Comment by CSMastermind
11 days ago
It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.
11 days ago
It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.
I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
I've said it before and say it again, I firmly think AOL was just ahead of its time.
Bring it back. Charge me 10 or 20 a month. Give me the walled off chatrooms, forums, IM, articles, keywords, search, etc. Revamp it, make it modern. And make a mobile app.
Everyone wanted a free and open Internet, until AI and the bots ruined it all.
> until AI and the bots ruined it all
Well... advertising as a business model ruined it all. They get paid for getting page views, so the business model optimizes for maximum page views at minimum cost of creation. This is the end result of what Google and Facebook have spent the last 20 years building.
But I'm sure the engineers who built all this have very nice yachts, so it's all fine.
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With every passing day I basically think this is going to be the future of the internet. Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.
It's largely already happening in places like Discord.
I think the first company that can capture what Discord has but is not wrapped in that "gamer aesthetic" ui/ux is going to do really well.
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I don't think it works today. You have walled communities in Discord and messaging apps, but if you are looking also for the degree of anarchy in those days, today we know that your everyday person can make money off the internet but you didn't know that then, and I think that colors a lot of the experience.
i think the problem with revamping Q-Link/AOL into the be-all end-all for everyone (thats human) youre gonna hafta pump the prime with AI chatbots to give the appearance of lots of people to draw you in, kinda like how reddit admins pumped the prime by making tons of posts early on. just a little light treason.
All it would take is a not phone friendly internet. Just a slight barrier to entry changes the dynamics quite a bit.
It still exists. Currently it looks like Patreons and their associated communities, long-running web forums, small chatrooms on platforms like Discord or Facebook or Instagram, and so on. Small communities, with relatively high barriers to entry.
That's not the same Internet.
Patreon, forums, Discord, Facebook, Instagram and so on are all centralized.
With the Internet of the 90s, discussion happened with decentralized Usenet (owned by nobody) with more-focused discussion happening on mailing lists (literally owned by whoever was smart enough to get Majordomo compiled and running).
Email was handled by individual ISPs or other orgs instead of funneled through a handful of blessed providers like Gmail.
Real-time chat was distributed on networks of IRC servers that were individually operated by people, not corporations.
Quickly publishing a thing on the web meant putting some files in ~/public_html, not selecting a WordPress host or using imgur.
Ports 80 and 25 were not blocked by default.
Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
One could construct an argument that supports either way being better than the other, but the the Internet of today is not the same thing as it was a quarter of a century ago.
(Anyone can make a "discord server," but all that means is that they've placed some data in some corpo database that they can never actually own or control.)
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Would you pay a nominal amount (like 5 cents or 25 cents) to consume one piece of good, ad-free content, assuming that there was no login, no account, no friction, etc? You click, you read, and 5 cents is magically transferred from you to the writer?
I would. But I've asked a lot of people who say "no, I don't want to pay when I can read it for free. I don't mind the ads that much."
> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century.
I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience of pre-Internet era.
Internet is lead of our time.
> where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me.
It's great to read these words. People are starting to get it. The Internet is not for you, it's against you.
"The internet" isn't for or against anything, it's just a vast computer network. It's the humans with an agenda that exploit the internet (specifically the web) that are against you.
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> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
I did, and...well, let's be careful how we look back at it.
Punch the monkey? Ad supported 'free' internet that literally put an adbar at the top of your browser at all times? Dreadfully slow loads of someone's animated construction sign GIF? Waiting for dial up to connect after 20 tries? Tracking super pixels? Java web applets? Flash? Watching your favorite ISP implode or get bought up? To say nothing of the pre-Google search results (I miss the categories though).
I have plenty of good memories from those days, but it still had plenty of problems. And it wasn't exactly a bastion of research material either unless you really went digging or paid for access.
It may be a minority, but you're not alone.
the problem with that is not the payment, it's that you will only be sharing it with people similarly willing to pay for a walled garden. I'm guessing most of what we're nostalgic for was created by people who wouldn't be up for that
It was created by people that
1. could afford a computer back then and saw the utility of owning one. 2. had access to the internet, so either in college, a 'tech' company, or ties to some local collective that provided access.
