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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It's not a false premise for many of us.

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.

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When I was growing up, I played on MUD games, which were text-based massively multiplayer games 100% free to play, with no ads or any other kind of monetization, with full staffs of admins, programmers (!!), level designers, and moderators, all 100% volunteers.

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.

Realms Of Despair (http://www.smaug.org/) is still running - last major update 2002, last update at all 2010 :P

`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

Ah, that's one of the main MUDs I played. I even built an area there. I did tons of runs there (even participated in successful runs on Hastur and Divine Retribution) until I got balzhur'd for cheating :P (I was just a high school kid back then).

Wonderful experiences still exist (for many transformative), they just have less reach than corporate cash cows unfortunately

It really does sound like a utopia. I was part of that community as well.

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.

Speaking of Technorati...the site Technorati. "The Web We Lost" pretty much sums up what I miss: https://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

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.

> Some of that amazing stuff is still out there, but it's drowned out by the firehose of corporatism and "normal" people.

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.

I have to be honest; I think a lot of this rhetoric (not just from this poster, but in general) smells like "I miss being in charge of a wonky system that was hard for people who didn't specialize in understanding it to use."

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 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.

And those places still exist. The various networks reachable with an IRC client are in that category. Hacker News is in that category. But they are never going to grow as big as Facebook or Reddit specifically because they do ask their participants to put effort in. And they are no longer the only game in town.

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.

You miss the old system that was exclusive to others because the inclusion of all these people has had the effect of excluding from participating to the extent that you used to?

I was on a neighborhood association board in an arts/music community. Whenever we talked about a new business coming there was a core group that constantly complained about how they wanted the neighborhood to go back to the way it was. After a while, I realized what they really wanted was for their lives to go back to the way it was. So much of their identity was attached to the neighborhood that any change was an attack on them personally. I feel the Internet is that way for many.

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