
Tell HN: I miss the old internet - anon1253
This is more of a rant I guess. HN provides a text box, that&#x27;s close enough for me.<p>I was born in 1988, I&#x27;m officially 30. While technically I never got to see the birth of the internet, I remember it differently sometimes. More nostalgically. The summer that never ended. When I was in my adolescent years, I chatted with dozens of people a day. Some I never got to meet in person. Some I did. People from all over the world. Our gateway drugs to the internet were things like IRC, MSN, AOL. Never was a big ICQ person, but I guess that counts. Adium was always on. I don&#x27;t quite remember how I met these fleeting, ephemeral, personal contacts. Mostly through web rings, PHPbb forums, personal reference. We talked so much, about everything. &quot;how&#x27;s your day&quot;. &quot;what do you think about Bush&quot;, &quot;hey I saw your del.icio.us link&quot;. Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook. And at first, that was great. But it feels different now. So different, that I&#x27;ve removed myself from all social media. &quot;social media&quot;. It&#x27;s all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn&#x27;t even recognize), bots, hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?<p>I miss those days sometimes. Maybe it&#x27;s just rose colored glasses of my puberty years. But you know, nothing fundamentally changed about my lifestyle. The internet changed. I&#x27;m still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek, nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won&#x27;t shut up about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them? Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old internet.<p>Maybe this should just be named &quot;how to make friends in your 30s&quot; instead. It&#x27;s different world out there, but I miss talking to people I&#x27;ve never met. Learn about their lives, be part of it somehow. And they, part of mine in return. I guess there&#x27;s no turning back from the bots.
======
CommanderData
Made me smile, I'm not too far behind. I think it was my rose colored glasses.

Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss and by comparison the nearest thing for
kids these days is probably YouTube or Reddit. However they are nothing like
Forums in ways.

How I'll miss spending months earning my way to become a mod, talking about
the community or a user in private sub forums, joking/gossip threads with
other mods, talking about real life issues with Mom-Mods and Dad-Mods in
private forums, and eventually meeting them irl. Customizing my profile with
weird ass sigs, animated avatars and coming home to an organized list unread
threads interesting to me. Sounds strikingly like Reddit but nothing like it,
how strange.

MSN was awesome, but I think kids these days have better options here.
Snapchat come close in some ways and does well for the mobile platform.

I felt the Internet was a smaller simpler place with lesser influence from
cooperate agenda, state sponsored ideas, and other influencing ideologies and
actors. The Internet has become less transparent, commercialized (not just
ads) blurring lines between genuine and insincerity.

Social marketing companies specialize in astroturfing places like Reddit
making it almost impossible to spot sponsored content sometimes. Try doing
that on a Forum and you'll be spotted miles away and made an example of.

Examples of propaganda factories in Russia or Israel with high influence on
social media is an example of one big problem Reddit or YouTube has today.
It's far too easy to game larger social media networks and make it seem like
the consensus.

~~~
varrock
Your anecdote about forums really hits home. I went to a small, private
elementary school with a class size of about 30. We were the only friends we
had. When I was in fourth grade, I created a forum for my classmates to use
when we got home and couldn't communicate with each other in person (this was
before it was standard for kids of this age to own a mobile phone). It was a
hit. I made separate boards (aka subreddits) for things like sports, video
games, and even just general chat. It was a huge hit in my class. I had people
begging to be moderators and asking for improvements. Delegating the moderator
title was serious at that age, as everybody wanted to feel like they were
contributing to our forum. I felt like a CEO of some fourth grade startup.

In a weird way, reflecting on this, it really says a lot about who I am as a
person to this day. Thank you for influencing this memory to come out of my
repository tonight.

~~~
cconstantin
Isn't Whatsapp/Snapchat today's alternative to that?

~~~
Qwertie
Sort of yeah. Semi-hidden/private groups on IM apps can be really good.

------
gkoberger
Me too. There's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel
like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. Just never
ending, mind numbing consuming of mediocre content.

I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met
in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed
online anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation.
People (myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now,
real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Our communities are no longer ours... we're now talking on the servers of
billion-dollar companies. Sure, back in the day AOL was a big company, and now
we have stuff like Discord servers. But it feels different now. Most of the
conversation has been sucked into FB, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. Even this
forum, which I do still like, is backed by a multi-billion dollar company.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most,
there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of
magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you
needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to
get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared
content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I
don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now
it doesn't.

(You should read this article: [http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-
know-how-to-waste-...](http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-
waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html))

------
King-Aaron
Car forums.

I don't know how many of you guys are on-the-side petrol heads, but it's one
thing that strikes me with the facebook generation - all the years of lost
knowledge when everyone pivoted from car forums to facebook groups.

No longer can you quickly search up 'what's the best gearbox oil to use in my
T56'... Oh no. It's an almost-hourly repetition of shitpost threads that
contain no useful information for anybody. Need to know what diameter bearing
you need? What part # for that o-ring? Good luck. And if you do happen to
stumble across the hidden knowledge of a now-defunct forum, you're likely to
be met with the next peril - images that are no longer hosted or available to
see without the original uploader paying for an image hosting account on
photobucket etc.

I feel like all the collective knowledge from the years of 1999 - 2009 is
basically lost to the sands of time.

~~~
defterGoose
I think my brother getting me into cars and my subsequent delve into
bimmerforums in the late-naughts is probably one of the big reasons my
interest in Facebook started to wane around the same time. My interactions
there were largely based on technical questions, but the humanity and humor
contained in those interactions were so much more genuine, and indeed, kind,
than anything I've seen on FB/tw/insta. I would be really interested in
helping out on a project to archive all the knowledge on those types of sites.

~~~
subway
An "Internet Archive" of sorts?

------
shakna
You're certainly not alone, and there are some of us who miss when technology
wasn't so biased towards harming you in some way, such as forcing you into a
'filter bubble', and more towards discovery.

Most social media seems actively geared towards making it harder for me to
make friends like I used to, and the old IRC servers, though some are still
active, are now either dead or filled with people who see all the changes as a
'good thing'.

I have noticed it, and my friends and I are slowly stumbling along in our own
pursuit. Our own feeble exploration, if you will.

Our first step, has been the blog you can find in my profile. It is a blog...
But it's powered by old .plan files that can sent through pandoc at regular
intervals. Every user of the server I've set up has it happen. Or we can just
use the ol' finger program to view them.

The shell, our shared shell, is becoming a place we can sit and experiment.

Other pieces of the puzzle are coming slowly too, I'm in the midst of writing
two different messaging applications, and others have their ideas as well.

There are no bots... Because we all have our SSH keys, and know to invite each
other. Hopefully it'll become more public, more inviting, but first we need to
work out what exactly it is that we want.

------
sengork
I think that what you're experiencing is pretty common. Internet itself has
changed but perhaps more crucially people with whom you've interacted with
changed their habits or simply lack the time they used to have (their age
groups are different so there's insufficient critical mass to maintain the old
community).

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s
early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite
often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it
is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters
creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily
take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that
you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example
today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were
fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities
or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others
with very specific non-majority interests.

------
noobermin
Communities do still exist online although their flavor has changed. Group
chat has essentially replaced the chatrooms and IRC channels of the mid
90s-00s. Pre 90s is too old for me, but I remember seeing pining for "days of
gopher/usenet" etc during the 00's, so really everyone has always been pining
for this or that. I don't mind it, people will always be nostalgic in some
sense. I was nostalgic for high school in college, and I'm somewhat nostalgic
for college now, so it's probably valuable to not take hindsight's insight too
seriously.

That said, the internet has not been the democratizing force most of us
believed it would become with curated and centralized social networks having
arisen as dominant. I am convinced that this is still a fact that can be
discerned distinct of the nostalgic pining. Individuals are pushing back a
little (not consciously perhaps) by opting for groups/smaller circles of
friends and interests.

~~~
ACS_Solver
There's definitely some nostalgia involved, but I feel some things from the
previous Internet have been lost. Discord communities are at least a
reasonable approximation of the old IRC channels, and there are other modern
analogs to "old Internet" things, but the forum format is something that I
feel has died, and I miss that a lot.

