The internet pre-'attention economy' was so much more wholesome and pure. It used to be exciting to surf the web; now it feels like dumpster diving. Now it's something I try my best to avoid.
I would say a bunch of average people came to the internet. Before that it was mostly reserved by geeks which valued information more than "form"/ux/beauty(irelevant pictures included)/...
Now we have just another pop culture. Sad.
But I still use IRC. It is interesting that most of (to me) relevant developers (system level development, ...) are still hanging there.
IRC is all textual and it was never filled with all the garbage you can see on web, but they did invent alternatives where all the pop culture went (discord O.o) while I can enjoy my peace on IRC.
I am really mourning about usenet. It was dying but still kicking, then google destroyed it with google groups.
Those are some rose tinted glasses you must be wearing. All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.
If people back then could've played full screen interactive video on page load, they would have. Look at how popular Flash became.
I too still use IRC (although a lot less than I used to). I don't think it's really about interesting people vs. "pop culture" though, it's more of a generational thing. I'm sure today's relevant coders are more likely to be found on Discord than IRC.
That's quite unfortunate I might add, Discord is a bloated, centralized, closed source mess. But what can you do, it is shinier.
> All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.
One of my websites (for my first startup - an ISP) used a server side include that called out to ping the client IP to inline either a static image or one of several "big" - by 1997 standards - animated GIFs by guessing at the client bandwidth based on ping time (yes, it was a very rough heuristic, but it worked surprisingly well at the time), because we wanted to be able to serve up a fancy animated logo to those whose connection could handle it...
If we could have served up something fancier we certainly would have.
I don't know if you have tried using Discord for any signifiant amount of time, but I have and I didn't find it to be the expertise filled successor that I thought it would be. I've joined channels for programming languages and it's at best the blind leading the blind, like a Programming 101 class forum. At worst it's lots of people asking if they can ask, or if anybody knows the language, and then leaving forever before someone replies.
definitely depends on the server, I’ve had difficult time finding groups for certain lang’s. but Rust, React, TypeScript have super active great communities there
I think in general what’s difficult these days is bringing communities together - there’s too much noise and promotion, too many places for people to be. so you get the situation you mention above - a lot of unanswered questions in a discord server with a perpetual churn of users looking for a community that fits what they’re looking for.
feels like people are less willing to become a part of a community - forum, IRC, discord, whatever - these days either. but I have a feeling that’s because I’m more out of the loop... FB groups seem to constantly pop off
I think IRC still has in depth communication is due to the fact that there is a barrier to joining. All these apps are trying to be easy, without realizing there's sometimes something good with being hard.
Were I inclined to implicate anybody, it would be the advertisers and marketeers, who will always be ahead of the rest of us in terms of understanding how to command attention.
That, and eroom's law applied to increasing bandwidth.
I was one of the average people. I started surfing the web on the day that AOL made it possible for customers to do so, rather than keeping us in their walled garden. Yes, I picked up a CD with the new version at the supermarket.
I remember reading about, and almost grasping, the article about hypertext in Byte Magazine. The idea as presented was that the tags controlled the formatting of a page to some extent, but also allowed people to have customized readers, e.g., for the blind. And if someone composed their HTML well, you could usually read it in raw format with minimal difficulty.
My personal web page is still written in plain HTML on a text editor, and would stand a pretty good chance of being readable on a 1990s machine.
What the Web evolved into was more like (to my mind) a general purpose GUI framework, and with it came the explosion of GUI bloat and constant revision, that we also experience on the desktop today.
Since I was dialing in with a slow modem, I learned the setting in Netscape to disable displaying images unless I clicked on them. Most websites remained functional that way for a few years, at least until broadband arrived in most cities.
Of all the early internet, I do miss Usenet the most. So much of it worked because it was really managed by sysadmins - if someone was a problem, spamming or griefing - was to simply email the sysadmin where they were posting and the admin would usually block them from Usenet. As public internet as a utility became a thing, the bigger isps couldn't manage at that scale. There's more to it, but as the sysadmins lost control, usenet was overwhelmed by spam.
