to pay for that. But this was not the case for its services. Google's primary business model way back in 2000 was already showing ads related to your search terms. Even back in 2003 Google introduced the free GMAIL service that showed ads based on your email content. That's 21 years ago.
IMHO it is your view on the Internet history that is being "revisionist" and "gaslighting". Take this from sb who had his private Internet access as early as 1998.
> Google's primary business model way back in 2000 was already showing ads related to your search terms. Even back in 2003 Google introduced the free GMAIL service that showed ads based on your email content. That's 21 years ago.
The adtech of today is nowhere near as invasive or pervasive as it was then - this is an extremely dishonest or ignorant framing of what is happening in today's internet vs the one of yesterday.
There are plenty examples of paid-for subscription services on the internet doing profitably without jamming adware/malware down your throat. Would you like examples?
> In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers.
Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and things were changing very rapidly in that time. By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic. Local ISPs for home users started popping up and AOL opened its access to USENET in 1993.
The push for residential broadband also started almost immediately; @Home was offering residential cable internet in 1996, it was the future at the time, just not very evenly distributed. This was well before PCs had the processing power to do standard-definition video.
I didn’t want to even get into this but yea as a 9 year old trying to set up IRC on an AOL connection by like 1996, this reeked of BS. I am only trusting my own hazy recollection here though, so thanks for validating it. Sometimes I feel like I am crazy describing how things used to be.
> By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic.
Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.
The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.
(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)
Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.
I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...
I have paid maybe 10k in my lifetime to be connected to internet. That is why the telecom company has been able to invest in infra. I don't have good fiber thanks to Netflix.
I'm in my very late 20s and I do miss this, too. I used MSN more than ICQ, however. I still use IRC just like I did when I was ~13 years old, without much knowledge of English.
I've been thinking about this too, perhaps it's my age (43) and the fact I vividly remember earlier times.
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
>
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
That's very plausible.
I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.
Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).
When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.
I don’t know if Palm was technically a walled garden, I’m guessing you could load from wherever, but practically it was and I don’t think anyone had a problem with it. Not sure if it’s a counterpoint but something to consider.
> I don’t know if Palm was technically a walled garden, I’m guessing you could load from wherever, but practically it was
According to this Reddit thread [1], you could easily install applications to a Palm from a memory stick. Additionally, I am not aware that Palm applications needed to be signed by the device producer (i.e. the device producer could not decide which applications are allowed vs forbidden on the device).
The Palm was wide open, there was zero DRM, I had a Palm IIIx in high school and spent hours browsing the web for fun freeware/shareware to HotSync onto it over serial. I also spent my time waiting at the bus stop writing my own bus time tables app directly on the Palm using yBasic
Palm even provided the source code of the built-in apps like the calendar etc as sample code with their SDK, leading to a huge ecosystem of freeware or shareware "Calendar Plus"-type applications that just added small quality of life features
Palm was an open platform. You could install apps from wherever you like, or write your own.
I learned 68k assembler in my teens for the purpose of cracking Palm apps for my Palm IIIe. I obviously had no credit card, and I had very little money.
This is interesting to me because I vividly remember the Summer of 2006 as being one of the most fun times I had on the Internet. I wasn't aware of these details but probably would've also said around 2007 or 2008 there was a vibe shift.
Not sure how it was 2007, but tumblr feels like relief nowadays because it still has some glimpses of that old internet. You can customize a tumblr down to the HTML, including JavaScript.
Not using the social parts (likes) etc. though. I'm using it as a way to share photos and what I'm up to with family without forced login. Like a homepage basically. It is not trying to distract visitors with pointing to other blogs either.
For me it was around this time, but 2013 when the Snowden revelations came out. The internet became creepy because of all the spying and collection. It was a distinct change in my attitude I remember distinctly.
One of the possible names for Gen Z that was thrown around about a decade ago was "iGen", a reference to the iPhone and noticing there was a cultural shift in those that came of age on/after 2008.
Been there, got on the internet ~90 (pre-www), my first web page ~93, first web coder job ~95. I do think it is overglorified (the web-part) - 80s BBS were more of a wild world with excitement to me.
What I did love though was getting on IRC, sitting in front of an amber VAX terminal late at night till morning, talking to people across the world. Reading NEWS and discussing things with people around the globe. What an eye opener for me.
The internet nowadays is run by gatekeepers, as traffic is increasingly funneled though a dozen or so popular sites. If you get banned from Facebook, twitter, Amazon, reddit, youtube etc. you're SOL. You either have to use in read-only mode or make new account and hope they do not notice it is tied to the old one (also, you're putting all your eggs in a single basket). A social media ban is effectively a ban on the person if it's tied to a real name/identify. The only people who get to use social media to its full capability are those who have the connections or clout to negotiate/dispute the bans that are inevitable.
I have multiple accounts on fb, twitter, reddit, maybe youtube. It's not that big a deal in practice. And it's quite unusual to get banned unless you do something quite bad.
The only thing I miss from the 90s-00s was the fun we had on IRC. And that was mostly due to our carelessness and youth, so I think I'm good in this future.
The funny thing is I'm still on IRC, with about the same size channel, but everyone is "new" and we're all old. I don't have any contact with the peeps from IRC back then.
I was a big user of IRC in the past, owned some channels that had thousands of daily messages, IRC may be mostly gone, but the experience and vibe is still as alive as ever on other IM apps.
