Tell HN: I miss the old internet

[anon1253]

This is more of a rant I guess. HN provides a text box, that's close enough for me.

I was born in 1988, I'm officially 30. While technically I never got to see the birth of the internet, I remember it differently sometimes. More nostalgically. The summer that never ended. When I was in my adolescent years, I chatted with dozens of people a day. Some I never got to meet in person. Some I did. People from all over the world. Our gateway drugs to the internet were things like IRC, MSN, AOL. Never was a big ICQ person, but I guess that counts. Adium was always on. I don't quite remember how I met these fleeting, ephemeral, personal contacts. Mostly through web rings, PHPbb forums, personal reference. We talked so much, about everything. "how's your day". "what do you think about Bush", "hey I saw your del.icio.us link". Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook. And at first, that was great. But it feels different now. So different, that I've removed myself from all social media. "social media". It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?

I miss those days sometimes. Maybe it's just rose colored glasses of my puberty years. But you know, nothing fundamentally changed about my lifestyle. The internet changed. I'm still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek, nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them? Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old internet.

Maybe this should just be named "how to make friends in your 30s" instead. It's different world out there, but I miss talking to people I've never met. Learn about their lives, be part of it somehow. And they, part of mine in return. I guess there's no turning back from the bots.

[CommanderData]

Made me smile, I'm not too far behind. I think it was my rose colored glasses.

Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss and by comparison the nearest thing for kids these days is probably YouTube or Reddit. However they are nothing like Forums in ways.

How I'll miss spending months earning my way to become a mod, talking about the community or a user in private sub forums, joking/gossip threads with other mods, talking about real life issues with Mom-Mods and Dad-Mods in private forums, and eventually meeting them irl. Customizing my profile with weird ass sigs, animated avatars and coming home to an organized list unread threads interesting to me. Sounds strikingly like Reddit but nothing like it, how strange.

MSN was awesome, but I think kids these days have better options here. Snapchat come close in some ways and does well for the mobile platform.

I felt the Internet was a smaller simpler place with lesser influence from cooperate agenda, state sponsored ideas, and other influencing ideologies and actors. The Internet has become less transparent, commercialized (not just ads) blurring lines between genuine and insincerity.

Social marketing companies specialize in astroturfing places like Reddit making it almost impossible to spot sponsored content sometimes. Try doing that on a Forum and you'll be spotted miles away and made an example of.

Examples of propaganda factories in Russia or Israel with high influence on social media is an example of one big problem Reddit or YouTube has today. It's far too easy to game larger social media networks and make it seem like the consensus.

[varrock]

Your anecdote about forums really hits home. I went to a small, private elementary school with a class size of about 30. We were the only friends we had. When I was in fourth grade, I created a forum for my classmates to use when we got home and couldn't communicate with each other in person (this was before it was standard for kids of this age to own a mobile phone). It was a hit. I made separate boards (aka subreddits) for things like sports, video games, and even just general chat. It was a huge hit in my class. I had people begging to be moderators and asking for improvements. Delegating the moderator title was serious at that age, as everybody wanted to feel like they were contributing to our forum. I felt like a CEO of some fourth grade startup.

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

[s-shellfish]

> It's far to easy too game larger social media networks and make it seem like the consensus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[oliwarner]

Maybe you're not appreciating how much more mainstream the internet is now compared to the late 90s, early 2000s. Sounds obvious but that has implications.

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

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

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

[mikekchar]

> Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss

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

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

[cirgue]

I think one of the biggest changes has been the visual deemphasis on individual identity in modern social media over forums, even on HN. Forums that allowed user large user avatars, flair, and the rest made it possible to easily visually identify back-and-forth between people, as opposed to reddit which deemphasizes usernames. This basically means that it’s harder to identify users across threads, and harder to “get to know people”. You may or may not have read my comments before, but you don’t instinctively make the connection between my past behavior and my present behavior unless you go look at my comment history or unless I’m one of the HN super-posters who gets mentioned by name.

[dchuk]

Come check out https://hackerforums.co ! We have a nice old fashioned phpbb forum for ya

[sparky_]

This is very well said. I made a ton of online-only friends with whom I've since met up with over the years. These were enabled by old school phpBB forums, gaming clans, things like that. I don't feel that any personal connection is enabled by Reddit, or even HN for that matter.

[ccajas]

If you want to relive the dial-up days, cap out your phone's data plan till it busts you down to 2G speeds. Now it's 48K :D

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

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

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

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

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

[bfuller]

Maybe you just got older? I have those same experiences today moderating subreddits.

