I miss the old Internet of 10-20 years ago

Now search sucks Organic engagement sucks Anything creative or thoughtful is driven out by slop or not intellectual content

Specifically I am interested in reading about news and geopolitics

With many traditional media sites both being paywalled and eliminating their comments sections it seems my option, only option is reddit which sucks. Is there anything else out there like and international politics forum that is NOT Reddit where I can read what real people think about a variety of issues facing the world today? Or does that not exist anymore. Maybe 4chan or a conspiracy site but again those all have their own bias. I am more interested in what normal people think and seeing free discussion.

I see this sentiment on here frequently. Yes, content delivery now sucks like it’s written by bots for consumption by bots solely with the goal of supplying mindless dribble for ad impressions.

However the technology is so much better. As a developer I can build web and media applications that you couldn’t ever imagine building 20 years ago. I am not talking about framework garbage like jquery or React. I am talking about things like WebSockets, HTML5 audio/video, Node/Deno, and more.

jjpones · 2 months ago

I agree that the technology is fine, and I also appreciate the breadth of tools I can fiddle with and how surprisingly approachable they've become for me (mdn docs are amazing to explore). But I miss the community spaces of the old internet. Different forums for the different games I played. The non-profit driven youtube / twitter. Truly the biggest pandora's box of the internet is the addition of profit incentives for posters. It was fine for a while, I liked it when video makers who put effort into their creations were compensated. But then it got gamed into becoming the worst self-fueling internet hate machine. Rewarding those who put out vapid and inflammatory content for the sake of serving ads to enraged (and engaged) viewers.

conception · 2 months ago

Look for text based media. As soon as images are introduced to a platform, memes take over and tank the quality of discourse.

al_borland · 2 months ago

I share your frustrations. I was hopefully for the relaunch of Digg, but it very quickly started to feel like Reddit, especially when people inject politics (with an heavy bias) into everything. I purposely didn’t follow the politics community, as I had a feeling that would be bad, but that mindset very quickly started infecting many other communities and discussions. It seemed impossible to have a good faith discussion of the actual issues. I gave up yesterday, deleting the app, logging out of the site, and deleting my bookmark. I’m too old to waste my time dealing with conversations like those.

aurareturn · 2 months ago

Reddit has a meme problem as well. Also a bad mod problem.

bn-l · 2 months ago

It’s such a boon having such a large unpaid workforce but it’s kind of a Faustian bargain.

0xCE0 · 2 months ago

Real life is the new forum of 2026, just like Roman Forum 2k years ago. You can see, feel and communicate with the reality as it is. Go find people and talk to them, and maybe you will meet someone with whom you can have a discourse of your life. Observe how the emotions of yourself and the other person(s) change during discourse, because they reveal hot points: limits, pain points, dreams, un(knowingness) etc. Learn/listen and teach/speak.

tolerance · 2 months ago

If you start a link blog with an RSS feed and an email or some way to comment I will subscribe and participate if it’s good enough.

Start here:

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

https://bearblog.dev

chistev · 2 months ago

Well, then, checkout mine

https://www.rxjourney.net/

austin-cheney · 2 months ago

leviliebvin · 2 months ago

There are probably some very high quality mailing lists or discord servers out there, but I wouldn't know where to find them.

I have personally never seen a high quality discord server. The chaotic ui lends itself to noisy random conversations and dropped threads.

baubino · 2 months ago

I don’t have any recommendations for you. A big part of the problem is that heavy moderation is necessary to keep forums from devolving into the slop that stands in for discourse these days. For example, even when there’s a fairly good question posted on reddit, the comments are just a string of one liners, snide quips, and snark. Few people know how to engage in thoughtful discussion anymore.

jryan49 · 2 months ago

Check out https://cyberspace.online/