Why does the article start with a false premise that "internet used to be fun" and "bygone era". Come on, if you don't want to follow Twitter drama just go to some other place. Ugh.
I miss the indie internet, before big corps and big tech started taking over.
I miss IRC and forums and personal websites. I miss the time when Digg was new and hadn't taken over, and memes weren't the most upvoted content. When websites weren't all Javascript and Google wasn't Yahoo.
MySpace and LiveJournal and Xanga were never as sterile as Facebook and Instagram.
The internet that appealed to the Technorati got put on dopamine-fueled monetization rails and turned into a bulk commodity that maximizes engagement over the population.
Reading that now, it sounds like I'm describing some kind of crazy sci-fi utopia that couldn't even get published because it's too unbelievable.
`nc realmsofdespair.com 4000`
A CLI interface with no readline support; an MMO where you need to manually save your game to avoid losing progress whenever the network glitches for a second; very nostalgic :D
Perhaps when things are small and the people can relate to most of the people directly, they're able to act in a more altruistic manner.
When we explore this thought experiment further, it has pretty bad consequences for politicians at a national or global stage.
The early 2000s had so much promise. The rise of reasonably easy to use blogging platforms, RSS, and web companies that were interested in playing in that world of distributed independent communication. Even Google was a different beast back then. It was the perfect balance: faster paced and more interactive than the days of manually editing files on GeoCities, but still mostly driven by indies doing things because they enjoyed it...instead of the cynical, marketing driven hellscape centered on siloed social media sites.
My pet hypothesis is that we had another Eternal September with the rise of the smartphone. Some of that amazing stuff is still out there, but it's drowned out by the firehose of corporatism and "normal" people. You can even see it with the shift in web sites aiming to be primarily consumed on a phone screen instead of a regular computer.
The good stuff is much harder to discover than it used to be.
Even before Google, if you were persistent enough you would eventually find what you were looking for deep in the Lycos / Alta Vista search results. I have tried doing that a few times recently with both Duck Duck Go (Bing?) and Google, and past page 2 the results seem to devolve into an unstructured morass (no matching terms - but it might be relevant... somehow?) in ways that were much more depressing than searches of old.
IRC didn't go anywhere. LiveJournal is still there. JavaScript-free pages still exist. What has changed is the network of users has found them wanting and left those spaces ghost towns because they don't feel as good to use, or they're too complicated, or they haven't received any UX love beyond "Bare minimum viable product."
I don't miss that. I don't miss a system that excludes users.
I do. Not every community needs to be inclusive. Meritocratic communities with onboarding rails that are non-discriminatory are important in many places.
Do immunologists appreciate armchair antivaxers? Social media has given everyone a soap box to perpetuate damaging memes, and it makes our work harder.
I can't use Reddit to the extent I used to.
I don't think it's necessarily true that places like that went away in the large. Certainly some have shriveled up. And discoverability for them is about as challenging as it always has been---major search engines aren't going to index them at the top of most queries because major search engines are targeting what the average user is searching for and most popular results. But many simply didn't grow larger while the rest of the internet exploded with some billion new people.
With that loss of diversity comes loss of communities and cultures. CollegeHumor used to have all its videos on its own site. If you liked the site, you created an account and interacted with the community, which had its own culture as you wouldn't behave as you normally would on FB or Twitter.
With the pivot to FB, that's gone. Now, it's no longer a friendly conversation between people who have CH in common, it's a free-for-all comments section featuring everyone from spambots, trolls and random users who stumbled across the video and just have to add their 2c.
Numerous other forums and blogs, all with their own communities have suffered this fate. That is why the Internet isn't fun anymore.
Replying a bit transversally here, but I was on IRC 18 years ago and still am every day. Any game you have played before can be played now, easier than before, heck we are just organizing Worms I tournament. Youtube is still full of funny stuff and reddit communities exist, RSS didn't go anywhere and there are many many hobbyists blogs out there still.
Sure stuff got piled on top of all that but nowadays it's easier, cheaper and more accessible to do what we were doing "back then".
Yahoo search would bring up sites on geocities, or small indy sites, for pretty much any topic.
For instance, in the mid 90's you could search for the band "Green Day" on yahoo, and get all sorts of personal fan pages. Now it's 100% corporate crap results.
Independent users no longer have the 'reach' as the corporate users do. We used to share cool things via word of mouth on IRC or AIM or ICQ. Now people just share memes on facebook.
I still share cool stuff with groups of friends via hangouts, irc and iMessage. I find a lot of cool stuff right here on HN too.
As for memes, yeah, I can’t argue that mass appeal jokes bubble up to the top.
I ran a website and accompanying forum from early highschool to well into college, about 8 years or so. It was mostly a large circle of friends but it organically attracted randoms from all walks of life. Once Reddit and Facebook took over, that was that - no one used it anymore, and certainly no one stumbled upon it.
It's not just growing up that changed the thinking on this (ie. "the good old days"), because I think the internet was still awesome in 2012, and I was well into my 20s at that time. That was only 8 years ago - it's not nostalgia speaking here.
Sounds like modern search engines know the score. I'm kind of kidding.. only kind of. If you search for non-corporate content you get more non-corporate results, although admittedly less than in the past.