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Hacker News Hacker News>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.
You can still go down memory lane but you quickly realize you are romanticizing a past that did its time. I pretty much stay away from the worst of social media and the internet is a fairly calm place for me and a tool I wouldn't give back.
> While there may have been some money in it for a few select games, most were not profitable - they were created for other reasons, such as genuine intrigue in mechanics, users' fun, and curiosity.
2007 places us well into World of Warcraft territory. Online games were already a juggernaut and highly profitable.
The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease.
I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make it even easier for the eventualality that people are going to want these abilities back. The ability to create spaces that are yours. Establish a mailbox that's yours. A social platform that's yours. Collaboration tools that are yours. A messaging platform that is yours, all running on hardware you own.
Building on the backbone of tor as the founding principles for the future.
I like the the term stable diffusion to describe this...(not the ai) we need stable diffusion of the simple idea that one can create their own spaces in cyberspace again.
10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers...
Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up
Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere!
Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves, Gator, you'd have half your screen taken up by add-on toolbars in your browser.
Your system crashing at least once a day. Compared to the 16-bit days, system crashes are rare.
Terrible streaming. Nothing like RealPlayer on a modem, where it sounded like a clock radio placed deep inside a steel 55 gallon drum.
Laptop battery life that was measured in minutes. If you had more than 2 hours of battery life...
We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat.
It never left a mark, regardless of how hard we hit it. Why don't we produce that quality anymore?
I would hazard that given the inflation adjusted price of a mid-range TV appears to have dropped about 99 percent since 1975, if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for a TV as we actually do here in the year 2026, we could have one made out of bulletproof glass too :)
In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.
It ran pretty well from what I recall.
https://boomkat.com/artists/magic-lantern
I also use Linux exclusively at home, with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole, so I don't see anywhere near as much friction as the average user.
The internet is still kind of the same. Yes - some IRC networks changed but people think that facebook/discord/reddit/tiktok are the center of internet. No - just go to the real web - it still exists out there. IRC is still here, and they do not ask about your age/id in order to enter and chat. BTW HN is one of these places where you are free too. Probably when Paul starts demanding my ID in order to post my dull sarcasm here I will move, but for now it is a pretty nice place to be.
Which begs the obvious question - to those whose internet values are formed in the current era, will this feel like a lost "golden era" 30 years from now?
It's a bit of a shame it went that deep. What started as a fun new technology seems to have turned into a vortex that just absorbed everything (attention spans, social skills, overall IQ) and everyone (we're now more alone and isolated behind screens), save for the few who were smart enough to protect themselves.
I wonder how things would've turned out if internet had stayed a place for fun, exploration, and freedom.
Now days, I don't have Facebook, I don't play games, and the only forum I call home is this one. Times have changed, but so have I. At least I can reminisce on the good times.
I miss the feel of the internet I grew up with...I don't think it's coming back. However, I do think we can make a new one.
Finally, no one owned the internet. Sure, we can get into semantics of the DNS system and infrastructure, but the web - and specifically, content - quickly became decentralized after the early stages until the recent centralization of content.
I just miss being able to visit the web, find personal content from fellow internet explorers, and not spend the whole time avoiding the pitfalls of the modern web.
It was all new for us and it was "ours", finally we had a place to ourselves and then the "others" showed up. It's fine. There are still places on the net to mine that dopamine.
I remember switching ISPs on the regular, panic.net, akula.net, earthlink, etc to just get a better ping in Quake. Then my clan mate in Bensonhurst discovered that one could get a double ISDN line through Nynex for $80/m if you pretended to be a business and all was again well. T1 lines at the time were $1K or more IIRC.
Switching back to RSS and Linux made me a much happier person.
Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.
It was ever thus; so shall it be.
> Listening to music
Isn’t that just their choice? The most tedious it can get is if you want to stay completely offline, then for acquisition you have to buy the CD or Vinyl in person, which makes it about exactly as tedious as it used to be before the internet. Listening offline? Extremely easy. Works the same way it always had, but the software is better.
There are a lot more examples like this, where the tedious part is simply how it used to be, and using the internet instead is making it easier.
It doesn’t become tedious, it always was, and the internet simply offers an easier alternative. Granted, there are some other examples on there, but not that many.
They shortly after say "joking aside", but that seems like a lot of text for a "joke".
> We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away
That's how I feel about the internet. Fun while it lasted, but I think AI is going to keep diluting authenticity and intention at scale until that "why bother" feeling reaches critical mass and we try something else. Maybe it will kick more people offline into physical meet-ups and group hobbies.