They all essentially work the same as IRC did but with modern bells and mobile support.
You still can use it that way. I don't read the backlogs of large chats. I just talk to the people actively there in the moment. It's pretty much the same as it was but you don't get the spam of "Hey, anyone online?" on low activity groups like you used to.
well I was around then and am around now and yeah, still writing a blog that is in no way monetised or SEO prepped. I do use OG for better search & share but thats it. built first websites en of 90s, started on Blogger in 2003 and if I had not done that I would not have done the webdev and video knowledge of my tech pivot. That changed my life and made possible everything I have done since.
AI has me super jealous of how quickly kids can learn things today. Back in the 90s banging you head against the wall trying to get the simplest things in Linux to work, and trying to learn programming from a book with minimal resources online. It was 'hard mode'. I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that.. though I would like to play some Quake deathmatch again on a populated server..
There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.
> I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that..
I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.
The problem is you struggle to hack together a sub optimal solution because you don't have the resources to figure out anything better. It didn't make me better, it was a waste of time. Remember experts exchange? Uhg..
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.
Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.
>
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains
Today, you can quickly get a shallow, superficial understanding of the domain that might impress some people who know barely anything about the respective domain.
> and learn while asking questions to an AI that [...] has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things.
Bullshit. I've seen blind idiots kids pasting Solaris commands into Linux servers, without having any clue of what were they doing.
Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.
If any, we the older Millenials are trained to do hard tasks with just the manuals sitting on a table.
The rest will be clueless.
> Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.
This isn't going to happen. The literature on model collapse suggests it occurs when your model is fed on majority synthetic data, which is not how anyone is training models. Even if they were, do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?
> do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?
This happens all the time. Once the first gen devs are off, the releases tend to alternate. A decline from the existing version and then an improvement that mostly fixes what they made worse in the prior release. e.g. Windows XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10
The nature of AI though may make it more difficult to distinguish the failings immediately which could result in an irreversible inflection point.
AI's are not OSes. Once the source of training comes mostly from the AI itself instead of human curated sources, what will you get over time it's the same thing the Megahal/Hailo chatbots parroted a few decades ago.
> do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?
Yes. Capitalist software vendors do that all the time. Google search has been getting continually worse over the decades. Windows is more bloated than ever. AI is going to be no different.
Hell, I'm old and had been meaning to learn React for years but never really stuck with it (I have things to do). With GPT it was pretty easy. I still read the docs, but I don't get stuck for hours on syntax minutiae and the like.
Dunno, I never saw the value of learning some esoteric piece of language/library/sysadmin trivia I'd use once or twice after spending hours poking at things trying to figure it out.
This is true. I am lucky to have learned as much as I have by this point. My Dad reminds me almost daily how lucky I am.
There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.
I left Windows for Linux in 1999 and I do NOT miss how difficult everything was to get working, even with the reasonably user-friendly Red Hat (5? 6?). I even became the maintainer of a Linmodem driver by accident (it was abandoned, the author was uncontactable, and I needed the modem to dial).
I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.
I’m so glad I lived through hard mode. I have a kind of perseverance and resilience in the face of difficult learning challenges that my teenagers are hardly developing (despite my best efforts), and it has made my life so much richer.
In your dreams. Corps are running the internet and small fish have no place to go but the social networks. I am surprised why forums even exist anymore at this point.
The Internet was dream once, back when giant telcos ran circuit
switched copper line monopolies. It remains a dream today - unfinished
work we still have not realised. Because it's not a thing, it's a
social project.
There's a line in "Leave the world behind" [0] where Rose says about
Friends that it's feel is "nostalgic for a world that never happened"
It's called "anemoia" [1] It's many things. One is that it's a way
of expressing latent values that don't fit into the current culture.
"Small fish have no place to go" is a comment on a perceived reality
that misses (and so reveals) two important points; the Internet didn't
change [2], people did. It's not a place you go, it's a thing you do
and the attitude you bring to that.
But ultimately the Internet is nothing but people connected by
wires. People have moods we call "culture". Back then it was
unbelievably optimistic and giddy. People wanted to reach
out. Everything was ripe with possibility and fun. The OP is justified
to wonder what it was like to live then.
Now we know what kind of things are at the other end of that wire and
it feels more like a dark forest.
It's more than that people like me "just get older", the culture has
palpably changed for the worse. Climate change maybe. It's become
objectively more pessimistic and neurotic. Sure there's a few
hold-outs, but that takes a lot of Prozac to keep up.
Anyway, the future of the Internet is all about "small fish". That's
all it's ever been about.
Man, I feel you. The old internet had this raw, curious energy that just isn’t the same today. That’s kind of what led us to create Bettermode. We still believe in that mission of giving people the tools to build, connect, and create something meaningful—like the good ol’ days but with today's tech.
It’s not about looking back, though—it’s about bringing that same spirit into the future. We’re still here building towards that, even if the landscape looks a bit different now.
Haha it was a fun time. We had forums and blogs that people would visit. It was a blast. I still have a blog but back then I'd get random visitors from the Internet. These days not unless it's linked somewhere. Centralized platforms won the discoverability game.
