The article brings back fond memories. We had the feeling of being part of something new and exciting. This was also a good way to combine fun and learning. The skills I developed then set me on a path to (relative) success which I'm not sure I'd have found otherwise.
Weird that CNN couldn't help inserting a race comment in a story that has nothing to do with it (case in point: we had a black kid in our group of friends doing LAN parties, and we never thought of him as black, he was just one of us, a human being whom you'd define across infinitely many dimensions, and definitely not just skin color).
I’ve thought about this before, and I’m not sure it is weird, I think it largely makes sense.
The early days of the internet was essentially a self-selecting group of individuals, the chances for finding like minded folks were that much higher. Just the excitement at being online at all is no longer an interesting experience to anyone - it was back then to much of this much smaller group. A shared exciting experience attracting likeminded people.
Now the entire planet is almost online, the distinction between a human and someone who uses the internet largely doesn’t exist anymore- it’s no longer a subset and has all the vagaries of real life, with its good, bad and in-between actors. Another example of this is that in the early 90s we didn’t care about identity fraud online nearly as much - today it’s a much bigger problem that many people have experienced.
Given that, is it any surprise people are now perhaps as guarded as they are in the “real world”? Back then the line between the offline world and the online one was much clearer, today it’s more and more a core feature of humanity’s daily existence, good and bad. My thoughts anyway.
Does this single anecdote change the actual data evident in the photos? I'm sure you didn't wake up and think of excluding anyone, but clearly this selected for white males as many activities do. Nobody is asking anyone to feel guilty about it, cnn is just reporting the facts.
It's CNN selectively reporting the facts because most of the MSM now looks at everything through a culture war lens. Plenty of other lenses to pick from.
A large reason old internet was so fun is that nobody gave a damn about this identity nonsense, we were too busy playing Quake 2 with ninja ropes.
What happens more often, MSM doing culture war gymnastics? Or people accusing MSM of culture war gymnastics (an accusation which is, itself, culture war gymnastics)?
In my house we have minecraft Lan parties for 8 year old girls. Minecraft is quite good for this because it's such a deep game that realtime help is very useful and the girls are not really able to research on the net, So the social aspect becomes more important to them. Also minecraft is quite cooperative anyway.
Also VR parties are sorta similar in vibe to LAN parties too. I feel this stuff is sorta alive still and it was niche in the 90s too.
Yeah, they're selected based on something like "vibe". I've tried to make it a bit chaotic with a few wildcards and unexpected results, without the pure pandemonium you'd get with no curation at all.
I will have to spend some time visiting all these links (and the ones in the replies). I hope these address what I think was an incorrect statement in the article:
"There’s less of a sense of exploration because there just isn’t as much out there."
I'm assuming that is not true but rather that is just harder to find the good stuff among all the billboards and blaring, glaring lights of the mainstream sites.
We are funded directly by our community through supporter plans and donations. This allows us to base all our decisions on making the best possible web building experience for you, rather than on appeasing ad companies.
Pay DO a pittance, make and tend a website, creating part of the internet you wish existed.
Work at ignoring more of the major sites on a daily basis.
Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions, just do you. Share what you’re passionate about, tend that garden for its own awesomeness (and back it up;).
Build connections to others with shared interest, and who are also contributing to the Internet you wish existed.
The internet kind of sucks now because everything must be huge or die, if it doesn’t “hit” it’s considered a waste of time. That is not the Internet I was captivated by in the nineties.
That easy to say, but it needs to be understood that nowadays, contrary to how it worked 20-25 years ago, if you don’t actively and continuously promote your content in some social media, no one, not a single person will ever find it. Google will never direct traffic to small websites unless you’re extremely specific. You might as well publish it in a HTML file on your hard drive.
Then don't rely on Google to "direct traffic" to you. In fact, don't worry about traffic at all! Hence, OP's advice:
> Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions
This is the root of what sucks about everything on the Internet these days: Everyone measures the success of whatever they are doing using engagement crap like "number of likes" and "daily active users" and "number of GitHub stars." Junk metrics. Stop worrying about building an audience. Stop worrying about your follower count. Stop obsessing over pointless things like clout and karma. And, most of all, never use the word "monetize." Just tend your little garden, and if people happen to visit, great.
Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.
