Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
Says who? Please define your definition of the word "needs" here in this context.
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
> That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
In the 90s, my parents made at least 50% more than I do (for similar work, not inflation adjusted), bought a house almost twice as big as mine in a nicer area for 25% less than mine, and traveled internationally for what it costs me to take my kids camping. Well, maybe that last one is a slight exaggeration, but the rest isn't.
I typed out a very snarky response which was in complete agreement with your point, and erased it.
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day.
Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive.
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
Good question. No, unless we have similar interests and hobbies. Specialized topics and fields (I observe anecdotally) tend to be less vulnerable to the optimization this article laments!
The big, bold world outside the internet is arguably far more locked down, enshittified and regulated than the online world.
I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.
You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.
> The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion"
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
A little while ago I got my hodge podge Amazon soldering kit out and took the time to fix two DMG-01 Game Boys from my childhood. I opened up a bunch of PS5 controllers and replaced the analog sticks with hall sensors.
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
I repair electronics every once in a while and I've always hated doing it. If you actually like doing that, then you absolutely should try doing it for a living.
as someone who laments the loss of spaces and pastimes that once brought people together -- bowling alleys, dance halls, pubs, movie houses, etc. -- to work from home, home entertainment and especially anything and everything online, I keep hoping for some kind of reversal.
Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
That seems kind of like a non-sequiter none of that stuff has anything to do with what made the internet special so I don't see how doing so would help either bring the internet back or create a viable alternative.
I swapped to Linux last year and my computer has actually been fun. Bazzite is great. I barely tinker with it if ever and it’s mostly because I feel like it, not out of necessity. I have a very reliable gaming and video editing machine, mostly using open source stuff, and I am in no way a coder/programmer/engineer. I just love using it.
Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.
Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake.
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
Tragedy of the Commons. It was around 2012 when my reactionary boomer relatives started trying to friend me on Facebook, wondering what the kids were all talking about.
I too have felt the same around me. There is this lack of faith in the institutions now, feeling of distrust. Someone on HN called this the era of shamelessness and I kind of agree to it. The top has gotten shameless and the people at the bottom are trying to scrabble whatever they can to become one of them so that they can escape this hellhole that has been created.
> I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
I don't know if they are really capable of thinking of the second and third order effects of what they're doing. There is something psychologically broken about many of the ultra-rich today where their behavior comes across as compulsive.
When you have a hole in your soul that can't be filled with a billion dollars, it simply can't be filled, and that black hole drives much of their behavior. You look at people like Trump and Musk, and they seem... miserable. Like, have you ever heard Trump have a genuine laugh of joy? Not the sort of sneering snicker of a bully, but one that comes from delight? Because I haven't.
We are all at the mercy of their actions, but it's almost like they're at the mercy of their irrational compulsions too.
Not that I'm saying they are deserving of sympathy or aren't responsible for their actions. But if we're looking for someone to pump the brakes on the crazy that's happening these days, it's sure as hell not going to be those hollow men.
I don't like being conspiratorial but it genuinely feels like the people at the top know some major catastrophe is coming and are just grabbing whatever resources they can while they can before retreating to their bunkers. Even the white house is trying to build a massive underground bunker using the ballroom on top as a excuse. I don't see why else they would all be willingly destroying society as they are right now unless they don't think it matters.
Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.
It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
This sounds like a bit of romance for the past, and if any software developers are thinking about "grinding misery", it wasn't any better in the past. My salary as a junior developer in the early 2000s was about $60k, on average. I met someone who had given up a $100k networking job (to do church ministry), and I remember $100k feeling like a number that was just not ever going to be in the realm of possibility for me. Now all the numbers have gone up, but the relatively percentages are about the same. (Except commercial rent, that is a terrible value in my area, but housing prices are reasonable.)
I wasn't joking, just trying to compact my thoughts. The lifestyle and abundance we sold the last generation of university students turned out to be wholly out of reach for all but the luckiest and most well-connected, and that disillusion is why we feel so much like crap, even when we point out we're still objectively far ahead of the global average.
If you feel that way then you have to question what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way. Many people (most that I know) don’t feel that way. It may be the online communities that you are in or the news you consume, and the great news about that is that is stuff that is not only optional; you choose to consume it. You can just stop consuming it.
It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.
I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:
- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.
- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.
- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.
- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.
> what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way.
I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.
I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.
If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.
If you spend all day on Reddit or twitter etc., and you say “all these Reddit and twitter things are making me feel sad and anxious”, then you can’t avoid all the blame for making yourself feel that way.
> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
This is an amazing comment. I'm old. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and miss those times so much. But that is because I was young, immortal, the world was mine to discover.
In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.
I like the forums of the old way better than what we have now, Discord and reddit suck I mean, even back button on reddit does not work 50% of the time, lol.
Hacker News is the only thing that we have left that's similar to what we had from forums of the old. And even then, I think I like those forums better. Remember Deja News before Google bought them. Shit like that, that was good.
This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.
They're often not wrong though. Nothing ruins a city quite like a white collar industry boom. It normalizes everything down to the "globalhomo" (for lack of a better word) baseline. The bars, the stores, the government, the transportation, it's all the same. Unless you fixate on appearances like the local architecture (a reflection of local climate for the most part) or minutia like "this city has a park by the river" vs "this city has a park by the highway" they're nearly indistinguishable.
Whether it's an old industry town going to shit or a hippies and artists type place or a former the shit it goes to seems to be the same every damn time.
Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…
You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
As Ia genz I can say that the internet help me learn english, programming and before that I got an advertisement freelance business that took me out of poverty. What got me into these were videos recommended by youtube or something.
It was still an extremely exciting period of time that everyone was enjoying at the time. Mostly because it was augmenting existing friendships rather than replacing them with algorithmic content.
I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
This is a great point. Us millenials all look at AOL through rosy colored glasses as part of the halcyon days of the free internet, but there was probably just as much depressing corporate overlord bullshit going on, we just thought it was fun that they printed billions of garbage CDs!
