I Wish I Didn't Miss the '90s-00s Internet

I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod files and .xm files from aminet and learning to write tracker music in Fast Tracker 2, downloading and playing all sorts of cool Doom wads, installing DJGPP and pouring over the source code for Allegro and picking up more game programming chops, and getting incredibly caught up in following the Doom community and .plan files for the release of Quake.

Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.

There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.

This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.

I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).

I miss the 00s internet. I miss IRC and geeking out for the sake of it. Maybe i'm just missing my younger years, but I think there was a distinct feeling back then, of wonder and being amongst the first to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.

Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health"). Since I'm older I had a more of a choice in terms of social media presence (and get away with basically none) the younger folks practically don't.

Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.

As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.

[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...

[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0

> There is neocites, and a small community of people who share this philosophy about the web (and that are relatively young), but I have not met anyone my age, in the real world, that would choose to do something like this.

When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.

Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.

AI has me super jealous of how quickly kids can learn things today. Back in the 90s banging you head against the wall trying to get the simplest things in Linux to work, and trying to learn programming from a book with minimal resources online. It was 'hard mode'. I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that.. though I would like to play some Quake deathmatch again on a populated server..

There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.

One thing that's happening currently that has been alluded to by other people in the comments is the rapid disappearance of forums.

Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.

Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.

Dial-up connection, ICQ, and 10mb files left to be downloaded through the night were my connection to the world.

I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.

Is it nostalgia, or is there something more? Who knows at this point.

I’m 30.

I was on the 'net pre-WWW and wrote my first web page in 1992.

The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.

I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.

I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.

I'll go against the grain, here.

I do miss a simpler time. I run some very modern hardware, with modern games and hardware. But I also play around with my GameBoy, maintain a DOS VM for writing my novels, reach for Lynx as often as Firefox.

Simplicity isn't just an aesthetic though. I find it to be a requirement just for getting through life. I shouldnt need adblockers and popup blockers and consent optouts just to view a site. They're worse than the era of iframe popups.

Granted, I am prone to overstimulation and get seizures when it happens. But that just reinforces what I already want. A space to enjoy what little life I've got.

Whenever I come across posts like this, I need to remind myself that it's actually a very small minority of people online who feel this way. Most people are perfectly happy with how the internet is right now and don't care for going back to things you used to do online a decade or two ago.

On social media: today it's no longer even about ordinary individuals sharing their ordinary lives online like they used to 15 years ago. It's about consuming content around your interests (which includes entertainment). Very few people on my instagram make personal posts anymore (myself included) and when they do, they're few and far in between. It's all brands and content creators. I also think people's mentality has shifted and they no longer care about sharing their lives online. It was a new concept to many between 2006-2014 to be able to do it, and so many did. Now they're past it. It was interesting in 2008 to see that Johnny is currently sipping on a latte in front of his window. Now nobody gives a fuck unless Johnny is a celebrity.

On scrolling TikTok-like feeds: not to glorify the concept but it makes it easier for the anti-social-medias to accept if you think of it as the equivalent of when your parents would get home, turn on the TV and start flipping through the channels trying to find something interesting to watch. TikTok and Reels put the TV in your pocket. 80% of the content on them is of no substance but occasionally a valuable post does come up and provide me with something I need/enjoy. The other day, I had a spontaneous date night because a reel showed up for my wife about some food truck nearby and she shared it with me (we went there an hour later and it turned out to be a good one - we're going again next week). P.S. it didn't even cross my mind to bother posting a snap of my meal as a story on IG :)

The vibes of the early internet are still out there, you just won't be directed there by Google or any of the other "social" silos.

Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.

Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.

When it comes to technologies or cultural periods there's usually a Goldilocks zone where new developments open up possibilities for people to participate but complexity and the usual market capture hasn't yet set in. Basically points where ideas are up for grabs and the culture is especially dynamic and the barrier to entry is low.

For computing and the internet I think the author is spot on. The late 80s to mid 2000s had that these kinds of features. For electronic, rock or punk it was probably the 60s to 80s. I don't really like the relativism of writing people just off as nostalgic in this case funnily enough applied to both people too young or too old.

There really are time periods that suck and some that don't. An interesting observation is that there are very few, if any Gen Z hackers or founders comparable to say Carmack or entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg. Virtually every tech company today is run by Gen X / Millenials. Maybe reflecting that the "product culture" Gen Z grew up in has resulted in not very technology oriented social media businesses.