Thats's correct, part of the reason the Internet feels low quality is because it is. Garbage content abounds because you need to put something out every day, or at least every week, so that the Gooogle/FB algos don't drop you from their discoverability index.
Even the biggest TV shows did not put out more than 24 episodes in a season. A solo blogger/artist is required to put out twice that many pieces of content in a year. Can't expect the quality of that to be very good.
You can still build tiny communities. I joined several discord servers when interested to certain topics in the past, with anonymous people still sharing about them. And a couple of phpbb forums with < 300 subscribers. I'm sure if I were into even more niche stuff I would find people interested in writing and reading about the topic. Also youtube is quite good for certain stuffs.
As an early teenager, in late 90s, I built a crappy non-English website on a topic that was covered by only a few other sites in that language. It received a healthy amount of traffic for a few years, as anyone researching that topic was bound to end up visiting. As you say, I did add it to a few catalogues and exchanged a few banners, but that was it.
And hey, I’m not angry about it. Anyone visiting Wikipedia nowadays is MUCH better served. But the vibe of being a “webmaster” has definitely changed.
Social media had a built in feedback mechanism that personal websites don't. We can't even have a 'sign my guestbook' feature without having to deal with spam moderation.
I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is. We used to make websites for fun. We could host them for free on platforms like Geocities. The only cost to us, the webmasters, was our time. We weren't out to make money.
Then came ubiquitous advertising. And affiliate links. And paid content. Suddenly every website was a potential moneymaker. SEO became a thing, so we could drive more traffic and increase ad revenue. Back in the early 2000s, I got weekly emails from ad companies offering money to inject banners on my websites.
Free web hosting that's as easy as Geocities was is hard to find these days. But web hosting has become dirt cheap (so cheap that I shut down my hosting business, as I can't compete on price, and no one cares about service).
I wish websites could go back to being labours of love, rather than being side hustles.
> I don't think the algorithmic nature is necessarily the problem. The monetization is.
IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.
I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.
Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.
Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.
The reason you could host them for free is because geocities, anglefire, etc monetized it. Banner ads existed in those days too. It was just the early days of internet advertising so ads where less targeted.
It's been said ad nauseam but the sort of things that people would put on a geocities page (pictures, political diatribes, even things like fan pages) has moved to social media. But even that is not a problem in and of itself. The early days of social media were fun as well.
The thing that killed the internet IMO is smartphones. The internet was better when it was a "place" (cyberspace!) that you consciously had to take time to visit. You sat down, you "got on the internet" and then you "left" when you got up. The ubiquitous internet that you carry around at all times, being constantly connected is what created the pervasive advertising that you're talking about because the internet captured more of people's attention which made advertising much, much more lucrative.
Not to mention the fact that it's a content creation device as well. You couldn't take a picture and instantly post it to your geocities page or bang out 288 character brain farts on a whim. Everything was much more deliberate.
The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since.
But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor.
Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink.
So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.
They are to a large extent, but the learning resources, and those who use it professionally, have moved on, so you’re a bit on your own and don’t receive the simpler view of the HTML 4 that everyone was using and referencing twenty years ago.
Some people still do blogs, youtube channels, or website for fun. It's just increasingly difficult to find them. Bypassing the algorithmic feeds is hard. Youtube has made it even harder for people to share their assessment of videos by suppressing the dislike count.
It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.
This reminds me of playing Duke Nukem 3D on a LAN in 1997/8. Me and some friends were in our 20s, had just set up a company together and had a few PCs linked together in a converted garage. After work on a Friday, we’d get beers in, invite other friends over and have a Dukefest. Great times!
Nothing wrong with LAN parties but they were a tiny subculture back in the Counterstrike days, not comparable to the web that many more people were engrossed in years before social media.
Recently I've tended to look at mid-2000s Web 2.0 as a source of nostalgia. It was back in the day when twttr felt like people were optimistic about building a new community for the future and the possibilities were still unexplored. Poring through all the dense skeumorphic design trends of the era is like unearthing a time capsule.
Back then, not everything had been flattened to fit the needs of the app stores. Dedicated hardware existed for portable music, movies, games and photo/video. Each of these had their own particular design language and fanbase that made the world feel larger and more varied than the one-device-fits-all reality we havetoday.
Hello Herman, I like your project! I noticed that you are working on LLM tutoring projects for parts of Africa. Do you have a link to more information for that? Want help?
