Hacker News Reader

Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

> I could gopher topics by early 90's

So you weren't a normal, mainstream, new user to the internet. You knew how to use it, you knew where to go to search.

I was the same in the 90s (minus Gopher skills), I learned about Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, etc. and became a wizard to my friends and some relatives because I could find things on the internet, didn't need to know the website address beforehand or click somewhere in AOL.

It did exist, it just wasn't accessible and generally available, nor it was a tool people knew how to use.

So domain names up to the early 2000s were pretty important to capture the mainstream market, not the Gophers.

View on HN

Actually that was very normal for a new Internet user of the time. In the early 90's there was no web as far as the public was concerned so Yahoo (1994)/Altavista (1995)/Infoseek (1994) did not exist yet. For users of the pre-1993/1994 Internet, to use it you had to learn a hodge-podge of protocols and software including UUCP, gopher, FTP, telnet, NNTP etc. since that was the Internet back then. It wasn't until online services like AOL started providing web gateways (1995/6?) when 'normal' people really started flooding onto the 'net and it took a few years longer before there were useful web frontends for the majority of services.

And it's been September ever since

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Imho the September was really kicked into overdrive with smartphone and mobile Internet adoption facilitating the social media hype.

Prior to that people would at least need to sit down and dedicate attention to whatever they were doing online at their desktop.

It required at least some technical base knowledge.

While nowadays pretty much everybody can, and will, pull out their smartphone even during very short breaks: It' all short attention span, relegated to devices were multi-tasking is way more of an hassle, which means people are also way less likely to do research on whatever they are discussing.

It's gotten to a point where in many places writing anything longer than Tweet length is considered something bad, as most peoples attention span just can't cope with long-form forum posts anymore.

I remember my school ran a contest where you had to find obscure information on the net. Things like when the inventor of the saxophone was born? You had to submit an URL so using the library was not an option. It was insanely hard, nowadays it's just one wikipedia click away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com