
The old internet died and we watched and did nothing - eplanit
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/how-we-killed-the-old-internet
======
rasengan
The old internet died long before these centralized services appeared. The old
internet was when we ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites,
and we were truly free in the wild wild west.

Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.

The old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era today.
But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that now.

I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization work that is in
progress from the numerous people on HN and the internet.

~~~
Timberwolf
I thought similar. To me what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is
something I very much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which
dedicated protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial
upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life features and
about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced everything that
came before them because you could embed images, have an animated avatar and
(most importantly) not have to delve into the world of finding a client of
choice and connecting it to your ISP's news servers.

What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was
something _you_ paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated
service or your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the
provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector for
targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic mechanics of
discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of "engagement" or
"monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community size played a part
things seemed to bump along with a far greater degree of civility and
allowance for misunderstanding.

~~~
api
You're forgetting spam. Spam destroyed all those first generation federated
systems. IRC survived because it was too niche for spammers to target much but
spam is the primary thing that killed Usenet and email as a truly open system.

The closed systems were better able to fight spam because they could easily
ban people and IPs.

On a deeper level spam, "brattish" commercial sites, etc. all come from when
money got involved.

The old Internet was mostly noncommercial. Money changes everything.

Even on the new sites I saw a massive shift when e.g. it became possible to
monetize YouTube videos. All the sudden everything became about engagement and
controversy and got big and divisive and dumb and flashy.

Ultimately we must adapt or perish. There is no going back. I think all new
systems must be designed with the trial by fire of spam and other profit
motivated attacks in mind from the start.

~~~
takeda
IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.

Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I
blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft's EEE (Embrace, Extend,
Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a
gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam to
the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing. Eventually
they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a way that it got
hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.

They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk,
their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got
popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations)
Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present people
on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn't message
people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many users switch
to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.

They attempted to do the same thing with email, but were less successful
(since many big companies are also providing the service), this was done
through introducing various anti spam measures. You now have to jump through
various hoops (SPF, DKIM, RBAC) to have your service still reach Google uses.
It didn't matter that I used the same IP and domain for 15 years never had
spam sent from it, but suddenly my emails started being silently classified as
spam without any warning.

~~~
vageli
> IRC has mechanisms that make dealing with spam easy.

> Usenet on the other hand required cooperation from all providers. Actually I
> blame Google for killing Usenet. They used Microsoft's EEE (Embrace, Extend,
> Extinguish). They acquired DejaNews, renamed it to Google Groups, provided a
> gateway that allowed everyone to use Usenet. This introduced a lot of spam
> to the network, but whenever someone reported it, they did nothing.
> Eventually they introduced their internal groups, and shifted search in a
> way that it got hard to use Google Groups for searching Usenet posts.

> They did similar thing with XMPP (Jabber). When they introduced Google Talk,
> their service was interconnected with the other XMPP servers. Once it got
> popular they discontinued it and introduced Hangouts (then later iterations)
> Hangouts was still connected people could see each other being present
> people on Hangouts could message anyone, but people on other XMPP couldn't
> message people on Hangouts. It didn't even show an error. This made many
> users switch to Hangouts to continue taking with their friends.

The Jabber coopting by Google always felt like something straight out of the
old "Embrace, extend, extinguish" playbook of yore.

------
decasteve
More than a dozen comments on this article and none reference the actual
content of the article and miss the point of the article entirely. It's a
headline the evokes different ideas but it has nothing to do with the Internet
not being what it used to be. The sorry state of platforms is an issue, for
sure, but it's not what this article is about. Commenting on headlines is
another sorry state of Internet discussion.

The article is about a loss of content and a lack of preservation. It's about
doing nothing to preserve an era of digital heritage.

~~~
mumblemumble
I'm actually OK with that.

Mass preservation of literally everything isn't custodianship, it's
viparinama-dukkha. It's coming from the same place that resulted in my great-
grandmother's house being fit for an episode of _Hoarders_. She thought that
each of those items might be useful to someone some day, but actually it just
created that much bigger and nastier a haystack to sift through when the time
came to try and sort out a few family heirlooms and keepsakes.

And, once you take that instinct and apply it to massive, corporate-owned,
centralized sites where people casually socialize, it becomes even more
problematic. I agree, pre-sanitization Tumblr was a great place for young
people - especially queer youth - to work out their sexual identities. But
nobody wants to have that phase of their life preserved in perfect detail, for
all perpetuity, and nobody wants it sitting around in a big public archive
just waiting for someone else to figure out how to de-anonymize people's old
Internet accounts. It's OK, even preferable for some things to be forgotten.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't preserve a record of our digital heritage.
But it should be a curated preservation of a reasonable subset of the content
on these sites, not an enormous trash heap of everything that's ever happened
on the Internet being kept around for people to fripple through when they're
in a voyeuristic mood.

~~~
decasteve
Yours is the sort of comment I’d hope for. It’s an excellent point of
discussion.

I tend to agree with your perspective myself. But at the same time, much of
what we discovered about ancient civilization literally came from trash heaps.
Future generations after we’re gone might enjoy frippling through what we took
for granted.

------
esotericn
Is this a joke? I mean, it's buzzfeed, so it obviously is, but seriously?

That internet didn't die at all! You're looking at the same thing with
different company names! Myspace and Facebook are the same thing with a
different skin.

I figured this would be an article about like, vBulletin forums, IRC, tilde
pages, something like that.