This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.
> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
Indeed. I was trying to sell a loft bed a couple years ago and Craigslist is essentially dead for that sort of thing now, killed by Facebook (I deleted my account in 2021 and I have to say that eschewing that corner of the internet has been a net positive for my mental health). The only replies I got were obvious scams (“I love this! I’ll pay you $100 more than you’re asking for it!”)
Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).
I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.
A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.
It's almost preferable for sites to die than for them to be captured by the various ideological extremes that it seems necessary for them to subscribe to these days.
the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason
Billions have been spent building walls around niche and small sites to funnel people into major platforms. Pretending this ad/discoverability infrastructure doesn't exist is very naive.
I think this cynicism is more borne out of a despair for the average person stuck in all that. They often don't know that there's something else, that you can just Do Things.
What does this accomplish? You could always write some words on a paper and then throw that paper into a fire, you don't need the internet to do that.
The whole appeal of the internet was that you could write about some random niche thing you liked and reliably find other people who liked the same thing. It was never about screaming into a void or otherwise "doing things for yourself". It sucks now specifically because whatever you "do for yourself" is now far less likely to be seen by anyone else who cares than it has ever been before.
That hasn't been my experience. The problem is do you expect it to be seen by thousands upon thousands of people? That wasn't a thing back then and it's not now either. You get a handful of hits, as you always did. The big numbers are the algorithm's game, though for many people, they've become normalized. If 1000 people see your niche little project, that's a failure by modern standards. That was huge success for a noname nobody 20+ years ago.
So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).
Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
It’s true but things did change meaningfully. Before you could read forums discussions, mailing lists threads going for weeks or months on a topic. The content wasn’t optimized, it was between some people chatting/debating without the expectation of a larger audience. Same for blog. Not to say the quality was always great (blog comment sections were notoriously extremely low quality, I spent way too much time having the dumbest exchanges there) but you had some interesting things to search and look for. All current platforms (not HN) are full of cropped Twitter posts with cynical commentary that you consume in a few seconds or minutes (if you read the comment) before you scroll to the next one. Even if you go to smaller subreddit the discussions are dominated by whatever is the latest thing someone said on some other platform (still so much of Reddit is made of cropped twitter screenshots…), there is very limited actual engagement with the content. No interaction between whatever is posted (very likely out of context) and the original author. Virtually nobody ever interact with a discussion slightly older than a few hours.
Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?
I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest
I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.
i think discovery is the real thing all these “back in my day…” blog posts are about. they want the quirk delivered to them, but they’re fallen out of the zeitgeist and conclude that the old days are completely gone.
The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.
Most of those got absorbed by reddit for me. Reddit has some awesome characteristics. But over the past two years it's becoming more and more bots. You used to be able to make a reddit account without an email, now you can't for obvious reasons.
You can still make an account without an email because reddit doesn’t verify emails. You can put whatever you want in the email line. I have made dozens of accounts this way. No idea if the associated emails are even valid.
Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
The music was new, black polished chrome
And came over the summer like liquid night
The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.
My take is the shift to mobile is what really caused the biggest change in the Internet.
By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.
Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.
Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.
> Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult
I tried a foldable phone thinking it would solve my issues with mobile interactivity, and learned that it's not the small screen that hinders me. It's the terrible mobile input methods in general, particularly surrounding text manipulation and entry. I didn't keep the phone since it didn't solve my seemingly unsolvable problem after all.
Not just difficulty on the browsing side, difficulty on the presentation side, too. It took a while for anybody to figure out a decent presentation for forums on mobile devices, and in the meantime the experience was terrible. Frankly, you can get away with much worse UI on desktop, which made hacking together a webpage much easier.
How many of these will we get on a daily basis? Ten million nerds—7 million of which work for Meta—writing ten million blog posts about how nothing is fun anymore, and about 4 of them are doing anything fun.
This is pretty much true, but also, you're older now. The people the age you are now were saying things like this when you were having all that fun. You are in a different place now. Your life is not about coming home after school and goofing off. You have important things to do. Those bored, lonely, funny, obsessive, angry, horny, curious kids are still out there, finding their version of what we had. They always are.
The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.
Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
I still enjoy the things that are not overtaken by big tech (although it isn't much). Anna's archive and streaming niche movies.
I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.
The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.
I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.
I understand the sentiment. However, I would also suggest that people cultivate the culture/scene that they want to see.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
Yeah, it's all about communities, not platforms. What happens is that people find a community they like, then the platform underneath it dies (IRC, MySpace, Digg, etc) and they can't find the same community on a new platform. I've made a lot of friends on Discord, and ionce a year or so when it looks like Discord's about to finally give up we talk about our plans to migrate the community to a different platform. But since the community is the important part, we don't really care about the ills of the platform until it starts to actively hurt the community
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
To find these spaces, you have to think in reverse. You can’t look for the community first. You have to start by having a specialized interest. You can’t rely on an algorithm to tell you what you care about and how you want to spend the time in your life. That answer has to come from within. Once you have that answer, finding the community online is quite easy.
The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.
They are almost always Discord servers, ruled by terminally online powertripping weirdos who will make your life hell if you even slightly offend them, where knowledge and discussion go to die because none of it is searchable and whatever was being talked about 5 minutes ago is already forgotten.
This has nothing to do with what the internet used to be like.
So exactly like textboards in the 1990s, except powertripping discord mods just ban you. Aggrieved sysops would target you with malware before banning you.
In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
Right after reading this, I stumbled on another HN link showing a web-based version of Zork running in an interactive ZIL interpreter. The fun stuff is still out there, you just have to learn to screen out the ever-increasing background noise.
The internet is just a 'means'; the medium through which an 'end' is reached.
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.