"Being anonymous online can inspire the worst in people."
That's certainly true. Some people have no self control and rely on authority figures to keep them in line. My view is that it's a temporary phenomenon until members of society learn to regulate themselves better.
In the UK, the sales of alcohol were deregulated a few years back. Afterward there was a period of more alcohol consumption but now the country consumes less than before. If you treat people like children they'll act like them.
i'm not oblivious to the improvements, but the nostalgia goggles always forget a lot of basic experiences.
being disconnected from dialup because someone picked up a phone, being punted from a chatroom with racist shit because rate limits and a moderation staff don't meaningfully exist. File sharing where the main effort is to rename malicious executable into whatever the newest Britney Spears album is called for mass distribution. the pop-up wars, a new remote code exploit weekly..
I could keep going with the bad parts forever, but my point is that when people talk about geocities and napster they forget about what a shitshow the rest of computing was for the majority; this didn't stop them from partaking -- it was still amazing , but it was the Wild West in a lot more ways than it even is today, and I say that as someone who still views the net in that regard.
It's good to take off the nostalgia glasses and to be honest about how things were far from perfect in the past, but I feel like people sometimes overcompensate when doing so. Frankly, things weren't that bad most of the time.
I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today.
Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost.
You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.
I am forever in search of this incredible experience I had one summer in my late teens. It’s an indescribable feeling of freedom and wonder.
School was over, I could stay up late, and I had a computer in my room with broadband. The window was open, there was a slight moist breeze flowing in, combating the cooking heat of the AMD Thunderbird 1200. A train whistles in the distance. A car passes by on occasion. I’m on IRC and the Web, discovering new communities and websites. Finding some clever flash video that I bookmark to share with my friends later on MSN Messenger (we were Canadian so we congregated on MSN, not AIM).
It’s 2am and I just discovered people make total conversions for Diablo II. I won’t be sleeping this night.
My mum dug out last year some 20yo pictures (actual pictures on glass paper) of me and my friends at a LAN party, we used to do several of those every year. I was never much into pictures but damn that felt crazy to see them.
It turned out that having the whole of society on the Internet, made it as sh*tty as, well, …the whole of society is. I’d love to see a chart of “IQ of an average Internet user, 1990-2024”.
It seems so. Part of growing up is accepting change. I would say that the internet is the best it's ever been.
We have a wealth of knowledge that is easily shared, I can make friends in a variety of shared communities much easier now, and playing games together is more accessible than ever before.
All from consumer hardware that requires very little knowledge to set up. It's great!
This. There is something timeless about the '90s internet. Personal websites were invitations to visit someone's digital home and have a look around. The designs were quirky and personal, not standardized and sleek.
except everything is this way now too... design post iPhone is a lazy subconscious push toward boring, in the guise of culture, but is really just greed stripping culture out of everything to maximize profits.
I first got online in about 1984, via JANET (the UK's Joint Academic Network). Then Bitnet, then corporate networking via DECnet, added in UUCP, finally IP in about 1987. I say all this not to show off, but to add context to what I find myself saying so often:
it wasn't better back then, you were just younger.
I think it can be both. Pop culture is never as meaningful as when you're fourteen years old, and there can be secular trends where things get better and worse.
For example, I grew up in the US during the 90s. It was a great time because I was a teenager and because the 90s were a local maximum of life in the US being good. Do teenagers in the US now have as good a time? I don't think so, in general. Did teenagers in Russia in the 90s have as good a time? Probably not Russia was having problems in the 90s.
(I hope my examples don't inflame national or generational passions; I didn't mean it that way. They were just the first examples that came to mind and they could be broadly relatable.)
Agreed. And there were plenty of ugly aspects to early Internet (and BBS etc) culture. And it was much smaller and in some ways even kind of claustrophobic compared to now.
My teens extract their own content from it. What's more curious about today is that it's not "The Internet" that is the focus -- it's so ubiquitous and not-novel that it's just a fact/part of life and blurs in with just daily socializing and consumption. Almost mundane.
Weird that CNN couldn't help inserting a race comment in a story that has nothing to do with it (case in point: we had a black kid in our group of friends doing LAN parties, and we never thought of him as black, he was just one of us, a human being whom you'd define across infinitely many dimensions, and definitely not just skin color).