I went to college in 1995, and my very first week of school, I was introduced to the internet, usenet, ftp, and netscape navigator. A few months later, I was downloading cool .mod files and .xm files from aminet and learning to write tracker music in Fast Tracker 2, downloading and playing all sorts of cool Doom wads, installing DJGPP and pouring over the source code for Allegro and picking up more game programming chops, and getting incredibly caught up in following the Doom community and .plan files for the release of Quake.
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
I miss the Internet of the 90s because every page I visit today has a pop-up asking me if I want to accept cookies. It makes browsing the open web a jarring experience.
Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.
I think this is genuinely true. The internet today appeals to the lowest common denominator, in the same way that blockbuster movies often do. It is less appealing because it is less specific to our tastes.
Similar story here, with similarly disastrous impacts on my GPA. There was something magical about that time - technology was moving so rapidly and access to information was exploding. It was all so very early that it seemed like anything was possible for an aspiring computer nerd with a good computer and a fast internet connection.
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
Same here, the Internet, game modding, early LAN->Internet bridges for multiplayer gaming, IRC and all that probably reduced my GPA by about -1.0 and that caused me to miss out on the "premium" tech employers early in my career, ultimately set me back decades. Thank you, rec.games.computer.quake.* hierarchy and Quake-C mailing lists.
the AI image generation and 3D printing community had a similar kind of feel from 2021-2023, both are slowing down now though and becoming more mainstream everyday and needing less tinkering everyday. Which is great but disapointing at the same time.
It doesn't feel like the same energy to me. Image generation was always "ok, maybe we release this for free or cheap now to see how people feel about it but sooner or later we're going to charge $$$" and 3d printing... I don't know, I think those guys are still doing their own thing. The barrier to get in is lower but there's still Luke warm interest to do so.
Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
- AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists)
- VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb)
- Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years)
- WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons)
- 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p)
- High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies)
- Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff)
- Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car)
- Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012)
- Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service)
- SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV)
- CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion)
- Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games)
- GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US)
- Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it)
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.
The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
I miss the 00s internet. I miss IRC and geeking out for the sake of it. Maybe i'm just missing my younger years, but I think there was a distinct feeling back then, of wonder and being amongst the first to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.
A lot of things got worse, it's not just nostalgia.
The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
On the other side, a lot of it wasn't sustainable. Just how many forums just vanished all of a sudden as the owner died, ran out of money or was simply fed up moderating bullshit and infights, not to mention the ever increasing compliance workload/risk (yeeting spam, warez and especially CSAM)?
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
>When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream,
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
I miss the 90s internet and I think even though some things have objectively gotten worse (most people interact in proprietary networks, as opposed to using open standards), as a parent, I think part of that feeling is still there, since my kids are doing some of what I was doing back then, only that instead of irc they're mostly using discord now.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
> ... to tinker with these promising technologies that were going to change the world for the better and now it's 2024 and we've screwed it all up.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
> Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I agree somewhat. There really was a sense of wonder. Whats coming next? Where will it go?
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
Yeah, we will fondly reminisce about the planet-destroying ponzi scheme which made it so convenient to pay for illegal goods, scams and ransoms to cryptolockers. What a nice unnecessary ecological catastrophe we managed to concoct out of nothing.
Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health").
Since I'm older I had a more of a choice in terms of social media presence (and get away with basically none) the younger folks practically don't.
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
We are very careful with our kids in terms of they interact with technology for this reason.
Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.
It's a difficult balance.
My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"
Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.
The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
> The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
This has been our priority as parents forming peer groups with other parents. But it's very hard to find the kids that your kids like and are friends with who aren't constantly inundated with tech.
On the last bit, it seems like more parents are coming around to your way of thinking, and our public school system just sent out a survey about how hard they should ban personal electronics from our public schools.
> Surprisingly it is obvious for Gen Z that social media in its current form is highly addictive and destabilizing in terms of well-being because (usually framed as "mental health")
Is it?
It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.
Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.
GenZ are mostly aware[0] but feel powerless about it so they don't act accordingly which may seem that they are oblivious.
From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time.
Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.
I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964.
Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.
It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.
