
I Miss the Old Internet - sT370ma2
http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html
======
notJim
I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search
queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can
read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet
is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just
give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing
campaign.)

I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a
walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication
protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.

~~~
JohnFen
Do you not find Reddit to be a bit of a cesspool? I tend to avoid it for that
reason, but how true it is probably depends on which subreddit(s) we're
talking about.

~~~
verylittlemeat
Spend enough time on 4chan and you'll realize reddit is a safezone kid gloves
hug box.

And 4chan isn't even that bad in terms of bad or illegal content so that goes
to show how relative it all is.

~~~
tenpies
4chan is outright fantastic in some aspects.

/g/ is actually quite useful and friendly, especially the DPT (Daily
Programming Thread), more-so if you're a beginner.

/trv/ (travel) is just good and perfectly slow where you won't feel pressure
to keep up with a thread because it will still be there tomorrow.

/fit/ has good information and really encapsulates what happens when the
internet meets bro-gym culture.

Compared to parts of Reddit, I would honestly take 4chan over it. I mean even
some of the formerly "default" sub-Reddits are cesspools of hatred with the
occasional call for targeted violence and Moderators who will ban you by
association. Some of the big sub-Reddits openly discriminate based on race.

I know journalists have zero motivation to investigate sub-Reddits or the
incestous circle of Reddit moderators that control the groupthink in most of
the major sub-Reddits, but one day that will come out and it will be an
internet scandal. If they time it right it could sink any hope of an IPO or
serious monetization.

~~~
verylittlemeat
Yeah 4chan is great but it differs from reddit in a fundamental way.

You can have a normal thread where someone will casually drop the N word or
other slur and it will just sit there, maybe not even acknowledged but also
not downvoted or deleted.

That alone is enough to turn people off immediately. They need that sense of
retributive justice for a wrong they see in the universe. You're right that
reddit can be just as bigoted than 4chan if not more so but I think you
realize it's way more subtle and dogwhistley. The only reason a 4chan post
will ever dance around being blunt bigotry is usually for the sake of humor
not to ban evade.

Also I can't imagine browsing 4chan without something like 4chanX and your
average person probably isn't going to bother installing that.

~~~
UserIsUnused
>but also not downvoted

Well, there is no way to downvote. Point-based systems usually turn out bad if
the community is too big. Just check big subreddit like the defaults, posts
get too catering to group-think. Not having downvotes or even upvotes, means
that you have to deal with crap posts.

For some people 4chan has "upvotes", what they call "(you)"s, basically a
reply, people post too much bad content just trying to provoke a reaction.

~~~
claudiawerner
The introduction of the "(You)" feature arguably changed the spirit of 4chan,
since now people know that when they get a reply their comment will get more
attention because the list of replies is listed on the comment itself. I don't
think there was enough pushback against its introduction a few years ago.

If I still had an imageboard, it would never implement a feature like that.

~~~
UserIsUnused
Exactly. It's bigger than an upvote!

Of course, people could still get it from extensions, but not everybody uses
them.

Still, the provoking nature on 4chan would still remain even without (you)s as
it's the quickest way to get answers.

------
superkuh
The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a
thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you
want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use
any javascript frontends. It's a good time.

As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an
RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check
the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web
interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content
aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
> Start hosting your website from home.

This isn't feasible for a large chunk of the population, mainly because ISPs
like Comcast love to give you 500 mbps down while limiting your upload to a
pitiful 10 mbps.

Host a single 100K image that hits the front page of reddit and your home
internet gets hugged to death.

~~~
superkuh
How many 100k image hits do you get on your personal website you made for fun?
In the entire 20 years I've hosted my website on my comcast connection I have
never had this issue. If you're going to post an image to reddit (which is
kind of going backwards from the point of all this) then just mirror it onto
some popular image host (or your VPS). This doesn't prevent you from also
serving up a copy from your local disk to visitors.