Maybe a little bit uncharitably put we went from young people writing Doom and PageRank to bored ape nfts being hustled on Discord servers.

It’s refreshing to see a young person with such sound reflections about social media.

This post made me reminisce about learning web development when I was 11. Finding resources online was tricky, especially since I didn’t always have access to the Internet. I got books from my parents, and not very good ones either, but I loved them all the same.

I miss those days, when everything was more of an adventure.

Nerdy teen laments being born too late. I remember when I said I regret not being born in the 70s because I missed the 80s. Oh before that it was the 60s and I missed all those Dad Rock err Classic Rock acts.

Live your life, not the one you think you should have had.

The only thing I miss from the 90s-00s was the fun we had on IRC. And that was mostly due to our carelessness and youth, so I think I'm good in this future.

The funny thing is I'm still on IRC, with about the same size channel, but everyone is "new" and we're all old. I don't have any contact with the peeps from IRC back then.

Let's be honest, one reason many of us loved it was because of Flash. Thankfully there's Ruffle for that, now

Also, it would be helpful if Google hadn't steadily degraded their product. +words +that +must +be +included +should +have +those +words +in +the +search. Not "fuzzy search". Not "can't find my result even when I explicitly tell you". Which includes surfacing of more obscure sites (like what wiby/marginalia do now).

(Which also includes censorship but that's a different story)

The internet nowadays is run by gatekeepers, as traffic is increasingly funneled though a dozen or so popular sites. If you get banned from Facebook, twitter, Amazon, reddit, youtube etc. you're SOL. You either have to use in read-only mode or make new account and hope they do not notice it is tied to the old one (also, you're putting all your eggs in a single basket). A social media ban is effectively a ban on the person if it's tied to a real name/identify. The only people who get to use social media to its full capability are those who have the connections or clout to negotiate/dispute the bans that are inevitable.

I think I just miss being 14-ish when technology felt mesmerizing, and world seemed infinite because I was learning Pascal.

Now I just want to wake up, have my coffee, and not read about some new machine learning framework.

Some random observations:

1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.

2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.

3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.

4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.

5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.

6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.

7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.

8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!

9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.

I have been on the internet since the mid-90s and computers have defined my life , personally and professionally, since I was 4 years old.

And still, this kind of messages make me uncertain about what to really think. There is a nostalgia for the authenticity of the earlier web, and I have felt that myself. Things were hard in the 90s, but maybe that is what made it feel more worthwhile. It is also true that a lot of the current internet is dominated by financial and corporate interests.

BUT ! everything that was possible in the 90s is still possible today. Even more so. Access to technology and software has never been easier, neither has the opportunity to learn about pretty much any topic. We have access to the output of so many people in an instant.

This can be liberating, but it can also be paralyzing. An ugly mix of FOMO and impostor syndrome making many of us paralized on most days and scroll for a quick dopamine hit instead.

But what if we consciously choose to focus on the positives by focusing on what we feel truly engaged by, and to ruthlessly ignore the rest ?

We can only make that choice ourselves.

I think what's missing from a lot of these discussions is how much more commerce-driven the present day internet is over the 90s-00s. Social media is highly addictive and destabilizing in order to get it's audience to eventually pay for something in TikTok Shop, or view sponsored content, for example. Dark patterns were introduced to increase revenue or to get users to dole out their personal information for advertising effectiveness.

I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade

The only thing that sucked about 00s web was the tech.

Compared to today, I really wish that you could've had the creativity and general attitude of the 00s web with the tech of today.

But I guess this is why I don't regret spending so much time on the 00s web.

One of the things you didn't mention from back then was P2P file-sharing. I don't know when the RIAA won, but suddenly downloading mp3s was illegal. And now kids think that paying for iTunes songs was always normal.

I've been on the "Internet" since the mid-80's, when I was lucky to gain my very first shell account on an Internet-connected system at the electronics assembly line where I apprenticed as a junior programmer, building test software and eventually the DOS driver for a locally designed and produced modem. I wrote a lot of software on that shell account, relying on access to USENET and my email address for a lot of the research and hand-holding that booted me from junior to somewhat competent developer.

During the 90's, I set up and maintained my own Linux machine at home, pushing my 28.8k modem connection into service to put my little 486 on the Internet as a dedicated host, running Majordomo and mailman list-servs devoted to topics I was interested in - mostly music-making technology and the like.