I think this has to do with how a child's parents inform them about the addictive nature. I've been telling this to our children early on ("games = mostly engineered for addiction, be careful"), and the youngest (11yo soon) has no problem understanding this. And I'd say he manages to regulate his gaming hours surprisingly well all by himself.
What I particularly like is that children seem to be quite interested in what it actually is that makes games addictive. So a 10yo might reason along the lines of "Dude, gaming 2 hours straight must be worse for my brain than gaming 45 minutes straight. This game's got too many flashing things, too. Don't want to get addicted. Must go out".
So, from personal experience as a parent, I'd say we adults should not underestimate the influence of educating our children about the dangers of too much gaming. Apparently, quite a bit can be done with very simple means (talking!) to keep things healthier for them. Consistency is key, as always.
Its normalization of failure / suffering. in a village full of alcoholics, drinking with your family/neighbors was part of greeting, social contracts, or venting out frustrations. It was evident to everybody how things end up down the line without exception, but when all are in the suck, mentally it feels better.
Our herd social behavior which make humans such a successful species are showing its darker, and easy to abuse side.
> There is neocites, and a small community of people who share this philosophy about the web (and that are relatively young), but I have not met anyone my age, in the real world, that would choose to do something like this.
When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.
Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.
When I was a teen, most of my peers were not online and were not interested in being online, and actively derided anyone who even touched a computer without it being under duress - U.K., mid to late 90’s. A scattered few, usually those with bands, had a MySpace. I can count the geocities sites on one hand.
A big part of what the author is lamenting for, and touches upon with his final paragraph, is the Internet of weirdos, before the cool kids and your mother also got online.
It’s gone. September happened. It also still exists, in niches and pockets here and there - but the Wild West days are done.
Bingo, you hit the nail on the head. At that point in time my friend group were skaters and rockers with bands - the internet was a connection to that world that was in short supply in the small town we grew up in.
Well, the old internet was partially based on people knowing each other. Then the large players made it all about mass engagement. Maybe we should go back to linking your friends webpages from your own and have a small amount of readers.
I'd rather say in was based on common interests, and you'd go out of your way to find "your" community. I'm still friends with people I "met" on various phpBB forums 20 years ago.
The web was a diverse and dynamic space. Users were free to experiment with design, content, and interactivity without worrying about conforming to algorithms or best practices.
AI has me super jealous of how quickly kids can learn things today. Back in the 90s banging you head against the wall trying to get the simplest things in Linux to work, and trying to learn programming from a book with minimal resources online. It was 'hard mode'. I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that.. though I would like to play some Quake deathmatch again on a populated server..
There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.
> I'm glad I was there to appreciate what we have today, but not sure I'd want to go back to that..
I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.
The problem is you struggle to hack together a sub optimal solution because you don't have the resources to figure out anything better. It didn't make me better, it was a waste of time. Remember experts exchange? Uhg..
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.
Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.
Dunno, I never saw the value of learning some esoteric piece of language/library/sysadmin trivia I'd use once or twice after spending hours poking at things trying to figure it out.
This is true. I am lucky to have learned as much as I have by this point. My Dad reminds me almost daily how lucky I am.
There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.
I’m so glad I lived through hard mode. I have a kind of perseverance and resilience in the face of difficult learning challenges that my teenagers are hardly developing (despite my best efforts), and it has made my life so much richer.
I left Windows for Linux in 1999 and I do NOT miss how difficult everything was to get working, even with the reasonably user-friendly Red Hat (5? 6?). I even became the maintainer of a Linmodem driver by accident (it was abandoned, the author was uncontactable, and I needed the modem to dial).
I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.
One thing that's happening currently that has been alluded to by other people in the comments is the rapid disappearance of forums.
Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.
Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.
I’m curious what the general demographic preference is regarding real-time/chat vs. async/longer-form. I never much liked real-time/chat, even back in the times of IRC, BSD talk, and ICQ, and have always preferred mailing lists/Usenet/forums.