[curuinor]

Something Awful and Metafilter still exist in remarkably unchanged form, although both are now facing existential funding issues. Lowtax's spine is gone, the Mefi peeps have a huge shortfall...

[FranzFerdiNaN]

I still hang out on Something Awful and Resetera (videogame oriented, the follow-up of Neogaf after it imploded). Forums are so much nicer than Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.

[gkoberger]

Me too. There's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. Just never ending, mind numbing consuming of mediocre content.

I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed online anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Our communities are no longer ours... we're now talking on the servers of billion-dollar companies. Sure, back in the day AOL was a big company, and now we have stuff like Discord servers. But it feels different now. Most of the conversation has been sucked into FB, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. Even this forum, which I do still like, is backed by a multi-billion dollar company.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most, there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it doesn't.

(You should read this article: http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...)

[King-Aaron]

Car forums.

I don't know how many of you guys are on-the-side petrol heads, but it's one thing that strikes me with the facebook generation - all the years of lost knowledge when everyone pivoted from car forums to facebook groups.

No longer can you quickly search up 'what's the best gearbox oil to use in my T56'... Oh no. It's an almost-hourly repetition of shitpost threads that contain no useful information for anybody. Need to know what diameter bearing you need? What part # for that o-ring? Good luck. And if you do happen to stumble across the hidden knowledge of a now-defunct forum, you're likely to be met with the next peril - images that are no longer hosted or available to see without the original uploader paying for an image hosting account on photobucket etc.

I feel like all the collective knowledge from the years of 1999 - 2009 is basically lost to the sands of time.

[Samon]

Totally this. Most of the car forums I 'grew up on' 10 years ago are pretty much just wastelands these days. Where they were once a buzz with fantastic knowledge, insightful comments and advice, etc, they're now mostly filled with image-less posts (ImageShack, PhotoBucket, etc), spammy posts, and crickets. The missing images is the biggest shame... "The issue is the hose circled in red"... no pic.

[defterGoose]

I think my brother getting me into cars and my subsequent delve into bimmerforums in the late-naughts is probably one of the big reasons my interest in Facebook started to wane around the same time. My interactions there were largely based on technical questions, but the humanity and humor contained in those interactions were so much more genuine, and indeed, kind, than anything I've seen on FB/tw/insta. I would be really interested in helping out on a project to archive all the knowledge on those types of sites.

[roflchoppa]

Im constantly amazed by the information that people have collected over on classiczcars.com for the anything Nissan/Datsun Z related. Even before that over on SOHC4, I ended up finding threads where an individual was testing out the characteristics of brake caliper grease, by conducting thermal tests to indicate what performed the best.

On /r/datsun all you really get is memes, and half-thought troubleshooting.

Old-car people inspire me to have a dedication to work-ethic, but also to thinking about the dynamics of how everything is operating. Its a whole different level.

[TimTheTinker]

A lot of car how-tos are being posted on YouTube. If you need to replace your alternator, for example, look no further.

[phito]

Internet content went from small forum where people were actively talking about a subject, asking questions and answering them, gathering knowledge together, to facebook pages where you just absorb content (usually memes).

People have become passive on the internet

[shakna]

You're certainly not alone, and there are some of us who miss when technology wasn't so biased towards harming you in some way, such as forcing you into a 'filter bubble', and more towards discovery.

Most social media seems actively geared towards making it harder for me to make friends like I used to, and the old IRC servers, though some are still active, are now either dead or filled with people who see all the changes as a 'good thing'.

I have noticed it, and my friends and I are slowly stumbling along in our own pursuit. Our own feeble exploration, if you will.

Our first step, has been the blog you can find in my profile. It is a blog... But it's powered by old .plan files that can sent through pandoc at regular intervals. Every user of the server I've set up has it happen. Or we can just use the ol' finger program to view them.

The shell, our shared shell, is becoming a place we can sit and experiment.

Other pieces of the puzzle are coming slowly too, I'm in the midst of writing two different messaging applications, and others have their ideas as well.

There are no bots... Because we all have our SSH keys, and know to invite each other. Hopefully it'll become more public, more inviting, but first we need to work out what exactly it is that we want.

[sengork]

I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common. Internet itself has changed but perhaps more crucially people with whom you've interacted with changed their habits or simply lack the time they used to have (their age groups are different so there's insufficient critical mass to maintain the old community).

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others with very specific non-majority interests.

