alt Hacker NewsA retrospective of my time on the internet
Comments
I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.
This bit feels naive, in 2007:
> While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.
2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.
Things we don't have to worry about anymore:
10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...
Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up
Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.
Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.
Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.
Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.
In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.
It ran pretty well from what I recall.
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
<sarcasm> Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating. </sarcasm>
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
I was born in '88 and I feel like my generation is the last great one (doesn't ever generation think this? Hah!) because I got to experience playing outdoors and online, and was able to do a bunch of dumb stuff before smartphones existed so there's no photo proof.
I miss the feel of the internet I grew up with...I don't think it's coming back. However, I do think we can make a new one.
It's nostalgia through and through, I go through that as well.
Finally, no one owned the internet. Sure, we can get into semantics of the DNS system and infrastructure, but the web - and specifically, content - quickly became decentralized after the early stages until the recent centralization of content.
I just miss being able to visit the web, find personal content from fellow internet explorers, and not spend the whole time avoiding the pitfalls of the modern web.
It was all new for us and it was "ours", finally we had a place to ourselves and then the "others" showed up. It's fine. There are still places on the net to mine that dopamine.
I remember switching ISPs on the regular, panic.net, akula.net, earthlink, etc to just get a better ping in Quake. Then my clan mate in Bensonhurst discovered that one could get a double ISDN line through Nynex for $80/m if you pretended to be a business and all was again well. T1 lines at the time were $1K or more IIRC.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
Born in 89, I always feel nostalgic seeing screenshots of Windows 95. It brings back a time of novelty, exploration, and freedom. And what a ride it's been.
It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves.
I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
I was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
Might be weird, but, I have heard this "2012" reference many many times when things started to change (for worse), and then "2020" when it all started to go downhill with an ever-accelerating pace. Very consistently these two years from multiple people.
Any rational explanation for this?
Yeah and we all did that. Each and every one of us here that over the last 30+ years built part of that infrastructure, software, companies, culture etc. We all set out to build one thing and ended up building another in some weird switch-trick or something. Each of course in their own little micro cosmos within the macro, brick by brick, router by router.
I'll be the person who says what a lot of us believe, and even more know: the internet was cooked when the general public started to use it. The magic, community and naivety were all washed away when the socioeconomic & technical barriers fell, expanding the audience from industry & universities to the entire world. Next came those looking to solely profit and consume; not contribute back. This isn't a new problem just the current loudest version.
The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.
Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.
You can't step into the same river twice.
A lot of his gripes about 2026 internet seem quite fixable - if you don't like Windows, Chrome, Google junk use Mac/Linux, Firefox, DuckDuckGo or similar with ublock and a cookie pop up stopper.
> what requires the internet or becomes tedious if we opt not to use the internet
> Listening to music
Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.
There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.
It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.
They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".
The old internet still exists, we're just distracted by commercial slopware.
Switching back to RSS and Linux made me a much happier person.
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
but funbrain still exists
There's this one unexpectedly pensive line in Indiana Jones III
> We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away
That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.
Looking forward to reading something very similar to this in 10 years about the Discord servers and Insta DMs of the 2020s.
> The Internet I Grew Up With Doesn’t Exist Anymore
Every generation can say this. It's been a constant evolution since inception.
The internet has changed because attempts to bring commercial interests into it have been too successful.
In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hate beyond the typical local community hate speech, and hate speech was just one agenda item that could be discussed.
But now, even hate speech has become fragmented. And as hate became fragmented, people became too willing to pay money to those who agree with their opinions. It became easier to pay people who say what you want to hear.
On top of that, in the old days, if you were a minority in a local community, you had to bend your opinions somewhat for the majority in order to be heard. Unlike the old society where you had to tone down your voice to create a single unified voice, now you can speak out even if it's unpopular. The only catch is that it's now subject to a different metric: popularity.
And the generational divide in internet usage has also changed a lot.
For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same. That's why internet etiquette was important. But these days, there's a binary divide: the internet is the internet, and reality is reality. People think that even if they do something stupid online, it's separate from real life.
Damaging physical infrastructure is visible, but polluting the internet is invisible. Yet once someone starts it, there's no end to it. And the broken windows theory applies to advertising too. Most websites run ads, and many of those ads are low-quality porn ads, which easily create a mindset of 'this place is fair game for attack.'
In the past, the internet was less widely available and limited to a small elite, so it was relatively clean. The reason is simple: because only a few people used it, they were socially traceable, and their online reputation actually affected their real-life reputation. But as everyone gained access, it became harder to track identities online, and that changed everything.
It's no one's fault. It just seems like a natural shift of the times
I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.
Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.
It was ever thus; so shall it be.
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.
Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.
The world I grew up in, no longer exists
I mean, the old internet still exists if you want to use it. At least, in many places online.
There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.
There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.
Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.
The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.
It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.
Web3 can solve many of the problems he mentioned.
Every one of the items on the list can STILL be done in meat-space.
My recollection, growing up and living mostly in Scandinavia
90s - mid 2000s:
- Pre social media days, you visited home pages. - Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you. - Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.
mid 2000s - early 2010s:
- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes. - Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all. - Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus. - Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.
Early 2010s - late 2010s:
- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms. - Personal websites die off. - Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc. - Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services. - The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed. - Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.
Late 2010s - now:
- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players. - It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present. - Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it. - You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan. - Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.
Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.
Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.
There were a bunch of internet golden era but I think the last one was the rise of blogs and rss.
Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design. It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
> Dating
I have never done online dating, even though I was a teenager when it became a thing. It always seemed to be a complete horror show, and even today those are the stories I hear from people.
It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- No browser nagging, ever.
- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.
- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.
- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news
The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.
Finally, there's:
gopher://magical.fish <- huge portal, the news site it's great
gopher://sdf.org <- blogs in gopher
gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn <- check the Gopher lawn
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta <- updated blogsMostly agree with the timeline.
I would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.
(Anyone remember Klout?)
By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.
At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.
I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.
Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.
Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.
It all still exists in dark web. Anonymity, small communities, exploration, etc.
It looks like it starts with:
>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September