When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.
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> I'm a little sad for anyone who didn't get to experience the Internet of the twentieth century. It was a unique point in time.
Sadly, they won't know what they were missing. It'll be the new normal
Some asshole tech apologist is probably getting ready to post that section from Plato where Socrates complains about writing any minute now.
Of course, that asshole is oblivious to the fact that most if not all of us probably just don't understand what Socrates was missing, so he's just showing his ignorance and stupidity.
> I'm ready to pay for a walled garden where the incentives are aligned towards me, instead of against me. I know that puts me in a minority, but I'm tired of the advertising 'net.
The problem is that, even if you try to do that, the incentives are probably still aligned against you, just maybe less blatantly.
Just look at how many formerly ad-free paid services are adding ads, and how hardware users literally own acts against their interests by pushing ads in their faces (e.g. smart TVs).
The guy who runs the walled garden will always be tempted to get some extra cash by adding ad revenue to your subscription feed, or cut costs by replacing human curated stuff with AI slop (maybe cleaned up a bit).
Isn't it worse knowing what was lost instead of never knowing how good things actually were?
I only just put it together but Peter Watt's Rifters series is some epic earth grimdark hard-sci-fi, the first taking place as practically horror, confined deep under water.
But my point is, the latter books have this has amazing post-internet, just a ravaged chaotic Wildlands filled with rabid programs & wild viruses. Packets staggering half intact across the virtualscape, hit by digital storms. Our internet isn't quite so amazing, but I see the relationship more subtly with where we have gone, with so so so many generated sites happy to regurgitate information poorly at you or to sell you a slant quietly. Bereft of real sites, real traffic. Watts is a master writer. Maelstrom.
First book Starfish is free. https://www.rifters.com/real/STARFISH.htm
Thanks for the recommendation and free link!
Another book on my reading list!
> It really is a werid feeling remembering the internet of my youth and even my 20s and knowing that it will never exist again.
User facing ability to whitelist and blacklist websites in search results, ability to set weights for websites you want to see higher in search results.
Spamlists for search results, so even if you don't have knowledge/experience to do it yourself, you can still protect them from spam.
It's recreation of e-mail situation, not because it's good, but because www is getting even worse than e-mail.
A mesh network on top of IP with an enforcable license agreement that prohibits all commercial use would suffice to get the old net back. Bonus points if no html/css/js is involved but some sane display technology instead.
No way. What you are describing is Gemini, but even more niche - a place which is explicitly walled-off from the "big net", which only nostalgic people with right technical skills and a desire to jump some hoops can get to.
This is not going to work - as time progresses, there will be less and less nostalgic people who are willing to put up with that complexity. And "non-commercial" part will ensure that there _never_ be an option to say: "I am tired of fixing my homeserver once again, I am going to put up my site to (github|sourceforge|$1 hosting) and forget about it".
Compare to early web. First thing that came to my mind was Bowden's Hobby Circuits site [0]. It's designed for advanced beginners - simple projects, nice explanations. And there are no hoops to jump through - I've personally sent the links to it to many people via forums, private emails, and so on. It apparently went down in 2023, but while it was still up, I remember regularly finding it from google searches and via links from other pages.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220429084959/http://www.bowden...
Without most of what makes the internet useful, sadly.
I'm not sure I like your parent's idea, but it isn't like the regular internet would go away... when you want useful, go there.
I wouldn't mind a modern take on geocities sorta system. Where: (1) You can make a webpage that could be about whatever the bleep you wanted it to be about. (2) Only allowed a reduced subset of web technologies. (3) That was free from any advertising or commerce/sales. (4) Was only available to individuals or businesses no larger than closely-held corporation. (5) had clear limitation on AI uses. (6) Had a complete index, categorized and tagged, of all the sites available.
But if I am being honest, that is just the nostalgia for the old internet talking.
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