Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A retrospective of my time on the internet

cleberg.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 317 posts

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#221

Post by stasomatic »

It's nostalgia through and through, I go through that as well.

Finally, no one owned the internet. Sure, we can get into semantics of the DNS system and infrastructure, but the web - and specifically, content - quickly became decentralized after the early stages until the recent centralization of content.

I just miss being able to visit the web, find personal content from fellow internet explorers, and not spend the whole time avoiding the pitfalls of the modern web.

It was all new for us and it was "ours", finally we had a place to ourselves and then the "others" showed up. It's fine. There are still places on the net to mine that dopamine.

I remember switching ISPs on the regular, panic.net, akula.net, earthlink, etc to just get a better ping in Quake. Then my clan mate in Bensonhurst discovered that one could get a double ISDN line through Nynex for $80/m if you pretended to be a business and all was again well. T1 lines at the time were $1K or more IIRC.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#222

Post by skeeter2020 »

I'll be the person who says what a lot of us believe, and even more know: the internet was cooked when the general public started to use it. The magic, community and naivety were all washed away when the socioeconomic & technical barriers fell, expanding the audience from industry & universities to the entire world. Next came those looking to solely profit and consume; not contribute back. This isn't a new problem just the current loudest version.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#223

Post by iamnothere »

reaperducer wrote: post #132
HappMacDonald wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?

I haven't been on NextDoor in more than a decade. Does it list phone numbers and employers now?

Employers? Why not add number, names, and ages of their children, as well as DOB and SSN?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#224

Post by nicbou »

alex1138 wrote: post #145
Habgdnv wrote: post #21

Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating. The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that faceboo…

I have PTCD. Post traumatic cookie disorder. Seriously. If I see one more of those I am going to throw my PC out the window Apparently you can hide these with a ublock (origin) filter but I haven't found it and I know people have made separate extensions for this

It's the "annoyances" filter lists. Takes a few seconds to turn on in the settings, works like a charm.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#225

Post by empyrrhicist »

AlexandrB wrote: post #121
sanderjd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything…

I struggle to believe that it had anything to do with "Gaming journalism". I tried several times to figure out what the big deal was, and each time left with the impression that it was really just a bunch of antisocial misogynists who wanted a hate figure.

Like, then and now I do get the impression that there's very little in the way of real "journalism" going on in gaming, but that seemed like just a weird non-sequitur people would trot out as a fig leaf for all the vileness whenever confronted about it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#226

Post by monknomo »

jerf wrote: post #209
sanderjd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to dis…

ejecting jerks is something forums did better than social media, even if the definition of jerk varied widely and was forum-specific. I can't imagine a forum doing something like promoting the user with the most interacted with posts; they'd probably lock the thread and consider banning

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#227

Post by myself248 »

reaperducer wrote: post #113
myself248 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000. What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's get…

what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000. I guess you never lived in a place with public access cable. This has been going on for 50 years. It's not new at all.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Whenever I stopped on the public access channel, it was reruns of city council meetings and stuff. I've heard about all sorts of wild and wooly productions by teenagers and weirdos, but never saw any myself.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#230

Post by tim333 »

You can't step into the same river twice.

A lot of his gripes about 2026 internet seem quite fixable - if you don't like Windows, Chrome, Google junk use Mac/Linux, Firefox, DuckDuckGo or similar with ublock and a cookie pop up stopper.

Post reply on HN