They all still exist, you're just not using them, why don't you start?

~~~
samb1729
BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They've won many journalism awards as you can
see on their Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BuzzFeed_News)

I do agree that reusing the name must surely do their image significant harm.

~~~
mashby
This is often repeated, but...Can you name a large news source that has not
won a "journalism awards"?

~~~
samb1729
I'm not attempting to establish credibility for BuzzFeed News beyond the
statement of fact I made the my first comment. BuzzFeed itself doesn't win
journalism awards, regardless of how you useful a signal you consider those,
because their listicle stuff isn't journalism.

I have no interest in debating the nature of BuzzFeed News's journalism beyond
making this distinction clear.

------
MisterTea
As far as I'm concerned the internet is just a global IP network. I can still
ssh to my openbsd server and connect to my plan 9 system at home. I can rent a
server that is still a PC. I can rent a VPS that feels like a pc.

Until the day comes when I can no longer send whatever IP traffic where and
when I want, I'm still using the same old internet. The roads are still the
same. The scenery just changed with time. Everything else is just a roadside
attraction along the way. And like roads the attractions ebb and flow with
time.

~~~
xg15
That's all fine and good as long as you only build things for yourself (even
then you'll have more trouble routing niche protocols and defending against
hacking attempts) - but the scenery becomes extremely important once you
involve others.

------
mumblemumble
> Can you think of a picture of yourself on the internet from before 2010,
> other than your old Facebook photos?

Nah, because I never felt compelled to put pictures of myself on the Internet
before then. I still don't.

What I miss is the personal website, where people shared information and
opinions about things they loved. That Web has been crowded out by, well,
people posting pictures of themselves.

It's like that point in the party where the stimulating conversation ends
because the host decided it's time to break out the slide projector.

~~~
prox
I think the advance of mobile phones and the cool factor that surrounded it
for a long time, and “Hey look at this picture of my coffee I am drinking
right now” kind of drowned the blogosphere. It was the time Facebook could
count on being cool. Which evaporated after 2010/2012.

I think my personal take is that the idea of “your content is your own” got
lost in the process of sharing-everything culture.

Luckily it isn’t dead, this site and the people writing informative blogs is
still available.

~~~
mumblemumble
Even blogs feel a little bit stilted to me. They encourage a certain way of
organizing things that is useful for RSS syndication, but at the cost of
placing some fairly tight editorial limits on the person running the site.

What I really miss is what came before the blogosphere really took off:
Geocities-style loosely organized collections of static pages.

~~~
zozbot234
What's RSS syndication?

~~~
prox
It’s a xml format spec. It holds the latest posts in a convenient way which a
rss reader can sub to. It kind of went away unfortunately, it was pretty
handy.

------
gravitas
The Buzzfeed article seems to focus around a particular user usage pattern, in
that these were sites I personally did not use that horribly much. My "old
internet" was Digg, Slashdot, GeoCities, HowardForums, ISP `~username` pages,
Usenet, IRC and a multitude of others I've long forgotten. The Consumerist has
a better version that speaks to me: [https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-
did-everyone-from-t...](https://consumerist.com/2015/03/20/where-did-everyone-
from-the-90s-go-when-we-all-got-facebook-and-quit-web-1-0/)

In any case, we all agree Eternal September was the beginning of the end. :)
[http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html](http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/AOL-.html)

~~~
ewzimm
September 1993 Internet use shows the silliness of the idea of the death of
the old Internet. In 1993, "...the World Wide Web, has seen the number of
daily queries explode from almost 100,000 requests in June to almost 400,000
in October"

[https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-
technol...](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/business/business-technology-
jams-already-on-data-highway.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all)

There are now over 4.5 billion Internet users. If even 0.002% of them make
just one daily query on the web of the "old Internet," then it's still larger
than the web before the Eternal September. Protocols like IRC and Gopher are
more active today than late 1993.

It's true that data moving through centralized services is larger today, but
that doesn't invalidate the continued life of the "old Internet" any more than
the relative domination of analog communications over copper wires in 1993
meant the Internet was dead back then.