On the plus side we're never bored. But I'll tell you, man. Back then we'd comment with our real names on random blogs. And shit like that. Privacy and stuff wasn't really a big deal.
after hearing mark fisher slow cancellation of the future, i believed there was more to it than just an eternal september.
there was a real utopian feeling of the early internet. one i remember. this was lost due to the commercialization and corporatization of the web.
the internet began as a place for creativity, freedom, exploration andlater became dominated by profit-driven platforms, surveillance capitalism, and monopolies like google and facebook.
neoliberalism turned the internet into a tool for consumption and data extraction, stifling the initial sense of openness and possibility, and replacing it with controlled, market-driven environments.
this shift eroded the hope for a radically different digital future. and that is (part) of the reason i miss the 90s - 00s internet.
the other side of it is the emergence of the complex web. where things that used to be simple are now endlessly complicated, and working on the web feels like building a jenga tower on a plane in turbulence.
I do miss a simpler time. I run some very modern hardware, with modern games and hardware. But I also play around with my GameBoy, maintain a DOS VM for writing my novels, reach for Lynx as often as Firefox.
Simplicity isn't just an aesthetic though. I find it to be a requirement just for getting through life. I shouldnt need adblockers and popup blockers and consent optouts just to view a site. They're worse than the era of iframe popups.
Granted, I am prone to overstimulation and get seizures when it happens. But that just reinforces what I already want. A space to enjoy what little life I've got.
Social media is like TV zapping, just... probably more addicting because you're likelier to find something mildly interesting (to you). It's also described as junk food for the brain. Don't go there, instead spend time in the weird and fun niches, which are probably just fine still! (Note, even back then they had people who were wrong on the internet.)
If you use Social Media sites sometimes, I recommend at least getting rid of "recommendations"/"sponsored" boxes. To see what that looks like e.g. on Twitter without installing an extension and keeping it up-to-date (cause Twitter keeps changing their stuff), you can try a bookmarklet like this:
Not all is worse in this decade though. If you're actually looking to learn stuff that involves e.g. physically building stuff (rather than just doing stuff on your computer), YouTube et al. have improved that by a lot! (Of course, this kind of content can be addicting too. But at least you learn a thing or two!)
Note: the YouTube of the 00s was very low-resolution and the comments often were really bad! (https://xkcd.com/202/)
1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.
2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.
3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.
4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.
5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.
6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.
7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.
8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!
9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.
Every now and then as I find a piece of scarce, non-trivial information on the net in a minute or 5, I stop to think about how long that would have taken 30 years ago.
If I did have some appropriate physical reference books to look in, it might still take 15 minutes to an hour. But if not, I'd have to travel to a library (weather permitting) while/if it was open, find the appropriate section of books, read through the index or chapter titles, etc. and scan - in hopes the answer was there.
Today, in some spheres (except e.g. those where the answers are still hidden) I'm much -much- freer to ask many more questions and deep-dive into subjects that, back then, I could only dream of learning about. Yes, I could read a book, if I knew the book existed. And where to order it from. And wait for it to arrive in 2 to 6 weeks.
If only I'd had this 30 years ago. Hell, I imagine, what if I'd had this power as a child in a small town.
Let's be honest, one reason many of us loved it was because of Flash. Thankfully there's Ruffle for that, now
Also, it would be helpful if Google hadn't steadily degraded their product. +words +that +must +be +included +should +have +those +words +in +the +search. Not "fuzzy search". Not "can't find my result even when I explicitly tell you". Which includes surfacing of more obscure sites (like what wiby/marginalia do now).
(Which also includes censorship but that's a different story)
Don’t know if it’s sad or sickening to see Google pretend it only has 10 results for a query when we all know every single query got 10k-1m results before they nerfed it
Whenever I come across posts like this, I need to remind myself that it's actually a very small minority of people online who feel this way. Most people are perfectly happy with how the internet is right now and don't care for going back to things you used to do online a decade or two ago.
On social media: today it's no longer even about ordinary individuals sharing their ordinary lives online like they used to 15 years ago. It's about consuming content around your interests (which includes entertainment). Very few people on my instagram make personal posts anymore (myself included) and when they do, they're few and far in between. It's all brands and content creators. I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online. It was a new concept to many between 2006-2014 to be able to do it, and so many did. Now they're past it. It was interesting in 2008 to see that Johnny is currently sipping on a latte in front of his window. Now nobody gives a fuck unless Johnny is a celebrity.
On scrolling TikTok-like feeds: not to glorify the concept but it makes it easier for the anti-social-medias to accept if you think of it as the equivalent of when your parents would get home, turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels trying to find something interesting to watch. TikTok and Reels put the TV in your pocket. 80% of the content on them is of no substance but occasionally a valuable post does come up and provide me with something I need/enjoy. The other day, I had a spontaneous date night because a reel showed up for my wife about some food truck nearby and she shared it with me (we went there an hour later and it turned out to be a good one - we're going again next week). P.S. it didn't even cross my mind to bother posting a snap of my meal as a story on IG :)
> I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online.
I tend to disagree. I have a few hundred friends/people I follow on Instagram and I see people post stories and posts about their life all the time. People are generally trying to portray "Look at me! I have such a cool life!". This is how it is for young people.
As for TikTok, I find myself scrolling with no end in sight. I think the studies on the addiction level of shortform content and its long term effects is going to be extremely shocking.
I can watch an episode or two of a show, maybe 30m-1hr, and turn it off. But TikTok keeps me constantly stimulated and I can easily forget what I am watching and "doomscroll" for hours. With TV I make the conscious decision to watch it. With TikTok I have to make the conscious decision to not watch it or open the app. This may be a side effect of how my brain works, but a lot of young people have similar experiences.
