I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
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 else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.
Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
No, you've hit on the issue. The shit that is the internet now didn't come about solely due to scale—or even from the newbies migrating in via AOL. It came about because bad-intentioned and greed-driven actors moved in to make money, or to push their propaganda.
I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was.
Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.
it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along.
I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures.
Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty.
Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.
Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.
Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.
But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.
Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.
Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.
I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.
I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.
I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.
I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.
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 getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.
If only someone would just bump up the size of the address space, so that there would be enough to go around again.
I mean, it's kinda like Y2K, isn't it? We're stuck with this old addressing scheme that chose 32 bits per address back when that was a lot for any computer to comfortably handle. But today if we used up twice.. no, even four times as many bits no PC would bat an eyelash and the increase in address space would be truly exponential.
It's just a shame that so much built infrastructure expects the current addressing system that it would probably take a life time to phase out. Plus that if anyone tried to rebuild it from scratch they would probably forget to make it backwards compatible, and also change so many things about it that it becomes a nightmare for anyone to try to implement. It's like trying to pass a new law and it gets infected by death-by-a-thousand-riders as a prerequisite to passing. :'(
Yeah, I definitely remember Jennicam now that you bring it up. There were a lot of people vying for cam attention back then, I think it's basically the inception of the influencers we see today. Then again I don't know that anyone thought it was really something of a way to make a living. Maybe a very small few, but if any of those early day cammers/streamers had tried to get a discount at a restaurant for a positive review that would have been met with confusion for sure. I guess when one calls themselves an "influencer" they know what they're after.
The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.
Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.
I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.
"The iPhone 5 was released.
The first iPad Mini was released.
The Wii U was released.
Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems.
YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape.
Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'
All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.
2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.
When the "mobile first" design pattern really took off is when the Internet was handed to the masses IMO. That's when it became accessible to everyone's mom and grandparents through their phone and that really changed things from a user base perspective. At the same time, all the mobile apps started getting published and the internet, to most people, became answering the question "which app do i tap on?". Honestly, it's pretty much that way for me. The Internet, outside of work, consists of this website, my youtube app, my wikipedia app, spotify app, and maybe google news app.
> I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.
The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:
The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.
That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline becomes the topic everyone just starts pointing to their early years on the internet as the golden age.
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding.
The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being.
"Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic as well as the language. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
That's rose-tinted glasses. You're not describing a trend of the Internet, but of individual insular communities. It happens in every community that eventually people get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. I was part of a C++ forum for a long time, and I lost count how times I answered that both template definitions and declarations must be visible at the point of usage, and then of mentioning that I'd answered that exact thing many times already.
PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.
The answers were literally "WHY ARE YOU CODING IN PERL" "WHY ARE YOU CODING IN Tcl" to "How can I read a file and split the line via a pipe symbol. It wasn't "how do I stdout foobar in X".
Facebook came a long "Your not on facebook, you must be a red flag" -- I've never had facebook, yet, then one wanted to even seek contact unlike previous text message / phone.
Twitter came a long which was the trend.
Communities are the trend to the internet, they are really what make the internet.
Where would be the internet if FB, SO and all the rest never existed? If not more peaceful.
If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.
I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.
I also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.
I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.
By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new
*.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
>I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses.
Really? I would consider myself an "Internet person" in the sense you're saying. I spend most of my time, if not on old-school forums, certainly on discussion forums like this one and imageboards. I don't find that the existence of those other platforms affects me much, besides allowing me to use them when I'm the mood to do so, and if they went away I would neither mourn it nor cheer it.
The early Internet had many more small personal and hobby sites, and it was easier to find them. Some are still there, but they get drowned out in the noise. If the commercial noise were gone, in some hypothetical new web, personal sites would be all that remains.
The Gemini protocol space is somewhat like this now, it’s very cozy. (But I’d prefer a Gemini-like web with guaranteed privacy and anonymity.)
What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?
For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'
Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.
> While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.
2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.
For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)
The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS)
10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...
Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up
Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.
Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.
Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.
Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.
Google doesn't bother to add cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feed private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and selling data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.
Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.
Born in 89, I always feel nostalgic seeing screenshots of Windows 95. It brings back a time of novelty, exploration, and freedom. And what a ride it's been.