~~~
gravitas
It was a tongue in cheek sarcastic comment, my friend. Whole new paragraph,
smiley face at the end, fun link to the "me, too!" history, you know -
lighthearted and jovial.

~~~
ewzimm
Intent understood! It's a classic turning point in Internet history, and I
think the massive rise in traffic to 400,000 queries per day is the perfect
example of how much bigger things are today and how all those old paradigms
are even more alive now than they were then.

------
badrabbit
Oh please...nostalgia is self deception. I knew this but the movie "Midnight
in Paris" had a big impact on my perspective. The main character travels to
the 1920s and meets famous writers and figures like picasso. And there were
people and a general view that their time was past the "good ol days", we now
call their time "the golden 20s" but they thought about how the late 1800s
were much better.

Anyway, back on topic: The internet is the global BGPv4 and BGPv6 network,as
seen in the global routing table. It's a network and how that network
functions has not changed much.

The web on the other hand has changed a lot both in terms of functionality and
content. But here's a different perspective: the "old web" was very slow.
There were so many limitations, i mean are we talking pre-adobe-flash? If
so,you had little rich and dynamic content. You couldn't stream movies,things
like napster were viewed as criminal , as much as i dislike it youtube on it's
ow has given much such rich and valuable content. Social media sucks but man,
we're living in the golden age of memes!. Look at all the great things that
happen because people can record videos and share them live/instantly! And
security! We have come sooo far!!! From how amazing twitter has been to help
infosec pros communicate to all the crypto improvements. I don't think i can
go back in time and be able to share or access the same sites and content i
did in the past,knowing how everything was so full of holes and made with
little to no security consideration. I think I can easily make the argument
that the old web was a dumpster fire. But in reality, I think it was ok for
it's time and what we have today works for our time as well.

Let's be real here, anyone can host a discord server and many do that. There
are so many free web hosting services now that let anyone host their own site
without needing to learn html or webadmin. So many blogging platforms like
medium and wordpress. So many privacy friendly products and services.

The past always looks different in hindsight and you don't know what you have
until it's gone.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-
free_zone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default-free_zone)

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

------
rdiddly
That's why your local storage is the single source of truth, and anything you
put "on the internet" is just a copy of something from there. I mean that's
how you did things riiiight?

No biggie if not. As someone said elsewhere in the thread, most of that stuff
is clutter and probably best forgotten anyway. But if it's something you want
to keep, and the only place it exists is someone else's
site/computer/database, then yeah, it's not a bad idea to start thinking of it
as being gone soon, or even gone already. (Unless you WANT it to go away; in
that case you should apply Murphy's Law and think of it as uncontrollably
hanging around forever.)

Growing up with computers and the internet and not knowing how they truly work
is maybe the central problem here. Did you "post a picture on Instagram" or
did you create an image file, upload it via an app or browser, pass it across
the network, to a server somewhere, where it's getting stored in a database,
to be retrieved and displayed later? Seems like if you understand how it
really works, you automatically start thinking about better practices. I
dunno.

------
agentultra
Parts of it were good but there was a tonne of bad stuff too. Entire sites
devoted to content that is beyond indecent that were completely open. Networks
of sites devoted to exploiting young people. Nothing has entirely changed in
that realm except that such sites are more rare. There was a whole cottage
industry of software dedicated to making using the Internet for younger
audiences possible. Without it the Internet was a funnel for the most base
garbage humanity could produce.

I'm all down for decentralization but I think part of the protocol should be
dedicated to enabling us to filter the content we receive.

------
maxymajzr
I remember the sound my 28800 modem made before connecting.

I knew I have exactly 1 second below 60 minutes to be online before I get
disconnected from my student dial-up.

I had ICQ. We used Altavista (and Astalavista to crack the software we
illegally got). Relevant information and socializing was done via newsgroups,
as well as content-sharing. Many don't know why winzip/winrar has the option
to split an archive into multiple files (so they can fit 1.44" floppy disk and
avoid upload limits). Later on I used Miranda so I can use ICQ/IRC/AIM/MSN
from the same client. Browser wars were nonexistent. First "awesome" browser
shell I used was Maxthon and content was shared on lan parties or you used
obscure xdcc search engines to leech off of IRC. FPS games that I played
(quake 1, 2 and 3) lagged, I had 200 ping - which is how I learned about the
importance of latency and what it is. It dropped to 50 once I got ISDN.

Now, why did I type this? Not to present myself as "the old internet user". I
don't consider myself a user of internet from "before", I'm well aware of even
older generation whose internet looked even different. I'm just saddened by
the fact that buzzfeed, one of the worst ad-ridden sites that exists, is
making this kind of an article, spreading false knowledge (which is what it
does anyway). It's not even an article. It's made by someone who used Facebook
when it looked slightly shittier than it does now.

That's not "old" internet. The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches
such as buzzfeed/youtube has no experience nor right to write about "old"
internet. They simply haven't experienced how internet used to be when total
population online was well below 50 million people and when broadband was a
luxury.

~~~
ravenstine
> The consumer-generation that's lifeblood of leeches such as buzzfeed/youtube
> has no experience nor right to write about "old" internet

While I share your sentiment towards Buzzfeed and clueless millennials, I
don't think it's entirely fair to say they have no right to write about the
"old" internet.

I began to experience the web around 1997, and it was different in a lot of
ways compared to now. More personal pages, less centralization, little content
policing, Netscape, Real Player, etc.

I'm sure some old fart from the 80's would tell me that I didn't know the
"old" internet because I'd never used Telnet to log in to a BBS. While there's
truth to that, it doesn't mean I don't have my own perspective of what's
"old".

~~~
maxymajzr
When I used "they have no right" \- what I meant was this: they haven't
experienced anything fundamentally different 10 years ago, therefore they
can't be writing about something that "died" simply due to the fact there was
nothing different to experience back then that doesn't exist today. The
article seems forced, as any article from fake-factory would be. I'm always
skeptical towards such content, that attributes to my negativity when typing
all this. I merely find it ironic that someone who has no clue about the
matter is writing about it :)

------
malvosenior
> _The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the
> 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy scandals
> like Cambridge Analytica._

When I think of the internet of the 2010s I think of clickbait farms like
Buzzfeed politicizing _absolutely everything_. This statement by them is 100%
in line with the type of content "journalists" have produced and polluted the
internet with the past 10 years.

~~~
zozbot234
That's the thing about extremism, it comes in lots of flavors. And clickbait
farms are incented to whip it up.

------
knorker
I'm sick of hearing about the death of blogs.

I read more blogs now than ever. More than in the 90s. What are you even
talking about? As a percentage of online content? Who cares? there are more
blogs to read on any topic than you can read in a lifetime.