Those listservs (and also, of course, USENET) gave me access to a vast and awesome array of folks around the world, some of whom were my early guru's, some of whom became my nemeses, but most of whom were a part of a worldwide community of folks I knew I could rely on for an entertaining and educational hour or two, each day, of reading. (Some of those listservs still exist, but have gone into comatose, dormant state with the last decades' rise of social media..)

Without question, I feel that the quality of the community is directly related to the involvement of that community in the methods used by the community to sustain itself - as the "AOL'ization" of the Internet occurred, the quality when way, way down. Yes, I was there that fateful September when the Internet was invaded by the hoards of unwashed masses. I still feel that phenomenon was a turning point in social community - it went from being a community, to a media.

I also still think there is a place for these kinds of locally-built and run communities. I often wonder how viable it would be for me to set up and run another little box, locally, and invite some friends to join me on it, discussing whatever we want, through a shell-only account, or at the very least, using only email/listservs for distribution ... I think there's still a lot of room for that style of community building, personally, since: technology doesn't get old - only its users do.

Not sure that old internet was better, it was too slow for the most interesting imagined uses, but unlike today's internet users were invited to imagine many possibilities for how it could be used. Today, so-called "tech" companies, basically incorporated websites that have reached absurd, unmanageable sizes and are used to do things people in the 90s and early 00s would never have imagined using websites to do, have attempted monopolise and commercialise all those possibilities.

The internet has sadly become synonymous with the web for the majority internet users and this web is infested with middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, that refuse to honour that any internet user would ever imagine their own possibilities for usage of their netwwork subscription, e.g., non-commercial usage. These middlemen purport to determine how the network should and will be used. There is nothing left for the internet subscriber to imagine, no decisions to make. All usage is predictable, pre-determined by the so-called "tech" companies. They want internet subscribers to believe an internet subscription alone provides no value; all value resides in the middlemen that wait for subscribers on the network, lure them in, surveil them and serve them ads. To add insult to injury, they coerce internet subscribers into "subscribing" to websites!

With internet speeds today, those possibilities some of us imagined in the 90s and 00s are now possible. The problem is so-called "tech" companies stand in the way. Attempting to intermediate anything and everything.

> born in 2006

not to be pedantic, but how do you miss something you never experienced to begin with?

Been there, got on the internet ~90 (pre-www), my first web page ~93, first web coder job ~95. I do think it is overglorified (the web-part) - 80s BBS were more of a wild world with excitement to me.

What I did love though was getting on IRC, sitting in front of an amber VAX terminal late at night till morning, talking to people across the world. Reading NEWS and discussing things with people around the globe. What an eye opener for me.

It is not just technology, but people, and culture, and mindsets, and more. I started in the local BBS arena and from there all the stages till now.

And even something similar from the technological side is done, catching a critical, and big enough, and diverse community may be something short lived, as we live with the rest of internet, that is trying to grab our attention and set our agendas

I miss the 90s/2000s internet too, but I'm also realistic about it.

Dialup sucked, search engines sucked, it was easy for random stuff to brick your computer and it was hard for anything you published to reach an audience. If you think ads now are bad, they were even worse back then.

What people miss is the slower sense of community. Social media has removed all boundaries between smaller local communities and many people aren't interested in finding one. So a lot of people have local friends, and then the amorphous blob of people on social media that they throw posts into. But these things still exist. You can find forums with only a couple hundred users, or circles of blogs. There are IRC channels dedicated to niche interests.

I haven't engaged with proper social media in years because I realized the above and just...left.

I lived through that time (was in high school and college). It was pretty neat to read about the Internet and web browsers in Newsweek, but we didn’t have it at home for a few years. Then it was just a 28.8 dial up connection that dropped randomly. It wasn’t until I got to university that I had a real broadband connection, and even that was slow compared to what I get on my phone today.

Programming (for me) was mostly basic and a bit of C, although I never totally figured out pointers. By the time I got to university, we had early versions of Java and HTML.

That time was fun, but right now is fun in different ways. The tools are much better. Computing is massively cheaper. Laptops weren’t nearly as good as desktops until the early 2000s. Also, you couldn’t do much with AI back then.

This post struck a chord with me. In keeping with it's spirit, I wrote a reply.

https://tonyedwardspz.co.uk/blog/im-glad-i-miss-the-old-inte...