In the old days, people were physically connected, so if you made hateful remarks, you could face physical threats. But now, it's hard to make those physical threats over the internet. And many people think of their online self and their real-life self as separate. So it was harder to express certain kinds of hate beyond the typical local community hate speech, and hate speech was just one agenda item that could be discussed.
But now, even hate speech has become fragmented. And as hate became fragmented, people became too willing to pay money to those who agree with their opinions. It became easier to pay people who say what you want to hear.
On top of that, in the old days, if you were a minority in a local community, you had to bend your opinions somewhat for the majority in order to be heard. Unlike the old society where you had to tone down your voice to create a single unified voice, now you can speak out even if it's unpopular. The only catch is that it's now subject to a different metric: popularity.
And the generational divide in internet usage has also changed a lot.
For example, in the old days, the internet was scarce, so people had the sense that their online self and their real-life self were the same. That's why internet etiquette was important. But these days, there's a binary divide: the internet is the internet, and reality is reality. People think that even if they do something stupid online, it's separate from real life.
Damaging physical infrastructure is visible, but polluting the internet is invisible. Yet once someone starts it, there's no end to it. And the broken windows theory applies to advertising too. Most websites run ads, and many of those ads are low-quality porn ads, which easily create a mindset of 'this place is fair game for attack.'
In the past, the internet was less widely available and limited to a small elite, so it was relatively clean. The reason is simple: because only a few people used it, they were socially traceable, and their online reputation actually affected their real-life reputation. But as everyone gained access, it became harder to track identities online, and that changed everything.
It's no one's fault. It just seems like a natural shift of the times
Any rational explanation for this?
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
A lot of his gripes about 2026 internet seem quite fixable - if you don't like Windows, Chrome, Google junk use Mac/Linux, Firefox, DuckDuckGo or similar with ublock and a cookie pop up stopper.
> You open your default browser - most likely Chrome.
> …your browser (most likely Google) will show you an AI summary…
> Once you solve all that, there's a cookie banner waiting for you that gives you two options:
> Oh wait, you're interrupted again. This site requires age verification to view its contents.
Those are your problems. Why not use Linux (or even macOS), Firefox, Kagi, Consent-O-Matic, and avoid websites with stupid captchas and age verification? (Not always possible for government and banking sites, but you use to need to be in person)
There are still forums, and people either discussing how to run them or setting up new ones today.
There are still personal blogs out there, and some are even bringing back things like blogrolls and webrings.
Heck, there's arguably a bit of a trend to try and recapture some of this era for a modern audience now. Sites like Neocities let you host personal websites like you would in the 90s, and I saw a human curated website directory for gaming blogs pop up on Bluesky the other day, complete with a webring you could add to your site once featured in it.
The issue isn't that this stuff isn't out there, it's that most people have chosen social media and big tech platforms over independently run websites and communities. If more people were like the author, social media could be made almost entirely irrelevant.
It's possible to live online without social media and apps, just as it is to support mum and pop businesses rather than Walmart or Amazon. It's just the majority of the population seem to prefer the convenience offered by the mass market solutions.
Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.
And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness.
It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always.
I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the successor arises. How will it even look like? Will it be using IPv12?
___
Man, I wish reticulum wasn't broken by design. It has so many cool future ideas, but pinning all that on a hard dependency to crypto that _will_ be broken is just so dumb.
That and lack of hardening against really any sort of malicious actor.
Someone please build reticulum with those things fixed.
It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing + without the Lord Jesus Christ denying your connection before marriage.
Every generation can say this. It's been a constant evolution since inception.
90s - mid 2000s:
- Pre social media days, you visited home pages. - Chat was done via IRC, ICQ, what have you. - Forums, news groups, etc. were the places to discuss things with others.
mid 2000s - early 2010s:
- Chat moved from IRC to MSN Messenger and the likes. - Social media (SoMe) took off. Started with lots of smaller SoMe sites, which were eventually made obsolete or acquired by big players. In the end Facebook dominated all. - Media sites (Youtube, photo hosting, etc.) start taking up more space and focus. - Smartphones are introduced, apps become a thing.
Early 2010s - late 2010s:
- Forums, news groups, etc. start to go extinct as owners and creators migrate to SoMe platforms. - Personal websites die off. - Everything becomes more and more walled garden. Everything starts requiring user, log-in, etc. - Mass M&A spree consolidates products and services. - The "linear" internet starts to die, as the big tech wants to monetize your attention completely. Everything starts to feel like some random feed. - Buying digital products starts to take a tumble.