The internet is what we make of it. Of course there has to be some realism about it (most services algorithmic by default etc), but I don't think it's enough to declare it's all over. Generally, yes, the internet has become worse, but some corners are growing, the 'small internet' especially-- if only in these small circles. Where you spend your time in really determines how you feel about this matter.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
same can be said for a lot of things tho. e.g. nature used to be fun but then we discovered it all :’( I miss when ships literally sailed into the unknown and found surprising and novel things like hot peppers and pineapples
The old internet can't come back, no matter how many MySpace[0] and Geocities clones[1] are spun up. The world has changed. Even the author's reference to TikTok lip-syncing videos are at least 5 years out of date - kids aren't doing that anymore.
People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.
If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
Nah. There are billions of people on the internet, and it varies from a dusty library to Atlantic City (though for some reason we let kids into the casino?). It is not one thing any more, but there are plenty of fun corners.
I don't agree entirely with the cleansing being done on behalf of AI. Sure the Internet was slowly descending into influence bot nets and sim card farms. But it couldn't scale to all corners of the internet. AI is the tool that destroyed that. Soon the amount of human content on the Internet will be so small it will be a place mostly for bots.
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
Yes the internet has changed, as it always has. The internet is many layers built upon each other. Under no circumstances would I consider the 2000s to be the "old internet", there are probably plenty of people in this thread who get a chuckle out of that. I assure you, there are plenty who look down on what you think was the "golden age". The procession of generations is to lament the younger and affirm Hesiod's ages of man in their own way. I'm sure you don't have to dig very hard to find computer scientists lamenting the new generation of undergrads in the 1980s who spent too much time with the low-brow, crude and totally soulless Usenet phenomenon.
The "old internet" isn't dead, and this is somewhat acknowledged by the author with a disclaimer. In fact, they make note the number of people producing work that they would normally value is higher than ever. But they lament it with a vague feeling that it's simply "not the same", not feeling like it "came from some place". That's very telling, because that's exactly a sensation of disenchantment. As we age, there are less surprises, less things feel new, less mysteries to wonder about. Patterns that were hidden and novel come into stark relief. The more pessimistically minded begin to suffer from world-weariness. Anomie sets in, and rationalization begins, attempting to ground the loss of youthful whimsy with some external phenomenon.
I would say embrace it, you were always on your way to become a crotchety old coot. That's a very important social role to play. Just don't mistake your rationalization of feelings for something substantial, it's nothing but a hard-wired delusion to help guide your development as a human being.
Maybe on the surface this is true but you try to look for it you can have a lot more fun. Looking for communities that are harder to find but with common interests and you can find it but you have to work for it.
The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.
disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.
People created for the pure joy of creation. It's rare now. If you talk to younger people about it, they will sometimes look at you puzzled, like that was never a thing or doesn't make sense. "Back in the day" is a dangerous thing when you're older - we tend to idealize the past, but truly, back then if you made something that went viral, you didn't try to spin up a crypto rug pull and sell merch, you'd just go to a party and they'd be like "oh my god, you're THAT guy!" and you'd smile and say "yep, was me." and that was literally it. Perfect example of how distorted this is now is watching the brief story of the Hawk Tuah girl - one small viral moment, all of a sudden she's got crypto, a multi million dollar podcast, the whole standard path sans an onlyfans. Off a 10 second clip. Just absurd.
It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.
I’m in my 20s but I’ve felt the same way for years. If I were growing up now, I’m not sure I would still make it into my career.
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
RSS is great and I love that it's making a resurgence. I've sworn off big social media sites, including Reddit. Lemmy/Piefed feels more like "old internet" and I like it.
For me, what has really changed is the feeling of having community on the Internet.
In the 90s, I had:
Instant Messenger with people I knew
IRC channels for interests
Forums for specific topics
A Web Ring for my James Bond website
Back then, the Internet felt like an actual place I went to. I would sit down at the computer, dial up, and enter a space that had boundaries. When I was done, I left, and that separation made the time I spent there feel focused and real. You couldn't take it with you, and that was a feature, not a bug.
In the 2000s, we had:
Social Media (Facebook), where you actually talked to people you knew and shared experiences with them
It hadn't yet become a content distribution machine. It was still a tool for connection.
All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.
Maybe that's why something is missing.
Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.
On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.
Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.
We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.
Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.
The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.
Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.
The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
> It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
I think that's fair, the algorithms are manipulative and one has to be very aware of their own susceptibility to it. Everything you specifically mentioned is why I don't go on Twitter to scroll anymore. I will use the platform to search something or I will click links to it but Twitter is not my go-to for scrolling dopamine because it is too negative.
It's the normies. Any group that grows larger starts losing its initial focus, and starts being a vague mass of undefined humans. As the internet grew larger and more accessible to everyone, it lost its initial focus. Same reason why a house party with your friends is more fun than a ceremony of 200 people you don't know.
Enshittification was very advanced in the 2010s, which the author describes as still within the golden age.
I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.
The best part about the best is over is that it can be a turning point to drive us back to what is better than online -- offline. Go live real life, touch grass, and give real monetary value to things which give meaning back in return. For most people this involves people or animals, maybe dirt, and often involves giving more than you take.
Enshittification is just how platforms try to adapt to new users, and it actually works very well. It's just old users have grown to be ... classy, which are less profitable for platforms.
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
My theory is that basically everything is controlled by income inequality and interest rates. AI should not, in theory, lead to a loss of creativity. If anything, we should see a creative explosion because it’s easier to create more and better things. If nothing else, generative AI is a great tool for brainstorming and prototyping ideas.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
That's not what this article is about. It's really about algorithmic social media. There is one short paragraph near the end that mentions AI: "AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it."
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.
The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.
I agree, but it's been said by all...
make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having
Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
Don’t try to make money from it and you can still do fun things in life
How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
How did they in the 1990s/2000s/2010s?
Lower cost of living and higher incomes when compared to purchasing power of a dollar.
Do you have sources? Because my understanding is that medium income/inflation increased
That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
People were paying $150/mo cable bill.
Nobody needs to pay for any of that
Says who? Please define your definition of the word "needs" here in this context.
