I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod files and .xm files from aminet and learning to write tracker music in Fast Tracker 2, downloading and playing all sorts of cool Doom wads, installing DJGPP and pouring over the source code for Allegro and picking up more game programming chops, and getting incredibly caught up in following the Doom community and .plan files for the release of Quake.
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
Similar story here, with similarly disastrous impacts on my GPA. There was something magical about that time - technology was moving so rapidly and access to information was exploding. It was all so very early that it seemed like anything was possible for an aspiring computer nerd with a good computer and a fast internet connection.
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
the AI image generation and 3D printing community had a similar kind of feel from 2021-2023, both are slowing down now though and becoming more mainstream everyday and needing less tinkering everyday. Which is great but disapointing at the same time.
Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
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.
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.
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.
Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health").
Since I'm older I had a more of a choice in terms of social media presence (and get away with basically none) the younger folks practically don't.
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
We are very careful with our kids in terms of they interact with technology for this reason.
Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.
It's a difficult balance.
My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"
Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.
The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
> Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health")
Is it?
It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.
Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.
> There is neocites, and a small community of people who share this philosophy about the web (and that are relatively young), but I have not met anyone my age, in the real world, that would choose to do something like this.
When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.
Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.
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.
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’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.
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.
One thing that's happening currently that has been alluded to by other people in the comments is the rapid disappearance of forums.
Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.
Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.
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.
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.
> 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.
I was on the 'net pre-WWW and wrote my first web page in 1992.
The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.
I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.
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.
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 :)
The vibes of the early internet are still out there, you just won't be directed there by Google or any of the other "social" silos.
Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.
Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.
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.
It’s refreshing to see a young person with such sound reflections about social media.
This post made me reminisce about learning web development when I was 11. Finding resources online was tricky, especially since I didn’t always have access to the Internet. I got books from my parents, and not very good ones either, but I loved them all the same.
I miss those days, when everything was more of an adventure.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I have been on the internet since the mid-90s and computers have defined my life , personally and professionally, since I was 4 years old.
And still, this kind of messages make me uncertain about what to really think.
There is a nostalgia for the authenticity of the earlier web, and I have felt that myself. Things were hard in the 90s, but maybe that is what made it feel more worthwhile. It is also true that a lot of the current internet is dominated by financial and corporate interests.
BUT ! everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so.
Access to technology and software has never been easier, neither has the opportunity to learn about pretty much any topic. We have access to the output of so many people in an instant.
This can be liberating, but it can also be paralyzing. An ugly mix of FOMO and impostor syndrome making many of us paralized on most days and scroll for a quick dopamine hit instead.
But what if we consciously choose to focus on the positives by focusing on what we feel truly engaged by, and to ruthlessly ignore the rest ?
This forum is literally the proof that old web still exists, its ugly but efficient.
People there aren't chasing for social recognition or karma and genuinely want to share their opinion.
And back then website were still chasing for advertising money, the popups and ads were absolute cancer. More than today. IMO the tool (internet) hasn't changed, it's the people using it who changed for the worst.
> everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so.
This is only true in a narrow technical sense. But the Internet is not only the technology, it's its users. Many social interactions that were possible in the 90s are not possible today because, even if the infrastructure that facilitated them is still there or can be built, the people are not there.
[+] [-] i_c_b|1 year ago|reply
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
[+] [-] Dalewyn|1 year ago|reply
We hate the internet today because it became mainstream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[+] [-] JeremyNT|1 year ago|reply
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
[+] [-] michaelbrave|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zackmorris|1 year ago|reply
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
[+] [-] vbo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] surgical_fire|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fipar|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] intelVISA|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HackerQED|1 year ago|reply
Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.
[+] [-] j45|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dav_Oz|1 year ago|reply
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
[+] [-] donw|1 year ago|reply
Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.
It's a difficult balance.
My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"
Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.
The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
[+] [-] jdthedisciple|1 year ago|reply
Is it?
It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.
Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.
[+] [-] pera|1 year ago|reply
When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.
Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.
[+] [-] bottlepalm|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bigstrat2003|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] system2|1 year ago|reply
Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi
[+] [-] sirsinsalot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ocean_moist|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ggambetta|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulpauper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bayareateg|1 year ago|reply
Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.
Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.
[+] [-] kazcaptain|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cutthegrass2|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dmead|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] G3rn0ti|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] femto|1 year ago|reply
The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.
I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.
[+] [-] shakna|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bugthe0ry|1 year ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] rainingmonkey|1 year ago|reply
Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.
Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.
[+] [-] Barrin92|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bubblebeard|1 year ago|reply
This post made me reminisce about learning web development when I was 11. Finding resources online was tricky, especially since I didn’t always have access to the Internet. I got books from my parents, and not very good ones either, but I loved them all the same.
I miss those days, when everything was more of an adventure.
[+] [-] voidfunc|1 year ago|reply
Live your life, not the one you think you should have had.
[+] [-] ocean_moist|1 year ago|reply
I just think the internet is much worse than it was.
[+] [-] tdeck|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Rinzler89|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] runjake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ranger_danger|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alex1138|1 year ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] paulpauper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maurits|1 year ago|reply
Now I just want to wake up, have my coffee, and not read about some new machine learning framework.
[+] [-] beloch|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 7222aafdcf68cfe|1 year ago|reply
And still, this kind of messages make me uncertain about what to really think. There is a nostalgia for the authenticity of the earlier web, and I have felt that myself. Things were hard in the 90s, but maybe that is what made it feel more worthwhile. It is also true that a lot of the current internet is dominated by financial and corporate interests.
BUT ! everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so. Access to technology and software has never been easier, neither has the opportunity to learn about pretty much any topic. We have access to the output of so many people in an instant.
This can be liberating, but it can also be paralyzing. An ugly mix of FOMO and impostor syndrome making many of us paralized on most days and scroll for a quick dopamine hit instead.
But what if we consciously choose to focus on the positives by focusing on what we feel truly engaged by, and to ruthlessly ignore the rest ?
We can only make that choice ourselves.
[+] [-] aucisson_masque|1 year ago|reply
People there aren't chasing for social recognition or karma and genuinely want to share their opinion.
And back then website were still chasing for advertising money, the popups and ads were absolute cancer. More than today. IMO the tool (internet) hasn't changed, it's the people using it who changed for the worst.
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|1 year ago|reply
This is only true in a narrow technical sense. But the Internet is not only the technology, it's its users. Many social interactions that were possible in the 90s are not possible today because, even if the infrastructure that facilitated them is still there or can be built, the people are not there.
[+] [-] veunes|1 year ago|reply