Perhaps the main difference between forums and modern sites like Reddit, or
Facebook groups, is that forums were a natural fit for slower, longer in-depth
conversations. It's normal to have a forum conversation that lasts days, if
not weeks, and where the posts all consist of many paragraphs. A site like
Reddit is designed for older posts to sink. Same with anything that employs a
"news feed" page format. Yes, forums are still around, but they're a shadow of
their former selves, and often seem to have an old userbase.

~~~
StudentStuff
Reddit has slowly died though as it has become a much more popular site. The
people I used to enjoy interacting with have slowly gravitated away, while the
quality of the average comment has significantly degraded. HN isn't a great
replacement either, but outside of a handful of small subreddits I have found
myself frequenting it more.

------
klenwell
One thing I appreciate about the internet, even nowadays, is learning about
people I've never met. This isn't talking to them necessarily. It can just be
someone I could imagine striking up an interesting conversation with if I did
meet them someday.

As an American who grew up in a way that I felt was somewhat typically (but
perhaps less so nowadays) suburban middle-class, I similarly appreciate
reading thoughtful comments from people who grew up in different circumstances
and didn't necessarily have it as easily as I did. Where I have most
frequently encountered these voices is here and on Reddit and on Metafilter
(which I first discovered here on HN). If I can dig up a good example, I'll
add it to this comment.

Finally, when I think about that old spirit of the internet that I think
you're talking about, and places where it still may prevail, I'd like to offer
as an example Erowid. I'm not a contributor, I don't even read it that often.
But it just comforts me that sites like this still exist:

[https://www.erowid.org/](https://www.erowid.org/)

So I don't think the good old internet is dead. You just have to know where to
look.

~~~
freehunter
I think you're spot-on. The web didn't die, there's just more people on it
now. And if you go where all the people are (Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, etc),
places that didn't exist in the old web, of course you're going to get a
different experience than you had back then. Even the difference between
Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day. What you want may actually just be
"fewer people on my web".

I still feel the old web/Internet a lot. BBS still exists, and it's not
popular but shit there weren't a lot of people on the web back then anyway.
phpBB still exists and plenty of the sites are still active. Logging into
Guild Wars 2 feels a lot like logging into GW1 or DAoC or my favorite UO
shard. Playing Quake is still playing Quake. There's nothing stopping you from
having a UT2004 LAN party other than you not wanting to have a LAN party.
Hell, MUDs are still a thing, and they're just as popular as ever.

Perhaps it's not the web that's changed... perhaps it's us? As they say, you
can't go home again. Stopping by my parents house is still the same home I
grew up in, but Doug and Rocko's Modern Life aren't playing on the TV anymore,
and there aren't any freezie-pops in the freezer. Not because they can't be,
but because I don't really want it to be like that anymore.

Every experience you loved, you can find again. If it seems like you can't,
then you probably don't actually want that experience. You're looking for
something far less tangible than an MSN chatroom.

~~~
dhruvkar
>> Even the difference between Hacker News vs lobste.rs is night and day.

I'm curious, what are the differences? I'm not on lobste.rs except as a casual
observer and it seems similar to HN.

------
termer
I wish I were there for all that. I'm still a teen, but I like to hearken to
older times. I voluntarily chose not to join any social media, because I can
see how commercialized it is. In a world were smartphones and social media are
dominant, the world seems like glass, where everyone can see everyone, and
everyone's competing to be seen. I hate and reject such ideas, becuase they
make daily interaction something of a contest. "How many likes can I get for
this tweet?" and other such things turn what normally would be conversation
into someone shouting at the top of a tower to see how many people shout in
agreement. Forums, largely aren't that way. I've been a part of many different
forums in my life, and I can see that they fostered conversation and
community. It's sad to see them go the way of the dinosaur in favor of
commercialized, mobile, "reactive" "apps".

------
chrisco255
I came of age in the AOL days, and fondly remember meeting random people in
chat rooms and message forums. Some of the people I met back in the 90s I'm
friends with on Facebook today. That came from frequenting the same N64 forum
for like 4 years. We talked about everything including our personal lives and
in some ways I feel closer to them than the people I actually went to high
school with.

I have noticed, however, that despite the internet working better than ever in
many ways (in terms of speed and capabilities), that it seems harder to make
friends or meet random people. Let's take HN for example, I love this site,
but maybe because the community is so big, it seems like I'm just an anonymous
figure on here. I'm one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands that visit this site
regularly. Do I learn a lot from HN? Of course! Do I enjoy the conversations
and comments? Absolutely! Is the platform conducive to casual conversation
among strangers in a way that facilitates getting to know someone else and how
they think and view the world? No.

For that matter, neither is Reddit.

If I had to guess, it's the news feed mechanic that has killed real social
interaction on the net. The news feed mechanic works, it generates clicks,
it's constantly feeding you interesting and stimulating information and
updates, but it's surface level deep. So much of making friends is being in a
group that's small enough to promote shared intimacy and repeated interactions
with the same people.

~~~
CommanderData
I was a member of a bustling forum with hundred, perhaps thousands of new
users a day. If a new user would surface, it would not take long for them to
leave an impression even with all the noise. As long as they were posting
something interesting to me. I would remember small things about the user that
would help me build a mental profile, things like fonts, sigs, avatars and
badges, name.

That's been lost with Facebook, Reddit. There is a lack of personality from
one comment to another, no distinguishable visual factor to aid distinction or
a contrast . I think Humans appreciate the slight difference to tell people
apart. Aside from a username, maybe it is not enough.

------
mseebach
It's common, to the point of being an age-old popular culture trope, for
people turning 30 to be very nostalgic about their late teens/early 20s.

 _You_ changed. So did I. The world did too, for sure, but the 17 year olds of
today will miss the pure and uncorrupted world of 2018 when _they_ turn 30.

~~~
21
Exactly this.

Another classic example, the 30+ of today comment on YouTube videos from 15
years ago how amazing it was, and how shit the music of today is, forgetting
that 15 years ago their parents said the exact same thing about the music of
the day.

~~~
bitwize
Ah, but teenagers comment on how amazing _my_ music (80s-early 90s) was, and
how shit _their_ music is. So I feel a bit justified in saying my tunes were
objectively better.

~~~
21
Some teenagers.

Who do you think is driving the music charts today?

~~~
ccajas
I wonder for how long traditional style of music charts and albums sales hold
up for when digital streaming and downloading is becoming the norm.

~~~
21
Today's music charts are already basically Spotify/Apple/YouTube streams.

[http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/06/kanye-west-ye-album-
domin...](http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/06/kanye-west-ye-album-dominating-
spotify-apple-music-charts/)

------
iEchoic
As the internet gets bigger, it's been feeling increasingly "small" to me. The
time I spend is concentrated on a few sites, which haven't changed much in
years.

I used to find random forums and communities on a regular basis, and each had
their own character. They were small enough that I'd quickly come to know
various people in the community and establish a connection with them, whereas
now posting always feels I'm broadcasting to nobody in particular.

Nowadays, I often write posts, think "wait, does this matter? why am I posting
this?" and then just delete it. It feels like dumping words into the abyss.

~~~
wilsonnb2
I agree, it feels like most posting on the internet is just screaming into the
void. There's no meaning behind it, no interactions to come of it. I'll never
talk to the other commenters again or know anything about them. They could be
bots for all I know, but the worst part is that it wouldn't even matter if
they were bots because the interactions wouldn't be any different.

This [1] Reddit thread filled almost entirely by a single guy commenting to
himself is the best illustration of this that I've found so far.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/comments/77d9ou/the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/comments/77d9ou/the_predictable_threads_are_driving_me_insane/)

~~~
TeMPOraL
The GIF itself is good too.

------
sudofail
While I do think nostalgia plays a big part in this feeling, I also think a
major contributing factor is centralization. Instead of fragmented forums and
IRC channels where people would congregate for years, we generally have moved
on to things like Reddit, and Facebook.

Dunbar's number states that the number of relationships someone can
comfortably maintain is about 150 or so. Sense of community comes from
connecting with small groups. I do not feel a sense of community by chatting
with strangers on /r/funny.

Decentralized forums or IRC channels run by small groups were much more
accessible, and allowed you to connect with people and form relationships.

That all said, IRC channels and independent forums do still exist. Hobby
forums are great (I personally love the Small Form Factor PC forum, great
community[1] ).

But today, small groups are the exception and not the norm of the internet of
the 90s and early 00s.

[1]: [https://smallformfactor.net/forum/](https://smallformfactor.net/forum/)

------
rmason
I'm a little older and am nostalgic about BBS's. It brought people together in
a specific city. I've still got friends whom I might never have met in real
life if it weren't connecting with them first on the BBS.

My experiences online also gave me a big jump over most people on
understanding the potential of the Internet. Despite my sermonizing a lot of
my friends didn't see any value in getting online for a good three to five
years.

When I got a Palm Pilot phone in 2003(?) and showed them I had Internet access
on it they were incredulous. These same people who were late to the Internet
laughed and said why would you ever want the Internet on your phone?

