The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago
229 comments
·January 12, 2025dijit
coffeebeqn
It wasn’t just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy and there weren’t incentives to spam and scam people since you couldn’t monetize on such things. State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform, there weren’t trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a hundred other variables
mingus88
In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being always online.
To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
So the people you had available to create communities with were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and rage bait?
Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online. It’s actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the communities reflects this.
disqard
A bit late to this discussion, but your comment really reminded me of this Stewart Brand quote from his 1985 interview with KQED Focus magazine:
"Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel."
sneak
> To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
Still is. IRC is much the same as it has ever been.
canucker2016
Usenet pre-"green-card-spam" was a relative utopia.
Sure you had arguments. That's where 'flamewar' came from. But quickly people tired of that and created *.advocacy sub-newsgroups to let people vent in their corner of the net.
Then domains were opened up for commerce a few years later and eternal September became a thing... The net never recovered, it just used up more bandwidth.
AznHisoka
I’m not sure there wasnt as much spam and scams back then. I fondly remember 99% of my AOL inbox was filled with porn…
But ppl were definitely much more open and trustworthy back then. You could start a conversation with any random stranger and they wouldnt immediately dismiss you as some sort of scammer. Try that today and people will immediately flag you as a scammer
freehorse
Trolling used to be more about pranking each other than about organised scam or attacks, or manufacturing consent for governments or promoting political parties. It was more like an internet art form. I guess this is about what one can consider as the internet being more innocent back then.
herbst
Trolling is still essentially that, it's just that state actors and media decided to call scam and attacks trolling.
HeckFeck
truly we have lost teh lulz :(
sangnoir
> State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform
Security was awful for both the client and server. Who needs a warrant when all the user data is an SQL injection away? Broswers not fussy about https, Java Applets, flash, browser toolbars, XSS - the Internet must have been like an open book for anyone with access to backbone traffic.
p_l
I remember when IE actually warned you when you went to HTTPS!
wordpad25
Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...
chasd00
Heh yeah and irc wasnt exactly filled with upstanding honorable citizens either.
brianbest101
[dead]
dartos
There weren’t even trillion dollar companies at all back then
PoppinFreshDo
The trolling was epic. sigh
webwanderings
It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.
Barrin92
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.
The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.
There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.
skydhash
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.
webwanderings
So you missed one more: religion. If you were going to reappropriate the internet into existing - I take it that you mean, human - structure, then you might as well add religion here too. There have been no other factors beyond religion and national geographies, that have bound humans at a larger scale. IMHO, this is/was not the original intent when DARPA unleashed Internet beyond it's laboratory. Sure, we can reappropriate as we move along. But there is no precedence of a promised land here. The nation-states and/or religions have been at wars since the beginning of time. What's there to prove that a technology like Internet (throw AI of the future into it) would make things better for human nature to adopt. Just because we can scale does not mean that we may be scaling to something better.
amonith
The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.
They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.
Triphibian
I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.
rexer
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?
The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
dingnuts
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
mongol
By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can choose how you live in it.
coldtea
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
jaapz
The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.
> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.
pjmlp
> did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines
Certainly, that is what call center robot calls trying to sell unwanted stuff are all about.
> Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail?
Certainly, it comes on stamps.
smitty1e
Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the technology has increased in every way.
The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
marcus_holmes
I think this is why I enjoy Mastodon at the moment. Not so many people, and self-selecting geeks.
If it gets popular I'll have to look at blocking all the popular non-geeky instances ;)
stego-tech
Very well said. I struggled with a dearth of social skills in adolescence that persevered well into adulthood, a combination of extreme naivety and being a spoiled brat (and, potentially, some autism for good measure). Being online in forums and IRC helped me work on those a bit at a time, thanks to clear-cut and instant feedback on what was and wasn’t acceptable. What really boosted my abilities were my tenure as server administrator or moderator, though, something I never would’ve been given a position of in a real job. I learned the basics of power politics, how to lead a group of people (or at the very least, how to herd cats), and how successful authority derives respect (hint: by adhering to the rules and punishments it applies to others; yes, I banned myself on several occasions when I overstepped or broke rules, just as I did to anyone else). None of that is really feasible on such a large scale anymore, with centralized social media having centralized moderation (if any at all) that the average community member has no hope of reaching.
