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I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

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Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#231

Post by erikbye »

thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

Yeah.. this younger generation you speak of will at some point lament about Discord or Snap with the same nostalgia. Maybe.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#232

Post by Aeolun »

jcfrei wrote: post #47
failwhaleshark wrote: post #5

"I miss old ATX." "I miss old [X]." There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.

I feel like a lot of those nostalgic posts are made by people who were simply happier when they were younger. And they conflate this general decline in happiness with a perceived decline in quality (of anything, be it the internet, television, music, etc). But in most cases it's just that things change and they no longer fit their desired qualities - they haven't become worse per se. For a lot of people who are young…

I guess I can see how a lot of the stuff on the internet now makes me really happy too. It’s just that it came with the loss of a lot of other things.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#233

Post by mycologos »

Black101 wrote: post #223
thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

> I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.

You know this? As far as I can tell, it's still possible to find weird little sub-sub-sub-culture groups on the internet if you actually want to, and curious kids can do it. Maybe most kids aren't, but I don't think there was ever a time when most kids were exploring the full possibilities of the internet either. Put another way, maybe the fraction of internet-using kids doing stuff we'd think is cool was higher back in the day, but I think the fraction of kids in general doing stuff we'd think is cooler is higher now.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#234

Post by deeg »

thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

I'm totally with you. Most of these lamentations are not people missing the old internet but their old selves, when everything was new and exciting. The OP rues the loss of Geocities but most of those sites were terrible and hard to read.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#235

Post by vkk8 »

ryandrake wrote: post #193
vkk8 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.

And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse! “Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product. I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly…

I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple the internet platforms to the economic system. I think that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's not like there aren't many federalized/decentralized/community driven and open source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-viable in the long run.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#236

Post by every »

I had been in DOS for almost a decade when I got my first (dial-up) unix shell. I had been using ported unix utilities (MKS Toolkit) for some time so it was somewhat less painful than being thrown into the deep end. Now I have a terminal Debian container on my Chromebook and can wax nostalgic whenever I wish. And no, I do not conflate the internet with the web...

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#237

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

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.

For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.) became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling of community around shared cultural references.

Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#238

Post by hrtk »

I have never seen the old internet but looking at the remains of it, it does appear really interesting. It is sad that the most popular search engine throws complete garbage at you when there still exist fabulous websites with real content.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#239

Post by emodendroket »

thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

I completely agree. A lot of times I'll see people dig up old stuff from Something Awful forums or whatever and... honestly it's not as funny as I remember. It's just as lame and stupid as what people are passing around today.

Re: I Miss the Old Internet (2019)

#240

Post by jasode »

thom wrote: post #206

I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flame…

>I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and [...] I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate.

Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792

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