Late 2010s - now:
- Everything feels smaller, yet there is more content. All products are owned by the same players. - It feels like there's a life-or-death battle for your attention. Most content feels like it should take tops 30 seconds to consume. Feeds feel like some stochastic hell where everything is in the extreme present. - Content seems to have underlying motive, the more controversial the more you see it. - You own nothing. Everything is a subscription, everything has a pricing plan. - Dark patterns is the way of life now. It feels like you're interacting more with mechanisms made to make you buy something, than people. It feels relentless.
Could probably add another era for the past 2 years, but this covers most of what I'm feeling.
Inside the walled gardens there are other walled gardens for humans, but the closeness you had before feels gone.
There are still niche blogs and even phlogs.
And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to connect to modern networks such as Discord, Mastodon, Telegram and whatnot.
On games, well... JS and Itch.io ate Flash and indie/shareware games. But even today people creates hackroms (esp. Pokémon) and games for RPG Maker 2k/2k3 which they can be run under EasyRPG anywhere.
On loggin' in today:
- No Windows. Slackware in a NUC with a debblobbed kernel from Linux-Libre, propietary packages with Flatpak for corporate crap. OFC that's the work/HD movie player/libre 'high end' games, for the rest I use an n270 netbook with hyperbola.
- I update when I want, but slapt-get and flatpak do everything. On the netbook, I can spend ages without updating anything.
- No ads on any $GNULINUX or $BSD distro/branch.
- Dillo on the netbook, Librewolf on the NUC, Crapium because of $CORPORATE, isolated under bubblewrap and a separate user account. Is not my computing technically, so it's 'GNU kosher'.
- No browser nagging, ever.
- I have a either https://wiby.me or a blank homepage.
- I disabled remote searching for the URL bar.
- I don't use Google. DDG, searx and the like.
- Dillo and a hosts file cuts down both ads and cookies/trackers: https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts. On the NUC, using a browser with UBo today it's digitally suicidal.
- For news, I avoid all mainstream political bullshit except for:
https://sciencealert.com for good pop Science news
The Conversation's Spanish feed for Nature/Environment and Science news.
Finally, there's:
gopher://magical.fish <- huge portal, the news site it's great
gopher://sdf.org <- blogs in gopher
gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn <- check the Gopher lawn
gopher://i-logout.cz/1/bongusta <- updated blogsI would say that advertising took over the consumer web ushering in censorship and extreme word policing to satisfy family (ad) friendly content - starting in 2010ish with influencer marketing.
(Anyone remember Klout?)
By 2016, with Trump and DEI and everything else (ZIRP), Old Money took over the industry side - hiring, equity, liquidity.
At some point tech jobs became all white collar. All “IC” (then coined) were being funneled into generalist full stack engineer increasing the fungibility of labor to a point you even could do leveling and layoffs.
I digress, we as technologists and creatives need to be constantly making new ways, new things, and staying ahead, so we can always have the golden years because we’re always operating at the cutting edge.
Like it or not, we are currently in a time with AI that many will look back on fondly.
Someday someone will write “the AI I grew up with doesn’t exist” and it really won’t, once everyone else really gets their hands on it, it pervades industry, and becomes curricularized into whatever the markets want.
The first thing about the Internet is that you should know by now how to use it, at least as well as it knows how to use you. If not, you will be subjected to the Internet, not using it but being used. The web has evolved to a point where you need to remove a few layers before you find the actual web.
Don't use predatory social media. Don't use Chrome. Don't use Windows. Those three things will get you 90% of the way back. The rest is using the Fediverse, the small web, moving away from Google and subscription shit like Netflix and the rest of the business who trade with your time.
Learn to identify the things that are actively trying to profit off of you and don't use them, even if they're made to be extraordinarily convenient. The web you like is still there, it just takes some effort and know-how to get to.
I have never done online dating, even though I was a teenager when it became a thing. It always seemed to be a complete horror show, and even today those are the stories I hear from people.
I miss the niche bespoke websites and forum communities of the years past, but there’s nothing holding us back from creating and maintaining spaces like that these days, aside from spam and AI slop. Some are still out there.
The shift is mainly attributable to lowering the bar to access as cellphones with browsers came on: it became such a valuable consumer platform, rather than a place for creators, hobbyists, and those with a nerdy curiosity to congregate.
I hope the pendulum swings back the other way someday, but I fear ‘dead internet theory’ may be the current endpoint of least resistance.
You're not alone. The internet we built doesn't exist anymore.
When I talk with fellow graybeards, the sentiment is universally the same: This isn't what we built. This wasn't the intent. This isn't what we worked so hard for. This isn't what was supposed to happen.