That said, I’d also echo what others have pointed out regarding the “barrier to entry”/“this tall to ride” mindset of the early internet. Good sites would block free email providers from signups to both preserve community standards and reduce spam accounts. IRC required some rudimentary understanding of ports and domains to join, along with some text commands if you really wanted to have fun. And everything was offline by default, requiring an always-online connection, a dedicated computer, or access to a shared server at a colo to run your own bouncer and remain online at all times. Even those of us who invested that time and effort to be online more often approached a point of diminishing returns as we moved to smartphones of the era and their meager data plans at extortionate rates (miss you, Nokia N80ie and my Symbian IRC client). The internet was a “destination” that required some degree of skill to engage with, and rewarded those who practiced and honed that skill with more freedom.
Ultimately, the nostalgia my friends and I have for those bygone days is twofold: the ability to disconnect entirely and be unreachable until we decide to hop online again, and the barrier to entry weeding out those who don’t really want to be there in the first place. An era of opt-in, rather than opt-out, and all the beauty that came from the types of people who were willing to put in the effort of going online in the first place.
BehindBlueEyes
Thanks for sharing this. Somehow it evokes images of travel to me.
Seeing the wonders of the world used to require skill, (sailing, flying, or) hiking/climbing up mountains to see the view. There were few people at the top and likely like-minded.
Since cable cars were installed, there's hordes of tourists at the top that take the place for granted and cable car operators eventually ruin the view by putting up ads billboards all over the landscape.
Some folks set-up their private viewing areas only accessible by hiking (some free, some rented, some purchased), and still hike to the top, but they'll take the cable car for convenience sometimes and there is the looming threat that the hiking path will become inaccessible some day.
Others find new mountains where they try to trailbreak with a few others, knowing they may be laying the groundwork for new cablecars down the line and will need to move on again.
srmarm
There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I like about forums and web communities back then.
I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics. There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm also from an age where the internet was it's own world where your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of protecting yourself.
andrepd
I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it :) So strange that there were people who actually knew what they were doing and studied problems with rigour and care! Rather than some SV techdude's idea of what is cool
mentos
I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator.
"You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
hibikir
Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.
Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
dyauspitr
I think you’re overestimating how much moderation it takes to keep a community whole. HN is dang and a handful of other moderators and things are stable. If you could have AI even approach 90% of that then it will truly solve problems.
null
elpocko
They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased moderator actions in their training data, and the even more reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone controversial statements.
matthewdgreen
So spin up your own forum and don't moderate it. Or spend some time (un-)finetuning an LLM moderator so you can talk about race or eugenics or whatever "exciting" controversial statements you want to talk about. Who cares.
satvikpendem
Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is reading every one of the forum's comments.
mentos
Can have the AI just flag posts for a human to review in v1? Then as you refine the prompt injection detection can move to have the AI be autonomous?
deadbabe
“Review this comment as if you are an AI clone of the moderator dang from Hackernews and select the appropriate function call to apply.”
metalman
the term, nostalgia, was coined to describe a mental illness, specificaly a type of home sickness, experienced by 17th century mercinaries. Nostagia is a poison, a little will give you a buzz ,but beware of more, as the results are all too common, especialy in those, who mix,there poisons. The only advantage in remembering the past, is to sum up the things that worked, and offer alternative actions for the things that didn't.
gxs
Wow, you’re mangling thr word nostalgia’s history.
Great example of where someone isn’t technically lying, but the essence of the word is definitely not how you’ve portrayed it here.
null
MarkusWandel
I do miss it though.
20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
20 years ago, you could go on Facebook, and see what your friends were up to.