~~~
flyinghamster
Back in the mid-1980s in Champaign-Urbana, one of the most vibrant BBSes in
town (Tranquillity II) had no downloads - conversation was its specialty.
There were even real-life gatherings of the participants. That sort of thing
is hard to do when almost everyone you interact with could be halfway around
the world.

~~~
perardi
Was it run out of the U of I?

This was more early-1990s, but my first internet was a BBS out of Bradley
University in Peoria. Ah, the sweet scream of ZTerm on a Performa.

~~~
flyinghamster
That board was run from a private home (originally on a TI 99/4A with the
expansion box, and a 300 baud modem). It later moved to an Amiga.

------
CM30
I miss those days as well. Felt like the people online then were somewhat more
interesting than those now, and were likely to get involved in stuff because
it was a fun hobby rather than a way to make money or 'build a career' or what
not.

Still, there are communities like that out there now, and quite a few of them
are where they always were. Forums are less popular, but active ones do still
exist, and some have good communities. Same with IRC and mailing lists and
chat rooms and whatever else.

And while it's unfortunately centralised, I guess Discord has become the
'place' for many of these communities too, with the better ones being
basically an old school forum in chat room form.

There are places out there.

------
cmg_xyz
One answer to “What happened to the old internet?”

We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age
to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot
of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-
gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_
generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many
cases _we_ started them.

I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better.
We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know,
that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened
before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our
watch.

If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the
60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

~~~
alexcabrera
I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to use
the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general
public. You can see it reflected across the web now in ways that have caused
real, lasting damage.

And while I agree that we're the first digital natives, I think what screwed
the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything
that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given
tools they weren't ready to handle.

Who knew a textarea and a notification system could become so troublesome?

~~~
cmg_xyz
> I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to
> use the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general
> public... I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers
> into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-
> digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

See, I think this is where we didn't apply lessons that we should've learned.
A good moderation policy and good moderators are arguably essential to the
life of a good forum, but Twitter is and always has been disastrous at it.
It's a global forum thread or IRC channel where the trolls have completely
free reign.

------
devaroop
(I guess, everyone in this thread is ranting about the same. Here's my anger:)

We have slowly morphed from "users of the internet" to "a product of the
internet".

The internet, today, is so interested about what I do every second. This made
every common man a celebrity. A friend recently said she's aware of her data
being used to snoop on her, but she refrained to stop it citing that it gave
her "momentary happiness" to stay on social networks. I practically couldn't
deny what she said.

While I follow ('ed) a few discussions over internet, the moment I turn my
phone screen on, I get disrupted by the numerous feeds from social apps ending
up forgetting what I had to look at. I keep confining me to the same space
eventually.

The internet is following the greatest blindfold of democracy: "Set strict
boundaries for individuals of the society and let them argue within those
limits infinitely. Keep them busy with controversies within those boundaries
so that there isn't time left to think beyond the limits"

------
DoreenMichele
You may have changed more than you realize. I like to think I'm as open to
social connections as I always was, but the reality is that I'm older and
wiser and quicker to recognize that a lot of people who want to talk to me are
not really innocently trying to befriend me in some mutually beneficial
squeeing over common interests kind of way. They usually have an agenda and
it's often not a nice agenda. They are usually looking to take advantage of me
in some way or to force a particular narrative onto me driven by some internal
psychology of theirs, and don't confuse them with the facts.

I have learned to have my own agenda of looking out for my own needs and
husbanding my time to invest it in things that matter to me. This turns out to
not be conducive to the kinds of conversations I used to have.

I'm lonelier than I used to be by quite a lot. But my life overall works
better.

I don't know how to get both things. I wish I did.

~~~
allworknoplay
I think they’re saying they miss not having to worry about being used by
randos. if you were around in the early days of the web, there were definitely
a lot of people trying a lot of things (I tried on more than a few different
personas when I was a young teen in the mid nineties), but almost none of it
was for profit, it was just people trying things.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm a woman. A high percentage of the time, when people are looking to use me,
it's for sex or "emotional labor." A very high percentage of people who expect
me to care about them and their welfare have a "Giving Tree" mental model of
what _love_ looks like and they very much expect it to be a one way street.

This has mostly always been true in my life, both online and off. I'm just
much more aware that I am merely being bled by people who will do absolutely
nothing in return for me and who will, in fact, shit all over me if I bring up
my needs and wants at all. They explicitly expect a woman to do nice things
for free for them. Expecting something in return offends them in the extreme.

I'm quicker to cut people off than I used to be. It doesn't lead to the kinds
of mutually beneficial relationships I desire, but I spend far less time
feeling bled for my time, energy, expertise and wisdom by people who
explicitly think women should give those things away for free and who saw zero
problem with that abusive expectation even when I was literally homeless and
going hungry. That was not their problem and how dare I suggest they should
care about that.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I'm 27, but here's some recent experiences:

You can still participate in IRC! It's still alive and kicking. Look at the
channel in list in freenode.net, it's huge! Most of it is focused on tech, but
there's plenty of non-tech channels as well.

Try checking out communities using Discord. I started participating in a
couple anime-related groups and I met tons of interesting people through that.
I eventually got invited to a private Discord where many members hang out, but
it's more casual and personal than the public server, and it's been a blast.
I've learned tons of things about their different cultures, and I'm hoping to
meet some of em at events later this year or next. Although I haven't met with
anyone in real life yet, it turned out one member actually lives live like 20
mins, so we actually planning on meeting soon, when we don't have any big
real-life issues on our plates.

It turns out a few of the people I've been talking to recently are Muslims,
and I didn't know much about their beliefs, so it has been a highly
enlightening experience. They recently stopped fasting and were celebrating
being able to eat during regular hours again.

One of the people I've been talking to is from a middle-eastern country but
had family in Qatar, so he's visiting. Did you know that apostasy is illegal
there? Oh, and they also block porn sites! This is an image of what you get
when you try accessing a porn site in Qatar [0].

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/1a9lDDi.png](https://i.imgur.com/1a9lDDi.png)

~~~
wyclif
"We grew up with IRC. Let's take it further."
[https://irc.com/](https://irc.com/)

------
Lazare
I'm few years older than you but I had a similar experience. However, I'm not
sure the "old internet" is gone so much as it's moved a few doors down.

There still _are_ communities: Some on Facebook groups, more on Twitter or
Tumblr, but increasingly found on Discord. Find a Discord related to some
topic (a game, a fandom, a hobby, a city), and you'll find that casual
chatting, meeting new people, people arranging to meet up, etc.

"Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice
chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them?"

Discord, a Facebook group, maybe a Twitter group chat. Seriously. There's more
people doing what you miss today than at any time in the past, but they're not
doing it in the same places.

That being said...keep in mind it's much easier to make friends in your teens
and early 20s than in later life. I struggle a lot to make connections, not
because the opportunity isn't available, but just because I'm a lot more
closed off than I used to be. Some of your nostalgia is for the internet of
yesteryear, but some of it is for the _you_ of yesteryear, and that's not
going to be recoverable by installing a new chat client.

------
bowlich
This seems to be the zeitgeist lately -- folks wanting to get back to the
small community feeling. I think some of the different "fediverse" takes are
trying to do just that. I'll throw out the typical Mastodon plug.

I've spent the last four or so years hoping around dead phpBBs and empty IRC
channels trying to find a community that reminded me of the pre-Facebook
communities.