I think the main difference in our experiences is a generational gap in how social media is used.
But why wouldn't the solution with TikTok just be to delete your account and the app? I am young like you and that works perfectly fine for me.
If friends want to share videos/tiktoks with me, they download them and then send them with another messaging app so I don't have to go to the platform. And that's not something I force on them but something they do because they really want me to see those videos I suppose.
And what is the content people scroll to? And how does one become a celebrity in the first place on IG or TikTok? And what teens do all day long? Yep, sharing their live.
I share your experience, but for me it is just the one of a millennial getting older.
Was tough to get past the first sentence. I wouldn’t consider 18 the prime of your life, that’s still far too young to know better.
The trope of old man yells at cloud should have the dual of young person thinks they have discovered something new. It takes a while to learn there is nothing new under the sun.
Sure, normies have invaded the internet, but there are plenty of niches in various fields that are sufficiently avant-gard that even the most dissenting hipsters can still find a home. But it’s never easy, almost by definition such places are defined by their difficulty of entry.
I was late to the party (but with my country’s tardiness in anything technology, it was pretty much the same) as I started around 2010, but the one nice thing I do remember was how easy it was to find random blogs or forums about your subject of interest. Even though I was connected for only an hour or so a day, information was readily available although sparse. Now, we have more data, but it feels more like a humid jungle full of tarpits and biting insects. Even corporate sites have the slimy feeling you’d associate with shady sites that wanted you to update flash.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadLive your life, not the one you think you should have had.
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
The monetary model has changed for sure but that was inevitable.
The 90s internet was slow. Stuff like IRC and email are a product of their time. Stuff was designed to work on 28 or 56k modems. The lucky few had ISDN.
I don't miss the old internet that much. I miss some of the apps and the stripped down low bandwidth UX of stuff.
What I really miss is th era of native desktop applications that had a consistent look and feel.
The problem now is not the visible aspect of advertising on the internet. It's the obsessive tracking and categorization of people to make advertising more effective that I'm upset with. There was no such apparatus in the 90s/00s. Most legitimate websites wouldn't be plastered with banner spam, but all legitimate websites now will attempt to track you.
I was a high school senior in 2006. Growing up with computers becoming exponentially faster and better every 6 months was freakin’ amazing and I’m happy to have seen it.
> I am also at the age where I can take advantage of the shift towards AI and related technological advancements
Me too! This shift comes every few years. The first successful mass deployment of modern AI technology was in the 1970’s when the post office started using computer vision to route mail. The shift to AI that I got to see was Google. That was amazing.
Big fan of the current LLM shift too, of course, but it feels less magical than Google did. A little because I understand it better, a little because it benefits me less personally than Google did. Feels more like a marginal improvement whereas Google felt like omg everything is different now the olds are so behind the times they can’t even comprehend!!
But I think it’s more that the big shift happens with your newfound ability to grok things, leverage information, and get shit done in your late teens / early 20’s than the actual technology available. Whatever new tech happens around that age will feel like a profound hugely impactful change in the world (but it’s actually you, not the tech).
> I just think the internet is much worse than it was
It is. And also it isn’t. Depends where you go and who you talk to.
It was very exciting. Every year that followed seemed like a massive leap forward with smartphone evolution, 4G LTE market penetration, application improvements, etc.
It was a really fun time and I have fond memories of jailbreaking early iPhones/rooting Android phones.
It was all new and very entertaining.
It's definitely worse than it was, in some ways. In other ways it's better. TLS is everywhere now. uBlock origin exists. The bar for pwning web apps is much higher today because we learned collectively from our mistakes/our fun times defacing PHP-Nuke sites.
But I miss pirating warez on IRC and scoring game rips from FTP topsites, and LAN parties. Facebook and Twitter were really fun in the early years, but these days Big Social really sucks and "growth focus" in tech is exhausting.
TLS is a racket. The protocol is important, it's required, sure.
The companies who issue the certificates however have been printing money ever since SSL came to exist. Each certificate issued is a money note.
LetsEncrypt only exists now and only because the internet is an heap of security mess. And caused by the same SSL certificate companies.
Domains are too.
Let'sEncrypt has been providing service for nearly 10 years now
I was there and I'm glad its past.
The computers were slow.
Microsoft ruled the day, which was fine for me because I was a Microsoft fanboy back then.
The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
Things crashed - alot.
I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
I'm certainly glad I witnessed all that first hand since 1979 but wouldn't want to go back.
The program has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown.
> The computers were slow.
Not for mundane tasks, or not a whole lot anyways. Productivity software used to be optimized for the client. Today's equivalent is cloud-based, written in managed code and often actually slower.
> Microsoft ruled the day
I do agree here, this part sucked.
> The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.
This varies by field and task. As a developer, it was easier to break through because there were not 35,000 competing partial alternatives. Without this "value puzzle" new stuff was a much easier sell.
> Things crashed - alot.
In my particular experience, things break a little more than they used to. OS's don't crash as much, though.
> I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?
Same here, but only because I can emulate old platforms, otherwise I would. I still play old games and use old software I wrote.
https://youtube.com/@danooct1 shows off some old malware.
Agreed. I was born in '83. The author misses the things he never even experienced and is living in the 90s-00s "Highlights" reel.
5" floppy drives. 3" hard disks. Single core computers. 28k dial-up was almost torture. 56k was not much better. Waiting 5-10 minutes for a single picture to load one. pixel. at. a. time. CRT monitors. Trojans. Viruses.