Sure, many things didn't exist back then. But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
GuB-42
The article doesn't seem to make it its mind about whether it was the web 20 or 25 years ago. Very different actually
- 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement
25 years ago there was a good chance you were on dialup and couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement
- 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps
25 years ago: Google Maps?
- 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life
25 years ago: Women on the internet?
- 20 years ago, you could go on Facebook
25 years ago: Facebook?
MarkusWandel
"couldn't afford to run a server 24/7 from your basement" - it was early days but DSL was a thing, though expensive. But you could get a static IP address (which I still have! though when, not if, I have to change ISPs I'll lose that - another "good old days" thing) and fulltime internet access from your own box was a novelty. That's why I registered a domain (which I still have) and a friend said hey, you can get yourname@yourdomain email address and I can help you set it up! That was around 2002, give or take. I used that until "google apps for your domain" came along and let me port yourname@yourdomain to a Google account.
It was such a novelty that I let friends and family have accounts on the box to host their own web stuff. The Google Maps hack wasn't exactly 20 years ago, possibly 2005-2006; I know that Gmaps (not Google Satellite) was a novelty, and still since "everything in the cloud" wasn't the default yet (as you point out, dialup was still the norm), a friend wanted to stitch together a big map of our area out of Gmaps tiles to use offline.
Facebook: I got on in 2007 and felt late to the game already. Possibly exactly 20 years ago it didn't exist but close enough.
As for online dating, that was just the thing! And here the date is spot on; I was active from 2003 to 2005. It wasn't just geeks any more. There were women. Lots of them. Just like a bit later everyone was on Facebook, at the time pretty much everyone who was single was trying online dating. But the "shareholder value" ensh*ttification was still in the future, and fake profiles weren't a significant factor. It was just lonelyhearts ads on steroids, and it worked. The other couples (20 years and going) that I know it worked for were "almosts" from my own dating that I stayed in touch with, simple as that. I was at a couple of the weddings!
BehindBlueEyes
> 25 years ago: Women on the internet?
This kind of reaction is (partly) why the women on the internet that I knew rarely disclosed their gender 25 years ago
jjav
> 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
I'm still doing that today, works fine. Incoming spam is much reduced these days though, it was worse 20 years ago.
Mistletoe
I can't even get Proton emails to be received and not go straight to spam, I think rolling my own would be even more impossible. Hell, Google is sending my own iCloud emails to spam from a fresh account.
lelandfe
Last year I went to two weddings of people who met on Hinge. I've got three more this year.
charlieyu1
Good to hear. In my country there are too many MLMers or insurance agents that agree to a date then come to sell you things
null
melvinroest
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
You still can, you just have to be strategic about it due to a higher noise to signal ratio. I've helped a few of my friends and fellow HN'ers with it.
Each individual case differs, but it is always a variation of looking as your best self (or best photogenic self for online dating) and putting yourself out there a lot. You're looking for someone that you click really well with. So ultimately, it's a needle in a haystack thing.
concerndc1tizen
It's hard to prove either way, for or against, because behaviors are different in different countries, age groups, apps, and so on. Maybe it works for some segments, but not others.
But I've met countless people, of both genders, who swore that dating apps is a waste of time, and money. They're designed to be gambling machines. The house always wins, which in this case means the customers keep coming back.
melvinroest
I've used dating apps in multiple countries. I always got to where I wanted to be in the dating game (a serious game at that) by being a bit strategic about it. I'm average looking too, at best. My cleft lip scar doesn't help.
I feel most people just don't have the right frame or set of beliefs of looking at it. To be fair, I can be pretty intense about it if that is what the situation requires. I found that most people can't match that intensity, the uncomfortableness overwhelms them. I've seen people close to my intensity, far under it and clearly above it. It's in my opinion a big determinant to fix dating issues when one experiences them.
That's my perspective anyway, it's a bit unique as my journey in it has been a bit unique, I daresay.
BehindBlueEyes
Maybe the problem is paid dating aps?