So far Mastodon reminds me of a kind of async-IRC for the 30+ crowd who don't
have time to idle in an empty channel all day. Plenty of conversations, and If
feel like I'm starting to recognize repeated posters and strike up
conversations again.

~~~
Double_a_92
> folks wanting to get back to the small community feeling

Agree. The problem for me is that if I happen to find a small community, I
still wonder if I'm missing out on something else.

Back then if you found an nicely made forum in your language, that was it. A
couple 100 people and no real alternative to them.

Maybe that's why dating seems to be so hard. It's possible to meet a partner
from literally all over the world. Where is in old times you were more or less
limited by the village you happened to live in.

I don't want to chose good people... I want to have them slightly "forced" on
me and learn to live with them. :/

------
agumonkey
Weren't there a previous Tell HN about this very same topic ?

I'm older than you. I spend half my time trying to explain what is this
feeling. It's so ironic that every golden age is killed by itself in a way.
We're all pushing for 'better' until we realize that it was just as neat as it
should before.

Maybe it's just relativism from psychology, call this general roots. At
periods of your time you imprint signals. Minute details that will always make
you feel at home. Whenever I run win95, winxp, linux 2.4 I feel so chill. Even
though on paper, linux 4 / systemd have 320 extremely valuable features...
still there's a 'better' effect. The other day I registered on a phpbb website
.. felt cool. No php7 generators or DI based modules .. but I couldn't care
less.

It's probably not all nostalgia, you can really tell how internet became a
social business from a fun on the side, everyside is monetized, full of
warnings, hyper complex. And very rarely so for the benefits of the user,
mostly to avoid harm from stupid businesses.

Thank god IRC (and others) are still the same.

------
soperj
I miss old phpbb forums. I still occasionally chat with people who's email
addresses I got in the late 90s, early 00s. I never met any of them in person,
but still feel a really close connection with lots of people that i "met" in
that era.

~~~
interdrift
Writing phpBB articles, was my first clue of what programming was. Oh, the
shame, but still, was quite fun

------
FooHentai
You can never go back. The place you remember now exists only in memories, and
it's doubtful it ever existed quite how you recall it.

I moved around a lot between 18 and 30 - About 30 different properties, 15
different towns, five major cities, a few countries.

Something I learned over that time is when you return to a location you once
lived in, it never matches up to whatever memories you have. People have moved
on (a particularly stark lesson in university towns, which churn ~30% every
single year), businesses have shuttered, public spaces have been redeveloped.
Even the road/path networks have changed. So it's not possible to turn those
fond memories back into a current experience. Of the things that DO match, a
significant number of them will be negative elements that your memory had
kinda hidden away. We tend to frame memories of our environment as fixed, with
a sense of timelessness that doesn't match how those spaces evolve over time.

The same thing applies to Internets. There's a BB I posted heavily on in the
late nineties that's still active and largely unchanged. But having recently
started posting there again, it's just not an enjoyable experience. All the
personalities are in a different phase of life (as am I), the central theme
topic has aged badly, and the level of activity is low enough that there's
rarely any point checking in daily. Worst of all, as someone that gets flighty
at the first whiff of stagnation, going back to something so far in my past
brings up a strong negative reaction. Even though it's just a bloody forum.

I guess all of this is obvious and not hugely insightful, but it leads me to
the conclusion that it's not worth pining for the Internets that was, because
the reality of returning to that would not be as awesome as our memories
suggest. If anyone wants a taste of that today, stuff like TOR, freenet, and
I2P echo a lot of the Web 1.0 feeling and community.

------
thwarted
_The summer that never ended._

In relation to the internet, summer never ending was never a thing.

Eternal September¹ is a thing.

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

~~~
anon1253
Yep that's what I meant from memory, thank you for providing the correct
reference :-)

~~~
thwarted
You were 5 when this occurred.

------
tcdent
I’m 33 and share a similar experience, except that I’ve found Instagram in
particular to be an even better social experience than the old days of IM.

I regularly meet people I follow in person if they come through my town, or if
I come through theres. And, when I make a new acquaintance, we stay in touch
and learn more about eachother in preparation for our next chance encounter.
My group of friends is lager than ever, though we don’t meet in person as
often as a traditional local relationship.

~~~
monort
I have the same experience with Instagram, but it's still worse, than in older
days, because there is no desktop client. Discussing anything deep is
practically impossible.

------
xellisx
Having grown up with BBSs and getting on information super highway in 92, I
miss the crazyness and "decentralization". Also stuff like IMs and IRC I find
a lot better than what has replaced them, since you had your choice of
programs to use with them, not web page that kind of just lock you down to a
browser or a closed off app that is really just a web app. Why cant I have
Facebook messenger just part of trillian or pidgen or what ever?

------
meritt
> What happened?

I think it's due to the popularity contest that has taken over our
communication mediums. Everything is based upon likes, stars,
upvotes/downvotes, retweets, and shares. This social influence leads to herd
behavior and conformity.

I too greatly miss the tight communities I used to participate in across IRC,
chat rooms, and topic-specific forums where people simply voiced their
opinions and had discussions. They still exist in pockets but the communities
are much smaller today. If people were out of line, they were kicked out. If
they continued, they were banned. Discussion manipulation was generally
limited to bumping forum threads to the top. Today a malicious actor just
needs a small bot network to complete control opinion on upvote-based
discussion platforms.

------
leed25d
I was born in 1946. I miss acoustic couplers and I miss The Well.

~~~
ashleyn
The WELL technically still exists.

~~~
prepend
I was thinking of joining to assuage some of OP’s comments.

Are you a user? Is it worth joining to have Community - driven conversation?

Joined LongNow and it has a nice series of seminars and hints of community,
but no chat or comment culture.

------
DanBC
> The internet changed

It got a heck of a lot cheaper for home users. People forget just how much
online access used to cost. It also got a lot more users, and many services
seem to want huge numbers of users, rather than being happy to serve their
niche well. Finally, when you're dialing up at 33.6 or slower you make an
effort because every second counts.

Here's a page from 1988.
[http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7)

Compuserve charged $11 per hour and had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source charged $8 per hour and was popular for its conferencing system
"parti".

Delphi charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users)
following.

BIX charge $9 per hour.

------
ljw1001
> Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook.... It's all
> influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots, hate
> speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you. What happened?

I hadn't heard it put quite so clearly before: First, Tech Cos turned
conversation into big-business by corralling everyone into their platforms,
then the the second wave came and turned these "walled-gardens" into game
reserves. I can't imagine how little of twitter's volume is not bots, ads,
self-promotion, and trolls - paid or otherwise.

Online we're already living in a dystopian future.

------
sheepmullet
I think it is caused by two major changes:

1) Everything has been commercialized.

Even in the tech world most posts aren't to inform, illuminate, or even just
show off something cool. A huge number of tech blog posts are really just ads
to build a company or personal brand.

2) Propaganda

Propaganda infects pretty much every semi-political discussion on the web and
it has lead to most sites having a single accepted viewpoint on major
discussion points and serious hostility towards the out-group.

The water has been muddied so much that the average person cannot dig down and
find the truth.

I've personally had to take a holistic counter-examples based approach.

------
mastrsushi
Everyone misses what they used to live for, I'm only 23 and I've noticed the
pattern. Look up "Eternal September" or the "September that never ended"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
During this period AOL aggressively marketed Usenet access, saturating what
was once a University grade Network for educated users, steering the path
towards the consumer focused Internet we now have today. People longed for the
old 70's-80's era of the Internet back in 1993, nothing new, nothing old.
Because of my age, I miss the 2006 Web 2.0 era of the internet, before the
access was even more expanded to the smartphone generation. When having a blog
or a website was still relevant, before everything became encapsulated into
social media. Yes, I'll admit, I don't like this new wave of illiterate image
based Snapchat and Instagram morons that express through emojis and selfies,
but they'll too as community environments become even more abstracted.

------
reustle
I'm the same age and feel similar. I wonder how my and others actions differ
now that my name is tied to everything. Back in those days, it was rare to
know even the first name of my friend, only their handle. Now we just craft
our posts carefully hoping it's not used against you in the future.

I grew up on forums, and began programming with php on them. I'd love to see
something similar to them take over slack.

~~~
spronkey
Protip: stop caring. Just post it and own it.

Everyone makes mistakes, and the sooner people realise that in this modern,
lose your job because of a twitter post society, the better.

------
isostatic
> The summer that never ended

1993 was the September that never ended, when AOL invaded usenet and the world
fell apart. At least if you talk to those who were on the internet before
then.

People have always longed for the good old days. Those days weren't much
different to now, it's often just your perspective that's changed, and you
don't miss the good old days, you miss being a carefree teenager

------
mrobins
Completely agree. Fragmented communities run by mods meant that reputations
were built on time and trust rather than #s of followers. Influence in that
sense was built by long-term commitment to a group organized around a specific
topic. That dynamic disincentived bad behavior and diminished its effects in
ways that mimic real human relationships. The same isn’t true on social media.

------
fossuser
I think there is a community problem out there that remains unsolved in a nice
way - particularly in real life spaces.

Church used to be a source of it for people, but it has a lot of obvious
negatives and there are limited options without religion involved.