> A look through its “Deathwatch” page — a list of websites and services shut
> down over the last 10 years — is harrowing.

It's really not.

------
augusto-moura
There's a project focused on backuping this kind of information[1]. It's
actually a distributed and communitary way of doing it, anyone can run a
"warrior" instance and help the project. Modern problems require modern
solutions

Edit: In the project wiki there's a lot of interesting links, like this one
listing all tracked projects that are dying[2]

[1]: [https://www.archiveteam.org/](https://www.archiveteam.org/)

[2]:
[https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch)

~~~
btrettel
Unfortunately newer systems seem more resistant to archival than older.
Compare getting a copy of a mailing list vs. getting a copy of a forum like
phpBB or (even more modern) archiving a copy of a subreddit or Facebook group.
Some people on a mailing list may already have a full copy simply from their
participation in the list, and if the list has archives then presumably they
are in a format which has stood the test of time. The other cases contrast
with this. You can run wget on online forums, though the result is not as
clean as the mailing list. Someone (maybe me) should write a bot to parse the
pages into something more useful. I've also seen a script to scrape
subreddits, though in my experience scraping subreddits is rarer than
spidering forums. No idea what you can do with Facebook groups.

While I am irritated by how much of the internet has been replaced by
JavaScript, one advantage has been the exposure of APIs that can be reverse
engineered, as seems to have been done in the recent Yahoo Groups case. So
there might be some hope here.

------
Zmetta
Is indefinite retention and archival of all the shit put online really good
for anyone other than AI feeding? When encryption eventually breaks and all
our old private emails, AIMs, and other junk can be searched as easily as
Shodan are we really going to be glad we have an extensive digital history?

I don't think it's as simple as more data = better.

------
beatpanda
People love to trash talk WordPress, but by being consistently correct and
committed to its principles, it got this single line in this article:

"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."

It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the
open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.

Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via
building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies
like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing
more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.

~~~
frank2
Automattic has raised US$617.3 million in six funding rounds, the latest one
being 3 months ago. (Source: Wikipedia.)

~~~
beatpanda
Automattic was founded 15 years ago, and despite being a profitable and
growing company for most of that time, has only raised $617.3 million, mostly
to fund specific expansion projects. At no time have they sought 10x returns
or some kind of spectacular exit for the benefits of its shareholders. It’s
not even close to the disaster that is most of VC world.

~~~
frank2
617 million is a lot for the general sector. Quora has raised 226 million; the
company behind Stack Exchange, 68M.

------
AlphaWeaver
> Companies don’t make internet culture; people do. People make communities;
> they make the inside jokes; they make their own mores and unwritten rules.
> But people need the web services and platforms made by companies to create
> this culture. We’re locked in a symbiotic relationship: We, the users, need
> the companies, and they need us to keep running. When they shut down or
> delete our precious stuff, it’s because we’ve abandoned and neglected them
> for years already, leaving them to starve.

This line resonated most with me. Truly though, it's sometimes not our first
instinct as developers to design for the future- the current culture of "build
an MVP as soon as possible" doesn't always incentivize forward thinking.

If you're interested in thinking about how we can better design software
solutions to support online communities further into the future, you might be
a good fit for a discussion group I'm starting soon, called VC3. We're trying
to bring together people who are as interested as we are in solving the
problem of building meaningful virtual community. Building communities that
stand the test of time are part of that.

If you have any questions, shoot me a message (profile) or check out our
website at [https://vc3.club](https://vc3.club).

------
mattlondon
It is interesting that people say "the internet never forgets", yet this
article clearly shows it does.

Do we want the internet to forget, or not to forget? Is forgetting so bad? Not
everything needs to be collected and catalogued and preserved forevermore.

There is a lot of crap out there - I'd be happy for some personal stuff I
posted many years ago as a much younger and naïve person to just slowly rot
away.

~~~
krapp
"The internet" never forgets porn. It never forgets your dox. It will never
forget anything it can use against you for the lulz.

Everything else is a house of cards, though. It's just software on a server,
after all, and if no one cares to back it up, no one will.

------
carapace
First, it didn't _die_ , it attenuated. It's still there. Even Gopher is still
there.

Second, when one says, "we did nothing", well, speak for yourself, eh? Lots of
people did a lot of things and are still doing them.

But the normals do not care. It's that simple: apathy and complacency (the
twins demons of our New Age) and a good stiff whollop of ignorance.

(Over a _billion_ people don't know that Facebook _isn 't_ the Internet! Chew
on that.)

Meanwhile, you know who _didn 't_ lose all their content? _This guy._ Because
backups. (Another thing normals try not to think about.)

I've been saying _for years now_ that the world is bifurcating into Eloi and
Morlocks.

This is "victim" blaming, yeah, but in this case IMO the "victims" are to
blame: no one's forcing people to be Eloi. If you care about your digital
shit, back it the frak up already.

(E.g. Tarsnap, Amazon Glacier, a box of DVDs!?)

