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Comment by uejfiweun | Hacker News Reader

Can I ask you something?

I grew up in the 2000s. I've constantly seen people on the internet complaining about its modern state, saying the internet of the 90s was so much better, less spam, filled with smart people, etc. Basically saying that the mass influx of people is what turned the internet into the cesspool it is today.

I of course never got to experience this, so all my life I've only been able to dream about what this is like. But this Lemmy / Fediverse stuff seems promising. A discussion platform that requires technical expertise to engage in (for now) while also being completely decentralized... seems analogous to the early internet for sure.

Am I correct in this assumption? Are these platforms home to high quality discussion and little spam? If so, then I think I'd bite the bullet and try to figure out how to actually set this stuff up on my PC.

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The Internet was a place where people shared knowledge. Now it is a giant ad for shopping.

People were given the sum of human knowledge and instead of becoming more self sufficient they have become more reliant. Take for instance repair cafes, whose goal isn't to repair stuff for people but to teach people that things can be repaired which if you think about it for a bit is mind boggling.

Instead of taking advantage of knowledge and experience humanity has doubled down on denial, hatred, superstition and outright craziness. Witness the response to COVID and current political polarization happening everywhere.

Instead of sharing information, now a search of the Internet find SEO gibberish, scams, fake reviews and all manner of horrors that we never expected possible in the 80s and 90s from the Internet.

I started using the Internet in the mid-90s, back when it was still primarily a communications platform. It's now primarily an economic platform with a side dish of conflict promotion. (But of course the Internet is huge, and you can find worthwhile things and communities if you try.)

But back in the 90s (and moreso before that), the average Internet user was more technically minded. For instance, everyone on IRC had a basic sense of how NAT affected TCP connection setup and whether a private message or DCC chat would be more appropriate, and who should initiate the DCC chat. They had a sense of what a T1 line was and had a better mental model of how pieces connected together. Nowadays, the average user doesn't have to navigate technical issues and can only be trusted to know the difference between swiping left and swiping right.

This makes it easy for major services to pimp their own users and make obscene amounts of money.

That said, the dream of the 90s is alive in Lemmy and other new technologies. It would be sad if you didn't explore what's out there.

IMO you can experience a form of those good old days if you find an organically created community which doesn't care about popularity. There's a few on discords. Some on matrix. Some very small fedi instances. Smaller Lemmy boards will likely feel similar too.

It's basically the effect of people interested enough to be already connected on some level in a small group, but not trivial to find and flooded with people. Any group over 200 people losses that charm I think.

The last one I joined was a discord for a smaller podcast with maybe 20 active users and it's lots of fun.

In the 90s there was a phrase called “surf the web”. You would find a website, then click though links to different websites (usually through an affiliate/partner section on the sites menu bar) and end up in all sorts of places. You might start out looking at Dragon Ball Z gifs and end up discovering emulators and roms. You might find something cool, amazing, personal, illegal, scary, or pornographic. It was the Wild West and there was a massive sense of unguided, uncontrolled discovery.

Reminds me of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

I would love for this kind of thing to return to the web. I could see it being a fun way to search for new io games.

I don't know if holds for everyone, but I would say that it was more innocent, more intellectual, less comprehensive, and therefore less apathetic because everything hadn't "already been done".

There also was no pyramid scheme vibe because advertisement hadn't taken hold as kind of an important part of all things. Paying for hosting and thinking about like becoming viral were not concerns that I recognized then.

The Internet became corporatized and web surfing died. Search engines stopped promoting novel content, website design became homogenized, and everything became commercialized. Ironically, Hacker News with its lack of ads, niche audience, and unconventional web design is more akin to the 90s Internet experience.

In the 90s you'd go on the internet to find or share information and communicate, and when you were done you'd go back to whatever you were doing.

Today, you go on the internet and oooo cats... wikipedia lookup "polydactyl", get ads for cat toys, check to see if there are any reviews for cat toys, ... 3 hours later, you forgot what you started to do but the Amazon Prime truck is stopped at your house dropping off 17 boxes of cat stuff. And you don't own a cat.

Getting on mastodon, specifically functional.cafe absolutely reminds me of “the old internet”/bbs era. That is to say it has been delightfully nerdy! (activity pub needs to figure out support for door games though)

It was "better" like how the town you probably live in was "better" (I.e. cheaper and kinder, because it was smaller and emptier)

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