Also enshitification is real there too, I don't think I'd find anyone now on the same dating app I met my spouse on years ago.
golergka
Every time I go on Facebook, Instagram and twitter, I see what my friends are up too. What happened to your social feeds?
mrweasel
> What happened to your social feeds?
That's a really interesting question. Pretty much everyone I know stopped posting on Facebook around 2014 (rough guess, but seems about right). It's not that they stopped posting altogether, but they cut down severally. The final year on Facebook I'd curated my feed to see only post made directly by friends, and I could pretty much catch up in five minutes every other week. Post was also never really stuff that I needed to know, it would just be silly things, which is nice, or something that we'd talk about anyway at some point. It feels like people got tired of keeping an online journal on Facebook pretty quickly.
It's interesting that some people travel in circles where Facebook, or perhaps more likely Instagram these days, just work for them and the people around them. Other, like myself, or my wife, are probably more often talking to friends on the phone or chatting on some type of chat/group chat.
It would be an interesting study, if someone where to find out why difference social circles gravitate towards different channels of communication. For me, the people I care about are clearly split in two, IRC or Snapchat (which is two really weird extremes).
MarkusWandel
I have a handful of friends who still post interesting stuff. I get shown maybe 50% of that, and yes, sometimes on the "throne of introspection" with my smartphone I [doom]scroll quite a way down so it's not like I never look.
FB still works for special interest groups and Marketplace. But the timeline is a morass of clickbait, scams, and borderline porn. And in my case, Coyote/Roadrunner clips and old comics.
The main timeline is so algorithmically generated - sometimes I get shown something, want to look at it a bit later, and never see it again.
herbst
As nobody else is actually using it all I get is spam got investment scams.
Aurornis
Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses
> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.
You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.
> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.
Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?
The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.
> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.
This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.
> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.
MarkusWandel
20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out.
And I did actually run the mail server. A friend set it up for me, SpamAssassin or something else may have been involved. The main thing was, though, you could still send email from your own SMTP server without it being automatically binned because it doesn't come from one of the big, "trusted" email services.
ryandrake
I run my own mail server today for my family, and very rarely have deliverability problems. Bog standard Linux install, exim4, dovecot, SpamAssassin. It's basically set and forget. I've been doing so for over a decade, so I probably built up some pretty good IP reputation, but it's totally possible to run mail yourself.
owebmaster
> 20 years ago you didn't get lifetime-banned by an AI for going off the beaten path and experimenting. That's what I was pointing out
20 years ago a mod would do that and today they still do for example here in this forum
droidist2
> This still happens all the time.
People win the lottery all the time too
Almondsetat
So they did 20 years ago
SllX
Back around the most recent election I dug up Digg’s front page and some of the comments from it’s earliest appearance in the Internet Archive and jumped around reading the comments sections on news items related to the 2004 and 2008 elections.
I walked away feeling much like I did after reading some Ancient Roman Graffiti left in Pompeii: people are just people. What’s different now isn’t the web, it’s just there’s more people, we’re more connected across State and International borders, you can actually find people you know online and the people that were kids back then are in their 30s while a lot of people you once knew online are dead. But there’s still kids, there’s still people who remember the world before the ARPAnet and UNIX and CP/M and Apple and DOS.
Hacker News will be 18 this year. All the kids born in 2007 are turning 18 this year. Twitter passed that milestone a year ago and Facebook a couple of years before that.
ratg13
The type of people are different.
Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
Now anyone that can afford a cheap phone can access the internet, and the user landscape has changed.
Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Those days are over and the internet is a much more hostile place.
SllX
> The type of people are different.
That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries.
By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web.
> Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly.
Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005.
> Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.
Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.
ratg13
Minor nitpick.. Netmeeting came pre-installed with windows.
All anyone had to do was open the software.
Clubber
>The type of people are different.
>Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.
I remember the sub-$1000 PC came about in the late 90s, you didn't have to be that affluent; lower-middle class was enough. I remember people in the BBS days that were barely middle class that had computers. Wealth wasn't really that much of an issue. It was more of an interest thing. Lots of people back then really didn't know how to use computers and they were pretty foreign to most people.