Early 2000 isn’t early web. By that point it had already been around for a decade, had been heavily commercialised and a lot of the fun independent portals were already starting to disappear. By early 2000 Yahoo! was already losing favour to Google and the MS buyout of Hotmail was already a distant memory. VRML2 had been and gone, XHTML was deprecated and FutureWave / Macromedia Flash was just about to move to it’s 3rd company, Adobe. By early 2000s the browsers wars had already been lost too Microsoft and the era of Internet Explorer.
There’s so much history that had already been and gone by 2000 that it’s a real stretch to argue the middle third of the web as it’s early period.
Yeah, early 2000s is Web 2.0. Upthread is talking more like mid-1990s when you could plausibly have a hand-curated directory of the interesting sites (which Yahoo did at scale of course but for a time I even maintained an internal home page that was links to the sites I was interested in).
Myspace in 2003, O'Reilly coined read/write web at about the same time. The original iteration of Facebook was 2004. The Ajax book I have on my shelf is 2006. All this stuff started coming in as the industry was starting to pick itself up from the dot-com bubble bursting. phpBB was a little bit earlier with the first release at the end of 2000.
Ahhh the era of blahblah");drop table users; -- , and unencrypted unhashed password databases :+ I'm still amazed the internet didn't just blow up in those days. Strange enough that was sufficient security back then.
Because those were the days that you didn't trust a website enough to enter a credit card number. If you needed to give a credit card number you called a land line phone number listed on the page that took you to their sales department (or the one guy answering the phones who also worked as sales, tech support, and customer service).
That was true in the 90s but by the early 00s there were already a few online payment processors around. I remember using WorldPay a lot in around 2000 to 2004. PayPal came onto my radar shortly after, though even then I was aware it had been around for a while beforehand.
I vaguely recall there was another service like WorldPay, and possibly named similarly too, around that time.
I’ve been running websites since 1994 as well as a keen record collector in the early 00s so used to do a lot of transactions online. I can’t really remember how I payed for stuff online in the 90s, which leaves me wondering if it was all via phone. But I definitely remember using WorldPay sometime around 2000 as I recall being frustrated by the lengthy process (lots of questions, which in hindsight I should have been pleased they did thorough checks).
Explains a whole lot of the the anti-Google sentiment here.
I think a lot of us thought for once we had a smart, nice, funny tech giant and they just had to prove us wrong.
We now
- don't have any really good search engine anymore, no Reader, no Desktop Search, no Google+. It seems Google after 2009 is incapable of maintaining what they once built.
- Google long ago abandoned the idea of not being evil
- and even Microsoft is wittier and more playful in their messaging at the moment
So why am I writing this? Because I hope they will change their ways or that someone else will pick up the really nice niche they left behind:
- to find results for the things I actually ask for. (A bonus would be if they or whatever replaces them also implements the ~ operator for "something like".)
People talk about "Eternal September" in regards to the web as if to imply that all of the cool, interesting smart people were on the web in the early 1990s, and that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall. It's typical for people to draw an imaginary line in the sand of cultures or subcultures they care about and believe that everything that came before them was better than everything that came after.
They're right in a particularly narrow-minded way that only considers the "modern web" to be the public feed on Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter, and corporate sites and the effect of SEO. But it's also the case that the quality of content on the modern web far surpasses that of the early web because so many more people, representing a greater diversity of cultures and ideas, are on it and able to express themselves.
So if that's "Eternal September" then I think it can be argued that it was as much evolution as devolution.
> "People talk about 'Eternal September' as if to imply ... that the culture of the internet rightly belonged to those people alone, and that everyone who joined afterwards were part of the web's degradation and downfall".