It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves.
I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.
<sarcasm>
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.
</sarcasm>
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.
i wonder if there's a niche market for an oled screen with a 100lbs glass surface for the hipsters out there. all the weight without that pesky electron cannon.
I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark.
CRTs are built like that because otherwise they would implode from the slightest bump and send thousands of tiny glass fragments flying in all directions.
Panel displays of today have their glass pieces glued together into one solid lump, and there is no pressure, so when they break the broken pieces stay where they are for the most part.
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
> what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet
> Listening to music
Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.
There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.
It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.
They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?
You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.
There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III
> We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away
That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.
I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.
Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.
The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
Sure, but the actual reasons matter. A big part of it changed due to making the internet primarily a place for circulating ads, and that's a change many may not like.
>It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free.
Oh, you mean hosting as in, from your home. I wouldn't say hosting from a provider is significantly harder than at home. It might be philosophically more attractive. Serving the data (whether from rented or own hardware) is probably the least of the technical hurdles, especially compared to actually designing the site.
The world can change both toward better and toward worst. The countries go from peaceful to war obsessed, from autocracy to genocide and from peaceful democratic to pogroms. Women or minorities can gain rights and loose rights.
The algorithmic propagation of toxicity is changing it towards worst. And internet is actively used to incite some of the things I listed above. And major companies actively facilitated those changes towards the worst. And by actively I mean "we now know they were actively helping the bad stuff to happen".
Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.
No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.
Most of the old internet could be restored with the right search engine and browser. Index all of the invasive BS to page 100 or the results, and put the interesting/relevant things up front. People might pay for it. You could do some of it with an extension.
The internet has changed because attempts to bring commercial interests into it have been too successful.
In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hate beyond the typical local community hate speech, and hate speech was just one agenda item that could be discussed.
But now, even hate speech has become fragmented. And as hate became fragmented, people became too willing to pay money to those who agree with their opinions. It became easier to pay people who say what you want to hear.
On top of that, in the old days, if you were a minority in a local community, you had to bend your opinions somewhat for the majority in order to be heard. Unlike the old society where you had to tone down your voice to create a single unified voice, now you can speak out even if it's unpopular. The only catch is that it's now subject to a different metric: popularity.
And the generational divide in internet usage has also changed a lot.
For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same. That's why internet etiquette was important. But these days, there's a binary divide: the internet is the internet, and reality is reality. People think that even if they do something stupid online, it's separate from real life.
Damaging physical infrastructure is visible, but polluting the internet is invisible. Yet once someone starts it, there's no end to it. And the broken windows theory applies to advertising too. Most websites run ads, and many of those ads are low-quality porn ads, which easily create a mindset of 'this place is fair game for attack.'
In the past, the internet was less widely available and limited to a small elite, so it was relatively clean. The reason is simple: because only a few people used it, they were socially traceable, and their online reputation actually affected their real-life reputation. But as everyone gained access, it became harder to track identities online, and that changed everything.
It's no one's fault. It just seems like a natural shift of the times
> For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same.
I’d argue the opposite.
On the old internet we all used nicknames, and everyone knew not to share their personal info. These days nearly everyone posts stuff on social media using their real name and a photo of their face.
Reading your comment, I realize that the local context was something I had been missing, and your point makes a lot of sense. I think I should revise it like this
"The online self used to be an identity that was managed within small, persistent communities. Now, that self is easily discarded and reformed."
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue
The average joe is a fundamental reason the internet he grew up with no longer exists. It’s not black and white, but away from average joe communities, there’s something almost like the old internet.
I mean, the old internet still exists if you want to use it. At least, in many places online.
There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.
There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.
Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.
The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.
It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.
I would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.
(Anyone remember Klout?)
By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.
At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.
I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.
Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.
Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
And the stamina, probably.
Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption.
Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design.
It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.
I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future.
And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.
This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
___
You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
My recollection, growing up and living mostly in Scandinavia
90s - mid 2000s:
- Pre social media days, you visited home pages.
- Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you.
- Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.
mid 2000s - early 2010s:
- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes.
- Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all.
- Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus.
- Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.
Early 2010s - late 2010s:
- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms.
- Personal websites die off.
- Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc.
- Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services.
- The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed.
- Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.
Late 2010s - now:
- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players.
- It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present.
- Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it.
- You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan.
- Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.
Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.
Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.
Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.
Honestly, I also miss, sometimes, those days, when every website had a toolbar to install. I didn't have high expectations in those days. Now you see these billion dollar companies and you ask yourself what are those people doing there? Can't they afford at least one guy to do the bugs?
I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.
The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.
Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.
Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.
This resonates: the Internet was such an interesting place to grow up in, though my experience may be a little before the author’s.
I miss the niche bespoke websites and forum communities of the years past, but there’s nothing holding us back from creating and maintaining spaces like that these days, aside from spam and AI slop. Some are still out there.
The shift is mainly attributable to lowering the bar to access as cellphones with browsers came on: it became such a valuable consumer platform, rather than a place for creators, hobbyists, and those with a nerdy curiosity to congregate.
I hope the pendulum swings back the other way someday, but I fear ‘dead internet theory’ may be the current endpoint of least resistance.
I think the biggest 'change' was when 'online' went from an activity you sat down in a specific spot in your house to enjoy for a couple of hours to something we have on our person 24/7 (sometimes via multiple devices). Less constant communication via SMS, Call, online messenger (on desktop) was very different from what we have now.
The internet went to shit pretty much when Facebook went mainstream: internet stopped being some kind of alternative reality and started merging with regular reality… but worse.
It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap.
OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers:
https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser
with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news
The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.
Finally, there's:
gopher://magical.fish <- huge portal, the news site it's great
gopher://sdf.org <- blogs in gopher
gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn <- check the Gopher lawn
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta <- updated blogs
I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP.
Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..
The internet which is being mourned was that period where it was better for the people who couldn’t make those changes.
There are always a few people who can manage to insulate themselves. Still, however well you insulate yourself, you are impacted by what happens to the majority, or the direction they vote.
You're not alone. The internet we built doesn't exist anymore.
When I talk with fellow graybeards, the sentiment is universally the same: This isn't what we built. This wasn't the intent. This isn't what we worked so hard for. This isn't what was supposed to happen.
Easily 90% of the graybeards I know who were involved in the early days have largely given up on the internet. They use the new breed of "essential" technologies like smart phone apps to talk to their doctor, or online bill payments. But they don't have a lot of internet use because they're just not interested in it anymore.
They're also at the age when their interests are more focused on real-life things like families, and increasingly taking up the same real-life hobbies they used to make fun of online.
Maybe they're just burned out after dozens and dozens of hype cycles.† But for the most part, I think they've just given up hope.
† Just last night, I saw an article in a 1980's computer magazine about a company that came out with what we could call "AR" glasses to project a screen in you field of vision so you could compute on the go without a monitor. Nothing in technology is new anymore.
The "old web" is now darknets, like Tor or especially I2P. Everything fits. It requires some technical expertise to set up (particularly I2P). Slow downloads. No Javascript (usually disabled for safety reasons). Some content that will shock you at 30 exactly as the old internets content occasionally shocked you at 13. Intermittent connection. Anarchy. You can explore this world.
The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
Authors first problem is "Using MS Windows". Its now solidly an advert and spam vehicle for other Microsoft shit nobody wants (like the 63 different things named Copilot). Seriously, use Linux. It is better in almost every way, other than extreme rootkit based games.
Next, use Firefox or Iceweasel with Ublock Origin and a useragent changer. Disable the spammy shit, but there's less of it.
For phones, run Graphene. Hands down.
Focus on Fediverse applications. Twitter -> Mastodon. Instagram -> Pixelfed. Reddit -> Lemmy. YouTube -> Peertube. Various chat -> Matrix (but its not good). Various search engines -> SearXNG.
And old stuff still exists. IRC is still a thing. Gopher still exists.
You can also run your discord chats, Facebook, Instagram, etm. Just run them through a web browser, and never let them see any apps.
Its easy to be all defeatist and shouty-at-clouds, and 'back in the old days'. They'll never come again. Instead, its all our jobs to MAKE the current place friendly to us and ours.
Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.
The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.
This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.
Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."
I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.
It looks like it starts with:
>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
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 else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected.
It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.
Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
No, you've hit on the issue. The shit that is the internet now didn't come about solely due to scale—or even from the newbies migrating in via AOL. It came about because bad-intentioned and greed-driven actors moved in to make money, or to push their propaganda.
I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was.
Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.
We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.
And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.
it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along.
I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures.
Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty.
Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.
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?
Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.
Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.
But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.
Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.
It was the smartphone that completely ruined the internet. Once everyone was connected 24/7 it became the ultimate eternal September.
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.
Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.
I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.
I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.
I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.
I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.
> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.
It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.
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 getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.
If only someone would just bump up the size of the address space, so that there would be enough to go around again.
I mean, it's kinda like Y2K, isn't it? We're stuck with this old addressing scheme that chose 32 bits per address back when that was a lot for any computer to comfortably handle. But today if we used up twice.. no, even four times as many bits no PC would bat an eyelash and the increase in address space would be truly exponential.
It's just a shame that so much built infrastructure expects the current addressing system that it would probably take a life time to phase out. Plus that if anyone tried to rebuild it from scratch they would probably forget to make it backwards compatible, and also change so many things about it that it becomes a nightmare for anyone to try to implement. It's like trying to pass a new law and it gets infected by death-by-a-thousand-riders as a prerequisite to passing. :'(
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.
Yeah, I definitely remember Jennicam now that you bring it up. There were a lot of people vying for cam attention back then, I think it's basically the inception of the influencers we see today. Then again I don't know that anyone thought it was really something of a way to make a living. Maybe a very small few, but if any of those early day cammers/streamers had tried to get a discount at a restaurant for a positive review that would have been met with confusion for sure. I guess when one calls themselves an "influencer" they know what they're after.
I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."
The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.
Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.
I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.
"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'
All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.
2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.
When the "mobile first" design pattern really took off is when the Internet was handed to the masses IMO. That's when it became accessible to everyone's mom and grandparents through their phone and that really changed things from a user base perspective. At the same time, all the mobile apps started getting published and the internet, to most people, became answering the question "which app do i tap on?". Honestly, it's pretty much that way for me. The Internet, outside of work, consists of this website, my youtube app, my wikipedia app, spotify app, and maybe google news app.
I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...
I bet when you were about 22 plus or minus a couple years music started to change for the worse too!
> I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.
The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:
The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.
That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline becomes the topic everyone just starts pointing to their early years on the internet as the golden age.
like the old slashdot min(uid) flex
Money getting into the net as created many problems
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
They also started top posting!
Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding.
The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being.
"Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic as well as the language. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
That's rose-tinted glasses. You're not describing a trend of the Internet, but of individual insular communities. It happens in every community that eventually people get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. I was part of a C++ forum for a long time, and I lost count how times I answered that both template definitions and declarations must be visible at the point of usage, and then of mentioning that I'd answered that exact thing many times already.
PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.
The answers were literally "WHY ARE YOU CODING IN PERL" "WHY ARE YOU CODING IN Tcl" to "How can I read a file and split the line via a pipe symbol. It wasn't "how do I stdout foobar in X".
Facebook came a long "Your not on facebook, you must be a red flag" -- I've never had facebook, yet, then one wanted to even seek contact unlike previous text message / phone.
Twitter came a long which was the trend.
Communities are the trend to the internet, they are really what make the internet.
Where would be the internet if FB, SO and all the rest never existed? If not more peaceful.
“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.
The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.
It's not elitist. It's just nostalgia.
"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"
"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("
If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.
I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.
I feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is
Oh hello, me! ;-)
I also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.
I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.
By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
This framing sets up variables incorrectly.
People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day.
People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier.
There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.
“People” != Internet people.
“People” at large were not part of the early Internet. They came much later and turned it into a shopping mall/surveillance hub.
I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses. We did just fine.
>I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses.
Really? I would consider myself an "Internet person" in the sense you're saying. I spend most of my time, if not on old-school forums, certainly on discussion forums like this one and imageboards. I don't find that the existence of those other platforms affects me much, besides allowing me to use them when I'm the mood to do so, and if they went away I would neither mourn it nor cheer it.
