I generally agree. I've taken to appending "reddit" to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought. It feels like nearly all content on the internet is some de-personalized corporate "content marketing" blog at this point. Just give us your email address and we'll send you a PDF (and a drip marketing campaign.)<p>I think the old internet went away because it was more profitable to create a walled garden distribution channel than it was to develop a syndication protocol like email or rss. I honestly don't see any way around this.
The old internet is still there, it's still growing. It's just covered in a thick layer of corporate shit sites. All you have to do is be the change you want to see. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't use any javascript frontends. It's a good time.<p>As for finding others, well, HN isn't a bad place to start. Just install an RSS reader client and every time you find yourself enjoying an article check the site to see if it has an RSS feed. In fact, do this with every web interaction. Pretty soon you can completely decouple yourself from content aggregators and start perceiving the web as a community again.
I don't miss the days when you had to physically send a paper form with a cheque or postal order, go to a bank, wait 28 days for things to be delivered, stand in line at a post office, or phone someone up to get mundane stuff done. Can you imagine sorting out car insurance quotes or booking flights/hotels or doing your tax return without the internet? What a ballache!<p>The modern internet has been utterly transformative and has made modern life so much easier and simpler. Don't forget about all the useful things you take for granted now that weren't possible then because the internet wasn't commercialised at the time.<p>The old internet is still there, some if it actually physically <i>still there</i> - i.e. still on the server/URL it was on back in the day (I find this kinda cool in a way - these sort of mary-celeste servers ticking away somewhere, untouched for 20 years but someone still cares enough to pay to keep it running).<p>Perhaps less people make their own websites these days, but there is still a thriving and still-as-useless ("not much yet - check back soon!") collection of random personal websites on dat, gopher and ipfs. Stumbling onto these things or hearing about them via word of mouth/keyboard was always part of the joy of 90s internet.
To me, the best "old internet" site is Wikipedia. Although they also partially succumbed to madness of breaking the web (opening images in JavaScript popups?? breaking the "Back" browser button??) it's mostly a well-done clean HMLL/CSS site which has everything you want. I even treat it as "slow news" source [1], instead of MSM.<p>In a way, they have outperformed Google at Google's vision of organizing the world's information. That's why I try to donate as much as I can every year.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kincade_Fire</a>
It's all still there, the major search engines are just broken because they've been co-opted by SEO.<p>Tons of people still own and operate their own websites; BBSes exist; IRC is still here; mailing lists are still here; and so on and so forth.<p>You just won't find it on the top hit at Google because their business model is based on ad sales wankery.<p>Whilst we're on the topic, I'm gonna take the chance to write - if you work on this corporate shit and you're doing stuff you despise day in day out - please re-assess whether you could change things in your life to prevent that. Be the change you want to see. Cheers.
> <i>You have to enter the exact name of the website to find it on Google. MayVaneDay is also mirrored on I2P, TOR, and Dat...You have to look really hard for them now, and the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites</i><p>Without getting into the argument of whether Google deliberately makes these sites hard to find, it doesn't really support the author's thesis that the old Internet was any better, at least in the case of MayVaneDay. In the early 90s, how else would you have found it except "through links from similar small websites"?<p>> <i>I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks, back when websites like Vane's were the internet. Don't get me wrong, many cool things can be found on the internet today. But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out...</i><p>This feels incredibly myopic. The Internet of those days were limited to the extreme minority of people who were aware of the Internet and had access to a connected computer, nevermind took the time to figure out how to create for it. The author derides Facebook and Reddit as being too "easily monitored and controlled" to allow for individual voices but that's utter bullshit. The modern Internet is far from perfect, but the diversity and quantity (and arguably, quality) of voices is far better than when the Internet catered mostly to college-age kids and academics, i.e. people with access to free, high-speed Internet portals.
"I Miss the Old Internet" - an article about another website WITHOUT LINKING THERE. Congratulations, you've played yourself.<p>What's murdering the old internet is the lack of links. Everyone is posting screenshots, twitter/facebook/etc all hijack links, and we're surprised we can't find the sites.<p>Link to eachother. That's why it used to work.