[noobermin]

Communities do still exist online although their flavor has changed. Group chat has essentially replaced the chatrooms and IRC channels of the mid 90s-00s. Pre 90s is too old for me, but I remember seeing pining for "days of gopher/usenet" etc during the 00's, so really everyone has always been pining for this or that. I don't mind it, people will always be nostalgic in some sense. I was nostalgic for high school in college, and I'm somewhat nostalgic for college now, so it's probably valuable to not take hindsight's insight too seriously.

That said, the internet has not been the democratizing force most of us believed it would become with curated and centralized social networks having arisen as dominant. I am convinced that this is still a fact that can be discerned distinct of the nostalgic pining. Individuals are pushing back a little (not consciously perhaps) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

[ACS_Solver]

There's definitely some nostalgia involved, but I feel some things from the previous Internet have been lost. Discord communities are at least a reasonable approximation of the old IRC channels, and there are other modern analogs to "old Internet" things, but the forum format is something that I feel has died, and I miss that a lot.

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

[stcredzero]

I don't mind it, people will always be nostalgic in some sense.

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

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

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

[klenwell]

One thing I appreciate about the internet, even nowadays, is learning about people I've never met. This isn't talking to them necessarily. It can just be someone I could imagine striking up an interesting conversation with if I did meet them someday.

As an American who grew up in a way that I felt was somewhat typically (but perhaps less so nowadays) suburban middle-class, I similarly appreciate reading thoughtful comments from people who grew up in different circumstances and didn't necessarily have it as easily as I did. Where I have most frequently encountered these voices is here and on Reddit and on Metafilter (which I first discovered here on HN). If I can dig up a good example, I'll add it to this comment.

Finally, when I think about that old spirit of the internet that I think you're talking about, and places where it still may prevail, I'd like to offer as an example Erowid. I'm not a contributor, I don't even read it that often. But it just comforts me that sites like this still exist:

https://www.erowid.org/

So I don't think the good old internet is dead. You just have to know where to look.

[freehunter]

I think you're spot-on. The web didn't die, there's just more people on it now. And if you go where all the people are (Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc), places that didn't exist in the old web, of course you're going to get a different experience than you had back then. Even the difference between Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day. What you want may actually just be "fewer people on my web".

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

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

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

[_2hya]

I wish I were there for all that. I'm still a teen, but I like to hearken to older times. I voluntarily chose not to join any social media, because I can see how commercialized it is. In a world were smartphones and social media are dominant, the world seems like glass, where everyone can see everyone, and everyone's competing to be seen. I hate and reject such ideas, becuase they make daily interaction something of a contest. "How many likes can I get for this tweet?" and other such things turn what normally would be conversation into someone shouting at the top of a tower to see how many people shout in agreement. Forums, largely aren't that way. I've been a part of many different forums in my life, and I can see that they fostered conversation and community. It's sad to see them go the way of the dinosaur in favor of commercialized, mobile, "reactive" "apps".

[chrisco255]

I came of age in the AOL days, and fondly remember meeting random people in chat rooms and message forums. Some of the people I met back in the 90s I'm friends with on Facebook today. That came from frequenting the same N64 forum for like 4 years. We talked about everything including our personal lives and in some ways I feel closer to them than the people I actually went to high school with.

I have noticed, however, that despite the internet working better than ever in many ways (in terms of speed and capabilities), that it seems harder to make friends or meet random people. Let's take HN for example, I love this site, but maybe because the community is so big, it seems like I'm just an anonymous figure on here. I'm one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands that visit this site regularly. Do I learn a lot from HN? Of course! Do I enjoy the conversations and comments? Absolutely! Is the platform conducive to casual conversation among strangers in a way that facilitates getting to know someone else and how they think and view the world? No.

For that matter, neither is Reddit.

If I had to guess, it's the news feed mechanic that has killed real social interaction on the net. The news feed mechanic works, it generates clicks, it's constantly feeding you interesting and stimulating information and updates, but it's surface level deep. So much of making friends is being in a group that's small enough to promote shared intimacy and repeated interactions with the same people.

[CommanderData]

I was a member of a bustling forum with hundred, perhaps thousands of new users a day. If a new user would surface, it would not take long for them to leave an impression even with all the noise. As long as they were posting something interesting to me. I would remember small things about the user that would help me build a mental profile, things like fonts, sigs, avatars and badges, name.

That's been lost with Facebook, Reddit. There is a lack of personality from one comment to another, no distinguishable visual factor to aid distinction or a contrast . I think Humans appreciate the slight difference to tell people apart. Aside from a username, maybe it is not enough.

[wilsonnb2]

In my opinion it's due to the gargantuan number of people on this site and Reddit. On some of the smaller subreddits, you do learn to recognize people by username.