The early Internet had many more small personal and hobby sites, and it was easier to find them. Some are still there, but they get drowned out in the noise. If the commercial noise were gone, in some hypothetical new web, personal sites would be all that remains.
The Gemini protocol space is somewhat like this now, it’s very cozy. (But I’d prefer a Gemini-like web with guaranteed privacy and anonymity.)
>This framing sets up variables incorrectly.
What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?
For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'
Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.
This bit feels naive, in 2007:
> While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.
2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.
For context, initial WoW was developed until 2005, and up to roughly 2003 Blizzard was going to release it only for the US and Korea, because they thought “Europeans only play racing games” (source: WoW dev diary by Staats)
The release date was late 2004. It's definitely true that Blizzard massively underestimated demand. They expected the initial printing to last for months, and it sold out immediately. They needed to race to roll out more datacenter capacity as fast as possible. (This was pre-AWS)
Source: was there
Things we don't have to worry about anymore:
10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...
Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up
Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.
Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.
Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.
Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...
Well, adware and spyware just became a normal thing that people surrendered to and don't call a malware anymore due to heavy lobbying.
Google doesn't bother to add cloud AI spyware to the new android versions, feed private email contents to it; meta tries to spy by any fingerprinting techniques it can find and selling data to thousands of "data brokers" and everything is framed like it's supposed to be this way.
Would be much better if each "data broker" executive, Palantir's/Meta managers, Celebrite/NSO mercenaries do jail time just like malware/botnet/data exfiltration actors from those times.
And you don't have to compulsively save anymore! Autosave is everywhere!
> Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
This part, at least, is satire, right? The rest I largely agree with :-)
Now we get the popup for 'Click here to save 25% on your first order'
In the past, popups were a new browser window, and could appear by the tens or hundreds.
> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.
In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.
It ran pretty well from what I recall.
Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.
Born in 89, I always feel nostalgic seeing screenshots of Windows 95. It brings back a time of novelty, exploration, and freedom. And what a ride it's been.
It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves.
I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.
Needing a QR code to order food is a signal
<sarcasm> 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. </sarcasm>
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
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
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.
i wonder if there's a niche market for an oled screen with a 100lbs glass surface for the hipsters out there. all the weight without that pesky electron cannon.
I remember visiting a science museum as a kid which had a couple of CRTs like that set up where you could pull a rope to smash a hammer into it and try to break it. With the same result; never leaving a mark.
CRTs are built like that because otherwise they would implode from the slightest bump and send thousands of tiny glass fragments flying in all directions.
Panel displays of today have their glass pieces glued together into one solid lump, and there is no pressure, so when they break the broken pieces stay where they are for the most part.
TVs for consumers are sold at loss and the TV companies are making money with data and ads.
I guess the real price is 5-10x of what you pay. So only 10-20x more expensive for more apples to apples compariaon.
I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
>so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
What do you mean by friction?
> with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole
This is your regular reminder that many websites you are visiting are proxying your data to facebook for them. There is no host to block here.
Check out the Facebook Conversions API Gateway.
Does uBlock Origin block this by default?
If not, what are the counter-measures?
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
> I used 2012 as an example because that's when I was in my first year of high school
I don't think this person has the experience required to make a qualifiable judgement on what the internet was.
There is a large block of (Internet) time missing from this analysis.
> what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet
> Listening to music
Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.
There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.
It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.
They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?
You could be right. I haven't had one since 2018. ChatGPT says 70% of residential customers worldwide do still have routable addresses so I may have spoken too much from my own experience. I'm sure it depends on where you are, and I don't live in the US, which has a large number of IPv4 addresses per capita. Also IPv6 changes things.
There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III
> We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away
That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.
I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.
Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.
It was ever thus; so shall it be.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
The old internet still exists, we're just distracted by commercial slopware.
Switching back to RSS and Linux made me a much happier person.
The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.
Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.
The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
> The world changed for a reason.
Sure, but the actual reasons matter. A big part of it changed due to making the internet primarily a place for circulating ads, and that's a change many may not like.
I don't like ads either, but there are ad-free corners of the internet. If you don't like Facebook then don't use it.
Even if you don’t use Facebook they have a “shadow profile” of you. One of the things that is different on the modern internet.
>It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free.