This sort of post is a recurring theme here on HN, and in some ways I do sympathize with the sentiment. But I seriously believe that today that "independent" web is actually much bigger than it was in the olden days. It only seems small because of the illusion created by the hugeness of the non-independent web. And of course it is not clean binary option of independent or not, instead it really is more of a spectrum of independence, which further confuses the matters.
> the best way to find them is through links from similar small websites<p>That's also a property of the "Old Internet" though. Discoverability has always been a problem for smaller entities. It's why every fan/personal site in the 90's/00's belonged to a half-dozen web-rings or link-list sites.<p>> it's getting increasingly harder to find them<p>It's getting harder to find them because most content creators have moved to platforms. They don't want to deal with all the complexities and annoyance of running their own site and dealing with the discoverability problem -- they want to focus on creating their content. I'm also a fan of the personality small self-created/run sites can have, but it's not what most creators want to do.
The main thing I miss about "old" internet is personality. With Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you'll always have the same boring page design around your posts no matter who you are. Sure the content you post will get your personality across fairly well, but just like with art it's not only the painting that matters, but also the frame.<p>It's one of the two main reasons[1] why I vastly prefer Tumblr over the three aforementioned sites. It lets you create a page that's your own to customize how you like. And that makes it much more personal and interesting than Twitter and Instagram imo. I really wish those sites would start letting users customize their pages more than just by changing their profile pictures and header images.<p>[1]: The other being the ability to view all posts from people you follow in a sequential order instead of having some algorithm decide which posts you should see.
We don't have to "miss it". Let's just share it. There are many corners of the internet away from the spotlights. Let's just share some links, what are they ?
>But, the voice of individuals has mostly been drowned out, except on.. Reddit<p>A pretty big exception there. This reminds me of "But what did the Romans ever do for us?"[1] sketch.<p>"apart from free hosting and cataloging and tagging and community and moderation and upvote/downvote ordering and making all that easy to read with restrictions on formatting and still allowing individual expression by this newfangled concept of 'linking'[2]... what has the new Internet done for helping voices being heard?"<p>I'll tell you, I had a website that I hosted on my own PC. And before I got DSL, you could only reliably connect to it by dialing into the computer with a modem.<p>DSL didn't change much. My voice was heard by exactly one user: me.<p>And now I can make an comment on reddit about, say, why we use radians instead of degrees in Calculus, and it will have hundreds of upvotes, a dozen of responses, and an audience of at least thousands who actually read it.<p>Yes, there's no opportunity to practice Geocities-style web design there. That's <i>why</i> the things you write there actually get read by other people. Surprise, that's how it works in the old world too: print newspapers look and function about the same, and math papers are all generally typeset with the same <i>font</i> and style, as to not distract the reader from the content.<p>In today's internet, the voice of the individuals has been amplified. I had a lot of fun with HTML back in the day, but my voice was only heard when portals like reddit/fb/ng/etc came to be.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html</a><p>[2]Somebody please tell the author of the article that they can simply <i>link</i> to <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/" rel="nofollow">https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/</a> instead of ranting about how hard it is to find on Google<p>Also, it's not hard to find on Google. It's a personal homepage of "Vane Vander", and looking for Vane Vander gives you that page.
I miss the old internet, but if I had the magic to go back to 1997 to browse for a bit I'd be over it in about 30 minutes. Just like I'd be over Mac OS System 7.5 in about 10 minutes, or my SNES, or Darkwing Duck, and on and on.<p>...member chewbacca
I don't miss the old Internet because it never went away, at least the part that interests me the most and that's communities. Forums are still online and they seem to be doing just fine. Even IRC is still active.<p>What I miss is contextual advertising. You went to a video games site and all ads where relevant. Ads used to be informative and interesting. These days they're irrelevant, annoying and indifferent.<p>And I certainly don't miss the dial-up days when depending on the time of the day you might had to redial a dozen times to get a connection, and your bandwidth was a mere 28.8 Kbps which seems ridiculous by today standards.
It's essentially self-contradictory nostalgia.<p>> I miss the internet of the early 1990's, back before the World Wide Web had been visited by more than just a few computer geeks.<p>vs.<p>> Yes, alternative social networks [...]. But, they are not well-known or frequented by many.