I’m not that much crazy older than you, but I do remember well being a teenager at the peak of the dotcom craze, being a heavy internet user, and even back then having a vague feeling that the ad riddled, desperately monetized (and shitty) websites built on the back of mostly investment capital run amok felt a little shitty as an end user. It’s hazy now and lost to time (the internet is not actually forever it’s like ~10 years old at most now) but i vividly remember pages that became harder and harder to navigate because of invasive ads, and sites that’d somehow embed malware on your computer that’d spam you with weird porn popups when your parents used the machine - it all feels vaguely similar to now, albeit much sleeker. Adware in my opinion is bordering on malware to the point I find the definitions indistinguishable. It collapsed then for good reason, and IMHO similar conditions as to now. I don’t want to live through that as a fully grown adult with a tech career now, and it worries me a lot.
What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.
Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...
I've been thinking about this too, perhaps it's my age (43) and the fact I vividly remember earlier times.
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
>
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
That's very plausible.
I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.
Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).
When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.
One of the possible names for Gen Z that was thrown around about a decade ago was "iGen", a reference to the iPhone and noticing there was a cultural shift in those that came of age on/after 2008.
I'm in my very late 20s and I do miss this, too. I used MSN more than ICQ, however. I still use IRC just like I did when I was ~13 years old, without much knowledge of English.
> I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.
The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.
I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.
Blaming consumers for the state of things and for “not spending money” is a common refrain, and honestly is gaslighting and revisionist. The internet functioned fine for over a decade, profitably, without invasive adware like we see now, which is to the point of total degradation of the core service itself - this is not the cause of consumers, but rather the current mindset of the wall street landscape.
As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.
This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.
I have paid maybe 10k in my lifetime to be connected to internet. That is why the telecom company has been able to invest in infra. I don't have good fiber thanks to Netflix.
I was on the 'net pre-WWW and wrote my first web page in 1992.
The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.
I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.
I joined in 2003, so I'm probably around 10 yrs younger (born 88).
From my perspective, the only thing that changed is that most millennials grew up and realized that their quality of life mostly peaked in their teenage years and that most will never be able to provide even a fraction of that quality of life to their offspring.
It's honestly not really about the Internet itself, that's just a place where the same people ultimately communicate on.
If they're hopeful in real life, they're gonna be hopeful on forums etc.
I make this statement under the expectation that millennials are even now the biggest fraction of Internet users. Though I'd expect that to change within the next few years. I doubt the sentiment would change however, as the zoomers/Gen alpha will ultimately come to the same conclusions, as their prospects are even worse
> The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
Precisely this. I grew up in a post-communist country and I can definitely say that the democratic transformation gave everyone a sense of hope. Sure, there was the ozone hole, but other than that, when people thought "the future" they imagined all the technological advancement that would not only make life comfortable, but also solve most of social issues.
For me, that hope was realized,
we have access to most of the books in existence, incredible projects of knowledge sharing, and countless other resources to learn any subject you want.
If the majority of people don't want to use this, but instead just want to yell about politics and the news cycle, that's their problem and doesn't really diminish the achievements of the web.
Exactly. I got online in 1995 and the promise was kept by the internet. I have taken so many free classes from Ivy league schools along with all the books, pdfs, tutorials, physical books I would have never found otherwise.
What I highly overestimated was people's thirst for knowledge. I really thought that by this time I would be unemployable as the average young person would just be so learned that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The advantage of growing up with the internet would be just so huge.
I would have never guessed that the average young person instead almost has a type of learning disability from being addicted to political nonsense, stupid videos and gossip.
Everything is there from what I envisioned in 1995 though. It is just this useless, pernicious aspect dwarfs what I envisioned then in terms of popularity.
> For me, that hope was realized, we have access to most of the books in existence
As long as you are willing to enter a legal gray area, you can get access to some interesting books; but these are still an insanely small fraction of "most of the books in existence".
Readit News
Then Quake came out, and the community that grew up around it (both for multiplayer deathmatch and for QuakeC mods) were incredible. I remember following several guys putting up all sorts of cool experiments on their personal webpage, and then being really surprised when they got hired by some random company that hadn't done anything yet, Valve.