Oh, you mean hosting as in, from your home. I wouldn't say hosting from a provider is significantly harder than at home. It might be philosophically more attractive. Serving the data (whether from rented or own hardware) is probably the least of the technical hurdles, especially compared to actually designing the site.
The world can change both toward better and toward worst. The countries go from peaceful to war obsessed, from autocracy to genocide and from peaceful democratic to pogroms. Women or minorities can gain rights and loose rights.
The algorithmic propagation of toxicity is changing it towards worst. And internet is actively used to incite some of the things I listed above. And major companies actively facilitated those changes towards the worst. And by actively I mean "we now know they were actively helping the bad stuff to happen".
Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.
No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.
That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.
Most of the old internet could be restored with the right search engine and browser. Index all of the invasive BS to page 100 or the results, and put the interesting/relevant things up front. People might pay for it. You could do some of it with an extension.
The internet has changed because attempts to bring commercial interests into it have been too successful.
In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hate beyond the typical local community hate speech, and hate speech was just one agenda item that could be discussed.
But now, even hate speech has become fragmented. And as hate became fragmented, people became too willing to pay money to those who agree with their opinions. It became easier to pay people who say what you want to hear.
On top of that, in the old days, if you were a minority in a local community, you had to bend your opinions somewhat for the majority in order to be heard. Unlike the old society where you had to tone down your voice to create a single unified voice, now you can speak out even if it's unpopular. The only catch is that it's now subject to a different metric: popularity.
And the generational divide in internet usage has also changed a lot.
For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same. That's why internet etiquette was important. But these days, there's a binary divide: the internet is the internet, and reality is reality. People think that even if they do something stupid online, it's separate from real life.
Damaging physical infrastructure is visible, but polluting the internet is invisible. Yet once someone starts it, there's no end to it. And the broken windows theory applies to advertising too. Most websites run ads, and many of those ads are low-quality porn ads, which easily create a mindset of 'this place is fair game for attack.'
In the past, the internet was less widely available and limited to a small elite, so it was relatively clean. The reason is simple: because only a few people used it, they were socially traceable, and their online reputation actually affected their real-life reputation. But as everyone gained access, it became harder to track identities online, and that changed everything.
It's no one's fault. It just seems like a natural shift of the times
> For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same.
I’d argue the opposite. On the old internet we all used nicknames, and everyone knew not to share their personal info. These days nearly everyone posts stuff on social media using their real name and a photo of their face.
Reading your comment, I realize that the local context was something I had been missing, and your point makes a lot of sense. I think I should revise it like this
"The online self used to be an identity that was managed within small, persistent communities. Now, that self is easily discarded and reformed."
Thanks for the insight
The world I grew up in, no longer exists
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue
The average joe is a fundamental reason the internet he grew up with no longer exists. It’s not black and white, but away from average joe communities, there’s something almost like the old internet.
I mean, the old internet still exists if you want to use it. At least, in many places online.
There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.
There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.
Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.
The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.
It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.
There were a bunch of internet golden era but I think the last one was the rise of blogs and rss.
Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.
Mostly agree with the timeline.
I would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.
(Anyone remember Klout?)
By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.
At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.
I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.
Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.
Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design. It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.
I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.
This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
___
You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
My recollection, growing up and living mostly in Scandinavia
90s - mid 2000s:
- Pre social media days, you visited home pages. - Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you. - Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.
mid 2000s - early 2010s:
- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes. - Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all. - Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus. - Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.
Early 2010s - late 2010s:
- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms. - Personal websites die off. - Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc. - Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services. - The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed. - Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.
Late 2010s - now:
- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players. - It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present. - Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it. - You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan. - Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.
Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.
Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.
It all still exists in dark web. Anonymity, small communities, exploration, etc.
I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.
Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.
Honestly, I also miss, sometimes, those days, when every website had a toolbar to install. I didn't have high expectations in those days. Now you see these billion dollar companies and you ask yourself what are those people doing there? Can't they afford at least one guy to do the bugs?
Let's build a new one! We have the technology.
I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.
The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.
Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.
Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.
> Those of us who were cool used things like MSN Messenger, AIM, etc. to chat quickly without having to use an email.
Rubbish, MSN Messenger was never cool
This resonates: the Internet was such an interesting place to grow up in, though my experience may be a little before the author’s.