> Things crashed - alot.
Ahh, the Windows Blue Screen of Death. "hello darkness my old friend."
Programming (for me) was mostly basic and a bit of C, although I never totally figured out pointers. By the time I got to university, we had early versions of Java and HTML.
That time was fun, but right now is fun in different ways. The tools are much better. Computing is massively cheaper. Laptops weren’t nearly as good as desktops until the early 2000s. Also, you couldn’t do much with AI back then.
Was it skipped, or was it spread over many decades with AI winters interspersed throughout?
In 2017 I thought I missed bitcoin, still managed to mine a meager amount on my parents computers. In the modern day I was proven wrong.
Perhaps, but these will be different people than those who miss the 90-00 internet.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.
The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
Maybe the fact that I recognize that the way things changed were unavoidable fuels my general disdain internet culture nowadays, and my skepticism to tech innovations in a broader sense. Oh well.
I'd also blame rampant cheating for that. It's damn expensive to keep up with pirates, but cheaters are an entirely different league... the most advanced cheats these days are using dedicated PCI cards to directly manipulate memory with barely any ability for the host to detect or prevent it [1]. From the grapevines, there are developers charging hundreds of dollars per month to develop and maintain these things.
On top of that, up until the late '00s no one cared too much about racist slurs, sexism or other forms of discrimination. Maybe you'd get yeeted off from a server if you'd overdo it. But nowadays? Ever since GTA SA and its infamous Hot Coffee mod, there are a loooooot of "concerned parent" eyeballs on gaming, there's advertisers/sponsors looking for their brand image, and game developers also don't want to be associated with such behavior. And so, they took away self-hosted servers so that they could moderate everything that was going on... and here we are now.
[1] https://github.com/mbrking/ceserver-pcileech
Do not mistake my tolerating slurs and other insults for enjoying Nintendo games with being okay with it or the people who did it, or the people who did it and still remember being able to do it without consequence as a better time.
You typically played with a small group of people. LAN houses with people that were there physically, or groups of friends (even if they were online friends).
Even for stuff such as bnet when I played Diablo 2 or WC3, you typically created a game instance, and over time you could recognize the people playing. You curated friends lists, so you would know to avoid the ones that behaved in a way that didn't jive with the rest of the group.
Perhaps it was not scalable, and a change for the worse was unavoidable. There was a simplicity in those interactions that is completely lost and may be impossible to capture again. An echo of a time long past.
Things are better now because you can find that group that aligns with your values. You aren't stuck with the shitty guild that tolerates your differences (at best) because there are enough people online and gaming to where there's probably another that fits better. And it's even better offline because you can connect with those few people in your nowhere little town who aren't butts.
edit: for example
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40347601
There is no community, I am in a centralized server being matched against random people. And when there is a community, it's normally a cesspool where online interaction is at best meaningless. See Twitter for example (no matter if it before or after the retarded buffoon that acquired it, it was always a toxic dump).
Anyway, what is past is past. I talk about those times without much nostalgia (I was a broke teenager at the time, not really the happiest of times). I just rationalize about how things got worse since then.
I'm not an avid gamer, but it's not hard to notice that multiplayer games nowadays means "all the player in the world". Most games don't have a local version to either play with multiple controllers or through LAN. They don't even want to allow custom groups to play with. Cheating is way easier to manage at small scale.
How do they work? I know that in a game (Red Dead Redemption 2, for example) cheaters have infinite health and so forth. How? The server is responsible for validating all actions performed by players to prevent cheating, such as verifying movement, health, ammunition, and other game variables. It is not supposed to accept health values sent by the client without verifying against expected game logic. The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.
Or in racing games, extremely precise braking and steering assistance. Everything that a gamer can do, a cheat can also do.
As far as assistance goes: I despise it. Modern games have "aim assist" which is just a built-in aimbot. sighs
Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.
That doesn’t follow from the points you made. What follows is that you have to deal with whatever percentage of bad actors you get. If not, you have to contract someone to handle that part of the job or do the entire job. Plenty of opportunities on those sentences that look nothing like today’s feudalism.
For example, I have several sites I self-host on cheap VM’s with lighttpd and BunnyCDN. I can do anything I want with the whole site, including moving suppliers. They have no comments. I have both an email and Facebook messaging if they want to contact me.
For comments, the main problem is catching spam or illegal content. That just means a 3rd-party provider needs to see the content, make a decision based on customer’s needs, and customer’s server needs to post the edit they made. Disqus already implemented much of this concept but it could be modified for more owner control.
The stronger control some want over comment quality requires more time and controls. There’s tools to help with that. The Lobste.rs’s site had great moderation tools. MetaFilter added a cheap, paid system for account creation that filtered tons of spam. Most implementations just need laborers to enforce their view of social norms with might or might not be easy, and might not be right or worth keeping around either.
That leads to countering the last assumption some commenters have: the methods used should keep the sites around as long as Google or Facebook. Most, human activity is temporary. Much has little, long-term value. Many sites will serve their purpose for a specific time. Others might go up and down. These possibilities are fine for non-mission-critical uses. Life will go on.
Well, the "eternal september" problem... back in the '00s you could reasonably run a forum or a blog even if you're some high school kid, all you needed was your parents and 10 bucks a month for some shitty virtuozzo/UML VPS. No need to deal with stuff like setting up a CDN just to survive some random asshat thinking they can DDoS you off the 'net.