1 megabit of upstream is _plenty_ for a personal website. I can say this from
long experience.

~~~
gfody
when comes time for your personal websites 15 minutes of fame it becomes
inaccessible due to severe upstream bottlenecking

~~~
akiselev
If that 15 minutes of fame is so important, put up a load balancer with
autoscaling or make sure the Wayback machine archives every post upon
publication.

Not every site needs to have 3+ nines of uptime.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
While yes, that would work, we were talking about hosting things yourself at
home.

------
mattlondon
I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a
cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered,
stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done.
Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or
doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache!

The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life
so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take
for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't
commercialised at the time.

The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically _still there_
\- i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda
cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere,
untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it
running).

Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a
thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection
of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these
things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the
joy of 90s internet.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
>postal order

>a bank

>stand in line at a post office

>car insurance quotes

>booking flights/hotels

>tax return

These conveniences you cite of the _modern internet_ all feel like they help
the other side of the relationship even more than they help you. Imagine how
much the airlines, banks, tax collectors, and insurance companies love the
modern internet, making it all the more convenient for you to interact with
their products and services! And at such scale!

My point here is that, on the intellectual front, the _old_ internet was a lot
more transformative for humankind than the state of today's "cable television
as a service" internet we endure today.

~~~
pcnix
How does that change anything? The amount of ease of use you get from the
internet is not zero-sum; everyone benefits from it.

Calling the internet "cable television as a service" is ignoring the
incredible reach and user-friendliness of the modern internet, and all the
advantages that come from that. Nostalgia is okay, but that doesn't change the
fact that the current internet brings a lot more information to a lot more
people, albeit with differing quality. It has absolutely changed humanity for
the better, and is orders of magnitude more transformative than what you seem
to be calling old internet.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
You could make the same argument about the television remote control as it
relates to broadcast TV. There is a popular phrase these days, "progress
trap," [0] which I think adequately explains the issues with both today's
internet and the remote control.

We have indeed made some advancements in some interesting fields due to the
modern UI of the web, but what underlies this is a really heavy-handed
plasticity on the infrastructure/architecture fronts. That is what the earlier
web lacked, and what made it such a fantastic, democratized resource for
information and communication.

The remote control achieved the same thing for broadcast TV - a way to make
the format easier to use mindlessly. And what it enabled was channel surfing:
building it into the hunter-gatherer human mind that the TV was a universe to
be explored, filled with wondrous gifts for the would-be explorer to uncover.
But that's a lie merely proposed by the interface - the most common thing to
land on during a channel surf is a network advertisement. You will of course
land on some shows, too, but the channel surfer is destined to see more than a
couple of ads before they are finished with their remote.

Getting the internet away from its keyboard-driven beginnings has led to a
similar outcome on the web, and it's plain to see. The advent of touch screens
has made this interface/architecture authoritarianism even harder to avoid now
that the entire package has been shrunk to the size of one's palm and
available at a moment's notice or a passing whim.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_trap)

------
old-gregg
To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially
succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript
popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean
HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news"
source [1], instead of MSM.

In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the
world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire)

~~~
zozbot234
> ...organizing the world's information...

Wikipedia is even pushing further forward on that vision with Wikidata, a
general-purpose knowledge base that's perhaps _the_ most successful example of
such a thing, succeeding where many other efforts have failed dismally.
(Already, Wikidata gets _more_ edits per minute than Wikipedia, albeit much of
the activity is performed by bots.) It's also a successful use of Linked-Open-
Data and Semantic-Web technologies (the Wikidata site hosts a SPARQL endpoint,
for general queries of all sorts), so while it might not be "Old Web" per se,
it feels quite retro-futuristic in many ways.

And of course, all the well-known personal assistant AI's rely on it quite a
bit, although they're not eager to advertise that fact.

------
esotericn
It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've
been co-opted by SEO.

Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is
still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.

You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model
is based on ad sales wankery.

Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on
this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please
re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the
change you want to see. Cheers.

~~~
lethologica
>if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in
day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to
prevent that

I once worked for an SEO agency and ended up quitting after 4 months.
Everything about it went against my morals. I was disgusted with myself for
pushing rubbish sites, snooping on peoples browsing behaviour, and working to
squeeze every cent from it all through what I believed to be manipulative
practices (despite it all being 'white hat')

Quitting that job was a major relief, though I'm haunted by the fact that
there are thousands of other agencies and even more people willing to fill my
previous role.

~~~
anon9001
Can you elaborate more on what that industry is doing? How would you snoop on
people's browsing behavior?

I'd be curious if you know of any industry blogs or forums that you'd read to
stay current on techniques.

I haven't followed SEO since the early days of link trading and keyword
stuffing.

~~~
lethologica
Sure.

For one we had a service that records video of your site visit so we knew
exactly how you interacted with it. It would be no different from be standing
behind you and watching your screen as you navigated a website. While the data
is anonymised, I'm still morally against essentially video recording someones
interactions with a site. There was never any notice that they were being
recorded.

The email marketing workflows were relentless, especially on e-commerce stores
that required several points of contact in order to make a purchase. We were
able to build profiles on most customers by combining purchase history,
personal details, and details pulled from social media to get a fairly
accurate portrait of someones behaviour. For example, if someone bought engine
oil, we knew that a typical bottle of engine oil would last someone, say, 6
months. The email marketing workflow would automatically send out a
promotional coupon 6 months later for a discount on more engine oil. But
because we were able to build profiles on people, we were able to tell that
"Joe Blogs" is a motoring enthusiast and therefore the likelihood of him using
up that engine oil in three months rather than six months increases by 50%, so
send out the marketing materials to him quicker than the regular customers.
There were very smart people working on these campaigns. Statisticians,
psychologists, linguists and the like.

Because we had several points of contact with customers, having them
unsubscribe from an email list wasn't bad. If you unsubscribed from the email,
you would just be sent SMS notifications. If you replied STOP to that, you
were sent physical mail, and after all that it was still quite easy to target
you with remarking ad campaigns.

The amount of complete and utter garbage we were pouring out onto the web on a
daily basis was staggering. Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no
use to anyone but to Google would mean that we were able to rank clients for
some very serious keywords where real people needed real help but were instead
being presented with crap that we'd put out that wasn't meant to actually help
anyone but to get the #1 position and the sell things. And when I mean people
who need help, I mean people who seriously need help. We'd push crap to rank
for things like depression, bankruptcy, divorce, a whole array of legal
issues.

I hated working there.

~~~
anon9001
Thanks. Almost all of that makes good sense, and it's pretty clear that
optimization kept working so they just kept doing it. I wonder how much
farther it will go.

You lost me here though:

> Hundreds of pages a day that were of absolutely no use to anyone but to
> Google

Do you mean like spam/clickbait blog posts on their own domain? I'm having
trouble connecting "producing garbage content" to "increased ranking from
google".

~~~
lethologica
Think along the lines of those recipe pages that have 2000 words of backstory
that no one cares about but is considered good SEO practice in Googles eyes.

~~~
anon9001
Fascinating. I didn't know that was so significant to Google. That does
explain a lot of what we see in the search results though.

------
danso
> _You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google.
> MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really
> hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from
> similar small websites_

Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these
sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old
Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s,
how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small
websites"?

> _I miss the internet of the early 1990 's, back before the World Wide Web
> had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites
> like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be
> found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been
> drowned out..._

This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the
extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a
connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for
it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and
controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The
modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and
arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered
mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free,
high-speed Internet portals.

~~~
zozbot234
> how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small
> websites"?

By browsing Web-Directories such as DMOZ/ODP, mainly. Albeit that's really a
late-90s and 2000s thing. We should go back to that kind of curation effort.
It would be more of a challenge for politically-sensitive stuff (the Internet
overall is a _lot_ more politicized and less free-speech-friendly than it used
to be) but for most uncontroversial stuff it would work well enough.

(And no, Wikipedia is not a true replacement even though it might be the
closest thing to one we happen to have. They purposefully keep external links
to a minimum, for sensible reasons - they're building an encyclopedia, not a
Web directory.)