Children probably also take a lot of people off the map, but I think that
doesn’t have to be true either given the right solution.

~~~
spronkey
This times many.

Sports, activity interest groups fill the void a little.

But there's so little downtime as an adult these days it's a chore.

------
krapp
>I'm still self employed, child-free ... what do you call it these days: geek,
nerd? you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up
about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days?

Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, and 4chan a bit only now they're
talking about Firefly, the Expanse and Star Wars.

SF and anime fandom is bigger, more diverse, more involved and more complex
than its ever been, but you're going to have to go where the people are to
find it and engage with it, and you've already admitted you avoid going where
the people are.

You need to accept that everything that used to be hip and exclusive to
subculture is now mainstream and infested with millennials and normies and
social media and that it's ok. They love their stuff just as much as you and I
do.

edit: and Discord. I forgot about it because I'm old, but Discord is also a
thing.

------
User23
The average IQ of the Internet user population has dropped at least two
standard deviations from the pre-commercial days to now. As a result the
quality really truly has dropped. I suspect that whatever eventually displaces
Facebook is going to accomplish that by somehow dumbing things down even more.

------
stevage
>It's all influencers (a word my dictionary doesn't even recognize), bots,
hate speech, bickering, identity politics, and what have you.

I think the first two words are your problem. "It's all". The internet isn't
"all" anything. It's incredibly diverse. If all you see is that stuff, you
need to change your approach.

I spend lots of time on Twitter having very productive discussions in my
field. I rarely if ever see bots, "influencers", hate speech. Occasional
bickering, a bit of "identity politics", I guess - but that's because I chose
to opt into it.

And there are lots of great Slack channels, and StackOverflow, and Github
Issues for conversations about things that interest me.

I think the things you want on the Internet are still there, you just aren't
finding them for some reason.

------
Aloha
For me at least, telegram largely has replaced both IRC, and
AIM/Yahoo/ICQ/MSN/whatever.

My social circle is full of people like you - but I'm a furry - maybe you
should seek out the local scifi or furry community around you - I promise you,
that you'll feel right at home.

------
dchuk
This is exactly why I setup [https://hackerforums.co](https://hackerforums.co)
! It’s a small community, but humming along fine so far. I have a long post
with details of our first month getting posted tomorrow!

------
bryanlarsen
To many of us, the old Internet died in 1993, also known as "eternal
September"

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

------
Samon
This may be just nostalgia talking, but I think a big part of it is that these
days there is much more of a 'commercial' nature to the internet. 'Back in the
day', it seemed like there were a lot more 'community' focused sites, that
were primarily there to serve the community, rather than to actually make a
profit. Forums, blogs, etc where communities of people with similar interests
would share information, collaborate, or just 'hang out'. Forums in general
seem to have almost died out, and most blogs have some kind of commercial
intent.

------
craftoman
The old internet was so much fancy and weird at the same time. It was not
mainstream, no one was talking about, security was a hilarious joke and you
were feeling like some kind of an ultra combo hacker like those in the movies.
I remember there was no router with a basic prebuild NAT "security" and you
could just hack anything and almost everyone. I remember when I was a kid, I
got hacked just by entering an IRC chat filled with hackers. If someone had
your IP address and you had windows with netbios enabled you were a joke back
in the days.

------
rasengan
That time is coming back. We are all on IRC. Come chat!

~~~
kken
how to discover new irc channels/servers?

~~~
rasengan
There are some nice irc networks listed on
[http://irc.netsplit.de](http://irc.netsplit.de)

I actually use /list and join new channels from time to time!

------
scotty79
> ... of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook

Twitter was always useless for me for having a conversation. It's just
shouting short phrase into the void hoping someone will shout some other short
phrase back. It's roughly equivalent of ICQ status message. Little text you
could attach to information whether you are online or not. Technically you
could have conversation through that but it is more like passive-aggressive
shouting match in a large room full of other people than actual conversation.
Twitter is exactly that for me and I refuse to participate.

And Facebook forces you to have one exposed identity and glues it to your face
and your mom. So it's useless for conversation purposes because you won't dare
to say there anything ever. I still have an account if only to see what my
family and friends are doing with their lives and using messenger because
nobody installs even skype anymore.

Pretty much old conversation systems from my point of view faded away into
their most limiting and stupid parts.

Bye bye ICQ or your local equivalent of that experience.

And forums got digg treatment. In the old days you could say whatever you
thought and you only risked that some people will mute you or you get kicked
out of that forum right away. Now everything is gamified, you get downvoted,
you are loosing karma, your post fades away for everybody, gets buried. And it
hurts much. To much to risk expressing any opinion you might think is
controversial. Because cost is loosing points you learned to care about,
loosing standing on a platform, the only platform. There's no second HN, no
second reddit.

Instead of providing personalized tools for muting trolls and their feeders
forums transformed into gamified, mob-policed states that keep everybody in
check with self-censorship. The only people that break through that are
straight up racist, sexist trolls that don't care about anything and anybody.
People with most extreme views. And then everybody else can say: "See? That's
why we can't have nice things. That's what we have downvoting for."

Modern internet is different. It's better in many aspects. Youtube is modern
marvel for hands-on learning. But freedom of expression definitely suffered.

~~~
spronkey
Well said. The thing I miss the most about the early 00s is the IM networks. I
still have a few close friends that I chat with regularly, but so many have
just ditched the idea of chatting altogether.

Sitting down after dinner and having a few deep, interesting conversations
with friends and random strangers was enlightening, and so rare these days.

------
Pooky
This is very interesting and I have the same felling. I think it is due to
expansion of smartphones and mobile internet around us. Before smartphones
everyone typed with their keyboard on the table and you were sure, that the
person who is connected have time to answer. Today you are basically reachable
everywhere and when you don't respond immediately the other side of
conversation think what could go wrong. It was not used to be like that
before. It was more letter oriented conversation where you had time to write
response properly and check your answer or modify it. Today on smartphone
there is no time, you have to write answer in few seconds even when you walk
or you are in hurry. You can not easily disconnect, because now by default
they see that you received message and that you read it. That's probably the
biggest difference between now and then.

The quality takes time and to respond 10 conversation at once is really
exhausting. It's not anymore about joy of internet, what I feel is there is
too much of it. Everyone is instantly connected and about 40% of new
generation is basically addicted to smartphones and to internet, that's
totally different feeling than before when you do it out of curiosity. The old
generation recognize it and probably try to limit their time online, that's
the reason why forums and blogs are not maintained today's, it takes time and
effort to produce something valuable and this days not many people have even
time to read it...

------
swah
I hear you. I feel like the internet is kinda hostile nowadays. Most folks are
only consuming, and its clear (here for example) that I should mostly not
contribute, unless I have something really insightful to say.

Is there a place on the internet for personal relations? Not for politics, not
for hooking up, not for seeing who has the most informed opinion about
something. Just for talking to the same people every day, help them out and be
helped. I see some of that on smaller Discord servers.

 _The really odd thing I 've been noticing though:_ that outside (real life)
its much easier to expose yourself to that kind of "random world" that the
internet felt like in those times. Like, walking in the streets and seeing
what people are talking about in bars I can expose myself to more
interesting[1] (to me of course) opinions than the front page of the biggest
subreddits.

But, if you are an introvert like many of us, you probably won't say hello and
make new friends that easy. And its not about joining the chess/dance/coding
club either, because I don't want to hang out with people just like me. I'd
rather hang out with strangers actually.

[1] Also, the factor that it is in my city makes this relatable, local, etc.
Now that I mention, BBSes were also a local thing.

------
monksy
I miss the voice people had with blogs. Now it's gated circle jerky
communities (fb/medium/Twitter for hate/etc) rather than independent thought
and ideas.

~~~
spronkey
I can't stand Medium or understand at all how it has become so popular.

Facebook is constantly trying to outgrow what it should be, and the more it
does this the less nice it becomes.

Twitter I have little issue with though, amazingly.

~~~
monksy
From the blogging point of view, twitter is nothing but for making
announcements on new content, or targetting them for outrage. There is very
little conversation around the message.

------
hrbf
I see what you mean. Back then, the internet was an exciting place with rules
you had to learn to be accepted at all in certain communities. The internet
was smaller then and required a certain level of technical knowledge to
properly navigate it. This level acted as a filter against the most mundane
most of the internet has become now. I remember sites like hell.com that were
basically web experiments meets digital art installation. There used to be
lots of trashy little pages and everything felt like the whole web was trying
to find its identity.

