Ask HN: I miss the internet of the 90s/00s. What should I do?

I've accepted that we kind of lost the net to the money people and bureaucrats. Mid-late 90's it really was a frontier full of adventurous nerds. I would spend entire weekends on Efnet learning and experimenting with a tight group of people. Since a parallel non-commercial web has never taken off (and VR fizzled) I've ended up adventuring outdoors, the old school way. It's less intellectual but triggers similar feelings of discovery. There's a lot of experimentation and improvisation once you get into things like ski mountaineering because something always goes wrong. The camaraderie is also strong.

Another alternative is simply Science, if you can handle the barrier to entry.

steve_adams_86 · a year ago

I like your point about the outdoors. My best adventures happen there these days. One of my most recent hobbies is using a fine net to capture microfauna from random bodies of water and checking it out with my microscope. It sounds lame but my god, I’m enthralled by what I find in there. Every time there’s something new. I’ve been writing a blog post about it for weeks but I can’t finish because I keep finding cool new stuff I want to write about. Maybe I need to do an ongoing series, haha.

I also started cleaning urban creeks and streams (with permission from my city) and made a little project out of it. It’s related to my business, but primarily just a volunteer project I enjoy. Definitely find some weird stuff. It’s a lot of fun just discovering new spots and pulling trash out of nature though.

I don’t think that’s a good idea for anyone but the possibilities are pretty much inexhaustible for a lot of people. Outside is big.

trevett · a year ago

That's funny I'm also setting up a home lab and buying a vintage microscope (state of the art 1999 from auction) to look at the creatures living in my pond. There are always new avenues.

rchaud · a year ago

> Since a parallel non-commercial web has never taken off

There's Neocities, but it's kind of a graveyard as well.

throaway89 · a year ago

Yeah, I was always a high-achieving, intellectual kid, and I've been really struggling as an adult to recapture that same love of learning. I think maybe some of it is actually a love of adventure and discovering new and interesting, exciting things. Not necessarily academic or intellectual pursuits. The Internet used to provide so much of that, it just doesn't anymore.

I think the solution is to be the change you want to see.

Lately a few friends and I have been switching back to basics of the olden days and enjoying it a lot. Our websites are hosted from home servers again (although my personal site is still on digital ocean… I’ll get to it), we don’t have analytics or ads in our apps anymore (not that anyone cares, I’ve got like 50 users across two apps), and we’ve stopped using social media. We’ve got a simple forum we share that’s hosted on my friend’s server. We’re actively trying to cultivate the internet experience we miss. Does it make a difference in the scheme of things? Not really. We could almost replace our forum with WhatsApp or Discord. But in our participation in the internet, it feels pretty good compared to say 5 years ago.

The pandemic really spurred out unhappiness with the way things have become. It’s still a choice to use the internet like we used to, for the most part. It’s affordable to build and host sites with no ads. You can still have an IRC or bulletin board-like experience. It’s all there still, but you have to choose to use it.

The experimentation part is all about doing things instead of thinking about things, and seeking out people doing the same. Experimentation is an outcome of action. Ideas come first of course, but you need to build and try things out and see what needs to come next. A lot of my friends get stuck in thinking mode (and I do too), but the solution is invariably to just DO something and follow through. Don’t worry if what you’re doing is high value or necessary or whatever. You’ll spend less time doing it and finding out than you would otherwise worrying about possibilities and not doing anything.

It's hard with so many distractions and with so many ideas already being executed on by massive companies with deep, deep pockets. The trick is to not care. Who cares. I don’t care. Explore what interests you. Cultivate curiosity and wonder and use it as intrinsic motivation. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing or has already done. Find other people like this, and I think that element of experimentation will return to your life. It certainly has in mine. It’s not quite the same as 20 years ago, but it’s there.

mips_avatar · a year ago

One thing I recently started doing is not caring about what I "should" be doing when I program. I used to love coding up random sites in basic html javascript with a few jQuery calls. But I was told I "should" be using react js, node js, hosting on specific cloud providers instead of a vps. I'm not saying all the new tools are bad, but I think the problem with the modern web, is it's less about building what you want and much much more about building what is considered "best practice". I think if you want adventures in the web, just start building janky weird stuff. AI is a help in that if you know what to ask for. Just have fun.

This is a great point. Back in the early internet days, that stuff we enjoyed was proper garbage on the inside. It was the ugliest stuff I ever saw. But it worked and we loved it.