~~~
krapp
>Over a billion people don't know that Facebook isn't the Internet! Chew on
that

While that's a common axiom bandied about on HN, as is your general tone of
condescension towards "the normals" (Eloi and Morlocks, seriously? You know
the Eloi were the villains, right?) I'm certain that practically no one who
uses Facebook is actually unaware that the rest of the web exists.

~~~
carapace
I was about to go on a bit of a rant about my general tone of condescension
but I caught myself. I'll tell a joke instead.

"You know how stupid the average person is, yeah? Well, by definition, _half_
of them are dumber than that."

> I'm certain that practically no one who uses Facebook is actually unaware
> that the rest of the web exists.

I wish there was a way to make a bet on that because I'd like to take your
money.

> You know the Eloi were the villains, right?

Are you sure? The Eloi were the innocent beautiful idiot surface dwellers, the
Morlocks were the grotesque cannibal machine-tenders, eh? My metaphor is that
tech-elites (myself somewhat included) are the Morlocks and the users are
Eloi.

------
whywhywhywhy
Shocked how many of the creators I'm interested in who previously would have
had a website presence now only have Instagram pages.

Mostly find it shocking because Instagram is so anti-internet you can't even
post links to promote/sell your work...

------
KaiserPro
The old internet is still around, if you know where to look.

You just need to look past the light pollution of google, facebook and
twitter.

------
duckqlz
Wow a super one sided article. Pretty sure that with the advent of cheap VMs
for hosting or even seeding has increased the total number of personal servers
but I could be wrong. Bottom line though is that the internet opened up to a
much larger user base and this shaped the majority of interactions we see. I
don’t think there is anyone who could reasonably claim the Internet was
hindered by the rise of large tech companies. Hosting your own server or using
sites who’s interfaces didn’t translate well with other cultures was a barrier
to entry for a huge portion of the world. Having everything look similar and
hosting content easily and seamlessly made it so even non-English speakers
could access the same content. There have been some big hiccups caused by
things like conflicting ideals and automation which helped create the ongoing
battles we have now where likes are monetized and content is pushed
aggressively to vulnerable sections of the population but with those new
problems also came new rewards. We are living in an age where a huge majority
of the world is connected in ways we never could have dreamed of in 2010.
Right now I see the world as being on the precipice of cooperation where we
are all shouting at each other but if we step back we might just realize that
while everyone is fighting we are all still coming to the table, posting our
content and inching closer and closer to a fully connected society.

------
zackmorris
I'm more worried about technological and legal chokeholds on free expression
like GDPR, whose main effect was to nag users with a popup about cookies on
every major website.

To me, it feels like the original possibility of inventing something, posting
it online and earning a passive income is all but dead today. Too many hurdles
now must be overcome. You pretty much have to learn a programming language,
containerization, the various layers of HTML/Javascript/CSS deployment, amoral
stuff like SEO and bribing influencers, to even have a chance at making more
than $10 per month.

When I think of every major innovation in web dev since 2000, almost all of it
has gone the opposite direction from how I would have done it. Instead of
autoscaling distributed servers, programming languages and databases, we ended
up with "bare hands" tools like Kubernetes, async-await and sharding on
proprietary monopolies like AWS locked into physical regions. My description
of what's wrong is fuzzy at best, but I feel it deep down, that this trend
away from computer science to application has all but halted progress.

I could write at length (seriously dozens/hundreds of pages) about better ways
of doing all of this. I already have to some degree. But nobody cares, and
nobody listens to me since I never built anything that made any appreciable
money. So what's the point? There isn't one. That's the internet today. Late-
stage capitalism, pretty people, and divisive political discourse. Dystopia.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
You know? In another galaxy, a long time ago there was some young guy who did
freelance sysadmin and education for private people and small businesses,
while assembling personal computers maindays in some omputer store. Let's call
that time 1995, where one early evening young Largo was asked by the very
established owner of some electronic parts import-export business with whom he
was on good terms if he liked what he does, and if he wanted to do it any
longer?

Whereupon young Largo LOL'd almost hysterically and said: 'What? _NO! " This
is so fucked up it isn't funny anymore!'

He was very surprised and asked why, young Largo couldn't say exactly why and
needed some minutes to collect his thougts and then began:

'This may come as a surprise to you, with me being an atheist, but what we
have now reminds me of the story in the old testament of the bible about the
building of the Tower of Babylon.'

That indeed raised some eyebrows!

Young Largo rambled on about the siloing of data in different non-
interoperable applications for reasons of customer tie in, which is against
the interests of said customer. About the bloat in software which requires
ever more potent hardware in regular intervals with every new software
version, while the old ones would be perfectly servicable if they only could
read the data from the newer versions, which of course is a No-Go because it
is against the interest of the software producers.

He rambled on about lack of stability and unintuiveness of UX while compairing
that with kitchen- and general household appliances, which would be considered
useless and broken if they required the effort PC's did then.

He fantasized on about something which combined the ease of use of Hypercard
and Visual Basic in some hypothetic platform with the versatility and
networkability of some Unix, extendable with modules available in countless
variations like in DOS/WIN in a way every other 'module' would benefit from,
because of extended capabilities and 'teaching' them new data formats,
creating a bespoke environment exactly fitting your needs, while being able to
run on ridiculously cheap and small hardware, nonetheless capable of reading
everything you could reasonably throw at them.

Young Largo rambled on about the impossibility of this happening in our
current society and economy with patents, intellectual property, and so on,
that this was easy to see and extrapolate into not getting any better EVER!

Because even then bloat was a thing.

What young Largo didn't really knew at the time were Plan9, OS-9, QNX and TRON
but he had dabbled in 386/FreeBSD, early Linuxes, knew some FORTHs and some
Assemblers and paid a shitload of money for his ISDN to get onto the internet
with his hot rod Pentium.

Young Largo concluded then that this all was nothing else but the biggest
bullshit job creation program since the building of the egyptian pyramids, and
at the end of the day almost as useless as them for society, with a few
exceptions of research and simulation, CAD/CAM and such, but not applicable to
the general public.

When asked 'But what for!?' he answered: 'How should i know? TO THE STARS!'

There could be a prequel to this, where an even younger Largo said in school
that he wanted every computer being able to speak with each other, one big
universal library, when being asked in class what the biggest thing he wished
for would be.'

That was pre- or proto-internet

Anyways, in a purely technical way all of this is possible, and even has been
realized in parts, or as complete proof of concept, _except the ability of
handling proprietary data formats by already entrenched market players behind
their moats.*

So one part of the army of bullshit jobbers is pecking like vultures at the
long rotten carcasses which were thrown out of some research labs eons ago for
antimonopolistic reasons, producing nothing but bloated zombies in different
paint schemes. Another part specializes in exploiting the bullshit jobbers
with proprietary software and services which don't really run according to
their needs, but clogging their toilets, while the part who feels like it is
the airforce tries to simulate being intelligent while unable to reliably
reproduce or even explain their cheap stunts, the part being the navy looming
beneath the waves and snorting..err snorkeling every and any shit, while the
real spaceforce which does solid engineering could have been up in the sky in
O'-Neil cylinders since decades, if the rest of the retarded shitheads
wouldn't have dragged them down so much.

Instead of the universal library with nice haptics i got craptastic
movieplayers in different sizes, which i use like giant microfiche readers. So
be it!

 _Aye häff SPOQQN!_