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
What a stretch to go from cars and luxury laptop to daily survival
> That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
In the 90s, my parents made at least 50% more than I do (for similar work, not inflation adjusted), bought a house almost twice as big as mine in a nicer area for 25% less than mine, and traveled internationally for what it costs me to take my kids camping. Well, maybe that last one is a slight exaggeration, but the rest isn't.
I typed out a very snarky response which was in complete agreement with your point, and erased it.
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
Can we actually separate distribution from sharing?
I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?
Based on my lived experience people were complaining the same way
Flea markets.
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
Thrift and vintage stores have been pivoting to the premium consumer as well.
WTF is the premium consumer of a thrift store?
Well, you got authentic experience that most of us only get to see on Hallmark TV :)
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day.
Rinse and repeat.
And of course the other chores: cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc. come out of the part you don't particularly enjoy right? Right?
That's why 'fun on the internet' was, always has been, is, and always will be a hobby, not a job.
If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
Perfect OK Boomer response. If this is parody then I salute you! So good.
We need to bring back BBS's over short range radio transmitters.
The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.
party van will get you for doing anything like that
What’s party van?
This. Yes, the mass internet is curated, created and censored. Usenet is a distant memory. But some changes are positive.
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
Kagi Small Web !!
It’s all mostly American tech blogs. I mean, it’s a nice initiative, but it’s less diverse than Hacker News.
Do you have interesting urls to recommend?
Good question. No, unless we have similar interests and hobbies. Specialized topics and fields (I observe anecdotally) tend to be less vulnerable to the optimization this article laments!
>bottom-feeder content
So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.
99%? if you count all submitted posts, then yeah, maybe even 99.5%, but the frontpage is maybe 90%
The big, bold world outside the internet is arguably far more locked down, enshittified and regulated than the online world.
I mean look at cities, removing parks, benches, trying to make it impossible to even stand without paying for existing. The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property. Can't do anything anywhere anymore.
You'd have to go somewhere incredibly remote to find any boldness left, like international waters or the Australian outback. The civilized world is just bureaucracy with extra steps.
> The countryside is all bought up, every inch of grass owned and people itching to tell you to get the fuck off their property.
You’re missing out if you think that. People come from all over the world to hike, bikepack, or van-dwell American wilderness. Since Covid there has been a big boom in ”weekender” routes that Americans can do in their own neck of the woods. And if there’s so much reward in the USA, think about what rewards await in other countries that have even less of a culture of territorialness and privatization.
This is a good point, and is depressing on its own...
Or just make homebrew.
It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.
It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
I can't wait to find out if I made pruno or jenkem
Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion"
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
A little while ago I got my hodge podge Amazon soldering kit out and took the time to fix two DMG-01 Game Boys from my childhood. I opened up a bunch of PS5 controllers and replaced the analog sticks with hall sensors.
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”
I repair electronics every once in a while and I've always hated doing it. If you actually like doing that, then you absolutely should try doing it for a living.
as someone who laments the loss of spaces and pastimes that once brought people together -- bowling alleys, dance halls, pubs, movie houses, etc. -- to work from home, home entertainment and especially anything and everything online, I keep hoping for some kind of reversal.
Maybe the day is getting closer when anything and everything internet-related is so drenched in uncanny artifice and extractionary intention that people will yearn for imperfect, multidimensional reality, and feel like the best thing they can do with their time is walk through the park with a friend.
That seems kind of like a non-sequiter none of that stuff has anything to do with what made the internet special so I don't see how doing so would help either bring the internet back or create a viable alternative.
I swapped to Linux last year and my computer has actually been fun. Bazzite is great. I barely tinker with it if ever and it’s mostly because I feel like it, not out of necessity. I have a very reliable gaming and video editing machine, mostly using open source stuff, and I am in no way a coder/programmer/engineer. I just love using it.
Tinkering with retro consoles has also been very satisfying. I would say more than half of the consoles in my home are modded in some way or another. My kids love it.
Then of course there’s film photography. Talk about a great way to force yourself to be intentional and patient. You can buy any dinky camera and a nifty 50 for like $100, it’ll work just fine. Just get out there and shoot and send off your rolls to be processed. Even just getting one or two good shots out of a roll feels fantastic. Every single photo you take matters and is memorable. It’s refreshing.
A: "The vibe at my favorite bar has changed"
B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"
I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
Why do they have to be pre-exisiting? Release the whatever to the world, make a Discord for it, and find people that way.
I hate the switch to discord so much…
Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
all of these things are not internet.
I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake.
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
The central platforms began before smart phones were common.
There are pockets of this on the internet, but you really have to go out of your way to find it
Tragedy of the Commons. It was around 2012 when my reactionary boomer relatives started trying to friend me on Facebook, wondering what the kids were all talking about.
I too have felt the same around me. There is this lack of faith in the institutions now, feeling of distrust. Someone on HN called this the era of shamelessness and I kind of agree to it. The top has gotten shameless and the people at the bottom are trying to scrabble whatever they can to become one of them so that they can escape this hellhole that has been created.
Definitely the fish stinks from the head.
I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
A long time ago there was a french saying "noblesse oblige", or the german pendant "Wohlstand verpflichtet".
> I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
I don't know if they are really capable of thinking of the second and third order effects of what they're doing. There is something psychologically broken about many of the ultra-rich today where their behavior comes across as compulsive.
When you have a hole in your soul that can't be filled with a billion dollars, it simply can't be filled, and that black hole drives much of their behavior. You look at people like Trump and Musk, and they seem... miserable. Like, have you ever heard Trump have a genuine laugh of joy? Not the sort of sneering snicker of a bully, but one that comes from delight? Because I haven't.
We are all at the mercy of their actions, but it's almost like they're at the mercy of their irrational compulsions too.
Not that I'm saying they are deserving of sympathy or aren't responsible for their actions. But if we're looking for someone to pump the brakes on the crazy that's happening these days, it's sure as hell not going to be those hollow men.
