Comment by rootusrootus
11 days ago
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.
This is the root cause. "AI and Bots" are just two of the many symptoms
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.
>Many disparate private/semi-private groups while the "public" internet becomes overloaded with AI slop.
And eventually someone is going to come up with a search engine for Discord, and the cycle will start all over.
Discord could probably become the new internet if they introduced a URN scheme and permitted folks to host web pages.
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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.)
> Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.
Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
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All of this still exists today though. It hasn't disappeared, it has only been drowned.
If you want to find it again, change your search engine. Use wiby.me, or search.marginalia.nu. Subscribe to RSS feeds of sites you find interesting, and go from there. Hop on gemini. Subscribe to some activitypub accounts (you don't even need an account for that). Communal IRC servers still exist, forums still exist, independent emails still exist.
Stop falling for the overall doomism HN is so quick to fall for, start doing and living what you want
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That's a pretty narrow view. My Internet in the 90s and early 2000s was on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Network, Yahoo! Mail and phpBB web forums hosted by random people with pictures hosted on PhotoBucket. Plenty centralized.
The technology doesn't matter, it's changing all the time. The difference is the size of the community, and the barriers to entry. If these communities were easy to discover and join and hard to be booted out from, they wouldn't be protected from The Slop. It used to be just getting on the Internet was the barrier. Now we need new barriers: paywalls and word-of-mouth and moderation.
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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.
You're correct of course leptons, but do please give credence to important shorthand. As I've put it before, the Internet is the battleground. Ground is not necessarily "neutral". It favours certain forces and tactics. See the "Nine Situations" [0] We used to occupy type-5 (open ground) which was also mostly type-2 (dispersive). We are now on "serious" and "difficult" ground. Therefore the environment itself is hostile. Most of what people commonly think of as "The Internet" - that's not your friend any more.
[0] https://suntzusaid.com/book/11
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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.
> When people say 'the old internet' they are referring to a very self selective/elite group.
And that's what made it fun I guess
> 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?