Easily 90% of the graybeards I know who were involved in the early days have largely given up on the internet. They use the new breed of "essential" technologies like smart phone apps to talk to their doctor, or online bill payments. But they don't have a lot of internet use because they're just not interested in it anymore.
They're also at the age when their interests are more focused on real-life things like families, and increasingly taking up the same real-life hobbies they used to make fun of online.
Maybe they're just burned out after dozens and dozens of hype cycles.† But for the most part, I think they've just given up hope.
† Just last night, I saw an article in a 1980's computer magazine about a company that came out with what we could call "AR" glasses to project a screen in you field of vision so you could compute on the go without a monitor. Nothing in technology is new anymore.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
The connected, small community internet still exists.
The article comes off as kind of a curmudgeonly old man yelling at clouds.
More nostalgia bait… I hope one day I get downvote privileges for posts.
Rubbish, MSN Messenger was never cool
Next, use Firefox or Iceweasel with Ublock Origin and a useragent changer. Disable the spammy shit, but there's less of it.
For phones, run Graphene. Hands down.
Focus on Fediverse applications. Twitter -> Mastodon. Instagram -> Pixelfed. Reddit -> Lemmy. YouTube -> Peertube. Various chat -> Matrix (but its not good). Various search engines -> SearXNG.
And old stuff still exists. IRC is still a thing. Gopher still exists.
You can also run your discord chats, Facebook, Instagram, etm. Just run them through a web browser, and never let them see any apps.
Its easy to be all defeatist and shouty-at-clouds, and 'back in the old days'. They'll never come again. Instead, its all our jobs to MAKE the current place friendly to us and ours.
I have independently dated it to that same year.
Two things happened at least near that time: (1) mobile phones began to eclipse desktops as the primary devices for interaction online, and (2) social media started to wholesale adopt algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, and hard-core addiction engineering.
The doom scrolling era started on or around 2012.
This was also when the looniest forms of "alt-right" and "woke warrior" stuff took over, and I blame algorithmic feeds for that. Rage bait and crazy divisive opinions maximize engagement, so that's what the algorithm is going to learn to boost. Algorithms amplified all the dumbest and craziest opinions across the entire political landscape and sidelined rational thought. Gotta keep people on the site/app. People don't slow down to look at good drivers. They slow down to stare at a wreck.
Along with algorithms, I think the mobile form factor itself is to blame. Small screen, slow typing, limited nerfed OS that is better for consumption than creation. It's generally a much more limited interaction than what a large screen PC with a real OS gives you, and a lot of the more information-rich early Internet doesn't translate well to a phone. It encourages brief, scattered, disjointed, low-information modes of communication or just consumption of "content."
I think that's another reason online discourse got dumb. Dumb opinions work well when interactions are brief and attention spans are short. You get memes, slogans, and sound bites, not long form nuanced deep discourse.
Then half of the other half would be solved by taking some agency back: self-host stuff.
I can disconnect my LAN from my router --which I often do-- and be fully operational. I can dev. I've got servers, VMs, containers, etc. I can rip audio CDs I own, I can play my music offline (I also have Qobuz: they're not mutually exclusive), I can watch movies offline (I have a lot of family movies and I know a friend who's sailing the digital high-seas), I can model 3D parts to fix stuff around the house than I then 3D print --all fully done offline.
My car, which is an incredibly comfy high-end luxury car, has no Internet connection. It's got its own memory for music files: no need to be connected.
And I don't always leave home with my phone. My phone has got two apps installed: the mandatory state-related ID thing (sad but this one I need) and one app for my stocks broker 2FA. And that's it. I don't believe in smartphone apps. Heck, I don't believe in smartphones: tiny, inferior, computing devices that are really more spies than (underperforming) computers.
You don't need to be a victim of Microsoft and you're not forced to waste your life on a phone that spies on you.
I never had any Meta account: like is better without Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. I use Telegram: 1 billion monthly active users now. Sure, it's not that better but at least it's not from mediocre Meta.
Really: give Microsoft the middle finger once and for all. Give the Zuck the middle finger. And spend less time on your phone.
Install Linux. If you're anything of a techie, do yourself a favor and run a server at home, try to host some stuff on it: it's never been easier. Doesn't even need to be a real server with ECC: a NUC will do. Heck, a Pi may do (although I'd advice buying a used Xeon with ECC).
Life's already going to feel better.
And I'm no luddite: I've got a sweet setup, with desktops, laptops, servers, NUCs and Pi (lots of Pi) at home.
It's just that you don't have to be a slave to the big tech slavers.