Yes, that is exactly correct. The people who made the web, and built a beautiful space were the 'rightful owners'. A few outsize capitalists then saw that they could extract value from this made world -- and make themselves rich -- by encouraging and enabling colonization of that once peaceable space. It was a form of cultural theft and appropriation -- indirect through corporate marketing and lawyers.
If we follow the argument of 'diversity everywhere', no culture could be any culture anywhere because it would "lack diversity". One grey world is not a win.
The existing pre-93 culture was wholly supplanted and destroyed by the "new and improved" "higher quality" culture that replaced it. Of course, that estimation of 'better' and 'higher' is evaluate from the mindset of the colonizers -- not at all from the perspective of whomever came before.
Moreover, its not just the corporate profiteering -- that just opened the door for all of the colonizers. It is all of the self righteous fake "representative" identity virtue signaling that goes with it. Capitalism and wall street corporate profits enabled an entire world of trolls -- who then use the claim of colonization on others to hide their own prior actions in kind. And this is an improvement?
It's the commercialized Internet's reaction to a large number of "average people" who want things and would rather pay with their attention than with cash.
No, paying with money is subject to AML/KYC while paying with attention is exempt. Lower friction. This is why micropayments-with-money hasn't taken off while micropayments-with-attention has exploded.
I don’t think there’s anything preventing anyone from setting up a usenet similar service? As long as the barrier to entry is high enough it’ll keep out all the average people.
The internet circa 1997 was an unsupervised, all-summer festival for free spirits & adventurers. Skinny dipping, legumes, transcendental dance and chance meetings that change the course of your life.
Now it's a residential school. 56% of the cultural machinery must be dedicated to dealing with behavioural problems in the cafeteria.
I don't remember an internet ever being "unsupervised" it was more that there were thousands of independent fiefdoms run by one autocrat and his minions. If you were in agreement with the ideas of that autocrat, it felt like freedom. If you weren't, you got banned and you found a different fiefdom with rules you liked, but there were plenty to choose from. Nowadays a few megacorps run those fiefdoms so it feels like there's less freedom because there's less options.
You answered your own question. Attention is essentially the currency of the internet and it's a finite resource. People got better at competing for your attention. Things are now optimized for "engagement" rather than enjoyment.
> People also got lazy, why bother hosting your own website when you can just upload to Instagram ?
Why bother changing your car oil when you can take it to the service?
Why bother cooking your own meal when you can just go to the restaurant?
Why bother sewing your own dress when you can just go to the mall?
It's not lazyness, it's convenience. Internet just got mainstream and popular, so people lacking time, interest or skills to create their own websites just use pre-built solutions. It's how everything works in real life.
Yeah, if I'm a writer, is it "lazy" of me to also not want to manually do the formatting, cover, layouts and print work, as opposed to just sending a manuscript to an editor? It's not necessarily a bad thing that the web has evolved to the point that people who want to produce content for it, for the most part, only have to worry about the content and not the infrastructure.
> Internet just got mainstream and popular, so people lacking time, interest or skills to create their own websites just use pre-built solutions.
They don't lack any of time or skills. Take the example of websites of local sport clubs: they all had a proper website with all info and news and stuff. Now they haven't any more, they've changed to a shitty Facebook page with everything mixed together into an incredible mess. (By the way, the traditional website is typically still running fine without maintenance, it just hasn't been updated since around 2015-2017.)
I don't think the people from your small town random sport club, who built and ran the site in the 2000s, had special computers skills or time compared to those of today.
Most local sports leagues (and some clubs) still run their own websites (and have systems that support mobile apps). I find the online presence far richer these days where little league teams collaborate attendance, schedules, practices this way.
I think this “everyone got lazy” is overblown. Yes some folks are lazy, but they were the folks that used Microsoft Frontpage in 1998 :)
Having spent a few years as a web designer in the aughts, I largely blame web designers. We persuaded people your site had to be professionally and fashionably designed to be taken seriously. Learning to write HTML is pretty easy, attaining and maintaining the skills of a professional web designer is not.