I don't like being conspiratorial but it genuinely feels like the people at the top know some major catastrophe is coming and are just grabbing whatever resources they can while they can before retreating to their bunkers. Even the white house is trying to build a massive underground bunker using the ballroom on top as a excuse. I don't see why else they would all be willingly destroying society as they are right now unless they don't think it matters.
Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.
How reductionist.
It's not the end of the world though. Not everyone has to be a CS graduate. There's other professions out there.
Nobody said that everyone has to be a CS graduate.
It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
This sounds like a bit of romance for the past, and if any software developers are thinking about "grinding misery", it wasn't any better in the past. My salary as a junior developer in the early 2000s was about $60k, on average. I met someone who had given up a $100k networking job (to do church ministry), and I remember $100k feeling like a number that was just not ever going to be in the realm of possibility for me. Now all the numbers have gone up, but the relatively percentages are about the same. (Except commercial rent, that is a terrible value in my area, but housing prices are reasonable.)
I wasn't joking, just trying to compact my thoughts. The lifestyle and abundance we sold the last generation of university students turned out to be wholly out of reach for all but the luckiest and most well-connected, and that disillusion is why we feel so much like crap, even when we point out we're still objectively far ahead of the global average.
If you feel that way then you have to question what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way. Many people (most that I know) don’t feel that way. It may be the online communities that you are in or the news you consume, and the great news about that is that is stuff that is not only optional; you choose to consume it. You can just stop consuming it.
It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.
I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:
- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.
- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.
- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.
- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.
> what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way.
I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.
I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.
If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.
You can feel how you feel and understand how and why people feel how they feel too.
Instead, reads like you're blaming the victim. Shoulda worked harder in school!
If you spend all day on Reddit or twitter etc., and you say “all these Reddit and twitter things are making me feel sad and anxious”, then you can’t avoid all the blame for making yourself feel that way.
If my choice is "work harder in school" or "wait for the system to fix itself" I think the rational choice is the former.
Wisdom is accepting that you can only control what you can control, and to focus on that.
I think it's as simple as Citizens United and wealth inequality exploding.
90s had much less wealth concentration than today.
Truth is everything rots over time, there is no escaping from entropy.
> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
Music becoming more commercial is a widely held complaint. It’s also mostly all the same chord progression so you could say sloppy as well
Music being too AI generated is the new "pop music is formulaic".
I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
I've heard people describe this phenomenon in basically two ways:
- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.
- The past is another country.
The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.
Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
This is an amazing comment. I'm old. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and miss those times so much. But that is because I was young, immortal, the world was mine to discover.
In 20 years people will be missing the 2020s too. It is just human nature to complain.
I like the forums of the old way better than what we have now, Discord and reddit suck I mean, even back button on reddit does not work 50% of the time, lol. Hacker News is the only thing that we have left that's similar to what we had from forums of the old. And even then, I think I like those forums better. Remember Deja News before Google bought them. Shit like that, that was good.
This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.
They're often not wrong though. Nothing ruins a city quite like a white collar industry boom. It normalizes everything down to the "globalhomo" (for lack of a better word) baseline. The bars, the stores, the government, the transportation, it's all the same. Unless you fixate on appearances like the local architecture (a reflection of local climate for the most part) or minutia like "this city has a park by the river" vs "this city has a park by the highway" they're nearly indistinguishable.
Whether it's an old industry town going to shit or a hippies and artists type place or a former the shit it goes to seems to be the same every damn time.
Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…
At my first Burning Man in 1998, I met a guy in his 3rd year who told me, "It's changed, man."
Burning Man may have peaked by now. But looking back, most would agree it still had a lot of good years left in it in 1998.
Are they wrong though? Are there any metrics people today can look at and see things were indeed better in the past when they weren't around?
That's when you ask what exactly was better and then you can tell whether it's just typical nostalgia or if there are genuinely things to miss.
You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
As Ia genz I can say that the internet help me learn english, programming and before that I got an advertisement freelance business that took me out of poverty. What got me into these were videos recommended by youtube or something.
The monetization of every platform has killed the internet. It's hard to find genuine posts anymore. It's all engagement bait.
> millenials got the birth of social media
..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.
It was still an extremely exciting period of time that everyone was enjoying at the time. Mostly because it was augmenting existing friendships rather than replacing them with algorithmic content.
The statement "[thing] is worse now than it was X years ago" is not something that can only be true at a single point in time.
What if [thing] is just contiguously getting worse? What if that statement has always been true regardless of when it's been said?
I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).
I believe it was “Eternal September”.
A vantage point from a very long time ago: The big social media services are pining for the days of CompuServe and Prodigy.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
This is a great point. Us millenials all look at AOL through rosy colored glasses as part of the halcyon days of the free internet, but there was probably just as much depressing corporate overlord bullshit going on, we just thought it was fun that they printed billions of garbage CDs!
This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.
> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
Indeed. I was trying to sell a loft bed a couple years ago and Craigslist is essentially dead for that sort of thing now, killed by Facebook (I deleted my account in 2021 and I have to say that eschewing that corner of the internet has been a net positive for my mental health). The only replies I got were obvious scams (“I love this! I’ll pay you $100 more than you’re asking for it!”)
Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).
I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.
A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.
* The site still exists but has been taken over by Tapatalk, snuffing out what little remained of the original community.
It's almost preferable for sites to die than for them to be captured by the various ideological extremes that it seems necessary for them to subscribe to these days.
Care to provide some examples?
No, it's not! If you don't like the super-monetized over-optimized AI-generated walled garden we've-got-you-hooked experience —
just don't participate in it and do your own thing.
Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.
Write for yourself, not for "engagement".
Do your thing.
I think this cynicism is more borne out of a despair for the average person stuck in all that. They often don't know that there's something else, that you can just Do Things.
What does this accomplish? You could always write some words on a paper and then throw that paper into a fire, you don't need the internet to do that.