Social media is like TV zapping, just... probably more addicting because you're likelier to find something mildly interesting (to you). It's also described as junk food for the brain. Don't go there, instead spend time in the weird and fun niches, which are probably just fine still! (Note, even back then they had people who were wrong on the internet.)

If you use Social Media sites sometimes, I recommend at least getting rid of "recommendations"/"sponsored" boxes. To see what that looks like e.g. on Twitter without installing an extension and keeping it up-to-date (cause Twitter keeps changing their stuff), you can try a bookmarklet like this:

    (javascript:document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-label="Trending"]').forEach(function(v) { v.remove() }))

Not all is worse in this decade though. If you're actually looking to learn stuff that involves e.g. physically building stuff (rather than just doing stuff on your computer), YouTube et al. have improved that by a lot! (Of course, this kind of content can be addicting too. But at least you learn a thing or two!)

Note: the YouTube of the 00s was very low-resolution and the comments often were really bad! (https://xkcd.com/202/)

We just added an appeal system to our wiki-database for kpop at kpopping.com... There's lots of little projects going on that resemble the old web, you probably just don't hear about them because you're outside the niche.

I've been scratching this itch by getting into https://atproto.com/ and https://activitypub.rocks/ the platforms are much smaller than the mainstream ones, but the older internet was smaller too. I'm not sure you CAN have something like the old internet above a certain user penetration, it will always devolve to grocery checkout tabloids and afternoon talk show without a filter.

I was about 10 years old when I first started using the Internet (Netscape) in the mid 90s.

Around 97-98 was really when I went deep into it mostly because of Starcraft. That led to battle.net which led to IRC and the rest is history.

Man, I feel you. The old internet had this raw, curious energy that just isn’t the same today. That’s kind of what led us to create Bettermode. We still believe in that mission of giving people the tools to build, connect, and create something meaningful—like the good ol’ days but with today's tech.

It’s not about looking back, though—it’s about bringing that same spirit into the future. We’re still here building towards that, even if the landscape looks a bit different now.

Haha it was a fun time. We had forums and blogs that people would visit. It was a blast. I still have a blog but back then I'd get random visitors from the Internet. These days not unless it's linked somewhere. Centralized platforms won the discoverability game.

On the plus side we're never bored. But I'll tell you, man. Back then we'd comment with our real names on random blogs. And shit like that. Privacy and stuff wasn't really a big deal.

There are enough problems right now. Wishing you were born in time to see Led Zeppelin in the 70’s? Before some mass-Web consumption turning point? No, being born in the 80’s/90’s was late enough for me. Some kids these days are so neurotic about their future outlook that climate change lives rent-free in their minds, worsening their daily mental health.

Have fun with the ever-worsening Anthropocene, kid. I mean, we both will.

The first time I entered a random chat in the 90s someone typed Italian and I panicked thinking it may be the mafia and unplugged the modem.

The reason I miss the net from that time is not due to web design, but just the types of people that were online. I'm too young to have experienced Eternal September, but it seems every generation has their own...well, the current generation probably won't.

Nowadays you have every idiot spouting off half-baked opinions with horrible grammar and spelling, everyone arguing just to be right and not to test their own ideas, being ridiculously tribal, calling anything that disagrees with them fake news, etc etc.

When there was a little more barrier to entry, the net was vastly better. As someone that cares about truth, fact and good faith discourse, I miss that time terribly.

Reminds me of this article from Salon published back in 2002: https://www.salon.com/2002/05/31/back_in_the_day/

All nostalgia is a longing for youth.

I was late to the party (but with my country’s tardiness in anything technology, it was pretty much the same) as I started around 2010, but the one nice thing I do remember was how easy it was to find random blogs or forums about your subject of interest. Even though I was connected for only an hour or so a day, information was readily available although sparse. Now, we have more data, but it feels more like a humid jungle full of tarpits and biting insects. Even corporate sites have the slimy feeling you’d associate with shady sites that wanted you to update flash.