IMO, you have to think of it structurally. Who was online then and now, for example.
Instagram & facebook are a global scale economic mammoth that subsist on promoting the dynamics you are lamenting don't exist.
Maybe people have a lazy tendency. They can use that to build structure. Once it exists, it also becomes true that if you want people to read your post, it needs to be on instagram, fb or whatnot. If you want people to see your video, it needs to be released on youtube.
Even if people were willing to host their own video, youtube has all the viewers. A viewer/user on a centralised platform is worth more (economically) than elsewhere.
In 2003 I was in my early teens and we built a website for our classmates, to have a place for our class trip photos, photos from our parties, to have a list of contact details like phone numbers and email addresses for all of us and to have discussions. I was just an ignorant geek guy who was "good with computers". Well, in the sense of Microsoft Office, Paint, clicking Next, Next, Finish to install stuff, configure firewalls, use Napster and crack games (by which I mean I knew where to copy crack.exe).
So we wanted a website. Previously I had already "made websites" by saving as HTML in Word, so let's go! But I figured we need to do better than Word, because Word's output was messy and often rendered broken in browsers, so I found an HTML tutorial and I managed to hand build a simple site, with the aid of shareware Windows software for creating button images with cheesy fonts and another one to generate thumbnails of images etc. We then wanted a discussion board, so I figured out how to install phpBB.
I had no knowledgeable geeks to guide me in real life but through these experiences I picked up real programming skills in my teens, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and PHP (and probably actively contributed to PHP's meme reputation as a tool of kids and dilettantes). A few years later I learned Python to mod games. I learned to put computers together and had a rough but cloudy idea of how it all worked. I liked it and went on to study CS, where I first learned C and C++ and Java and a proper theoretical foundation which I also liked because I liked math.
It was only in my mid twenties that I started to look into Linux. All my peers had been using Windows my whole life and I was a bit afraid of becoming a full on social outcast Linux nerd. But then in my twenties I lost my urge to conform so hard and overall came to like Linux. Overall I'm now quite comfortable with the command line, shell scripting and so on.
My point is, I was nothing special of a geek and had no geek peers in my teens but through necessity I picked up geek skills to make a website, to fix computers, to pirate stuff, to mod games etc., which led me down the path of pursuing CS as a career. I know I wouldn't have enjoyed it if it was presented to me as some gameified app to learn programming with some upbeat cheerful mentor. I loved it for the exploration, for the "nobody told you you could or should do this but can you make it work?".
Would I have become a CS person in today's climate where we would have just made a Facebook group to upload our class trip photos without learning any HTML? Perhaps, maybe through game modding. But do kids today have the same chances to mod games with all the DRM and always-online monitoring software? Would I have learned about TCP/IP if everything worked out of the box? Although I'd love to say I learned it all out of intellectual curiosity, in the moment I picked up these skills because I had something concrete in mind that I wanted to make, and learning these was the only way. If there was and easier way, I would have been lazy and in turn perhaps miss out on all the wonders of this field.
On the other hand there's just so much helpful material out there today, you can buy electronics hobby kits on the cheap, Raspberry Pi, all kinds of programming tutorial.
Any input from today's teens/early twenties how this works today? How and why do kids pick up tech skills nowadays that everything is so convenient and streamlined to consumption and locked down for inspection?
I am 20 and my experience slightly mirrors yours -- it was all about wanting to do something, so I went to learn it. However, I got into the internet much, much earlier than my peers. I was regularly on the internet when I was 7-8 (2007-2008), so I did see some of the old internet. My first time on the internet was when I was 6, but I didn't really use it much at that time and I am not sure if I understood anything about it at that time.
My passion for computer hardware (and to a lesser extent software) comes purely from my childhood, I'd say. It had a great effect, and actually led me to many paths I wouldn't have taken otherwise. Also, I gained non-tech skills as well, like my handling of the English language, for instance.