I’d rather have garbage code I love using than best practices I’m not particularly interested in working on or using.

A friend of mine is such a pro at slapping stuff together that is technically bad, but definitely works. And he has great ideas, so his outputs are awesome despite the internal quality. I really envy how good he is at just making stuff. He has no shame about any of it. If anything he would feel shame about not letting his ideas out, which is so much more sensible.

I am a huge fan of janky weird stuff. It’s the best way to get your ideas out there.

I think Kanye West put it best "if every move you make you're trying to meet people's expectations, then every day is a test day. And what day was the most stressful in school? Test day"

The "shoulds" start piling up when the motivating factor for creating a website is to "get a job". As a result, most of those sites are useless Hello World/Todo projects or the same Ghost/Hugo blog hosted on Github pages that a million other people have.

mettamage · a year ago

I'm doing this with chrome extensions

trilinearnz · a year ago

Extremely well said.

The first thing is to accept, difficult as it may be, that that era of the net is gone and can't come back. I say this as someone who desperately wants that not to be true, but it is.

The number 1 reason for that is that the internet is everywhere now, whereas it wasn't before. That's why it was magic. Stumbling through Geocities sites and AOL chatrooms, it was always possible to find bits of arcane knowledge posted by a human who was educated and tech-savvy enough to even be online long enough to author something on it.

That's not the case now. Most of the arcane knowledge has been on Wikipedia or similar sites, or hoovered up by some chatbot that spits it back out to you in the most listless writing voice possible. Moreover, you consume thousands more pieces of content daily than you did back then. If you came across something special, how long would it be before you abandoned it out of boredom and desire for a dopamine hit from somewhere else?

Everybody is online now too, so forget about finding charming little outposts online; the best modernity offers is an occasionally funny social media account from a person who is almost certainly trying to sell a book, or course, or these days, a paid Discord channel. They create content for the sake of showing up on people's feeds, and that gets formulaic and performative real fast.

So, making the types of personal websites people used to want to browse through, is largely pointless for somebody not in the tech/media industry. There are a thousand better ways to communicate info to others.

sva_ · a year ago

> No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river, and he's not the same man.

- Heraclitus

mejutoco · a year ago

except Parmenides. Parmenides always swims in the same river.

P.S. Kind of the opposite POV to Heraclitus.

ryeguy_24 · a year ago

I love this quote for some reason.

marttt · a year ago

Read phpBB-based forums. Many of these 1) are still very active and lively, and 2) include a lot of users who grew up in the 90s/00s internet culture. I like how the phpBB UI encouraged free-form writing/thinking and discussions, with flexible boundaries and etiquette set by the admins or the community itself. Contemporary UIs like Facebook seem far more restricted (or: prescriptive) in this sense, IMO resulting in shorter, kind of impatient and often more aggressive replies. Ramblings on old phpBB boards seem to typically carry more intellectual depth.

Pro tip: to query only phpBB-based discussions via Google, I use the "inurl:" search operator with "viewtopic", which is a standard part of thread urls. E.g. "Windows 2000 inurl:viewtopic".

fragmede · a year ago

oh that's a really good protip. adding "reddit" to queries was getting results from, well, reddit, which was often hit or miss.

bawis · a year ago

Nice tip, thank you so much!

rambambram · a year ago

RSS.

It stands for Really Social Sites, if I recall correctly. ;)

I built my own reader - as a part of my website package - but there are more. You are on HN so you probably know what an RSS reader is already, so no need to explain what it is, I suppose.

I follow around 1200 feeds/websites with it, mostly blogs I found on HN and I think are interesting. At first, big tech's social media sucked me back in every time. Reading blogs, essays and articles linked to from a boring UI didn't gave me the 'sugar rush' that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Youtube gave me. But over time - especially after Youtube started showing me some stupid chicken video on every row of my subscription videos - I started to rely more on the peaceful oasis that is my own RSS reader. With content from 'channels' that I choose. In essence, I use a white list, not a black list.

Long story short: it takes some time to get used to consuming content this way, but it is out there and it is possible.

Besides, the web is already social media. No need to put unnecessary middle men between me and the web.

slater · a year ago

the indie web!

https://tilde.club/

https://blogroll.org/

https://personalsit.es/

https://iwebthings.joejenett.com/

https://gossipsweb.net/

https://www.thingsmagazine.net/