The feeling of meeting real people went away for me after my FidoNet days. You
had to wait up to two days for a message from Canada to Germany to arrive. It
was frustrating but it was great. Dial-up BBS' were all the rage before a
regular geek could access it from home. Even FidoNet-Email-Gateways existed.

So I guess every generation has its own frontier stories. For you, it was the
internet, for me, it was dial-up BBS', for others it was disk swapping,
building a simple computer from scratch or feeding paper strips to a
warehouse-sized monstrosity.

Still, it's pretty obvious that we as a whole of humanity are not prepared to
converse civilly on a global scale.

------
flyinghamster
There are still old phpBB forums that are still going strong, but that sort of
thing depends enormously on having a committed core of people keeping it going
and weeding out the trolls and spammers. Keeping a public forum running these
days is beyond a full-time job, and a lot of people just don't have the time
for that, especially in today's environment with hostile states, scammers, and
general jerks trying to ruin everything.

------
jackvalentine
When it was difficult or expensive to run a forum, and someone had to pay the
bills, it incentivised the owner to have an opinion about what the forum
should be and appoint mods to enforce it.

It also incentivised the participants to play nice within those rules because
splitting off and starting a rival forum was kinda expensive and a pain in the
arse.

By making things cheaper, and paid for by some big company somewhere, we've
lost that.

------
msvan
I grew up with phpBB forums. They sucked in many ways, but you could easily
find niche communities and be a part of them.

I think Twitter is an inadequate replacement, because on Twitter you don't
just sign up and post a thread for everyone to see. You have to convince
people to follow you first. Once you have done that you get exposed to many
parts of Twitter beyond just your niche -- politics and memes tend to spread
like wildfire. Twitter has other strengths but it's targeted to a wider group
of people, not just young men with narrow interests.

Reddit is a great place for talking about hobbies, but it is fairly anonymous.
Maybe it would be different if you could have animated GIF avatars and massive
signatures! I'm mostly a lurker there but I'm sure you can make great friends
on Reddit, especially if you reach out.

These days a lot of nice communities seem to be forming on Discord, for things
related to games, programming and similar nerdy interests.

There are more people than ever on the internet, and not everyone hangs out on
Twitter. I'm sure you can find your channels if you just look.

------
prolikewhoa
I miss it too. I really miss IRC. I used to have a large group of amateur
radio operators I chatted with for 5-7 years (the IRC channel is still up &
somewhat active!). We used to do meetups for ARRL Field Day & Dayton
Hamvention. We were all great friends, we all just shot the shit & had fun.
Unfortunately everyone found something else or moved to different software to
communicate and we slowly drifted apart.

All of my transgender support communities have been gutted and destroyed by
hate speech and people going "YOU HAVE A MENTAL DISORDER, FREAK". I really
used to enjoy my PHPbb & other forums for real groups of caring people.
Anonymity let the hate flow. I feel those communities have since moved to
Reddit -- just like mostly everything else.

The centralization & ease of access (it's in everyone's pockets) is really
what turned the tables.

It's fun to do internet archeology. [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/) is a
fun search engine.

------
thisisit
> Seems like a Silly Valley opportunity. But what do I know. I miss the old
> internet.

Don't get me wrong but isn't this the whole problem? Previously forums were
run for fun. People were not worried about pumping out ads to make money. And
if everything is about grabbing eyeballs for the ads...why not argue just for
the sake of arguing to grab attention?

------
mighty_bander
I've seen this same opinion, and similar ones, posted across a lot of the
boards I like to visit. Social media can probably be done right, but not by
dragging people into an advertising market like facebook does.

I have come to the conclusion that two factors are necessary to a social media
site truer to the original feel of the internet. One is smaller communities,
in which individual posters can recognize one another, whether they are named
or pseudonymous; another is categorization by interest, rather than
preexisting social connections.

Reddit nearly manages this, but, being motivated by profit, has failed to stem
the tide of idiots onto its platform. Solving the problem of overpopulation
while bringing many users to a site is something I'm not aware of anyone
having done.

I don't have a lot of interest in implementing yet another social media site,
but if anyone knows about such a place, I would love to hear about it.

------
rc-1140
I feel like this kind of post is starting to become much more common as of
late, wondering where everyone - including the internet of the past - has
gone. There's one currently up for maintaining a social life, there was one
maybe a week or so ago about someone grappling with how to improve their
social life, and I'm pretty sure there was a thread before that which was the
exact same subject but just about how to make friends past 30. The irony that
others have seen before me but that I will repeat is that social media isn't
very social.

This alone makes me wonder how people can just say "oh, it's not the internet
that has changed, it's you" when people clearly remember a better and more
social time which seems to have a cutoff point around the hyper-growth of
Reddit. I remember my super-early teens being defined by phpbb forums via
Invisionfree for video game clans, browsing Newgrounds, 4chan, and ytmnd, and
just being a part of the given community. Not to mention just hanging out in
Star Wars Battlefront/Team Fortress/Battlefield (194)2(142) public servers and
just chatting & blasting, eventually settling down to either one or two
servers where you feel most at home. "Where everybody knows your name."

Now forums are Reddit and Facebook. "Niche" forums are huge ones like RPGCodex
and what used to be Neogaf (awful place) and SomethingAwful. Sociability in
video games means you have to constantly roll the dice in terms of 9 to 11
other humans because matchmaking and MMR is the new normal; who knows who
you'll get and if they're not enjoyable to be around, maybe you'll be stuck
listening to them whinge because you're both on the same MMR level. I could go
on, but I can tell you for sure that while there were definitely awful things
back then, they're nothing in the face of the current web.

I don't miss IRC anywhere near as much as I thought I would, though. Going
back recently made me realize that some things have changed for the better.

~~~
nootropicat
Modern format prevents creation of social bonds. I'm not exactly sure why -
probably because discussions die very fast + upvotes/likes turn interactions
into a quasi-economic game. On normal forums you can have the same thread
going for years even.

Overall I think the idea of voting on comments and submissions has made the
world a much worse place.

------
iliaznk
Ones of the reasons you feel nostalgically is, of course, the fact that that
was your childhood. And the other, I think, is that Internet itself was still
quite a novelty those days, which made people use it just for the sake of
using it. You can still log on to an IRC server and find event those who had
been sitting there for all these years, and you can still make friends with
people you never met in person. I did that for a test a couple of years ago.
But later I realised, that it's just like a MOM game – you have to spend all
your free time there or it won't work. And there's so much more interesting
and useful things that I can invest my time in instead of just chatting with
strangers! I used to feel nostalgic about that too. But after a couple tries
like that I never looked back )

------
solarkraft
I never got to experience the legitimately old times, but still managed to see
some of it around 2010.

I find a lot of joy in a restricted, slow network with people who actually
_care_ to be there (have no money to gain, have to go through some effort).

I find this in the deep web. I think it resembles the early internet a lot.

------
snissn
In the last few months I've been spending a lot of my life in tech discords.
I'd like to invite anyone interested to join the reddit /r/webdev discord and
hang out with me

[https://discord.gg/H9Jkc7p](https://discord.gg/H9Jkc7p)

------
mrjay42
Completely agree with your opinion. Although I would say I found a good
substitute using Discord Massively.

Some steps 1\. Find some interest in something: a game, an art, etc. 2\. Find
some discords that are active with some people 3\. "Meet" a lot of people,
discuss, etc.

<3

------
macklinrw
This reminded me of the sweet memories of meeting interesting and new people
all the time. My medium was Warcraft III, I was a kid and remember buying that
game on 3-4 different occasions (lost the hard disk that many times, yes).
Interesting people in the right amount every day, and we played and had
similar interests together. It was worth staying up all night long to catch
that guild event, and everybody was as enthusiastic as me. The people, the
community, and the environment. We need something like this today. There's
nothing really equivalent except maybe community discords (the voice chat
people). Thanks for reminding me!

------
shem73
In the mid-eighties, you could ask any BITNET machine, anywhere in the world,
who was logged on. You could then send any of them a message. I did, and had
interesting correspondence thereafter with people thousands of kilometers
away.

------
pmlnr
I wrote a very similar entry not too long ago:
[https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-
core/](https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/)

------
ssvt
I used to be a CompuServe forum manager 25 years ago and got started with
dialup BBS using Qmodem at 2400bps. Sent mail via FidoNet and loved it. Got my
first internet access when IBM offered accounts to the general public. Our
small office of 15 had a Class C service provided by PSINet for $1100/month.
Even though I'm still active building sites and managing networks it seems...
boring. The old stuff took a bit of fiddling to optimize but now it is all so
homogenized it seems... boring and I notice myself avoiding online stuff.

------
larenser
When I got on the internet in 1992, every person you met there actually had a
valid and very good reason to be there. Nowadays, not so much. In fact most
people shouldn't be there at all.

------
irvingprime
Babylon 5? Okay. It's a classic, though mostly I think because so much of the
SF competition has been garbage. How do you feel about Buffy the Vampire
Slayer?