There was really just this incredible, amateur-in-the-best-sense energy to all those communities I had discovered, and it didn't seem like many people (at least to my recollection) in those communities had any inkling that all that effort was monetizable, yet... which would shortly change, of course. But everything had a loose, thrown off quality, and it was all largely pseudo-anonymous. It felt very set apart from the real world, in a very counter cultural way. Or at least that's how I experienced it.
This was all, needless to say, disastrous to my college career. But it was an incredible launching pad for me to get in the game industry and ship Quake engine games 2 years later, in many cases with other people pulled from those same online communities.
I miss that time too. But I think there's something like a lightning in a bottle aspect to it all - like, lots of really new, really exciting things were happening, but it took some time for all the social machinery of legible value creation / maximization to catch up because some of those things were really so new and hard to understand if you weren't in at the ground floor (and, often, young, particularly receptive to it all, and comfortable messing around with amateur stuff that looked, from the outside, kind of pointless).
We hate the internet today because it became mainstream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Why the EU didn’t require an ability to do global opt-opt while forcing web sites to implement this feature is a mystery to me.
The problem with the internet today is it’s a bunch of disconnected privately owned silos.
Of course, it was also really unevenly distributed. If you were on the "have" side of the equation - i.e. in a setting like a college campus, already working in the industry, or in the right IRC channels, with access to modern hardware - you could hop along for the ride and it felt like anything was possible. Otherwise, you were being left behind at a dramatic rate.
Overall things are better now, because so many more people have access to data and resources online. It's trivially easy to learn how to code, information is readily available to most of humanity, and access to good quality internet access has exploded. But I can't deny that it was kind of amazing being one of the lucky ones able to ride that wave.
So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery.
Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own.
What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it.
So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted:
Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc.The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes.
Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?
It's not that nobody cares, it's you're either rich and have influence, or you're a visionary like the rest of us.
I see all the coolest things get slapped behind a $50/m fee (or $ fee)
It's how it is, you hit it dead on.
We can try and fix it, but... all that's offered is running on hamster wheels. We lost. And we lost bad.
But, we can still create things and hope those things we create pave the foundation for things to be. That, that keeps us going.
Dead Comment
The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
Perhaps, but these will be different people than those who miss the 90-00 internet.
In 2017 I thought I missed bitcoin, still managed to mine a meager amount on my parents computers. In the modern day I was proven wrong.
Basically, I could have got "hooked" as my pre-frontal cortex was already fully developed and I kindly declined. Gen Z for the most part was confronted with the "choice" of small dopamine hits designed after the newest slot machine research [0][1] when they were underage.
As others have pointed out the 90s-00s had its own limitations and frustrations so going back to that nobody is really nostalgic about that part but back then you had to at least choose video games (install it, meet the hardware requirements and get sufficiently proficient in it ;) ) to get to today's level of addiction which permeates mainstream online social interactions.
[0]https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/social-media-copies-gambling-met...
[1]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
Raising luddites that can't type won't serve them well over the course of their lives, but neither will allowing them to become tap-and-scroll dopamine zombies.
It's a difficult balance.
My strategy will undoubtedly evolve over time, but I suppose it could be summarized as "permit supportive technology, aggressively deny anything else"
Of particular note is that most, if not all, "for kids" content is actively harmful.
The key to making things work is having a cohort of parents that have similar priorities. If the parents in your social group default to shutting Junior up with an iPad, you're going to have a bad time.
This has been our priority as parents forming peer groups with other parents. But it's very hard to find the kids that your kids like and are friends with who aren't constantly inundated with tech.
Is it?
It certainly is obvious to this particular 18 year old, but perhaps he is just above the 99th percentile of his generation in terms of intelligence.
Most others seem oblivious to this reality in my observation.
From personal experience in a controlled setting (tutoring) if I'm strict about the form: no phone and all learning material prepared beforehand I get mostly positive feedback and some even feel relief for that time. Imo the deeper truth of the matter is that they are used to adults struggling to give them full attention, too, a two-way-street but all the blame is usually given to the younger folk.
I find it surprising because it took e.g. smokers a lot longer although the evidence was overwhelming [1] in 1964. Today (almost) every tobacco smoker acknowledges the negative health effects.