~~~
solarkraft
I'm sure there are lists like these and we just don't know about them.

~~~
anon9001
They're called awesome lists and this is the problem they attempt to solve.
Here's a starting point
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)

------
pmlnr
"I Miss the Old Internet" \- an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING
THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself.

What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting
screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we
can't find the sites.

Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.

~~~
ahje
This. Also, make sure you have an RSS feed on your site. RSS helps people get
back to your site for new content later on.

~~~
pmlnr
Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current
September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as
infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into
other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc.

As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site
these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here:
[https://indieweb.org/follow](https://indieweb.org/follow)

There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's
new, and is not user friendly enough at all.

Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like
[https://fed.brid.gy/](https://fed.brid.gy/) and people on fediverse[^3]
instances will be able to follow it.

Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress
plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore
contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than
welcome.

[^1]: [http://www.unmung.com/](http://www.unmung.com/)

[^2]: [https://indieweb.org/Microsub](https://indieweb.org/Microsub)

[^3]: [https://fediverse.network/](https://fediverse.network/)

~~~
ahje
If we'd be talking about any category other than "the old Internet", I'd say
you were absolutely right. In this case, though, we are specifically talking
old-school web sites and I therefore maintain that RSS should be included. :)

------
zokier
This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do
sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that
"independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It
only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-
independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or
not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further
confuses the matters.

~~~
mattlondon
It is also relatively easy now for independent individuals to create
"professional" websites that look and behave like commercial ones -
professional templates on some hosted CRM system with dynamic features (ads,
shopping baskets, comment systems etc) just a few clicks away. Wix, wordpress,
shopify to a certain extent, disqus etc all make things pretty easy and decent
looking.

They may not be as "kooky" it as "characterful" as they used to be any more
which I guess is part of what people are missing.

------
mreome
> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites

That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has
always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site
in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites.

> it's getting increasingly harder to find them

It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to
platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of
running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they
want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality
small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to
do.

~~~
rchaud
I'd wager it's getting harder to find because content strategists have figured
out that they can pick up search traffic by creating throwaway blog posts
about unrelated topics on a site that already has a high domain ranking.

Take for example Game of Thrones. What does GoT have to do with personal
finance? Nothing, but that doesn't stop sites like Yahoo Finance from posting
bilge like "10 Epic Personal Finance Lessons From 'Game of Thrones'".

Who's going to rank higher on a search for GoT related content? It depends on
the search query for sure, but chances are Yahoo Finance, or HuffPost, or any
of the other content mills will beat out your hand-coded personal website that
probably doesn't even have Google Analytics set up on it.

------
DavidVoid
The main thing I miss about "old" internet is personality. With Twitter,
Facebook, and Instagram you'll always have the same boring page design around
your posts no matter who you are. Sure the content you post will get your
personality across fairly well, but just like with art it's not only the
painting that matters, but also the frame.

It's one of the two main reasons[1] why I vastly prefer Tumblr over the three
aforementioned sites. It lets you create a page that's your own to customize
how you like. And that makes it much more personal and interesting than
Twitter and Instagram imo. I really wish those sites would start letting users
customize their pages more than just by changing their profile pictures and
header images.

[1]: The other being the ability to view all posts from people you follow in a
sequential order instead of having some algorithm decide which posts you
should see.

~~~
ppseafield
I agree in part. However, there is an advantage to the same boring designs
being popular: they're actually readable. Some Tumblr themes in my experience
are more of an artsy flex rather than a conscious, well thought out design.
E.g. small text, low contrast, links that move, the menu being in any number
of places. This isn't exclusive to Tumblr - I remember many horrible MySpace
sites that were nigh impossible to read.

At least Tumblr has an archive view that doesn't throw you visual curve balls.

------
buboard
We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the
internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they
?

~~~
x2f10
I find people don't want to share these. I can understand to a degree as I've
seen good communities go to hell once the "normies" show up.

~~~
errantspark
It's so hard to strike a balance between inclusion and 'eternal september'.
Managing a community is incredibly hard work. I don't really know if I can
think of a way to be both inclusive and preserve the value of a community
indefinitely. It seems that at some point you really need barriers to entry to
keep things sane.

