I Miss the Old Internet (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#131

Post by mschuster91 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #25

mschuster91 wrote: post #10

> All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion. Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads. What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you will have a bunch of scriptk…

That is combination of great points. Most of those niche stuff sits in Facebook groups, I bet there are quite a lot of naturist/whatver groups there (probably not posting photos but organizing events or discussing stuff), you have to follow right people on fb/tt/yt. The creativity is there, for me author of that post misses forest for the trees. Web pages are just secondary artifacts. I don't want my favorite band me…

> Counter culture is about people and what they want to express, sometimes it might be important "how", but for a lot of hobbies "how" is not that much important as long as it is clear and easy to do.

The danger is that a lot of counter-culture movements aren't exactly welcomed by the major providers. Anything involving sex or sexuality - no matter if nudists, swingers, poly-amory, LGBT, fetish beyond 50SOG-style or sex work - has massive risk of getting booted off the internet, as a result of legal requirements (FOSTA/SESTA, child protection laws), credit card regulations or Evangelical fundamentalist pressure.

Anything involving drugs faces similar risks (I'm actually surprised Erowid hasn't been shut down), as is anything going too far anti-capitalist (see e.g. Pirate Bay, SciHub, but also Occupy Wall Street or u/DeepF.ckingValue being dragged in front of Congress after the $GME shenanigans).

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#132

Post by ethbr0 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #84

fabbari wrote: post #34

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided to monetize the internet.

"They" is a bit unfair here.

The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#133

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #106

cm2187 wrote: post #39

It’s like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills, crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of altavista results before finding something useful, etc

I'm not sure why you're downvoted, whatever there was, it was also abused or shit. Spam everywhere, banners as annoying as ever, the nice insights in forums buried between low-effort one-liners and the trendy extra spacious forum signatures, and you couldn't do much against the flashing banners because adblocking was hit or miss. It's not like I don't empathize. But one needs to realize that this is a specific thing,…

[deleted]

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#134

Post by tomjen3 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

fabbari wrote: post #34

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

That is really annoying with software.

Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#135

Post by globular-toast » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #49

This is a classic. It was put up 18 years ago, and still has plenty of relevance: https://www.internetisshit.org

This touches on something a bit different to the linked author which is people thinking the internet is something it is not. During my time at university I didn't initially use the library. Why would I? Everything is on the internet, isn't it? Not by a long shot. Once I went down the rabbit hole of scholarship I was amazed just how much information could not be found online. And this was just one tiny subject I was interested in. A real eye opener.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#136

Post by scrutinizer80 » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based websites at: https://wiby.me

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#137

Post by ipaddr » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #90

barney54 wrote: post #60

This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good. So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.

Fwiw I’m old enough to remember people deriding the internet for replacing more pure bbs’ and newsgroups with flashy websites like /. and digg.

The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses.

I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.

BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.

The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#138

Post by keiferski » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

sprkwd wrote: post #73

ethbr0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to distill four decades of "mass Internet" transformation into one phrase: Independent creator culture (1980-2000), converted into mass consumer culture (2000-2010), and then back into taxed creator culture within walled ecosystems (2010-2020).

What happens next?

If we ever get around to having a Basic Income, it may help this somewhat. Creators may feel less pushed to monetize the things they make.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#139

Post by superasn » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think those were the days at the same time think everything contemporary has gone to the dogs?

Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).

I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).

E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#140

Post by cdrini » Sun, Jun 13, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons.

As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.

Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".