~~~
zackmorris
I hear ya, that's about the time I was coming up too. While your colorful
vernacular isn't exactly how I might have put it, I think that it illustrates
the frustration felt by many, ever since the beginning of personal computing.

I also wish that HyperCard had been a bigger influence on the early web. It
was written in human terms for techno-novices trying to get real work done. As
HyperTalk evolved into AppleScript, it lost its original elegance and is now
just another cryptic toy language that is difficult or impossible to write
without a manual.

IMHO to fix all of this, we need to bring back ideas like research budgets of
perhaps 5-25% and every company over say 50 employees or $5 million/yr gross
having some form of 20% time for in-house projects. That can't happen as long
as everyone is competing with each other just to survive though. And not when
the leading internet companies plow most profits into share price and
dividends instead of free and open source community tools.

I wish we had more stories of individuals and groups that made enough money to
retire, but instead of just reinvesting into the status quo, went on to fund
real innovation through philanthropy or alternative business structures like
co ops.

------
bdcravens
Funny how they use services like MySpace and Flickr as the “old Internet”. For
me, the old Internet was Geocities and IRC, where sharing content required a
maker mentality, not a service.

------
batt4good
It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt
compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users
today. We are a niche. The vast majority are people looking to watch youtube,
TikTok or some other social networking garbage. It's sad but this is the
reality. People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine
think the old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".

:(

~~~
krapp
>It's sad to say, but "we" as people who enjoyed the old internet or felt
compelled to build and contribute to it are a tiny minority of internet users
today. We are a niche

That's not sad, actually, it's great. Being upset about that is like being
upset that too many people use telephones who've never operated a switchboard
or know morse code.

The internet (or at least the web) was never meant to be a niche redoubt only
for nerds and programmers, it's supposed to be for everyone. The old hacker
ethos was about liberating _humanity_ from censorship and centralized control
of access to information and communication, but now that that vision is
actually coming to pass (kind of) people are complaining about how the normies
ruined.

Fie. Fie, I say.

Also, almost everyone from the 'old internet' is watching Youtube and using
social media as well. Your implication that everyone using social media is
only doing so for entertainment or a dopamine rush is inaccurate. There are
more hardcore, old school nerds on the modern web than there ever were on the
old web.

>People who are just looking for entertainment or social dopamine think the
old internet is "boring" or "looks dumb".

Nobody says that. Your can stuff your sorries into a sack, sir or madam.

------
meisterveda
Technology and how we share information always moves forward, this is just a
new iteration, I expect that soon we will see decentralized internet services
based on what we have learned from cryptocurrency, most services being hosted
on others pc with high encryptions and high availability. Imagine a data
center that is just the entire world.

------
marcus_holmes
Interesting that they don't mention the business model that powered the old
internet: VC money based on a vague promise that a large enough user base,
coupled with ad revenue, would bring untold riches.

As TFA says, most of those sites switched to paid accounts as the promise of
"build a huge audience and work out how to monetise them later" didn't
actually deliver any money.

So it's not that they died (they're mostly still there). It's just that
they're not free any more.

I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying
for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the only
way this will work now. The rise of information products and services focused
around actually providing what their customers want, for a reasonable fee.

~~~
zozbot234
> I think the next decade will see this more and more: people actually paying
> for the things they use on the internet, because they realise that's the
> only way this will work now.