I miss the niche bespoke websites and forum communities of the years past, but there’s nothing holding us back from creating and maintaining spaces like that these days, aside from spam and AI slop. Some are still out there.
The shift is mainly attributable to lowering the bar to access as cellphones with browsers came on: it became such a valuable consumer platform, rather than a place for creators, hobbyists, and those with a nerdy curiosity to congregate.
I hope the pendulum swings back the other way someday, but I fear ‘dead internet theory’ may be the current endpoint of least resistance.
I think the biggest 'change' was when 'online' went from an activity you sat down in a specific spot in your house to enjoy for a couple of hours to something we have on our person 24/7 (sometimes via multiple devices). Less constant communication via SMS, Call, online messenger (on desktop) was very different from what we have now.
The internet went to shit pretty much when Facebook went mainstream: internet stopped being some kind of alternative reality and started merging with regular reality… but worse.
It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- No browser nagging, ever.
- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.
- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.
- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.Finally, there's:
Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online
I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP. Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..
Text only means limited opportunity for vulnerabilities (new HTML/CSS parser bugs all the time), and it’s trivial to roll your own client if you want.
Text only also means your value has to stand on words alone. No memes, no flashy design. Some of us value that and feel that it’s been lost over time.
If you're just serving static pages the scrapers aren't going to be a problem
This is what you and some people may do.
The internet which is being mourned was that period where it was better for the people who couldn’t make those changes.
There are always a few people who can manage to insulate themselves. Still, however well you insulate yourself, you are impacted by what happens to the majority, or the direction they vote.
The Internet I Grew Up with Doesn't Exist Anymore
You're not alone. The internet we built doesn't exist anymore.
When I talk with fellow graybeards, the sentiment is universally the same: This isn't what we built. This wasn't the intent. This isn't what we worked so hard for. This isn't what was supposed to happen.
Easily 90% of the graybeards I know who were involved in the early days have largely given up on the internet. They use the new breed of "essential" technologies like smart phone apps to talk to their doctor, or online bill payments. But they don't have a lot of internet use because they're just not interested in it anymore.
They're also at the age when their interests are more focused on real-life things like families, and increasingly taking up the same real-life hobbies they used to make fun of online.
Maybe they're just burned out after dozens and dozens of hype cycles.† But for the most part, I think they've just given up hope.
† Just last night, I saw an article in a 1980's computer magazine about a company that came out with what we could call "AR" glasses to project a screen in you field of vision so you could compute on the go without a monitor. Nothing in technology is new anymore.
The "old web" is now darknets, like Tor or especially I2P. Everything fits. It requires some technical expertise to set up (particularly I2P). Slow downloads. No Javascript (usually disabled for safety reasons). Some content that will shock you at 30 exactly as the old internets content occasionally shocked you at 13. Intermittent connection. Anarchy. You can explore this world.
the internet i grew up with didn't exist yet
The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
Not another one of these.
The connected, small community internet still exists.
The article comes off as kind of a curmudgeonly old man yelling at clouds.
More nostalgia bait… I hope one day I get downvote privileges for posts.
Authors first problem is "Using MS Windows". Its now solidly an advert and spam vehicle for other Microsoft shit nobody wants (like the 63 different things named Copilot). Seriously, use Linux. It is better in almost every way, other than extreme rootkit based games.
Next, use Firefox or Iceweasel with Ublock Origin and a useragent changer. Disable the spammy shit, but there's less of it.
For phones, run Graphene. Hands down.
Focus on Fediverse applications. Twitter -> Mastodon. Instagram -> Pixelfed. Reddit -> Lemmy. YouTube -> Peertube. Various chat -> Matrix (but its not good). Various search engines -> SearXNG.
And old stuff still exists. IRC is still a thing. Gopher still exists.
You can also run your discord chats, Facebook, Instagram, etm. Just run them through a web browser, and never let them see any apps.
Its easy to be all defeatist and shouty-at-clouds, and 'back in the old days'. They'll never come again. Instead, its all our jobs to MAKE the current place friendly to us and ours.
Let’s bring it back!
amazing idea
Now it's time to move on.
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I have independently dated it to that same year.
Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.
The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.
This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.
Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."
I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.