I can't answer your question, since I have had quite a different experience, but the reason my acquaintances are picking up tech skills is because it's the future and it's where the money is, or because their parents told them to. This is really unfortunate because they don't actually bother picking up any tech skills at all unless they absolutely need it (which is very rare in 2020 due to how everything is so convenient / available). However, I am from a poor country, so I am not the best person to answer this.
Personally, I prefer the old internet. Not only due to what I mentioned, but also because the current internet is just full of messed up things like the current state of social media (really, HN is the only one I tolerate) and how rooted it has become, or how people in general became more afraid of expressing themselves on the internet, and so much more.
I'm maybe a little older than what you had in mind (25) but still young enough to really grow up with Facebook. I think even in my age group, you saw tech skills primarily being taken up by people my age as "you can make a lot of money with this", or at least that was the mindset of most of my classmates at a mid tier state college.
Most of them seemed to have taken CS classes in high school and enjoyed it reasonably enough or have had CS recommended to them as a major since you could easily get a job in it (like the other reply to your comment suggested).
On the other hand, my interest in CS and programming was a lot more old school. I got on the internet for the first time in the mid 2000s and learned to make basic websites for my hobby and then JS, PHP, MySQL to make them interactive. I'm not sure I would've followed the career path I'm in now if I'd been born 5-10 years later. The epicenter of my hobby moved to FB/Discord/Instagram/Youtube and if I were growing up now I think I would've tried to share my hobby through those platforms and therefore never gotten into what I did now. I'm lucky I was born the time I am and thanks for an interesting question to think about!
Consolidation. Surfing the web used to be about discovery. I was into digital art back then and there were so many emerging artists with exciting personal sites. You actual found things through page links whether directly or though things like web rings.
Now I visit a couple of sites routinely and ignore everything else. HN is the closet I come to social media.
This is the case for my mother. Facebook has her thoroughly filter bubbled, and it's sad and worrying. I don't know how to wean her off the Facebook brain-rot. Her ipad is Facebook, and Facebook is the internet.
She recently told me she wouldn't get a flu shot this year, and I know where she got that idea. I got mad, and gave her a lecture about the insane anti-vax people, and the many ways in which their beliefs are complete bullshit.
But my anger wasn't at her, but rather frustration that Facebook might indirectly cost her her life.
Some days I feel like null routing Facebook on her router. I won't do that of course, because it's not my job to interfere with her choices. But I'm becoming increasingly concerned.
You aren't alone. My Mom went full on conspiracy with FB. She was always a little nutty, but its let her take it to a new level. I once told her "You better not make me watch you die over this (antivaxx/antidoctor)"
- old internet was the product of the previous generation culture, internet was a side piece, a tiny new button. It might influence the desires of users at the time.
- economy trying to leverage internet as a new phase in customer access and higher business profits (never good.). Old economy was also not in the best shape and now everybody thinks or wants to make it's own little place on the web game. People are not here to chill they're here to win something. Vastly different mindset.
- a false assumption that connecting everything with computers would make our lives lean, instead of separate programs, computers and persons.. you have one cloud thing where everything can be shared. Obvious idea in retrospect .. but releasing friction is also letting weird unplanned stuff happen without control. Look at how much things now have limits (smartphone time etc).
- naivety regarding 'spaces'.. internet was a hippie thing kinda, but whenever systems grow they start to influence the whole thing (facebook,..)
Many, possible most, young people today have nothing to compare today's internet with.
I recently read someone here arguing that "without ads, there's no incentive for anyone to create new content!"
If you're older, you can't help but know better. The majority of the web, in its first few years, was full of "content" and there was, broadly speaking, zero financial incentive.*
* To be fair, there were banner ads and, once Netscape introduced popup windows, even ads that hijacked your screen... you'd have been nuts to take that as an incentive though. People don't write essays for $2.50 a month.