I remember pre-Windows 95, you had to know someone who had WinSock and install it, and you had to manually enter your IP address and gateway and all that. It wasn't an easy task. Once things like Internet in a box came out, it became easier. That's what AOL offered, easy access to the internet back when it wasn't that easy.
I think the biggest difference is how commercialized it has become and how the big companies have essentially taken it over. In all fairness, they did have a lot to offer; most websites were static documents.
macNchz
The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.
weitendorf
I think an even bigger difference is that there was no concept of users monetizing their own usage via advertising or a personal brand. People were in it purely for the love of the game, and maybe some imaginary internet points.
If you wanted to make money you might try hosting a community and monetizing it somehow, but the concept of building a digital following and using it to market products/services (and not be seen as spam or a sellout) simply did not exist.
I recently capitulated and started using real-name HN/reddit accounts because personal branding is not just common now, it's one of the main ways of reaching users.
SoftTalker
It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
ReptileMan
I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
willywanker
Just reloading won't help, you need to actively train the algorithm by telling it what videos you don't like and why. It also lets you stop showing recommendations from a given channel altogether. On Facebook I've trained the algorithm to never show me any ads because I keep marking every ad that pops up as irrelevant and then 'hide all ads from this advertiser', and by also not following any celebrity, corporate or brand pages.
SoftTalker
I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something else.
johnny22
Every few weeks I end up with a new video card with button that takes the place of the video and it asks if i want to see something other than what it usually recommends. It's not quite as out there as I'd like, but it did shake things up a bit.
skeeter2020
I'll say it; the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
To paraphrase Matt Damon from a show only enjoyed by the true internet acolytes "the walking mozzarella sticks who think a three hundred android phone and a verizon contract give them the right to connect to every piece of information in the world..."
torginus
The fundamental problem of the internet was that it was full of nerds - from a monetization perspective, they are a loathsome bunch.
They barely buy anything, preferring to make their own stuff, and they incessantly complain about the things they do buy.
They resist and effectively fight back against all attempts to control them.
They hate pandering, they don't click on ads (and in fact block them), they smell scams a million miles away.
krapp
I disagree, at least as far as the entire internet is concerned. The internet should belong to, and be available to, everyone.
Individual sites on the internet can be as gatekept and elitist as they like, but keeping something as transformative and revolutionary as the internet locked away for a privileged technical elite goes against everything the hacker ethos is meant to stand for.
I can't comprehend how so many people can be so nostalgic for the past without understanding what the past was about. Yes, those walking mozzarella sticks have the right to connect to every piece of information in the world. Even if they're dumber and less cool than you. Everyone, everywhere, has the right to unrestricted information and communication, without qualifiers. That's the entire fucking point.
owebmaster
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
Did you start to use the internet before or after september 1993?
x-complexity
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.
...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion.
Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.
cobertos
I agree, having a little private intranet is great, it's where I'm at. But losing the interactions that lead to finding those people to share an intranet with that happened more often on early internet makes finding people so time consuming, or not possible.
Where have you met the people you share your intranet with?
x-complexity
Admittedly only on Discord & private chat apps. Luckily, the way Tailscale's network + private DNS works helps a lot in revoking access to a server you once gave beforehand.
dyauspitr
I’ve made a complete 180 on the subject. I don’t think you can build and maintain a solid online community without gatekeepers.
owebmaster
That's true but the internet should be the place where ever human being is allowed. Then it segregates into multiple well-protected communities.
alganet
> hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them)
Well, talk for yourself, sir. As a teenager, I had hundreds of IM contacts across ICQ and MSN from all over the world, not only classmates.
> eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares)
A friend recommends a song, you can get it with a 2h download and you both can enjoy talking about it. There was _nothing_ like it at the time.
