
Ask HN: What would a weirder internet look like to you? - personlurking
I&#x27;ve heard HNers at times briefly mention that the internet could have developed into a weird, wonderful and experimental place, from the 1990s onwards.<p>What would that kind of internet have actually looked like today?<p>If I had to imagine it myself, it&#x27;d be a place with a lot more variety and competition, ie. niche communities, companies and services. I&#x27;d like to have seen time banks become super popular and an otaku (a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests) culture have sprouted up in conjunction.
======
CM30
One where the nerds and outsiders find their projects and websites becoming
super popular and the 'mainstream' types find their voices ignored and pushed
to the background. One where say, the likes of pannenkoek2012 ended up where
PewDiePie is now, and where all those 'influencers' have zero audience and
appeal.

And yes, one where small communities about niche topics are the places to be
for discussion, and where more and more have sprung up over the years rather
than said communities ending up on the likes of Reddit or Discord or what not.
Heck, imagine a world where Twitter and Facebook actually failed to catch on
and social media died early.

In other words, the internet as it kinda was in the 90s and early 00s.

------
gitgud
In my opinion, the internet did develop into a weird place. There's a plethora
of [1] weird communities and people are still [2] experimenting and chucking
stuff up on the internet to see what others think.

It doesn't seem that weird anymore, because people have clustered into major
sites like Youtube, Reddit, Facebook .... but this was inevitable as people
would rather be part of a large community than fracture off into isolated
forums like the old days.

It's not that hard to find something weird online ...

[1] [http://boards.4chan.org/b/](http://boards.4chan.org/b/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

------
idDriven
I think what I miss the most was there was this idea at first that the
internet could be a kind of digital Library of Alexandria, where all of the
world's knowledge could be readily available to benefit society as a whole and
especially those who are economically or geographically challenged. What we
increasingly have on the WWW instead: Paywalls, misinformation, obfuscation
and lowest common denominator drivel.