It is a insidious kind of addiction: a massive amount of very short-lived, small dopamine spikes throughout the day seamlessly incorporated into your "normal" functional life which makes it extremely hard to get out of the loop.
[0]https://talker.news/2024/08/28/why-3-in-4-gen-z-blame-social...
[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/add.16007
All my friends constantly joke about being addicted to x social media app
What I particularly like is that children seem to be quite interested in what it actually is that makes games addictive. So a 10yo might reason along the lines of "Dude, gaming 2 hours straight must be worse for my brain than gaming 45 minutes straight. This game's got too many flashing things, too. Don't want to get addicted. Must go out".
So, from personal experience as a parent, I'd say we adults should not underestimate the influence of educating our children about the dangers of too much gaming. Apparently, quite a bit can be done with very simple means (talking!) to keep things healthier for them. Consistency is key, as always.
Its normalization of failure / suffering. in a village full of alcoholics, drinking with your family/neighbors was part of greeting, social contracts, or venting out frustrations. It was evident to everybody how things end up down the line without exception, but when all are in the suck, mentally it feels better.
Our herd social behavior which make humans such a successful species are showing its darker, and easy to abuse side.
When I was a teen at least half of my classmates had some kind of personal website (trends changed very fast back then but for my generation it all started with geocities). The idea of making something unique and sharing it online was very fun. It felt like you had a lot of freedom to do almost anything you wanted. There were no expectations, no standards to follow, nor "successful" people to imitate.
Probably my nostalgia is distorting my perception here but to me modern internet looks extremely homogeneous: everything seems to come from the same cookie-cutter, and the only degree of freedom you have is to either follow the formula for ranking higher or sink into the algorithmic oblivion.
A big part of what the author is lamenting for, and touches upon with his final paragraph, is the Internet of weirdos, before the cool kids and your mother also got online.
It’s gone. September happened. It also still exists, in niches and pockets here and there - but the Wild West days are done.
I could have sworn myspace was around ~2000/1, but apparently it wasn't founded until 2003.
There are still lots of underground nooks and crannies of the internet today, arguably more than ever. It's what you make of it, and where you choose to spend your time.
I would. Having the answer handed to you doesn't actually teach you much. It's the struggle to figure out the answer that makes it stick. The kids today who can just get easy answers from AI aren't going to have anywhere near the skills we do.
Today I can quickly be productive in unfamiliar domains, and learn while asking questions to an AI that is available 24/7, and and has an extremely deep knowledge of so many things. Personally even as an experienced programmer I have learned so much in the last year, greatly accelerated by AI.
Kids are going to be better off for it, and with it will achieve incredible things.
Not as glamorous as before but there are still players every day. http://tastyspleen.net/quake/servers/list.cgi
There is something to be said about doing things "the hard way" and I think AI is, in the short term, going to decrease the amount of medium-skilled software developers out there.
I'll take present-day Ubuntu any day. I install it on my desktop, and it just works, GPU and all. I install it on my weird laptop with a touchscreen that swivels 360 degrees and can rotate to a portrait desktop, and it also just works.
Instead of finding a forum dedicated to something you're interested in and getting access to a ton of structured, easily searchable information that has built up over time, things have moved to discord.
Discord's primary advantage is real-time communication, which comes at the cost of structured, long-term, and (generally) on topic knowledge. This is not a good trade off, imo. Discord is also a social media platform, which in itself comes with issues common with modern platforms.
Subreddits are okay, although I preferred the less centralised way of the past with the myriad vBulletin forums etc.
But Discord is built to replace IRC, not to replace forums, yet people use it for the latter.
I so badly wanted that future of the Internet, but somehow we ended up in a place where corporations ate it all.
Is it nostalgia, or is there something more? Who knows at this point.
I’m 30.
What arose from the ashes of that bubble event became great so maybe a reset is needed, but for me personally, it’d be a disaster.
The internet has existed for longer than the web which is already 30 yrs at this point. Not sure I catch your point that it's 10 yrs old.
Wikipedia is from 2001, Archive from 1996. IRC still exists as do retro games or the demo scene. There's still some of that good stuff around, but you can't really imagine it being founded today, at least not with the same cultural enthusiasm. Such an optimistic time...