~~~
bowlich
Just couldn't get past the first season despite being told that it gets
better.

~~~
wilsonnb2
I always skip the first season when I rewatch it. You don't really miss
anything.

I do the same thing for Parks and Rec and the Office (US), both of which had
subpar first seasons in my opinion.

------
backpropaganda
Discord communities are the new IRC, MSN, AOL, whatever. Find a few discord
servers of your interest, and you might find a bit of that old magic again.

~~~
robinduckett
I agree, I have found myself speaking to more people than ever whilst using
Discord.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
> Maybe it's just rose colored glasses of my puberty years.

I think you nailed it. All these things you mentioned can still be found, and
can give the same feelings to teenagers now. The channels used are different,
because these evolve with each generation, but I bet the young people who are
going through the same stage now will be nostalgic about it decades later as
things will definitely be different.

------
satysin
I just turned 34 so a few years older than you but I get what you are saying.
I know it wasn't that long ago but I miss the days of getting home from school
and chatting with friends on Yahoo! Messenger and then MSN (British so AIM was
not a big thing for me). Before Yahoo! Messenger was Yahoo! Chat and ICQ. One
of the strongest memories I have from when I was 16 was when my parents told
me they were separating. The first person I spoke to was a random guy on ICQ I
had made friends with somehow. From what I remember he was maybe 10 years
older than I and he gave me a lot of great advice. I think about him, b@dac1d
I think was how he spelt his name, from time to time. Although I don't even
know what country he was from he was a good 'friend'.

Part of what I miss is the _wonder_ that was the internet. Everything that
happened was happening for the first time. Real time chat, online gaming, etc.
as well as learning the fundamentals of many things such as programming and
computer science. Now when I sit down to learn a new language it doesn't
_feel_ like it did when I first learn VB, C, Java 2, Perl, etc.

The last "new" thing that I remember being truly excited for was when
virtualisation became something you could do on consumer hardware (VMware,
Virual PC) in the early/mid-00s. Now I see new things like VR but I don't
really get so excited for it.

Hardware is amazing now (I am writing this on a laptop with a six-core/twelve-
thread i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a GPU with 4GB RAM to itself and 2TB of solid state
storage) but it is just _better_ hardware, it doesn't have that exciting _new_
factor to it.

I remember feeling _so_ damn excited when I upgraded my old desktop to 768MB
RAM. Everytime I booted it up and saw the RAM check in POST scroll up to 768 I
got giddy with excitement. Almost a little adrenaline rush. Now not so much. I
guess I really am just getting old!

I regularly go on Slack and Discord servers (and still some IRC) but they
_feel_ different to me. I think it is the 1000+ members whereas back in the
90s/early-00s you had maybe 100-150 members in a channel and you would know
most of them to some degree. Same with USENET in that you would often have
conversations with the same people, it didn't matter how many people _read_
that newsgroup it was only those that were active and that was usually a lot
smaller in number. Often a couple of dozen in the newsgroups I frequented.

OP if you fancy a chat pop along to cpplang.slack.com and join us in #off-
topic, doesn't matter if you're not a C++ programmer. We welcome mostly anyone
in that channel and they are a nice bunch.

~~~
spronkey
I get the same rush if I fire up older hardware. Installing some random old OS
onto real hardware is still as thrilling as it ever was.

Far more thrilling than having Windows 10 invade itself onto some modern
soulless fucking lounge bar. I mean hardware.

------
rukittenme
Yeah I miss it too. I used to run a few forums way back when. The most popular
one I ever had was Forge Hub (gaming site). It still exists. I could go back
and start posting but I think its best to leave that memory in the past. After
all, there's a reason we left message boards in favor of aggregators and
social networks. Best to leave our memories as rosy as we can.

------
newnewpdro
There used to be more barriers to entry. The signal:noise ratio has steadily
deteriorated as those barriers fell and more of the general population got
online.

Now that the internet and the devices for accessing it are fully mature it's
the new television.

Maybe VR is the next niche where mostly geeks will converge until fully
matured with a headset in every household. Enjoy it while it lasts.

------
cunninghamd
I echo your rant.

Looked up effnet stats the other day to find out there's only 20k users there
these days. Not sure how many it was back in the day, and I was more of an
undernet guy... but seems small today.

Contact details are in my profile... we can reminisce via email (which is
effectively going the way of the Old Internet, especially as the millennials
take over).

------
mrhappyunhappy
Have similar feelings, am 32. I miss the old days of ultima online, vanilla
wow, shadowbane, can you tell I was a gamer :)

There is something very nostalgic to dialing up to your aol account and
opening up a chat with random people. Playing conquest for the first time...
wow. I don’t normally live in the past but had to fire up UO playlist this
morning.

------
myself248
> you know the slightly overweight guy with a telescope that won't shut up
> about how great Babylon 5 was. Where do these people hang out these days?

A lot of us are hanging out in person at the local hackerspace/makerspace,
physically building and sharing and teaching, because the online experience no
longer holds the magic it once did.

------
eb0la
I still remember the black terminal screen con the DEC Apha that we used un
the lab.

Alas, telneting to freenet finland where de could get a free email address...
... And discovering stuff inside ftp servers that mirrored shareware, and GNU
software you couldn't use at home because you ran windows 3.51

It felt like the wild wild west, ir the ultimate frontier.

------
DenisAyumu
I'm 31, and I found an even better Internet experience than the old phpBB
forums in the form of modern image boards.

I regularly visit Lainchan and a couple of boards at 8chan, and everything's
like the communities of the 90s. I actually met some people IRL and it was
great. You guys should try finding some of these small communities.

------
dkns
Rose colored glasses. You remember all the good stuff with none of the bad
stuff. Remember programming in that time? HTML, CSS, JS? Internet Explorer 6?

As to how to make friends in your 30s - pick up dancing. Salsa, bachata, salsa
cubana, kizomba all are build on idea of social dancing. You go to a party and
dance with random people. Try it.

------
stdgy
Hello fellow 30 year old!

I just climbed over that hump a little less than a month ago and have similar
feelings. My tech/internet journey started where lots of others probably
began, with games. I remember picking up the magazine Maximum PC and being
awed at the stories and reviews of different computers, video cards and games.
I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 at the time and was just beginning to
understand how computers functioned and could be built, piecemeal, so the
magazine felt like a major discovery.

And at about the same time I learned that a game called Diablo 2 was in
development by the company whose games I already adored, Blizzard. I learned
that there were websites that speculated on and followed the game's
development, so I started to visit those sites (namely diabloii.net) to
satisfy my curiosity. That ultimately led me to the forums and to creating my
first website, which I put together well before the game ever came out,
devoted to a guild I wanted to create.

And then I started to follow Warcraft 3, which led me to more forums and IRC.
IRC was the big one. It was like stepping into an entirely new universe. A
universe of people from around the world that could talk in groups and
communicate instantly about any topic. That was a real eye opener, which led
me to just about everything else in nerddom. I co-created websites, setup
servers, worked on a game mod, talked with programmers and artists, learned
about linux, dabbled with scripting... The floodgates were open!

There's no question that the internet played a major formative role in my life
and has had a huge impact on what I believe, who I've become and how I
understand the world. But when I look at today's internet I see a very
different place. Since 2016 I've been giving a lot of thought to how its
popularity has changed the way that it operates. The promises of
commercialization and politicization have brought many elements to bear that
simply didn't exist to the same extent when I was growing up. The ongoing war
for users and messaging seems to encourage cloistered spaces and inner-facing
pairings (ie: exclusive instead of inclusive).

Then again, maybe I'm just joining the ranks of old dudes yelling at kids to
get off their lawn and reminiscing about the good old days. I'd love to hear
from the people that are growing up online _today_. I'd like to know what
their experience has been like and if they've found their own fonts of wisdom
and information that I have never seen.

~~~
xxxmaster
So much nostalgia today bro. 30 years old here, similar story, check what else
is on hackernews today.
[https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution](https://github.com/galaxyhaxz/devilution)

------
marsrover
I definitely spend an unproductive amount of time on web.archive.org.