~~~
faissaloo
I've found that an effective way to strike a balance is to simply refuse to
scale. Once people can't access your site only the dedicated will remain.

------
romwell
>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit

A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever
do for us?"[1] sketch.

"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and
moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with
restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this
newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for
helping voices being heard?"

I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got
DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a
modem.

DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.

And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead
of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of
responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.

Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there.
That's _why_ the things you write there actually get read by other people.
Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and
function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the
same _font_ and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.

In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a
lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals
like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.

[1][http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html](http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html)

[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply _link_
to [https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/](https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/) instead
of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google

Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane
Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.

------
narrator
When I think of the old internet, I think of Usenet before the Green Card
Lawyers spammers.

~~~
Yetanfou
That, and a working DejaNews, before Google bought and sank it. I made a two-
frame (as in <frame>) browser for it and revelled in the sheer abundance of
information it provided. Enter Google, exit stage left DejaNews. Progress.

------
travisl12
I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse
for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS
System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on.

...member chewbacca

~~~
icedchai
The early Internet was less crowded and less commercialized. There were often
local communities, organized around local BBSes and ISPs. That is what I miss.

I certainly don't miss Netscape crashing every 10 minutes, and waiting for
downloads over my 33.6k modem.

------
elorant
I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part
that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and
they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active.

What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all
ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days
they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.

And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the
day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your
bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.

~~~
brandon272
> Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine.

I wonder what the stats would be on the number of forums and overall forum
activity today vs. 5, 10, or 15 years ago.

~~~
stonogo
That would depend on your definitions. Reddit is #18 on Alexa's top sites
list, and it's arguably nothing _but_ forums.

------
stared
It's essentially self-contradictory nostalgia.

> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had
> been visited by more than just a few computer geeks.

vs.

> Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or
> frequented by many.

------
pwinnski
The Old Internet was much smaller. Much, much smaller.

I don't think it can scale.

~~~
CalRobert
When the Old Internet was a small part of my life, it felt huge. The New
Internet is a huge part of my life, and feels small.

~~~
rchaud
True. It's everywhere but it feels small because we've trained ourselves to
ignore 95% of it. There is so much coming out, all the time, and all vying for
our attention. I can't stand it.

------
ratsmack
Like the author, I too had made an account on Raddle. After lurking for a
while, I came upon a post about the Proud Boy March in Portland, and I made
one single comment with a slightly cynical tone. Within a period of five
minutes I was banned from the site.

------
bbanyc
Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their
Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was
part of the standard package.

Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the
internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal
liability) to provide.

The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners,
watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't
afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that
anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.

------
fouc
The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and
information was open and accessible.

Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is
turning into walled gardens.

The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like
Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for
browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is
huge.

Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the
end user.

The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet &
the open browser is being strangled.

------
kickscondor
I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at
[http://href.cool](http://href.cool).

I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at
[http://www.kickscondor.com](http://www.kickscondor.com).

There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is.
(I kind of think it's great that it's not.)

~~~
Mizza
Hey man, I just have to say, I've randomly stumbled onto three(!) of your
projects this week and love them all! Keep it up!

~~~
kickscondor
Very kind. Thank you for saying hi. Your github has some sweet projects. Love
the D&D5 tldr. I need to look over your SoundCloud scraper today - I'm doing
the same thing in some code and it'll be good to compare. So thank YOU in
advance, Miserlou.

------
ZoomZoomZoom
More and more I blame not just social networks, but the Web Search (and I mean
Google) for strangling old-web community-centered resources. Many blogs and
forums were shadowed by infinity of click-farms and other CEO'ed to crap
sites, later adding tons of easily identifiable marketing black holes.
Discoverability plummeted.

That's understandable, as Google have zero intention to lead to "real people"
discussing things.

------
LiveTheDream
There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no
affiliation):

\- [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/)

\- [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/)

Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent
biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already
enjoy such as [https://slatestarcodex.com/](https://slatestarcodex.com/).