It's not about wanting to go back. We can't go back, even if everyone wanted to. It was something awesome that happened once and we don't know the formulae for it.
herbst
Today the few file sharing networks left are full of high quality sound, well organized and take less than a minute per song.
I didn't know until recently either, but that literally got way better.
Deprogrammer9
I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.
nox101
I've been on the internet as long as you and from my POV it changed a ton. The biggest changes to me are
(1) social media via smartphones - letting everyone trivially post to everyone else on the planet.
This use to be nerd activity (blogs) and the audience was other nerds. First social media sites, then the smart phone completely changed this.
(2) follows from 1, influencer culture, by which I mean, Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube all incentivize people performing to try to get as many viewers/followers as possible. Thinking back to the 70s/80s, even the top movie stars just got some fan mail. They didn't have 400-600 MILLION FOLLOWERS to whom they could say anything they wanted. A celebrity had a most a TV show with a crew and editors and a strong chance of getting fired/banned if they got to crazy. Now, any high school kid can have 100+ million followers
It's not just people with followers, 20% of my youtube feed is people trying desperately to have something to talk about. Some news happens, thousands of people "report it" on their "channel". The scale of it is insane to me.
insane_dreamer
> Absolutely nothing has really changed
been online since then as well; the arrival of ad-driven social media and "influencers" has changed the online landscape significantly. there's really no comparison.
raincole
> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved
Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.
DoodahMan
i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)
hn_acc1
I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam..
Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
Groxx
Yea, I lean this way too.
The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.
The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.
If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.
Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.
(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)
seneca
I know it's an old man comment, but there really was a time the internet was friendly. It just wasn't 20 years ago. It was before the general public got online, and the internet was a refuge for specialists and early adopters.
In the early 90s, the internet felt like a magical undiscovered wilderness. 90% of the people you met were excited to be there and eager to share. That was long gone 20 years ago.
ilrwbwrkhv
Yup a random guy taught me guitar online in 2006 even, painfully drawing tabs by hand.
cisrockandroll
In 2006-2007 someone walked me through step by atep how to assemble a computer in a newegg.com chatroom with the parts I had already purchased. That person changed my life. Thanks human.
goalieca
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
m3047
> not federated and centralized
That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
Eumenes
Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.
AshamedCaptain
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.
I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
matthewdgreen
Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included:
1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.)
2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs.
3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake".
4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras.
This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
AshamedCaptain
What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
jazzyjackson
I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
jazzyjackson
MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client.
It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
AshamedCaptain
Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems.
And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era.
And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
climb_stealth
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums.
But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
MarcelOlsz
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.
Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
ajoseps
every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar and I realize it's an ex-coworker
dmonitor
There's a handful of users on the reddit gaming pages where I can distinguish their writing style and bad opinions well enough from other users that I recognize them. The site culture is opposed to referencing someone's post history, though.
The pseudononymous nature of the website was originally one of its selling points, being a nice inbetween of 4chan's anon chaos and Facebook's "your boss and grandmother are reading your posts" stiltedness. Nowadays, I'd rather have the personalization back. The new UI lets people upload avatars for their comments, which probably helps, but they'll have to pry the old UI from my cold, dead hands
jappgar
It was better simply because normies weren't on the internet yet.
Like so many things, the more popular it becomes, the worse it gets.
null
cgh
Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.
m3047
The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times.
Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable:
I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.)
There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel.
I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here.
I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer.
No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs.
No takers.
20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.
DontchaKnowit
Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
m3047
That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track.
So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"?
Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.
Loughla
The car shows in all the small towns around me (populations less than 750) have entries for early, mid, and late model classics. So 20's through 90's. Most have trucks in every year.
They're also run by active shade tree mechanics clubs that get together once or twice a month to talk and get greasy.
I guess the reason I'm saying this is because sometimes the things you want aren't where you are, and that's just how it goes?
Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying.
Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation.
I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner.
The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff.
Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community.
Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community.
That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of:
* more focused, human and often better moderation;
* a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and;
* an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog".
Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now.
The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom.
[0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...