But also lots of commercial social media sites and forums disappeared, because the company got bust or changed its focus.
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids? They would have become adults too, so wouldn't you expect the "normal" to replace the previous and outgoing generation rather than this one particular minority?
Silent majority. It wouldn't surprise me if most "normal" kids simply minded their own "weird" business and waited for the winds to shift more in their favour.
What is mainstream today was counterculture 20~30 years ago, which coincidentally is about right for generational shifts in trends.
What happened is that in early to mid 2000s, careers that nerdy kids flocked to became desirable because they were well paid.
To this day I think there is something vaguely amusing regarding the push to get more girls to code, and how it is implied that women don't flock to it as some kind of conspiracy to keep them away from nice jobs or whatever.
By all means, I think this push is a good thing. Especially as I have a daughter and I'll certainly teach her the ropes when she is a little older, maybe try to code some silly games with her, that sort of stuff.
But in the 90s when I was a kid? Girls were absolutely repeled by anything nerdy. When my group of friends found a girl that had any remote interest in nerdy things, they would fall over one another to try to accommodate her. Fairly pathetic when I remember in hindsight. There was this active desire to feel less as outcasts by having our own tastes validated by someone from the outgroup, that sort of thing.
It was a different world. Weird to think that it was a mere 3 decades ago.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
For computing and the internet I think the author is spot on. The late 80s to mid 2000s had that these kinds of features. For electronic, rock or punk it was probably the 60s to 80s. I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.
There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.
Maybe a little bit uncharitably put we went from young people writing Doom and PageRank to bored ape nfts being hustled on Discord servers.
AI (LLMs) represents a platform shift on a large scale and I feel the environment is similar to that which birthed Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs. I think in the next 5 years Gen Z will have its heyday in terms of tech startups... At least, that's what I tell myself.
Yeah, I agree the Web3.0 stuff was overhyped--not really a platform or thinking shift. There are a lot of black-hat hackers who are Gen Z, because generally only young people take risks like that while simultaneously having the skills to get paid a tech salary.
It's not a relativism as applied to a specific technology, it's a relativism as applied to development as a whole. The 60s-80s represented a flowering of semiconductor applications, before which we had a huge period of radio and telephony experimentation. Each era had its low-hanging fruit ripe for innovation which became a mature, hard-to-innovate technology in the future.
There's new trends out there now. On the creative side of things, bloggers, artists, and influencers are toppling the old ideas of media empires and stodgy publishing houses. A Soundcloud god can sell out a stadium and virtual avatars are filling concert halls. Non-web-tech fields like climate tech are seeing crazy investment throughout the globe. It's true that webtech now is seen as a safe, stable, lucrative career but there's always something on the bleeding edge. It just might not be your thing and that's okay, that's what the kids are for. Or, pivot your career and try something new if that's what you want.
If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.
A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.
I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.
I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.
Is it nostalgia, or is there something more? Who knows at this point.
I’m 30.
What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.
The internet has existed for longer than the web which is already 30 yrs at this point. Not sure I catch your point that it's 10 yrs old.
Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...
The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.
I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.
As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.
This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.
What time period are you even talking about?
In the mid nineties the Internet was largely a research network between university computers and paid for by tax payers. The internet only started growing exponentially with commercial services appearing in the late nineties. This was the time when people started to demand high speed Internet connections (ASDL) and were willing to pay for that. But this was not the case for its services. Google's primary business model way back in 2000 was already showing ads related to your search terms. Even back in 2003 Google introduced the free GMAIL service that showed ads based on your email content. That's 21 years ago.
IMHO it is your view on the Internet history that is being "revisionist" and "gaslighting". Take this from sb who had his private Internet access as early as 1998.
The adtech of today is nowhere near as invasive or pervasive as it was then - this is an extremely dishonest or ignorant framing of what is happening in today's internet vs the one of yesterday.
There are plenty examples of paid-for subscription services on the internet doing profitably without jamming adware/malware down your throat. Would you like examples?
Your timeline is off by at least half a decade, and things were changing very rapidly in that time. By the mid-'90s, NSFNET was formally dead, after years of accepting commercial traffic. Local ISPs for home users started popping up and AOL opened its access to USENET in 1993.
The push for residential broadband also started almost immediately; @Home was offering residential cable internet in 1996, it was the future at the time, just not very evenly distributed. This was well before PCs had the processing power to do standard-definition video.
Mind you: Your statement says nothing about profitability. Until 1995 the NSFNET was the most important backbone of the American internet and it was paid for by the US government. Of course, other countries lagged way behind the US' development where the Internet still remained primarily a research network until the late nineties.
The German Telekom e.g. was still pitching its BTX service in 1995 (kinda like teletext for modems) that could be used for shopping, online banking and stuff -- stuff which you could not really do on the WWW yet. I remember my first experiments in browsing the WWW happend over a BTX gateway and it was awfully slow even by the standards back then. The first DSL service only started in 1999/2000 in Germany in the form of a test program where you were required to answer market research question to get a cheap, subsidized service.
(I mean we are talking about the _World Wide_ Web, here, not the _American_ Web.)
Furthermore, your argument also says _nothing_ about how commercial Internet services where financing themselves back then which was the original topic of this thread. GeoCities, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google -- all those sites featured adds back in the 90s. If I remember correctly, Netscape Navigator also featured a "what's cool" button that -- I believe -- brought you to sites that payed for being advertised that way. So even back in the Internet's infancy it was largely commercialized using advertisements. This has never changed. And this was my original point.