[mseebach]

It's common, to the point of being an age-old popular culture trope, for people turning 30 to be very nostalgic about their late teens/early 20s.

You changed. So did I. The world did too, for sure, but the 17 year olds of today will miss the pure and uncorrupted world of 2018 when they turn 30.

[iEchoic]

As the internet gets bigger, it's been feeling increasingly "small" to me. The time I spend is concentrated on a few sites, which haven't changed much in years.

I used to find random forums and communities on a regular basis, and each had their own character. They were small enough that I'd quickly come to know various people in the community and establish a connection with them, whereas now posting always feels I'm broadcasting to nobody in particular.

Nowadays, I often write posts, think "wait, does this matter? why am I posting this?" and then just delete it. It feels like dumping words into the abyss.

[wilsonnb2]

I agree, it feels like most posting on the internet is just screaming into the void. There's no meaning behind it, no interactions to come of it. I'll never talk to the other commenters again or know anything about them. They could be bots for all I know, but the worst part is that it wouldn't even matter if they were bots because the interactions wouldn't be any different.

This [1] Reddit thread filled almost entirely by a single guy commenting to himself is the best illustration of this that I've found so far.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/comments/77d9ou/the...

[sudofail]

While I do think nostalgia plays a big part in this feeling, I also think a major contributing factor is centralization. Instead of fragmented forums and IRC channels where people would congregate for years, we generally have moved on to things like Reddit, and Facebook.

Dunbar's number states that the number of relationships someone can comfortably maintain is about 150 or so. Sense of community comes from connecting with small groups. I do not feel a sense of community by chatting with strangers on /r/funny.

Decentralized forums or IRC channels run by small groups were much more accessible, and allowed you to connect with people and form relationships.

That all said, IRC channels and independent forums do still exist. Hobby forums are great (I personally love the Small Form Factor PC forum, great community[1] ).

But today, small groups are the exception and not the norm of the internet of the 90s and early 00s.

[1]: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/

[rmason]

I'm a little older and am nostalgic about BBS's. It brought people together in a specific city. I've still got friends whom I might never have met in real life if it weren't connecting with them first on the BBS.

My experiences online also gave me a big jump over most people on understanding the potential of the Internet. Despite my sermonizing a lot of my friends didn't see any value in getting online for a good three to five years.

When I got a Palm Pilot phone in 2003(?) and showed them I had Internet access on it they were incredulous. These same people who were late to the Internet laughed and said why would you ever want the Internet on your phone?

[flyinghamster]

Back in the mid-1980s in Champaign-Urbana, one of the most vibrant BBSes in town (Tranquillity II) had no downloads - conversation was its specialty. There were even real-life gatherings of the participants. That sort of thing is hard to do when almost everyone you interact with could be halfway around the world.

[CM30]

I miss those days as well. Felt like the people online then were somewhat more interesting than those now, and were likely to get involved in stuff because it was a fun hobby rather than a way to make money or 'build a career' or what not.

Still, there are communities like that out there now, and quite a few of them are where they always were. Forums are less popular, but active ones do still exist, and some have good communities. Same with IRC and mailing lists and chat rooms and whatever else.

And while it's unfortunately centralised, I guess Discord has become the 'place' for many of these communities too, with the better ones being basically an old school forum in chat room form.

There are places out there.

[cmg_xyz]

One answer to “What happened to the old internet?”

We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.

I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.

If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

[alexcabrera]

I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to use the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general public. You can see it reflected across the web now in ways that have caused real, lasting damage.

And while I agree that we're the first digital natives, I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

Who knew a textarea and a notification system could become so troublesome?

[ashleyn]

>If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

Reckless, "greed-is-good" neoliberalism.

[devaroop]

(I guess, everyone in this thread is ranting about the same. Here's my anger:)

We have slowly morphed from "users of the internet" to "a product of the internet".

The internet, today, is so interested about what I do every second. This made every common man a celebrity. A friend recently said she's aware of her data being used to snoop on her, but she refrained to stop it citing that it gave her "momentary happiness" to stay on social networks. I practically couldn't deny what she said.

While I follow ('ed) a few discussions over internet, the moment I turn my phone screen on, I get disrupted by the numerous feeds from social apps ending up forgetting what I had to look at. I keep confining me to the same space eventually.