If I were to pick an inflection point, a point at which the internet started going to shit, i'd say it was around 07/08 with the birth of the iPhone and Appstore. That's when "pay to publish" really started to take off.
That's very plausible.
I additionally want to add that before the iPhone, having a locked-down device where the vendor decides which app(lication)s you are allowed to install caused huge outcries and shitstorms.
Example: Microsoft's initiatives for "Next-Generation Secure Computing Base" (formerly Palladium) [1] and attempting to enforce a TPM on computers (keyword: trusted computing).
When the iPhone came out, this all suddenly became perfectly accepted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...
The birth of the iPhone changed a lot of things, but it took a few years to reach critical mass.
So corporate profit over users.
Another acceleration was google turning to shit as well.
http://0x0.st/Xx1H.png
Deleted Comment
The high bandwidths we got today are exactly the result of a full commercialization of the Internet. If there was no money to earn here, we would still be stuck with dial-up connections and had no YouTube and Netflix.
I understand that advertisements and online tracking suck but it’s the result of consumers not willing to pay a penny for many online services. But I think that’s already changing with all those subscription models and SaaS businesses out there.
As far as “not willing to pay for it” what do you call subscription models of popular language models like chatGPT? I would pay an embarrassing amount for a google that worked like google did 10 years ago. That isn’t my fault that product doesn’t exist anymore, the demand is there.
This angry tone isn’t directed at you, I just find it so frustrating that people believe it’s such a binary choice. Google had the literal monopoly on tech talent and knowledge for 20 years and decided to divert that into the most cannibalistic and predatory business model around. Can you imagine had they directed the same efforts to making an actual competitor to AWS? I am speaking as a career cloud infra guy and business owner running on cloud - as much as I hate MS products I’d sooner migrate to azure than ever spend a penny on a google cloud product for anything more critical than running the office coffee maker. That, I think, was a tremendously bad decision for the internet, and the decision absolutely was not binary. Make a good product people find useful and people pay for it. That’s how the market has worked for all of human history, there’s nothing different about the internet.
The thing that strikes me in hindsight is the hope everyone had.
I looked forward to the things the Internet might enable. I looked forward to whatever was going to replace my slow dial-up connection. I looked forward to an always-on connection, so I could run my own servers.
I do think the solution is not to look back wistfully at what was, as that's not the path to hope. Restore the hope by ignoring the noise (such as social media) and looking forward to what interesting things might be, as that was the essence of the early 'net.
From my perspective, the only thing that changed is that most millennials grew up and realized that their quality of life mostly peaked in their teenage years and that most will never be able to provide even a fraction of that quality of life to their offspring.
It's honestly not really about the Internet itself, that's just a place where the same people ultimately communicate on. If they're hopeful in real life, they're gonna be hopeful on forums etc.
I make this statement under the expectation that millennials are even now the biggest fraction of Internet users. Though I'd expect that to change within the next few years. I doubt the sentiment would change however, as the zoomers/Gen alpha will ultimately come to the same conclusions, as their prospects are even worse
Deleted Comment
Precisely this. I grew up in a post-communist country and I can definitely say that the democratic transformation gave everyone a sense of hope. Sure, there was the ozone hole, but other than that, when people thought "the future" they imagined all the technological advancement that would not only make life comfortable, but also solve most of social issues.
And then we saw the opposite happening.
If the majority of people don't want to use this, but instead just want to yell about politics and the news cycle, that's their problem and doesn't really diminish the achievements of the web.
What I highly overestimated was people's thirst for knowledge. I really thought that by this time I would be unemployable as the average young person would just be so learned that I wouldn't be able to keep up. The advantage of growing up with the internet would be just so huge.
I would have never guessed that the average young person instead almost has a type of learning disability from being addicted to political nonsense, stupid videos and gossip.
Everything is there from what I envisioned in 1995 though. It is just this useless, pernicious aspect dwarfs what I envisioned then in terms of popularity.
As long as you are willing to enter a legal gray area, you can get access to some interesting books; but these are still an insanely small fraction of "most of the books in existence".