I am not saying I am big fan of ads. But this is largely a problem of news agencies that work around a clock to bring you news (or rumors) and are currently unable to finance their services by subscriptions alone. This is the sector where ad spam is most visible. Despite all that the Internet has become a tremendously important part of our lives bringing real value: We get the news from there, we go shopping there, we watch live broadcasts there, watch movies, stay in contact with our friends, hold meetings, apply for jobs or housing and even work in there. The Internet was a toy in the 90s. These days it is central to our social lives. Saying the Internet is "broken" today and we have "skrewed it up" just because of its advertisement sector is a bit naive ...
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
That's very plausible.
I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.
Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).
When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
According to this Reddit thread [1], you could easily install applications to a Palm from a memory stick. Additionally, I am not aware that Palm applications needed to be signed by the device producer (i.e. the device producer could not decide which applications are allowed vs forbidden on the device).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/tmvm9z/is_there_a_way...
Palm even provided the source code of the built-in apps like the calendar etc as sample code with their SDK, leading to a huge ecosystem of freeware or shareware "Calendar Plus"-type applications that just added small quality of life features
I learned 68k assembler in my teens for the purpose of cracking Palm apps for my Palm IIIe. I obviously had no credit card, and I had very little money.
So corporate profit over users.
Another acceleration was google turning to shit as well.
http://0x0.st/Xx1H.png
Not using the social parts (likes) etc. though. I'm using it as a way to share photos and what I'm up to with family without forced login. Like a homepage basically. It is not trying to distract visitors with pointing to other blogs either.
The birth of the iPhone changed a lot of things, but it took a few years to reach critical mass.
What I did love though was getting on IRC, sitting in front of an amber VAX terminal late at night till morning, talking to people across the world. Reading NEWS and discussing things with people around the globe. What an eye opener for me.
There are more niche places, but it does get strange seeking out this tiny communities online
And so on.
The funny thing is I'm still on IRC, with about the same size channel, but everyone is "new" and we're all old. I don't have any contact with the peeps from IRC back then.
The rest like indymedia, libera, oftc are mostly to stay updated on tech and ask questions about tech.
They all essentially work the same as IRC did but with modern bells and mobile support.
There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.
I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.
Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.
Today, you can quickly get a shallow, superficial understanding of the domain that might impress some people who know barely anything about the respective domain.
> and learn while asking questions to an AI that [...] has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things.
ROFL
Bullshit. I've seen blind idiots kids pasting Solaris commands into Linux servers, without having any clue of what were they doing.
Kids are going to be really screwed when the AI output converges into more Markov-chains like bullshit as it's being self-feeding with it's own output, creating something like a big but pompous Megahal/Hailo clone.
If any, we the older Millenials are trained to do hard tasks with just the manuals sitting on a table. The rest will be clueless.
This isn't going to happen. The literature on model collapse suggests it occurs when your model is fed on majority synthetic data, which is not how anyone is training models. Even if they were, do you think they're going to ship something that performs noticeably worse than its predecessor?
Because the end users will use far more the output data from AI than feeding it from remote sources far from the original.
Disasters will happen, just wait.
This happens all the time. Once the first gen devs are off, the releases tend to alternate. A decline from the existing version and then an improvement that mostly fixes what they made worse in the prior release. e.g. Windows XP -> Vista -> 7 -> 8 -> 10
The nature of AI though may make it more difficult to distinguish the failings immediately which could result in an irreversible inflection point.
Yes. Capitalist software vendors do that all the time. Google search has been getting continually worse over the decades. Windows is more bloated than ever. AI is going to be no different.
Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi
There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.
I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.
There's a line in "Leave the world behind" [0] where Rose says about Friends that it's feel is "nostalgic for a world that never happened"
It's called "anemoia" [1] It's many things. One is that it's a way of expressing latent values that don't fit into the current culture.
"Small fish have no place to go" is a comment on a perceived reality that misses (and so reveals) two important points; the Internet didn't change [2], people did. It's not a place you go, it's a thing you do and the attitude you bring to that.
But ultimately the Internet is nothing but people connected by wires. People have moods we call "culture". Back then it was unbelievably optimistic and giddy. People wanted to reach out. Everything was ripe with possibility and fun. The OP is justified to wonder what it was like to live then.
Now we know what kind of things are at the other end of that wire and it feels more like a dark forest.
It's more than that people like me "just get older", the culture has palpably changed for the worse. Climate change maybe. It's become objectively more pessimistic and neurotic. Sure there's a few hold-outs, but that takes a lot of Prozac to keep up.
Anyway, the future of the Internet is all about "small fish". That's all it's ever been about.
[0] book: Rumaan Alam screen: Sam Esmail
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/anemoia-nostalgi...
[2] Of course the Internet did change technically, it got much bigger, faster, cheaper, more reliable etc.
It’s not about looking back, though—it’s about bringing that same spirit into the future. We’re still here building towards that, even if the landscape looks a bit different now.
Compared to today, I really wish that you could've had the creativity and general attitude of the 00s web with the tech of today.
But I guess this is why I don't regret spending so much time on the 00s web.
Around 97-98 was really when I went deep into it mostly because of Starcraft. That led to battle.net which led to IRC and the rest is history.