The internet is following the greatest blindfold of democracy: "Set strict boundaries for individuals of the society and let them argue within those limits infinitely. Keep them busy with controversies within those boundaries so that there isn't time left to think beyond the limits"

[DoreenMichele]

You may have changed more than you realize. I like to think I'm as open to social connections as I always was, but the reality is that I'm older and wiser and quicker to recognize that a lot of people who want to talk to me are not really innocently trying to befriend me in some mutually beneficial squeeing over common interests kind of way. They usually have an agenda and it's often not a nice agenda. They are usually looking to take advantage of me in some way or to force a particular narrative onto me driven by some internal psychology of theirs, and don't confuse them with the facts.

I have learned to have my own agenda of looking out for my own needs and husbanding my time to invest it in things that matter to me. This turns out to not be conducive to the kinds of conversations I used to have.

I'm lonelier than I used to be by quite a lot. But my life overall works better.

I don't know how to get both things. I wish I did.

[allworknoplay]

I think they’re saying they miss not having to worry about being used by randos. if you were around in the early days of the web, there were definitely a lot of people trying a lot of things (I tried on more than a few different personas when I was a young teen in the mid nineties), but almost none of it was for profit, it was just people trying things.

[TheAceOfHearts]

I'm 27, but here's some recent experiences:

You can still participate in IRC! It's still alive and kicking. Look at the channel in list in freenode.net, it's huge! Most of it is focused on tech, but there's plenty of non-tech channels as well.

Try checking out communities using Discord. I started participating in a couple anime-related groups and I met tons of interesting people through that. I eventually got invited to a private Discord where many members hang out, but it's more casual and personal than the public server, and it's been a blast. I've learned tons of things about their different cultures, and I'm hoping to meet some of em at events later this year or next. Although I haven't met with anyone in real life yet, it turned out one member actually lives live like 20 mins, so we actually planning on meeting soon, when we don't have any big real-life issues on our plates.

It turns out a few of the people I've been talking to recently are Muslims, and I didn't know much about their beliefs, so it has been a highly enlightening experience. They recently stopped fasting and were celebrating being able to eat during regular hours again.

One of the people I've been talking to is from a middle-eastern country but had family in Qatar, so he's visiting. Did you know that apostasy is illegal there? Oh, and they also block porn sites! This is an image of what you get when you try accessing a porn site in Qatar [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/1a9lDDi.png

[wyclif]

"We grew up with IRC. Let's take it further." https://irc.com/

[wyclif]

I agree with this; IRC is underrated now. Download irssi or something like that and use it every day. I think if you do you'll find that there are corners of the internet that haven't changed that much in a good way. People still make friends there, talk a lot, have debates, etc.

[Lazare]

I'm few years older than you but I had a similar experience. However, I'm not sure the "old internet" is gone so much as it's moved a few doors down.

There still are communities: Some on Facebook groups, more on Twitter or Tumblr, but increasingly found on Discord. Find a Discord related to some topic (a game, a fandom, a hobby, a city), and you'll find that casual chatting, meeting new people, people arranging to meet up, etc.

"Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them?"

Discord, a Facebook group, maybe a Twitter group chat. Seriously. There's more people doing what you miss today than at any time in the past, but they're not doing it in the same places.

That being said...keep in mind it's much easier to make friends in your teens and early 20s than in later life. I struggle a lot to make connections, not because the opportunity isn't available, but just because I'm a lot more closed off than I used to be. Some of your nostalgia is for the internet of yesteryear, but some of it is for the you of yesteryear, and that's not going to be recoverable by installing a new chat client.

[bowlich]

This seems to be the zeitgeist lately -- folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling. I think some of the different "fediverse" takes are trying to do just that. I'll throw out the typical Mastodon plug.

I've spent the last four or so years hoping around dead phpBBs and empty IRC channels trying to find a community that reminded me of the pre-Facebook communities.

So far Mastodon reminds me of a kind of async-IRC for the 30+ crowd who don't have time to idle in an empty channel all day. Plenty of conversations, and If feel like I'm starting to recognize repeated posters and strike up conversations again.

[Double_a_92]

> folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling

Agree. The problem for me is that if I happen to find a small community, I still wonder if I'm missing out on something else.

Back then if you found an nicely made forum in your language, that was it. A couple 100 people and no real alternative to them.

Maybe that's why dating seems to be so hard. It's possible to meet a partner from literally all over the world. Where is in old times you were more or less limited by the village you happened to live in.

I don't want to chose good people... I want to have them slightly "forced" on me and learn to live with them. :/

[alexweber]

+1 for Mastodon. It's pleasantly weird and small. I very much enjoy the instance(s) I'm on. Check out joinmastodon.org to find one that suits your interests and needs!