I think that "pay what you want"/crowdfunding models can fund a lot of the
stuff that used to be provided "free" back in the day. The thing about paying
for stuff on the internet is that many people find it quite inconvenient. It's
not about the actual monetary expense, that's a minor factor (although it _is_
a barrier to causal browsing, in and of itself). It's everything else you have
to deal with as part of paying for something.

~~~
marcus_holmes
I'm curious, what's the "everything else"?

------
riffic
All I ever see from media and journalists is bitching and moaning about
centralized services shutting down, yet none of them have taken the effort to
implement their own decentralized systems. The protocols exist today. Smart
media would do wise by adopting them.

------
logfromblammo
Right. Buzzfeed. Trying to slide itself into the group that just watched it
die, eliding over all those times it injected Old Internet's regular IV drip
with 100 mL of a 25 M solution of listicles and clickbait.

------
Zenst
One aspect about old archived stuff:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten)

------
peterwwillis
The saddest thing about this is how desperately people cling to records of the
past, as if they matter.

If you actually missed something from back then, you would remember it, and
it's not really gone. If you don't remember it, it wasn't important. But here
people are, trying to convince you you've lost something that you don't even
know what it is.

The first time you lose all your files, it feels like disaster. The second
time, you realize it's just digital materialism, and you get along just fine
without it.

~~~
btrettel
> If you don't remember it, it wasn't important.

I've found time and time again that something I thought wasn't important
before can end up being very important later. That's only what I can remember,
too.

Plus, there's a selection bias in what you remember. If you don't remember it,
how would you know that it's important or not later?

If the cost is small then I think "digital materialism" is probably mostly
okay. I've come to the conclusion that it's hard for me to predict the
importance of things later, so if something appears to be ephemeral and has
even a modest chance of being important later, I'll archive it and organize it
so I can find it later if I want to.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I always considered the "Old Internet" to be before 1994.

Get off my lawn!

------
starpilot
Meta: Does nostalgia always pick up during the holidays? Is this the time when
we reflect, on computing as well? We were reminiscing over the _Windows 95_
GUI, of all things, a week ago. What's next, "in defense of COBOL" or "the
elegance of PC DOS 3.0"? If you look hard enough and you have some personal
connection, any antiquated architecture seems worth reminiscing, but thank god
all of it went away.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Sounds like a worthy title for some Cyberspatial Archeosociologists.

------
yoz-y
Is it worth preserving all social media content from MySpace, Facebook et al
though? I see the argument for blogs because people usually put more thought
into the articles and they are more likely to be timeless. However, an endless
stream of breakfast photos or drunken lashing out may well be better off
deleted. Imo, the danger lies when the "serious" conversation/publishing moves
to ephemeral platforms.

------
markus_zhang
But nowadays we have so many personalized stuffs distributed across the
Internet. For example you can just build a static page and put up on Github
for free, and there are so many startups that provide all kinds of blogging
(some of them are very serious and educational, just one level below books).

I'd say that if the old Internet died then let's look forward to the future
and build something new.

------
indigodaddy
Kind of ironic when these type of articles inevitably show up on these heavy,
slow, ad-ridden websites such as this one..

------
balozi
Predictions: Reddit will make the next list.

------
EGreg
We can do something

[https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-
way-c...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-can-find-
a-new-one)

We have already been there with AOL, MSN, CompuServ. We learned that instead
of government regulation we just need a really robust open-source
permissionless ecosystem of software to run on servers and clients, like the
Web, to disrupt them.

I saw this coming in 2011 and built a company to be part of the solution. If
you want to learn more about the solution, ignore the token part (that’s to
make it more like Xanadu) and read this to diagnose the problems and the
solutions:

[https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-
Operating-...](https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-
System)

Contact me if you want to join the effort btw. Especially if you’re proficient
in Javascript and/or PHP and like to work from home.

------
kickscondor
Oh hey - this is my dept. [https://kickscondor.com](https://kickscondor.com)

I cover what's happening in modern personal blogs and independent web
weirdness. Rest assured, you can now put Buzzfeednooze safely behind you...

~~~
louisv
I've been following your blog for quite a while now, and I enjoy it a lot. Are
there any other link-blogs that you recommend? (besides the usual ones like
kottke, etc..)

~~~
kickscondor
Oh thank you and yes, link blogs - the biggest one for me right now is at
imperica.com. The weekly 'web curios' roundup. I link this one a lot, so
apologies if you've seen it already. (And I'm sure you mean Waxy in the
'usual' ones, right?)

I've also linked to these quite a lot, but hey:

* [https://philosopher.life/](https://philosopher.life/) (see his 'link log' pages)

* [https://www.gyford.com/](https://www.gyford.com/)

* [http://tilde.club/~jonbell/](http://tilde.club/~jonbell/)

* [https://thingstoclick.com](https://thingstoclick.com)

* [http://fimoculous.com/recs/](http://fimoculous.com/recs/)

The Internet is lacking good linkblogs - people don't run them nearly as much.

------
kirykl
The internet is what you make it. Until the incumbents legislate an
impenetrable switching cost for themselves, if don’t like the way the internet
serves people, you have the power to give them another option.

------
DanielBMarkham
I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Falling completely off my year-
long diet, I decided I wanted a pizza at all costs. So I went to a pizza
store. As it turns out, this was a store I had managed 30 years ago, and I
haven't been inside one of these stores since, so it made for a nice moment of
comparison. People are the same, the business is the same. What have computers
brought?

It used to be, when you talked about computers, you talked about data,
although at the time we confused behavior and data. Here's my computer. It has
my pictures. I write programs on it. There is a thing. I posses this thing. It
holds other things I posses that I can do neat stuff with.

But a weird thing happened. The arcade had sex with the IBM PC. That is,
computers stopped being about "things I own that I can do things with" and
became almost exclusively about the experience, the game. Having a good time.