On the plus side we're never bored. But I'll tell you, man. Back then we'd comment with our real names on random blogs. And shit like that. Privacy and stuff wasn't really a big deal.
there was a real utopian feeling of the early internet. one i remember. this was lost due to the commercialization and corporatization of the web.
the internet began as a place for creativity, freedom, exploration andlater became dominated by profit-driven platforms, surveillance capitalism, and monopolies like google and facebook.
neoliberalism turned the internet into a tool for consumption and data extraction, stifling the initial sense of openness and possibility, and replacing it with controlled, market-driven environments.
this shift eroded the hope for a radically different digital future. and that is (part) of the reason i miss the 90s - 00s internet.
the other side of it is the emergence of the complex web. where things that used to be simple are now endlessly complicated, and working on the web feels like building a jenga tower on a plane in turbulence.
I do miss a simpler time. I run some very modern hardware, with modern games and hardware. But I also play around with my GameBoy, maintain a DOS VM for writing my novels, reach for Lynx as often as Firefox.
Simplicity isn't just an aesthetic though. I find it to be a requirement just for getting through life. I shouldnt need adblockers and popup blockers and consent optouts just to view a site. They're worse than the era of iframe popups.
Granted, I am prone to overstimulation and get seizures when it happens. But that just reinforces what I already want. A space to enjoy what little life I've got.
If you use Social Media sites sometimes, I recommend at least getting rid of "recommendations"/"sponsored" boxes. To see what that looks like e.g. on Twitter without installing an extension and keeping it up-to-date (cause Twitter keeps changing their stuff), you can try a bookmarklet like this:
Not all is worse in this decade though. If you're actually looking to learn stuff that involves e.g. physically building stuff (rather than just doing stuff on your computer), YouTube et al. have improved that by a lot! (Of course, this kind of content can be addicting too. But at least you learn a thing or two!)Note: the YouTube of the 00s was very low-resolution and the comments often were really bad! (https://xkcd.com/202/)
1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.
2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.
3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.
4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.
5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.
6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.
7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.
8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!
9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.
If I did have some appropriate physical reference books to look in, it might still take 15 minutes to an hour. But if not, I'd have to travel to a library (weather permitting) while/if it was open, find the appropriate section of books, read through the index or chapter titles, etc. and scan - in hopes the answer was there.
Today, in some spheres (except e.g. those where the answers are still hidden) I'm much -much- freer to ask many more questions and deep-dive into subjects that, back then, I could only dream of learning about. Yes, I could read a book, if I knew the book existed. And where to order it from. And wait for it to arrive in 2 to 6 weeks.
If only I'd had this 30 years ago. Hell, I imagine, what if I'd had this power as a child in a small town.
Also, it would be helpful if Google hadn't steadily degraded their product. +words +that +must +be +included +should +have +those +words +in +the +search. Not "fuzzy search". Not "can't find my result even when I explicitly tell you". Which includes surfacing of more obscure sites (like what wiby/marginalia do now).
(Which also includes censorship but that's a different story)
On social media: today it's no longer even about ordinary individuals sharing their ordinary lives online like they used to 15 years ago. It's about consuming content around your interests (which includes entertainment). Very few people on my instagram make personal posts anymore (myself included) and when they do, they're few and far in between. It's all brands and content creators. I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online. It was a new concept to many between 2006-2014 to be able to do it, and so many did. Now they're past it. It was interesting in 2008 to see that Johnny is currently sipping on a latte in front of his window. Now nobody gives a fuck unless Johnny is a celebrity.
On scrolling TikTok-like feeds: not to glorify the concept but it makes it easier for the anti-social-medias to accept if you think of it as the equivalent of when your parents would get home, turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels trying to find something interesting to watch. TikTok and Reels put the TV in your pocket. 80% of the content on them is of no substance but occasionally a valuable post does come up and provide me with something I need/enjoy. The other day, I had a spontaneous date night because a reel showed up for my wife about some food truck nearby and she shared it with me (we went there an hour later and it turned out to be a good one - we're going again next week). P.S. it didn't even cross my mind to bother posting a snap of my meal as a story on IG :)
I tend to disagree. I have a few hundred friends/people I follow on Instagram and I see people post stories and posts about their life all the time. People are generally trying to portray "Look at me! I have such a cool life!". This is how it is for young people.
As for TikTok, I find myself scrolling with no end in sight. I think the studies on the addiction level of shortform content and its long term effects is going to be extremely shocking.
I can watch an episode or two of a show, maybe 30m-1hr, and turn it off. But TikTok keeps me constantly stimulated and I can easily forget what I am watching and "doomscroll" for hours. With TV I make the conscious decision to watch it. With TikTok I have to make the conscious decision to not watch it or open the app. This may be a side effect of how my brain works, but a lot of young people have similar experiences.
I think the main difference in our experiences is a generational gap in how social media is used.
If friends want to share videos/tiktoks with me, they download them and then send them with another messaging app so I don't have to go to the platform. And that's not something I force on them but something they do because they really want me to see those videos I suppose.
I share your experience, but for me it is just the one of a millennial getting older.
The trope of old man yells at cloud should have the dual of young person thinks they have discovered something new. It takes a while to learn there is nothing new under the sun.
Sure, normies have invaded the internet, but there are plenty of niches in various fields that are sufficiently avant-gard that even the most dissenting hipsters can still find a home. But it’s never easy, almost by definition such places are defined by their difficulty of entry.