------
notacoward
I always find it a bit weird when people wax nostalgic about the "old
internet" when they're still talking about the web. The _real_ old internet
had existed for a while before the web, BBSes and Usenet before that. Eternal
September[1], of which the early web was effectively a continuation,
practically obliterated those communities.

There's a lot to like about being able to do my banking, shopping, etc.
online. I value the contacts I've been able to make and maintain via Modern
Social Media. Still, the loss of something that existed before looms larger
for me than any differences between different generations of websites. The
author is missing the _middle period_ interent, and that's OK, but some of us
also miss the truly _old_ internet.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

------
Causality1
The continued integration of the "real world" and "online world" is cancerous
in my opinion. It never mattered if xXDeath_BonerXx said he was going to show
up at your house and kill you, but it matters when John Smith from Company Inc
who lives at 101 Boulevard Street tells his 400 followers he's going to murder
Cindi Jane from accounting. If you made a fool of yourself, you either made a
new screen name or left that website and found a new one. Nobody knew a thing
about you you didn't tell them, and that was wonderful.

------
root_axis
Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there
are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the
old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is
false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than
ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that
search habits have become much more directed towards specific tasks rather
than used for leisurely "browsing" the web.

~~~
einr
_today 's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever
you're looking for_

IMO this is empathically not true.

Not necessarily because Google has gotten worse -- although I will argue that
in some ways it has, especially by deleting or ignoring search terms that I
explicitely include in my query while freely adding others that are only
vaguely connected -- but because people have gotten better at gaming the
system on an immense scale. Search for basic information on a topic and more
often than not everything is an ad-ridden Wordpress site with lots of big
pictures and ten paragraphs of SEO-optimizing fluff (because Google likes lots
of text to harvest keywords from) before the actual information. Google has
utterly failed at de-prioritizing all this useless nonsense, probably because
they make money from ranking it high.

I have to work much harder now than ten years ago at getting Google to return
useful information.

~~~
root_axis
The handful of anti-features that google has implemented do not nullify the
immense progress in the other direction. There is literally _nothing_ I cannot
find on google.com with ease if I know what I am looking for.

------
randcraw
I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social
networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new
fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring
minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires
have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths
remain.

It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people
who just happen to be on-air when you are.

------
camexp
I wholeheartedly agree and think this pretty much every day. Additionally, I
still have my best links ever thread back from the early naughts on my
personal website (be sure to put protections up to full-on, I haven't tested
those links since back then (the site is still almost alive)).
[https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-
links...](https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links-ever)

------
mcovey
Maybe I'm just getting old, but the internet does not entertain me like it
used to. There used to be so many fun communities, now everything is Facebook,
Reddit, etc. We used to make fun of people who took the internet too
seriously, but nowadays the internet really is serious business.

I think the dawn of smartphones, high-speed wireless data, and the internet
being in everybody's pocket is one of the primary drivers behind this.

------
agumonkey
One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of
websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to
find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the
system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio-
economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making
Google's original job meaningless.

------
blakespot
My homepage from 1995/6.

[https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/](https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/)

------
playa1
I was just listening to 'Internet Sucks' by MC Frontalot and it basically has
the same message. The old internet was amazing and I also miss it.

------
JohnFen
> Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting
> increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by
> Google.

This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search --
it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding.

Other search engines don't have the problem so much.

------
MattyRad
"I2P, TOR, and DAT" is an interesting callout in the article. Purposefully
removing the search engine as a way of opting out of internet "homogenization"
is an interesting counter-culture move. I would be very interested to see if
it's possible to reclaim the individuality on the Old Internet using these
protocols.

------
therealmarv
Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what
you are searching for?

The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more
commercial) news&tech websites nowadays.

Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists.

Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all
important topics to look up.

~~~
pmlnr
Try searching with [https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/) as a
first step, but it's not simple at all.

------
clareaka
So, not sure what is meant by “old internet “ ... is meaning 1980’s BBS ‘s ?
Because the equivalent of those probably still exist for those who seek. Is
meaning 1990’s and early noughties? Or is meaning the noughties in their
entirety?

------
beckerdo
Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP
(Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find
simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring
charge.

------
anon1253
Similarly named discussion from a while back
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552)

------
kyledrake
There's still great creative stuff on the clearnet, you just need to know
where to look for it: [https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org)

------
platz
remember Hipster Runoff?

apparently, he was "The Last Relevant Blogger"

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-
the...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the-last-
relevant-blogger)

including posts such as:

\- Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet

\- U, Me, And Every Concert We Attend: How We Grow Older With Concerts

\- My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and
the mainstream workplace]

------
crtlaltdel
and here i thought this was going to be about compuserv or prodigy. those
experiences, along with aol, were the means by which many people experienced
"the internet" in the "olden days". the only place i used the "internet" was
at the computer lab in my school...all my friend's parents had signed up for
one of the walled gardens and had no idea what else was "out there".

------
jasoneckert
I enjoyed reading this.

However, a better title would be "I miss the old Information Superhighway"
(the stark 90s name for the Internet)

------
art4ur
The internet is a better place when it's treated like a network of people
instead of a network of Brands™.

------
JahWob
Maybe someone could take inspiration from Blizzard and create a "Classic
Internet" ;)

~~~
pmlnr
Chrome has been sort of working on disabling or not showing http sites - it's
already marked as insecure, so you might think you're joking, but I kind of
believe that we'll see 2 internets very soon: one of http/non http-2 https,
the other on some google abomination JSON-LD schema over HTTP3/brotli, only
working with "modern" frontend/social media.

------
sys_64738
gopher still works!

~~~
pmlnr
I made my site available over gopher a while ago[^1]; After reading
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178885)
and it's comments I curiously started up lynx and entered gopher the first
time* and it was a massively unexpected ride into the forgotten oldskool
internet.

* I'm from Hungary and gopher never really existed there. Besides, it kind of predates my internet-age, which really started around 1996.

[^1]: [https://petermolnar.net/gopher/](https://petermolnar.net/gopher/)

------
kamfc
I miss Diablo II.

------
j_wtf_all_taken
INTJ = "incredibly tiring jerk"?

------
SimeVidas
Old internet? I miss pre-internet.

~~~
pmlnr
The old internet was an escape from the ordinary, from the unforgiving world
out there. This seem to have swapped in the past ~20 years.

------
ethagnawl
I generally agree with the author's sentiment regarding "the Old Internet".
However, using "voat" and "thank goodness" in the same breath raised a red
flag for me about the author and their motives. They mentioned being kicked
off raddle.me for posting links to their site (the one that's currently linked
to on the top of the HN homepage); maybe that was with good reason and not a
result of gatekeeping?

For example, from _Men and Women and Marriage_:

> In contrast, from what I've observed of women's behavior, most women marry
> for money. Some of them marry several times for money. You see, women
> understand why marriage exists. It exists to ensure that women will be
> provided for while they raise their children. This is why so many marriages
> are dissolved after the children leave home. From the woman's perspective:
> no more children, no more reason to be married.

Perhaps, in addition to the conveniences, opportunities (learning, employment
and otherwise), etc. the "New Internet" has afforded us, making this sort of
trash harder to find is a bit of silver lining.

~~~
hnzix
Can you please link to the list of Empirically Correct Viewpoints™ so that I
can identify and purge myself of thoughtcrimes?

~~~
cortesoft
They aren't thought crimes, but they are views that will get you ostracized...
and they should.

The rule is fairly simple, and does not require a list; if you believe that
someone should have a different set of rules and expectations just because of
a characteristic outside or their control, that is not acceptable.

~~~
hnzix
Dividing the discourse into Correct people and The Others Who Shall Be Shunned
is exactly the kind of binary thinking that is killing rational discourse.

You are never going to change someone's mind by shouting at them.

~~~
tjpnz
It kills far more than rational discourse. People have had their careers and
lives ruined over what somebody else deems to be wrongthink.