> The majority of the web, in its first few years, was full of "content" and there was, broadly speaking, zero financial incentive.*
In grand scheme of things amount of content was abysmal compared to today. And today you have way way more of free content, created without financial initiatives by people who are passionate about the subject. Why? Because human nature didn’t change, and we got many orders of magnitude more people online.
Why do they need to compare their own culture with something that's long gone? We don't live the way our ancestors did, listen to the whole other kinds of music, enjoy completely different things and speak different dialects of the languages they had.
In the grand scheme of things the lack of ads or javascript is as irrelevant now as those times when you had to go to the post office to wish someone a happy birthday halfway across the country.
Same reason we study history: those who don't, are doomed to repeat it.
We can learn from past generations, especially about large societal and cultural issues, even if those past generations didn't have things like penicillin or TikTok.
> The civilization won't go anywhere, we're too smart now, too capable, tiktok or not.
This is an advanced level of naivete combined with arrogance I wish that I had. Unfortunately, I've studied history and I can very clearly see the parallels between now and moments in the fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing is forever, and our civilization will fall if we do nothing out of complacence.
Whole popular culture became a shopping mall. And if visitors of shopping mall don't agree with what I think, so be it. I cant change the product of our generation poisoning that make them attention junkies, perfect shoppers,... they just never went some other way to see it.
I'll answer: for starters, I want a protocol for articles that puts the dev into a straight-jacket: no dynamic features, no control of font or font-size, no ability to position text boxes. Basically, a protocol to present text articles Medium-style.
Why? Faster loading, fewer chances to track me, less ability to show me ads, more legibility, minuscule footprint to hack me, no ability to show me share buttons.
I was just thinking the other day that it must suck to have been born after the internet was taken over by a bunch of corporations. To never know what it used to be, how it was welcoming and user-centric. How there were many communities everywhere, where people could talk about everything without faceless corporate moderator oversight.
I think kids today would agree with this, it's just that no one tried to explain it to them. Engagement-driven social media is addictive because it's designed to be so, but once you've understood the difference, there's no going back to it.
Kids today spend their time in Snapchat or whatever, kids before them were into Facebook, those before who had access to forums, and before that there was TV, and radio, and Beatles. It is easy to arrive at the conclusion that things were better back in the days, but in reality there were just less things to do.
Engagement-driven kids are not dumb. They live in a different world, and it's their world now. The way we look at older people who can't figure out computers, they will soon be looking at us.
Engagement-driven web keeps pushing you to see content outside of your network because that's what makes them money. So, yes, it's a substitute for TV in a sense. I used to watch TV in my young teens, but now YouTube replaced it. The problem is that it effectively discourages person-to-person communication that people want and rely upon.
It's as if your phone line was free, but your calls with your friends and family would get interrupted with commercials and news broadcasts every 5 minutes.
And there was so much text! Old websites (90th) were so text-heavy, it almost hurts these days with videos in mind. Also people had more time to consume these amounts of text.
Search engines decided it was smart to reward the pages that got the most clickthroughs by pushing them to the front page, which quickly filled up with autogenerated pages from content farms, duplicated copy from wikipedia, and people trying to sell you shit.
You can still find a lot of it on millionshort.com, where they remove the top million results from other search engines.
Once the business model and psychology of content aggregation and habitual user feedback loops was discovered, there was no going back. That model is just too powerful and too economically successful. It sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Unless your community is paid for by some benefactor, you usually run out of money convincing people to pay for it, or end up copying the structure of Facebook/Pinterest/Twitter/Instagram etc.
Smartphones. They started picking up critical mass by 2010. Within a couple years social sites in all corners of internet culture started going downhill in various ways whether Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, etc.
The web had existed previously to that moment for 15 years, even with popular usage. It's nature changed significantly when people were no longer consciously sitting down at their desk to use the internet.
You can already see an example of this happening at this site. All the "Go Tucows" "get winzip" buttons. That's where the internet turned to shit. So it's not quite 'the good old internet', that was before that :P
What happened?