If you'd asked me in 89 what the store would evolve into in 30 years, I'd
probably say something about robots. Paper free, human free. Maybe humans out
front to talk to people with robots working behind the scenes.

Instead, the computers controlled the workers. They took orders, they printed
tickets to be stuck on boxes, they provided instructions, they tracked how
much time the worker took for various things, they provided a cool interface
for people to both order and see how their order was being processed. Who
owned what that did what? Nobody cared.

If you have an enjoyable, perhaps addictive experience doing X, and it's free,
who cares about ownership or data? We never thought behavior/experience and
ownership would be separate, so we reason poorly about it.

On the old net, I would visit sites lovingly-crafted by their owners, with
everything their owners enjoyed. We shared the experience of their creation,
both creator and consumer. If there was a problem, I'd email. Your site
doesn't work. You own it. Fix it.

The new net is full of companies providing unique and fun experiences that
people like, collecting data on their fellow humans like their lab rats with
the exit strategy of being bought out by even larger companies with even more
data. We create things we do not own. Instead we're like prostitutes in a red
light district that are forced to dance in glass windows. We are displayed.
Our existence and the things we create is owned by others. They choose to show
the parts of us as they will. Your data isn't important. My experience online
using some app is important. Everything else is subservient to that.

The old web is gone because it either died or was eaten by companies who
understand the new selection criteria. Anonymity is gone. Privacy is gone.
Ownership is gone. We are left with just a collective experience which we will
optimize for at all costs.

------
whatitdobooboo
I've heard that less new websites and blogs are actually bad for large
services like google in terms of their search product

------
stevefan1999
The old dies anyway; what we need to do is to learn from their mistakes and
prolong your life any means possible

------
ukyrgf
> If you remembered how to log in, you could download your old chat logs.

AIM never stored chat logs, did they?

------
PaulHoule
It is ironic that when I loaded that page on my mobile device i could see
those scare ads for old people and then more ads covered up the content.

Makes me think the back button is still the best thing since sliced bread and
I wonder when Google is going to take it out of chrome.

------
maerF0x0
Time for buzzfeed to experience ego-death and realize they're not immortal and
nothing they do will be either.

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

------
nathias
i'm still using irc

~~~
superkuh
Yep. There's a million of us still active on IRC daily. Federated protocols >
centralized services.

Also, the old internet where everyone hosted, or at least coded, their own
website still exists. In fact almost all the old internet is still around.
It's just that most people are stuck in their walled gardens and can't see it.

------
dana321
Where is Hotmail, Geocities, Xoom, Webring, Metacrawler etc? lol

------
jasoneckert
I think it's more accurate to say "The old Internet evolved while we watched.
Because after all, that's what technology does and we like to see where it's
going."

------
hanniabu
> and did nothing

False, it's just that plebeians like ourselves have no power against
politicians anymore or the corporate world.

~~~
yesenadam
>plebeians like ourselves have no power against politicians anymore or the
corporate world.

That's just what they want you to believe. You won't fight because you believe
no fight is possible. The good news is, that's not true.

(Gee, feel like I'm writing the _V for Vendetta_ script or something!)

------
throw7
Unfortunately the old internet died because "instant gratification" wins the
masses. Zuckerberg clearly understood "dumb fucks" and went "full retard".

------
scottmcdot
This is a bit rich coming from buzzfeed.

------
friedman23
News outlets like buzzfeed contributed to that. The old internet was an
uncensored free for all and I really doubt that is what they are advocating
for here.

~~~
Pigo
Of course not, because extremism is on the rise according to this article...

If they got one whiff of what the wild west days were like, they'd be writing
their Congressmen. They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites
they disagree with.

~~~
cirno
> They couldn't shame corporations into taking down sites they disagree with.

Just host your site behind Cloudflare and optimize it for Google SEO. With the
admitted and notable exception of two websites, they'll host absolutely
anything and give it top rankings.

------
tempsy
This is a terrible article and tries to make something out of nothing.

we’re supposed to shed a tear because AOL died? Is that really a version of
the internet that we wanted anyway?

------
madengr
Unlike that article, the old internet didn’t have inline video ads, mandatory
cookies, and social media bars at the bottom. Not to mention dynamic pages
that can load 100 ads if you scroll long enough.

I swear my reading comprehension has been poisoned by the new internet.

~~~
throwno
I guess everyone forgot the days before pop-up blocking was built into every
browser? Sure, Javascript modals are disgusting, but by definition they have
to be one at a time, not a giant stack of ads every time you browse a site.
Also, lets not forget the joy of being nagged to install Flash and Real Player
on every website.

~~~
jakemal
Along with the fact that we have the option to block all of those distractions
now. With my blocking extensions, that article was a single photo and all text
on a plain white background. It was a very enjoyable reading experience.

~~~
zozbot234
Back in the day, blocking all the distractions (well, almost all of them,
<blink> and <marquee> tags were a thing) was the _default_. You had to click a
button in order to load all images inline, _after_ the text had finished
loading.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
And hitting ESC stopped animated GIFs.

------
34679
Buzzfeed did not watch and do nothing, they actively participated in creating
its replacement. The author of this article is so tone deaf that he rails
against social media giants dominating the netscape in an article with "Tweet"
and Facebook "Share" buttons at the top.

~~~
orthecreedence
I can dislike the state things are in and still use the tools available to
spread a message or advance a cause without compromising my morals.

~~~
34679
Not if what you dislike about the state of things is having a few major
entities control the spread of messages.