I am very nostalgic of the early 2000 internet (I'm also 30). I spent a
majority of my free time making anime websites. I met a lot of friends through
affiliating with their sites.

Not only that, but on all the various forums I participated in and later
(2004) through World of Warcraft.

I miss it all.

------
sizzle
Anyone go on pcpitstop? Used to love benchmarking my custom computer rig and
chatting it up on the forums.

------
nanomonkey
I'd check out scuttlebutt
[[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz)], a decentralized
social network based off of the secure scuttlebutt gossip protocol. It feels
like the internet and bbs days that I remember.

------
tobyhinloopen
Every generation has its own "I miss the old XXX". You're just getting old.

------
pram
Discord is pretty close to the “old internet” from my POV, OP. Chat rooms full
of random people are straight out of the AOL/IRC days. It has all the humor
and pointless drama you’d expect. I’ve been enjoying the rebirth of chatting!

------
hotwire
I'm in the same boat as you my friend. Mid thirties guy, hit adolescence right
as the net was blowing up mid 90s. I still remember the first mp3 I found on a
computer in the library at school and it blew my freakin mind how small it was
(I had experimented with ripping CDs before resulting in huge, huge wav
files...)

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are
right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the
technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries)
there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both
feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling
any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon
after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their
pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online
were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social
validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL
probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet",
just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological
difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for
new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or
FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at
one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is
pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less
charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did
33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I
was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for
games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on
facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple
technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days);
just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a
domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you
feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten
you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those
"create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got
off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

~~~
chiyc
You hit on something that I really relate to. It used to be that I could say,
"I'll see you online later." But that doesn't mean much now.

Instant messaging was engaging. It meant that I was sitting there, actively
logged onto AIM with my status set as available. Now, with present-day
alternatives on mobile, that level of presence seems like it's missing.

Others are always available but not. I could receive a reply on Messenger
immediately or in a few hours. It definitely goes the other way, too. I may
reply immediately or not. People are always available for conversation but
conversations seem harder to have.

------
xj9
i'm a few years younger, but i get the same feeling from modern social media
sites. i don't really like the "broadcast" mentality, but i get caught up in
to too.

fediverse[1] is a great escape from the modern internet. it has its problems,
but it feels a lot like my early experiences with the internet.

[1]: [https://fediverse.network/](https://fediverse.network/)

------
ulisesrmzroche
How to meet friends in your 30s: as long as people are kind, sincere, etc,
then it doesn't matter if we have anything in common.

------
sizzle
I used to be on Trillian which let you log into MSN and AIM I believe.

Anyone remember SmarterChild, the original chatbot?

~~~
HeadlessChild
Yes, I remember SmarterChild on MSN.

~~~
sizzle
Did it inspire your username?

------
ggm
I was lucky enough to work on some of this technology across the 1980s. I
don't claim to "own" any of the running systems because what I did was OBE and
peripheral at best, but none the less, I have never felt "I wasn't there".

Something I think isn't said enough, is that despite everyone understanding
what "convergeance" meant (it was actually the topic of one of my first
lectures at university in 1979) it's one thing to understand, and it's another
to actually experience it and get some deep sense.

For instance, I knew the flatter protocol design implications of TCP/IP meant
"same everywhere" which was a huge relief after living networks with a
distinction between LAN and WAN in protocol terms: But I didn't really think
"everywhere" meant built into the doors of fridges.

Mentally, I think a lot of us made unnecessary, arbitrary distinctions between
systems which felt like toys and were sold as such, and systems bought to "do
work" -in fact several universities deliberately went out and got amigas and
did both low level coding, GUI design, and just banged the bejesus out of them
as cheap terminals to Vax 11/780s.

TL;DR being there was more than just being alive at the time. You had to learn
to think in new ways too.

------
Sophistifunk
Nostalgia: It ain't what it used to be.

------
firloop
I think the internet just got a lot bigger.

------
dmurthy
Yes. And I miss asking people their ASL!

------
kken
Why did the USENET have to disappear?

~~~
rasengan
Usenet still exists!

~~~
xellisx
Yeah but free usenet servers with binaries are rare.

~~~
dingaling
Binaries were the ( second ) death of Usenet. It went from being a social
medium to the poster-child of copyright infringement.

I wish uuencode had never been invented.

------
rain1
me too buddy

------
MaxDavis024
haha. Its really sad and funny

------
feiss
yeah, I miss having 16 too

------
anoncoward111
The internet is a walled garden now, that desires a pound of flesh from
everyone for every little thing.

It is no longer an egalitarian happy place for the exchange of ideas

~~~
freehunter
This is a silly notion, and almost every "Show HN" submission proves that.
Anyone can stand up any website they want for free or for a very low cost and
say/do anything they want.

Facebook and Google are not the Internet, they're just websites same as any
other.

~~~
lumberjack
The problem is searching through all the blogspam to find that nugget of good
content.

~~~
freehunter
Curation and discovery have been a problem with the web since day one, which
is why Dogpile and Yahoo and AOL and Google became so popular.

------
shawn
Discord is the new old internet. There are thousands of servers to discover,
and to surf. Whether it’s anime or games or programming, there’s a niche
server that has interesting people to chat with.

If you’re missing the old internet, try hopping on some discord portals
(basically “meta servers” that you can find other servers through) and just
see where they take you.

------
icedchai
Sounds like you don’t even remember the old internet. The old internet was
Usenet, telnet, gopher, etc.

~~~
isostatic
If you didn't use UUCP you shouldn't be allowed to post

In fact if you're not Vint Cerf, you shoudn't be allowed to post

Get off my lawn

~~~
icedchai
I agree. I had a UUCP node in 1992.

~~~
whatsstolat
I had a pigeon

------
nl
I’m going to be harsh here.

I’m 43. I got on the internet in 94.

The internet now is much better in every way than it was at <insert point x>.

Most of the discussions and sharing you seem to miss is now in the very
platforms you have rejected. Twitter in particular is great for communities
like Babylon 5. You just need to choose who to follow.

The key thing is don’t be the guy who hates new things. New things are
_different_ but they really do work. Try them!

~~~
smsm42
Tried Twitter. It's terrible and awful. I mean, there are some wonderful
people there, but it boggles the mind why they choose to use platform that
limits them to short grunts and which they have to share with so much
awfulness.

Tried Reddit. It has some good content but omg so much noise. So. Much. Noise.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an
occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went
where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that.
Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic
communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh,
and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your
soul to it.

Tried HN. That one works ok so far, a lot of smart people here. Content is
mostly limited to specific domain, but that's OK.

Still, all those new things didn't make an impact on my life like the old
internet things did. Maybe it's me that is different now.

I won't say internet is worse now than it was then. But it's different. Some
for the better (working search! Wikipedia! free university courses!), some for
the worse.

P.S. I got on the internet when Windows was sold on floppy disks :) I actually
used gopher.

~~~
nl
I agree completely that there is a lot of awfulness on Twitter. And when it
came out it amazed me too that people would limit themselves to such a short
form.

And yet it works. And intellectually it makes some sense too: it is very rare
that a single thought actually takes more than 280 characters (and maybe a
picture) to express.

(Hey, I think FriendFeed was the greatest social network ever built. But there
are good reasons it lost to Twitter, and they make a surprising amount of
sense)

~~~
smsm42
> And yet it works.

I don't see what happens on Twitter as "it working". Tastes differ I guess.

> it is very rare that a single thought actually takes more than 280
> characters (and maybe a picture) to express.

I guess that depends on the thought. Twitter is full of the kind that take a
short grunt to express. But do I really want them? I've found I can do very
well without them.

~~~
nl
So in this conversation, the only paragraph which is longer than 280
characters is this:

 _Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an
occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went
where and ate what, whose kid /dog/cat done what, and other things like that.
Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic
communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh,
and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your
soul to it._

That can be pretty easily split into two thoughts anyway.

If it doesn't work for you that's cool.

~~~
smsm42
I usually try to keep paragraphs small because it's more easily readable and
helps me structure my thoughts without getting too longwinded. Joyce could
afford multi-page sentences, but I have no hope to keep the reader engaged for
so long.

But that doesn't mean it would be better split by some weird interface into
separate pieces, each paragraph floating around detached from the next. When I
see people trying to fit their good thoughts into that format and then
resorting to all kinds of third party tools in order to reassemble the
resulting mess back into coherent text - I can't help pitying them. Why would
they subject themselves and their thoughts to this kind of torture?