If we want back the old internet we must build it. Create your own website, link to those you like, get in contact with the people running them. Mine is mglz.de, check out the link collection and get in touch about linking between sites :)

I like Jason Scott's take on the nostalgic internet: it was a cosy place for people "in the know" and we miss being in a special club.

https://textfiles.libsyn.com/the-nostalgic-web-episode

The post's author also talks about how social media is different from the web of the past. This is a good time to point out the difference between operating on the Web and operating on the Internet. The Internet is just a client-server technology. The Web is about hypertext and making connections. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are on the Internet but not on the Web, because they penalize linking to the wider web. Blogs, search engines and Reddit are "Web".

A better version of this article: https://vhsoverdrive.neocities.org/essays/oldweb

In the late 90s, I greatly enjoyed reading The Industry Standard every week. On paper.

There are dozens of sites today that try to cover emerging technology companies, none do it nearly as well.

Funny post, pining for the days of old that he never knew.

I was there and I'm glad its past.

The computers were slow.

Microsoft ruled the day, which was fine for me because I was a Microsoft fanboy back then.

The software was unsophisticated - any time you wanted to push the envelope you'd often hit some fundamental barrier because the software just wasn't there yet.

Things crashed - alot.

I own a ton of vintage computers but I don't use them, because why would you want to?

I'm certainly glad I witnessed all that first hand since 1979 but wouldn't want to go back.

I miss all of the quirky, smart people being online and none of the boring, mid people being online.

We need a Net 2.0 where we can go and be weird again.

Well, the clean, handed coded page posted is a good start.

It's refreshing to see - I think the web got boring once bootstrap hit and everything started looking that way.

I miss when ads were just a single banner image

A thread to pull on for anyone who misses this unconstrained creativity and humanness of online communities. It exists again, in a new form in VR. It's absolutely wild and fantastic and unbelievable.

Perhaps start here https://youtu.be/hVWlgh8QP5s?si=z4RD6FnMpPGQYuem&t=1523 And feel free to email (see bio) if you want to connect in there

I am hoping and waiting for the 80s punk equivalent anti-SoMe counterculture to appear.

I miss Delphi/C++ Builder for professional application development... :'(

I don't. I miss that Internet, and am always seeking bits here and there where it can be found and enjoyed.

The other thing I miss from that time is USENET. So damn great, until it got swamped by noise. Some parts of it remain active today.

Threaded conversation is fantastic. And it's searchable. So damn much can be found in the USENET archives. The modern tools we have today aren't the same at all, mostly super functional silos. Not bad. Also, just not very good!

Finally, mailing lists. Those are still a thing, and like USENET, are searchable, high value communication exchanges.

Reddit is a lot like USENET. And the original charter around the Aaron time was similar, basically by users, for users kind of thing. Now the enshittification is happening everywhere near constantly devaluing online discourse.

The way I see it, those of us who do miss the great things about this early Internet time can keep talking about it, and one day, one of us, or one we talk to, will figure out how to reboot USENET for all of us to enjoy just as was done back in the day.

It's the general feeling, I have been observing it. We are missing the personal touch, similar to what we had in small bookstores, cafeterias, and restaurants where, on each visit, we had a different experience, the walls reflecting the dedication (or lack of it) beliefs and dreams of the owner. The commoditization of social profiles, always packaged in the same way by a huge conglomerate, telling us all the time what we should consume, shaping who we are and what we believe by blatantly exploiting the dopamine sensors of our brain and other mental triggers to steal our attention at any cost. All of this is making us sick and desiring to reset it all, hoping that someone will do something to bring back the real fun and the creativity of the Internet on top of our search results again, and not lost somewhere in this sea of avatars resharing, reposting, forwarding and never creating anything themselves.

The real good and fun Internet still exists, it is just much harder to find it.

Maybe if I can challenge something a little bit,

    > What’s the ratio of followers to following you have? Are your story highlights organized and “aesthetic”? What reels are you liking? [...]
    > It has become so shallow, you can tell almost nothing about who someone actually is through Instagram or tiktok. You can only tell how they want to portray themselves to the general population and, by how they organize their profile, if they are eligible to be a part of your social circle.
    > [In the past,] There was little incentive to lie, to manipulate truth, and each blog entry or piece of information was tied to identity. (except in the cases of anonymity).

There's this idea that the internet had a point where it was _universally_ genuine, curious and welcoming. I don't really remember that? I'm a sucker for rose-tinted memories, but I don't think I remember 00's forums NOT being social cliques. There was a lot of posturing, clout-chasing, and mean-spirited trolling. Your identity online was crafted from scratch for a particular space because you really could be as anonymous as you wanted to be. A pseudonym on an image board, forum accounts, personal sites, that pitiful amount of web space your ISP would give you, MMORPG account, MUCK profile, etc could all be totally distinct "people".

