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.
The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.
Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.
I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.
"The iPhone 5 was released.
The first iPad Mini was released.
The Wii U was released.
Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems.
YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape.
Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'
All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.
2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.
Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.
Facebook only took of in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.
But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.
Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.
I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.
I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.
I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.
I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.
I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.
Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
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.
I 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.
> 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.
Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
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.
What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?
For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'
Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.
<sarcasm>
Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating.
</sarcasm>
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.
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
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 :)
There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
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 first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
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 was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
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?
Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> 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)
This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
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.
> 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.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.
I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future.
And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.
This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
___
You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
Authors first problem is "Using MS Windows". Its now solidly an advert and spam vehicle for other Microsoft shit nobody wants (like the 63 different things named Copilot). Seriously, use Linux. It is better in almost every way, other than extreme rootkit based games.
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.
This resonates: the Internet was such an interesting place to grow up in, though my experience may be a little before the author’s.
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.
The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.
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.
The "old web" is now darknets, like Tor or especially I2P. Everything fits. It requires some technical expertise to set up (particularly I2P). Slow downloads. No Javascript (usually disabled for safety reasons). Some content that will shock you at 30 exactly as the old internets content occasionally shocked you at 13. Intermittent connection. Anarchy. You can explore this world.
Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.
The internet went to shit pretty much when Facebook went mainstream: internet stopped being some kind of alternative reality and started merging with regular reality… but worse.
It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
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'.
- 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.
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.
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 blogs
I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP.
Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..
The internet which is being mourned was that period where it was better for the people who couldn’t make those changes.
There are always a few people who can manage to insulate themselves. Still, however well you insulate yourself, you are impacted by what happens to the majority, or the direction they vote.
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.
It looks like it starts with:
>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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.
Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.
I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.
"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'
All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.
2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.
Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.
Facebook only took of in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.
But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.
Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.
I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.
I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.
I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.
I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.
> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.
It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.
I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.
Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.
I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.
I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.
The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
No worries, it will change again multiple times in our lifetimes. Internet state derives on how people want to exchange information in a given moment of time.
The old internet is still there, people just choose to use the modern services of the internet instead. I was around in the 90's and remember very well usenet,irc and gopher sites. FTP'ing text files to a remote folder and then running weird perl scripts via telnet to refresh a website.
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.
Mostly agree with the timeline.
I 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.
This bit feels naive, in 2007:
> 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.
Picking 2012 feels arbitrary to fit the author's thesis and age. I don't see much difference between 2012 and now. Late 90s and now feel like two different worlds though.
With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign.
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.
This framing sets up variables incorrectly.
People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day.
People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier.
There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.
“People” != Internet people.
“People” at large were not part of the early Internet. They came much later and turned it into a shopping mall/surveillance hub.
I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses. We did just fine.
>This framing sets up variables incorrectly.
What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind?
For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man'
Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire generation was not aware (and still largely is not) that you can easily create your own networks.
<sarcasm> Today I sat down on my PC determined to finally go and file that bug report with debian - when I open their site in order to download the new .iso I am moving my mouse to the bottom of the screen and waiting to click that I accept the cookies in order to continue but I cannot see the banner. It is really frustrating. </sarcasm>
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.
Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward:
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 :)
There is a simpler explanation: Because TVs no longer contain particle accelerators that require the screen to be made of sufficient lead glass to absorb all the ionizing radiation they would otherwise be beaming into your living room, while enclosing a near vacuum.
TVs for consumers are sold at loss and the TV companies are making money with data and ads.
I guess the real price is 5-10x of what you pay. So only 10-20x more expensive for more apples to apples compariaon.
I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks
> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.
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.
Yes. There was no 'GB of memory' in that day.
On the flipside, I was able to purchase three albums in FLAC format, DRM free, from an obscure band that I thought wouldn't have a legitimate path to purchase.
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.
> with a paranoid-level of lists added to my pihole
This is your regular reminder that many websites you are visiting are proxying your data to facebook for them. There is no host to block here.
Check out the Facebook Conversions API Gateway.
Does uBlock Origin block this by default?
If not, what are the counter-measures?
The first time I accessed the internet (I was ~8) was at a computer school, where I learned LOGO and a bit of BASIC. The first website I ever visited was the Space Jam website. Great memories…
Oh, and the computer had a webcam, but we never managed to get it working with someone on the other end.
I miss the days of playing Halo as a kid, and jumping on internet forums. MSN being the primary chat app that everyone used. Facebook was in its infancy, but everyone who had hobbies or a community was on a purpose made forum. People who knew how to write html/css/php build basic websites and blogs. Gaming clans came together, and xfire/steam was a great way to talk to and play with the same people.