The whole appeal of the internet was that you could write about some random niche thing you liked and reliably find other people who liked the same thing. It was never about screaming into a void or otherwise "doing things for yourself". It sucks now specifically because whatever you "do for yourself" is now far less likely to be seen by anyone else who cares than it has ever been before.
That hasn't been my experience. The problem is do you expect it to be seen by thousands upon thousands of people? That wasn't a thing back then and it's not now either. You get a handful of hits, as you always did. The big numbers are the algorithm's game, though for many people, they've become normalized. If 1000 people see your niche little project, that's a failure by modern standards. That was huge success for a noname nobody 20+ years ago.
So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
I run an entire site and newsletter dedicated to showing fun things from across the web.
I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.
https://randomdailyurls.com
I also like to press "surprise me..." on https://wiby.me/
There is a lot of fun stuff still there, but a corporate search engine might not point you to it.
I think we just got older.
People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.
Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.
There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.
Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).
You're right - I think I could have made a better comparison.
Maybe a better comparison might be Source engine custom games to Minecraft mods?
Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
Yeah, that was a lapse :)
It’s true but things did change meaningfully. Before you could read forums discussions, mailing lists threads going for weeks or months on a topic. The content wasn’t optimized, it was between some people chatting/debating without the expectation of a larger audience. Same for blog. Not to say the quality was always great (blog comment sections were notoriously extremely low quality, I spent way too much time having the dumbest exchanges there) but you had some interesting things to search and look for. All current platforms (not HN) are full of cropped Twitter posts with cynical commentary that you consume in a few seconds or minutes (if you read the comment) before you scroll to the next one. Even if you go to smaller subreddit the discussions are dominated by whatever is the latest thing someone said on some other platform (still so much of Reddit is made of cropped twitter screenshots…), there is very limited actual engagement with the content. No interaction between whatever is posted (very likely out of context) and the original author. Virtually nobody ever interact with a discussion slightly older than a few hours.
Vlogs and discord content cannot be searched and found through serendipity. How are you supposed to discover those discussions?
I don’t think people spend that much time online because they have fun to be honest
I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.
Sure they exist. But nobody knows they exist because everyone just uses apps and SEO punishes actual good websites.
Things being too easy takes the joy away from the process. All you are left with is the result and not the journey.
A domain + compute has never been cheaper. That said, I think the signal-to-noise ratio on the modern internet makes discovery difficult.
i think discovery is the real thing all these “back in my day…” blog posts are about. they want the quirk delivered to them, but they’re fallen out of the zeitgeist and conclude that the old days are completely gone.
It's approaching near impossible. The amount of articles posted to hn that are near AI slop is so high it's almost not worth using anymore.
The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.
I mostly hang out in small online communities that essentially become tightly curated by people I am interested in interacting with.
Most of those got absorbed by reddit for me. Reddit has some awesome characteristics. But over the past two years it's becoming more and more bots. You used to be able to make a reddit account without an email, now you can't for obvious reasons.
You can still make an account without an email because reddit doesn’t verify emails. You can put whatever you want in the email line. I have made dozens of accounts this way. No idea if the associated emails are even valid.
Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
All other things aside, there definitely is some profound void which demise of Flash created and has never been filled again.
The music was new, black polished chrome And came over the summer like liquid night The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
Wasted potential is a mournful thing.
Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.
My take is the shift to mobile is what really caused the biggest change in the Internet.
By the mid/late 2000s, the UX for surfing the Web was mostly pretty good. Navigating to another site was as easy as typing in its URL or issuing a quick search.
Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult -- even 15+ years later simple things like browser tabs are a nuisance on mobile. Typing URLs is still a pain. Etc. That extra friction for more traditional Web browsing led to users preferring simpler apps that they didn't have to navigate from, including content that was less interactive. And social media companies were quite happy to exploit that and create endless feeds of content. People who create content followed suit and went were the eyeballs were.
Also, before mobile, using the Internet largely meant sitting down at a computer and browsing the Internet somewhat interrupted for a period of time. With mobile, Internet use became more far more disjointed. You might browse for a series of 2 minute spurts in between other activities, rather than having a dedicated sitdown browsing session. This also rewarded the 'feed' that instantly provided you something to do, without you having to put in effort to find it.
> Navigating the Web on mobile is much more difficult
I tried a foldable phone thinking it would solve my issues with mobile interactivity, and learned that it's not the small screen that hinders me. It's the terrible mobile input methods in general, particularly surrounding text manipulation and entry. I didn't keep the phone since it didn't solve my seemingly unsolvable problem after all.
Not just difficulty on the browsing side, difficulty on the presentation side, too. It took a while for anybody to figure out a decent presentation for forums on mobile devices, and in the meantime the experience was terrible. Frankly, you can get away with much worse UI on desktop, which made hacking together a webpage much easier.
How many of these will we get on a daily basis? Ten million nerds—7 million of which work for Meta—writing ten million blog posts about how nothing is fun anymore, and about 4 of them are doing anything fun.
This is pretty much true, but also, you're older now. The people the age you are now were saying things like this when you were having all that fun. You are in a different place now. Your life is not about coming home after school and goofing off. You have important things to do. Those bored, lonely, funny, obsessive, angry, horny, curious kids are still out there, finding their version of what we had. They always are.
The internet may have changed, but the human spirit hasn't.
Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
I still enjoy the things that are not overtaken by big tech (although it isn't much). Anna's archive and streaming niche movies.
I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.
The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.
I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.
I understand the sentiment. However, I would also suggest that people cultivate the culture/scene that they want to see.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
Yeah, it's all about communities, not platforms. What happens is that people find a community they like, then the platform underneath it dies (IRC, MySpace, Digg, etc) and they can't find the same community on a new platform. I've made a lot of friends on Discord, and ionce a year or so when it looks like Discord's about to finally give up we talk about our plans to migrate the community to a different platform. But since the community is the important part, we don't really care about the ills of the platform until it starts to actively hurt the community
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
Okay, so where are they? Show us some.
Let's be honest here, how many of these "specialized ultra-nerdy communities" are closed off Discord servers?