Lying on a speed running forum about a time you got in a game. Making things online, just to dog pile on hating 1 particular person. The mean shit people said to each other on any IM platform. Cyber bullying was a word I remember being tossed around a lot in the mid 00's.

The corpo vibe of things today sucks. Totally agree. But it's not like the internet of 2005 was this utopia of good vibes and positivity. It's never going to be that _universally_. Find your tribe eh?

---

However,

    > Also, websites just simply looked cooler.

Fuck yeah they did :)

As a counter example I'm old and I prefer the internet now to the 95-00s. The problem I had back then was there was a lot of potential but the content was mostly junk. There's a lot of great content now.

Nostalgia can be a “now” killer. careful with it.

Was tough to get past the first sentence. I wouldn’t consider 18 the prime of your life, that’s still far too young to know better.

The trope of old man yells at cloud should have the dual of young person thinks they have discovered something new. It takes a while to learn there is nothing new under the sun.

Sure, normies have invaded the internet, but there are plenty of niches in various fields that are sufficiently avant-gard that even the most dissenting hipsters can still find a home. But it’s never easy, almost by definition such places are defined by their difficulty of entry.

Let’s fix it

check out nostr. gives me the feeling of 90's internet

Ah yes, the short period of time in human history where global connectivity and individuality coexisted

90s internet versus now is like eating steaks and potatoes with red wine versus chocolate and gummy bears with coca cola. even those who are hooked on the dopamine rush despise it cause it just makes you sick even after a few hours already. sleeping is the tolerance break and then you need it again like a chain smoker needs his first cigarette - but after a few rounds one already anticipates the hollowness it leaves you with at the end of the day.

and it's not just the internet. the 90s and even more so the 80s were for sure the better time to be young (at heart).

well I was around then and am around now and yeah, still writing a blog that is in no way monetised or SEO prepped. I do use OG for better search & share but thats it. built first websites en of 90s, started on Blogger in 2003 and if I had not done that I would not have done the webdev and video knowledge of my tech pivot. That changed my life and made possible everything I have done since.

after hearing mark fisher slow cancellation of the future, i believed there was more to it than just an eternal september.

there was a real utopian feeling of the early internet. one i remember. this was lost due to the commercialization and corporatization of the web.

the internet began as a place for creativity, freedom, exploration andlater became dominated by profit-driven platforms, surveillance capitalism, and monopolies like google and facebook.

neoliberalism turned the internet into a tool for consumption and data extraction, stifling the initial sense of openness and possibility, and replacing it with controlled, market-driven environments.

this shift eroded the hope for a radically different digital future. and that is (part) of the reason i miss the 90s - 00s internet.

the other side of it is the emergence of the complex web. where things that used to be simple are now endlessly complicated, and working on the web feels like building a jenga tower on a plane in turbulence.

“Live and let die.”

— Kool G Rap & DJ Polo.

These sort of posts are getting tiresome.

I now file them in my head alongside the same sort of mindset of the Amish - i.e. a rejection of modern technology and centering on some perceived "better times" in the past (for better or worse)

I was there in the early-/mid-90s. Yes there was more "authenticity" but there was also a lot of crap (probably 50-75% of the self-published sites were essentially empty "welcome to my website! I'll add more soon!" type things) and critically there was a lot of stuff we take for granted today that simply was not there. It was shit compared to the modern internet when you think about what we can do now Vs what you could do then.

Yes there were more frequently found self-published kooky websites, but even "professional" sites were done as second-thoughts and the quality/freshness was often low, and there was a whole raft of things that make our lives easier today that simply could not be done or were terrible (decent search engines, decent high-quality news sites, chatgpt, wikipedia, book flights or hotels, watch videos, github, stream music, order groceries, turn your lights on, view online maps, attend university, talk to your friends/family on the other side of the world in crystal clear HD video, have Amazon deliver something to your house on the same freaking day etc etc etc etc).

A lot of the "old" stuff is there if you go look for it, just like in the 90s you had to go look for it too because Google didn't exist yet and altavista was shit. You don't have to read Reddit or Facebook or whatever in the same way you do not need to go and watch the latest shitty Marvel movie just because they released it. Be selective in your consumption.