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 was there when we turned on the Internet in 1981. At the time I would have defined the Internet as the set of all endpoints reachable using IPv4. By that definition, none of us today are even on the Internet. You can't send a SYN packet and have it arrive at my house, and I can't send a SYN packet to your house. That means we are entirely dependent on the big guys like Facebook if we want to communicate with each other. Yes, there are some protocols like bittorrent that get around this, but that's the default situation today.
The WAN port on my home WiFi router in my basement has a directly pingable IPv4 address - I would have thought that was still the most common way people’s houses are connected to the internet?
This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.
I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.
The old internet still exists, we're just distracted by commercial slopware.
Switching back to RSS and Linux made me a much happier person.
The general internet is TV. Crammed with ads and useless information and low brow entertainment.
To an oldster like me, this is already post classic internet, where the "golden" era was that of Usenet, and the web was just one interesting new use of the internet.
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?
Though I'm much (much) older, I was there at the start of TikTok and you can say about the same thing. It was weird and human and almost free from commercial influence in 2019. Now "creators" employ every type of psychological trick and deception to get views and engagement.
Not another one of these.
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.
My internet was gopher, Usenet, and the very beginnings of webpages at some universities. Much smaller. I don't miss it being only that. At the time it sucked when aol was attached to the academic internet and all of my usenet groups became unusable but now, yeah, things are much better with how vast and chaotic things are.
Checks out... the Internet is the thing that more humans are working everyday to change than anything else on the planet.
That was true back when the internet was made up of largely enthusiasts, but by now the entire general population is here. The internet is now made up of largely passive and docile types who don't change their behavior or environment. That's why we still have Twitter and Reddit going strong. The internet used to be a place where when sites got to be that bad people would have long since changed their situation by leaving for better sites. But today it's much more static with relatively few making the decisions for the many.
It all still exists in dark web. Anonymity, small communities, exploration, etc.
> Turn on your computer - most likely Windows 10 or 11.
> 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)
This part is speaking about the average joe, which does not use linux, and does not use firefox. Yes, these decisions technically change things, but it's not that black and white of an issue
The world I grew up in, no longer exists
There were a bunch of internet golden era but I think the last one was the rise of blogs and rss.
Really cool times when lots of people published blogs and everyone had rss readers.
Let's build a new one! We have the technology.
It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it.
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.
> 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.
I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like yours, and I'd like to understand.
I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.
But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.
The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.
This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.
___
You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.
That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.
Authors first problem is "Using MS Windows". Its now solidly an advert and spam vehicle for other Microsoft shit nobody wants (like the 63 different things named Copilot). Seriously, use Linux. It is better in almost every way, other than extreme rootkit based games.
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.
This resonates: the Internet was such an interesting place to grow up in, though my experience may be a little before the author’s.
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.
The “2026: Logging on today” section is way off the mark. It says that if you want to read the headlines, you turn on your Windows PC, get nagged for updates, etc.
No. You get your phone out of your pocket and it lights up instantly.
I mean... if you look at the "Logging on today" section, they're using Chrome on Windows 10/11 and spend half the 17 steps dealing with those two things.
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.
the internet i grew up with didn't exist yet
The "old web" is now darknets, like Tor or especially I2P. Everything fits. It requires some technical expertise to set up (particularly I2P). Slow downloads. No Javascript (usually disabled for safety reasons). Some content that will shock you at 30 exactly as the old internets content occasionally shocked you at 13. Intermittent connection. Anarchy. You can explore this world.
I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.
Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.
The internet went to shit pretty much when Facebook went mainstream: internet stopped being some kind of alternative reality and started merging with regular reality… but worse.
It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP.
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:
I have both set as RSS feeds and everything loads under sfeed_curses to read anything without ads, popups or distractions at crazy speeds. If I need images, I press 'o' and it opens up the news under Dillo costing me near nothing.Finally, there's:
Nobody's there, though. And the old internet was shaped not just by technology, but by the people who were online
I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP. Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..
Text only means limited opportunity for vulnerabilities (new HTML/CSS parser bugs all the time), and it’s trivial to roll your own client if you want.
Text only also means your value has to stand on words alone. No memes, no flashy design. Some of us value that and feel that it’s been lost over time.
If you're just serving static pages the scrapers aren't going to be a problem
This is what you and some people may do.
The internet which is being mourned was that period where it was better for the people who couldn’t make those changes.
There are always a few people who can manage to insulate themselves. Still, however well you insulate yourself, you are impacted by what happens to the majority, or the direction they vote.
amazing idea
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
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.
Let’s bring it back!