To find these spaces, you have to think in reverse. You can’t look for the community first. You have to start by having a specialized interest. You can’t rely on an algorithm to tell you what you care about and how you want to spend the time in your life. That answer has to come from within. Once you have that answer, finding the community online is quite easy.
The way you find them is to search for the creators and other community leaders. For example, let’s say you are interested in a specific video game. Look for the publishers, developers, top players, live streamers, and media coverage of that game. Those people are likely to be hosting or participating in communities that you can join, even if they are closed Discord servers.
They are almost always Discord servers, ruled by terminally online powertripping weirdos who will make your life hell if you even slightly offend them, where knowledge and discussion go to die because none of it is searchable and whatever was being talked about 5 minutes ago is already forgotten.
This has nothing to do with what the internet used to be like.
So exactly like textboards in the 1990s, except powertripping discord mods just ban you. Aggrieved sysops would target you with malware before banning you.
Nothing new under the sun.
In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
Gemini? Gopher, if you're old school? I also vaguely recall something called flask
there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages
I intended to explore it more as to say, this is my ideal, it used to be a lot more like it, now it is not, and further is less and less so.
I think overall, the pull and fun of the internet was in the content delivered; now the attractive forces are overwhelmingly rooted in the delivery.
The Internet Is Not Yours - and - You Can Do What You Want.
All the little niches can be your personal Web.
There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.
Craigslist is alive and well.
PayPay is weird but who cares.
The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.
That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.
I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.
Right after reading this, I stumbled on another HN link showing a web-based version of Zork running in an interactive ZIL interpreter. The fun stuff is still out there, you just have to learn to screen out the ever-increasing background noise.
The internet is just a 'means'; the medium through which an 'end' is reached.
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.
The internet is what we make of it. Of course there has to be some realism about it (most services algorithmic by default etc), but I don't think it's enough to declare it's all over. Generally, yes, the internet has become worse, but some corners are growing, the 'small internet' especially-- if only in these small circles. Where you spend your time in really determines how you feel about this matter.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
2026 and we still conflate the Internet with the WWW. As obscene as conflating culture and pop culture.
same can be said for a lot of things tho. e.g. nature used to be fun but then we discovered it all :’( I miss when ships literally sailed into the unknown and found surprising and novel things like hot peppers and pineapples
The old internet can't come back, no matter how many MySpace[0] and Geocities clones[1] are spun up. The world has changed. Even the author's reference to TikTok lip-syncing videos are at least 5 years out of date - kids aren't doing that anymore.
People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.
If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.
- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/
OP, the Badger Badger link is leading to a wiki page about the dead Internet theory.
Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
We have entered the Eternal October.
Nah. There are billions of people on the internet, and it varies from a dusty library to Atlantic City (though for some reason we let kids into the casino?). It is not one thing any more, but there are plenty of fun corners.
It's not just the internet -- it's everything in western society, as far as the eye can see.
This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.
You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.
This is the intended end result of capitalism, maybe its time we all gave socialism another chance?
How about no.
Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puOCoRc17I4
I don't agree entirely with the cleansing being done on behalf of AI. Sure the Internet was slowly descending into influence bot nets and sim card farms. But it couldn't scale to all corners of the internet. AI is the tool that destroyed that. Soon the amount of human content on the Internet will be so small it will be a place mostly for bots.
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
This is 100% nostalgia writing.
Yes the internet has changed, as it always has. The internet is many layers built upon each other. Under no circumstances would I consider the 2000s to be the "old internet", there are probably plenty of people in this thread who get a chuckle out of that. I assure you, there are plenty who look down on what you think was the "golden age". The procession of generations is to lament the younger and affirm Hesiod's ages of man in their own way. I'm sure you don't have to dig very hard to find computer scientists lamenting the new generation of undergrads in the 1980s who spent too much time with the low-brow, crude and totally soulless Usenet phenomenon.
The "old internet" isn't dead, and this is somewhat acknowledged by the author with a disclaimer. In fact, they make note the number of people producing work that they would normally value is higher than ever. But they lament it with a vague feeling that it's simply "not the same", not feeling like it "came from some place". That's very telling, because that's exactly a sensation of disenchantment. As we age, there are less surprises, less things feel new, less mysteries to wonder about. Patterns that were hidden and novel come into stark relief. The more pessimistically minded begin to suffer from world-weariness. Anomie sets in, and rationalization begins, attempting to ground the loss of youthful whimsy with some external phenomenon.
I would say embrace it, you were always on your way to become a crotchety old coot. That's a very important social role to play. Just don't mistake your rationalization of feelings for something substantial, it's nothing but a hard-wired delusion to help guide your development as a human being.
Do we really need one of these articles every month for decades?
Maybe on the surface this is true but you try to look for it you can have a lot more fun. Looking for communities that are harder to find but with common interests and you can find it but you have to work for it.
The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.
i don’t think it has to be like this. make dumb or silly stuff, share it.
it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.
disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.
Maybe this is just a personal thing for me, but I have difficulty saying that anything that Claude creates as "my own stuff".
Getting Claude Code is the opposite of writing your own apps.
If you think the 2000s were special, try going back to the 90s when you could finish browsing the web! :P
As much as you could at 9600 baud.
"You have reached the very last page of the Internet. We hope you have enjoyed your browsing. Now turn off your computer, and go have fun."
People created for the pure joy of creation. It's rare now. If you talk to younger people about it, they will sometimes look at you puzzled, like that was never a thing or doesn't make sense. "Back in the day" is a dangerous thing when you're older - we tend to idealize the past, but truly, back then if you made something that went viral, you didn't try to spin up a crypto rug pull and sell merch, you'd just go to a party and they'd be like "oh my god, you're THAT guy!" and you'd smile and say "yep, was me." and that was literally it. Perfect example of how distorted this is now is watching the brief story of the Hawk Tuah girl - one small viral moment, all of a sudden she's got crypto, a multi million dollar podcast, the whole standard path sans an onlyfans. Off a 10 second clip. Just absurd.
It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.
I’m in my 20s but I’ve felt the same way for years. If I were growing up now, I’m not sure I would still make it into my career.
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
Getting the "nothing new to be discovered in physics now" (Lord Kelvin) vibe.
Before internet existed, people went to clubs and malls, I wonder if they still do it now?
I think this is more a consumption problem.
Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.
Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.
Step 3: Read more books.
Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.
Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.
PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:
https://pinboard.in/popular
https://minifeed.net/
RSS is great and I love that it's making a resurgence. I've sworn off big social media sites, including Reddit. Lemmy/Piefed feels more like "old internet" and I like it.
For me, what has really changed is the feeling of having community on the Internet.
In the 90s, I had:
Back then, the Internet felt like an actual place I went to. I would sit down at the computer, dial up, and enter a space that had boundaries. When I was done, I left, and that separation made the time I spent there feel focused and real. You couldn't take it with you, and that was a feature, not a bug.In the 2000s, we had:
It hadn't yet become a content distribution machine. It was still a tool for connection.All of this still exists, but it just doesn't feel the same. I don't think it's simply because I grew up, or because I'm looking back with rose-colored glasses. And I don't think it's just because these spaces became ghost towns as people consolidated into a few large networks. The architecture changed. The Internet stopped being a destination and became a layer on top of real life that never turns off. Somewhere along the way, the business model shifted from helping people talk to each other to extracting as much attention as possible, and you can feel that in every interaction.
Maybe that's why something is missing.
Facebook now has too many connections, and is just designed for resharing and getting people to doom scroll. There's no real interaction with your friends anymore. It became a broadcast network pretending to be a living room.
On Reddit, I feel like the community is way too big. I don't know who I am talking to and have no connection with anyone on there, even for things that should be local, like my city's subreddit. It feels less like a neighborhood and more like a stadium where thousands of people are shouting over each other.
Hacker News feels the closest to a community, but it is still too big. I have never made a single personal connection here, so I don't even know what I am contributing to. It all just feels faceless and bland.
We still have "Instant Messaging", but my biggest issue is they are pretty much all tied to a phone and "always online." I have zero interest in having a long back-and-forth conversation on that medium, especially now that there is no status of the other people. Back in the day, you were online or not online, and that boundary created a kind of ritual. A conversation could actually be instant and FOCUSED because you both showed up to the same place at the same time. Now it's just a slow conversation over days that randomly interrupts what you are doing. The persistence feels more like an obligation than a hangout.
Most forums feel dead. IRC just isn't the same anymore, and I really dislike being locked into Discord or other proprietary platforms. Matrix bridging has been a godsend, but isn't perfect. I know these small communities haven't completely vanished, but they have been buried. In the old days, you found them through webrings and serendipity. Now you have to dig for them on purpose, and most people never will. My long time friends don't use them anymore, so they aren't useful in connecting to people I already have relationships with.
The Internet just doesn't feel connected or fun anymore.
Don't get me wrong, being able to do research and find information on the internet is better than it has ever been, and I am grateful for that. But the Internet seems to have split in two: it became an incredible tool for finding information, and a terrible tool for sustaining relationships. The Internet was touted as a place for connection, and I feel like that part is long gone. Or if it still exists somewhere, it's hiding in small corners that the algorithms never show us, while the rest of the web is optimized for engagement instead of actually being together.
The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
> It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
I think that's fair, the algorithms are manipulative and one has to be very aware of their own susceptibility to it. Everything you specifically mentioned is why I don't go on Twitter to scroll anymore. I will use the platform to search something or I will click links to it but Twitter is not my go-to for scrolling dopamine because it is too negative.
It's the normies. Any group that grows larger starts losing its initial focus, and starts being a vague mass of undefined humans. As the internet grew larger and more accessible to everyone, it lost its initial focus. Same reason why a house party with your friends is more fun than a ceremony of 200 people you don't know.
The main issue is that we can't really joke around anymore, without someone being offended (and then convincing a mob of people to destroy your life).
It sucks the fun out of pretty much anything.
What kind of joke?
Enshittification was very advanced in the 2010s, which the author describes as still within the golden age.
I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.
Golden ages are usually defined in retrospect.
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
All fun is on discord now.
The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.
TROGDOOOOOOR
The best part about the best is over is that it can be a turning point to drive us back to what is better than online -- offline. Go live real life, touch grass, and give real monetary value to things which give meaning back in return. For most people this involves people or animals, maybe dirt, and often involves giving more than you take.
Fun has been optimized out of the streets. No one plays kick the can anymore.
Guys, we got old.
The problem is discoverability.
Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.
Enshittification is just how platforms try to adapt to new users, and it actually works very well. It's just old users have grown to be ... classy, which are less profitable for platforms.
Well, time to enjoy other things then, no?
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
My theory is that basically everything is controlled by income inequality and interest rates. AI should not, in theory, lead to a loss of creativity. If anything, we should see a creative explosion because it’s easier to create more and better things. If nothing else, generative AI is a great tool for brainstorming and prototyping ideas.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
It’s true. AI slop is not what will kill the fun Internet. It’s just the mechanisation of the forces that already killed it.
Skill issue.
Been doing this for 20 years.
I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.
All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.
I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.
That's not what this article is about. It's really about algorithmic social media. There is one short paragraph near the end that mentions AI: "AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it."
Yeah I admit I only glanced at it. So okay, it was the other common nostalgia take...
Yes it was more whimsical, yes I miss it, but no point talking about it anymore, that part of life is over.
I now understand that writing like this is lamenting over a dearth of things to consume.
"The Medium Is The Message" - Marshall McLuhan
People aren't nihilist - social media is.
People aren't shallow - dating apps are.
The world isn't shit - late capital is.
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
I think a lot about this post along these lines:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.
the fun is still there, it's just harder to find because of all the shit burying it
The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.
true, but always people around who just squeeze for the fun of it
Another predictable anti-AI rant.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.