Like the author, I too had made an account on Raddle. After lurking for a while, I came upon a post about the Proud Boy March in Portland, and I made one single comment with a slightly cynical tone. Within a period of five minutes I was banned from the site.
Back in the day, your ISP would give you an email address, a login on their Usenet server, and a few megs of free web space under "~username". That was part of the standard package.<p>Nowadays it easily could be, but since approximately everybody only uses the internet for Facebook and Gmail, it became too much of a hassle (and a legal liability) to provide.<p>The old "free" hosting services injected all kinds of obnoxious ads - banners, watermarks, pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash. Still worth it for kids who couldn't afford to set up a "real" website. Now there aren't a lot of options like that anymore. You want a website? Pay for it.
The Old Internet is when the web browser was a "smart document reader" and information was open and accessible.<p>Now the web browser is more of a VM for "web applications" and the web is turning into walled gardens.<p>The tendency for the tech world to centralize around a single browser like Chrome is a big culprit. But once we started having auto-updaters for browsers, that was the nail in the coffin. The centralizing effect of that is huge.<p>Things became easier for web developers, but not necessarily better for the end user.<p>The new internet is in the favor of commercial interests. The open internet & the open browser is being strangled.
I keep a modern directory to the 'old' Internet at <a href="http://href.cool" rel="nofollow">http://href.cool</a>.<p>I also track what's happening on blogs and wikis at <a href="http://www.kickscondor.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickscondor.com</a>.<p>There is a whole lot of great stuff going on, regardless of how popular it is. (I kind of think it's great that it's not.)
More and more I blame not just social networks, but the Web Search (and I mean Google) for strangling old-web community-centered resources. Many blogs and forums were shadowed by infinity of click-farms and other CEO'ed to crap sites, later adding tons of easily identifiable marketing black holes. Discoverability plummeted.<p>That's understandable, as Google have zero intention to lead to "real people" discussing things.
There are some search engines that help to solve this problem (no affiliation):<p>- <a href="https://wiby.me/" rel="nofollow">https://wiby.me/</a><p>- <a href="https://millionshort.com/" rel="nofollow">https://millionshort.com/</a><p>Reddit is not bad for discovering content if you understand the inherent biases, and I personally have good results with blogrolls on blogs I already enjoy such as <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/</a>.
I always find it a bit weird when people wax nostalgic about the "old internet" when they're still talking about the web. The <i>real</i> old internet had existed for a while before the web, BBSes and Usenet before that. Eternal September[1], of which the early web was effectively a continuation, practically obliterated those communities.<p>There's a lot to like about being able to do my banking, shopping, etc. online. I value the contacts I've been able to make and maintain via Modern Social Media. Still, the loss of something that existed before looms larger for me than any differences between different generations of websites. The author is missing the <i>middle period</i> interent, and that's OK, but some of us also miss the truly <i>old</i> internet.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September</a>
The continued integration of the "real world" and "online world" is cancerous in my opinion. It never mattered if xXDeath_BonerXx said he was going to show up at your house and kill you, but it matters when John Smith from Company Inc who lives at 101 Boulevard Street tells his 400 followers he's going to murder Cindi Jane from accounting. If you made a fool of yourself, you either made a new screen name or left that website and found a new one. Nobody knew a thing about you you didn't tell them, and that was wonderful.
Rose colored glasses. "The old" internet still exists, it's only that there are many orders of magnitude more content available online today than in the old era. The idea that corporate dominance and filtering is hiding content is false, in fact, the opposite is true, today's search engines are better than ever before at finding whatever you're looking for, what has changed is that search habits have become much more directed towards specific tasks rather than used for leisurely "browsing" the web.
I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain.<p>It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.
I wholeheartedly agree and think this pretty much every day.
Additionally, I still have my best links ever thread back from the early naughts on my personal website (be sure to put protections up to full-on, I haven't tested those links since back then (the site is still almost alive)).
<a href="https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links-ever" rel="nofollow">https://sensibilium.com/writings/the-profane-dog/#best-links...</a>
Maybe I'm just getting old, but the internet does not entertain me like it used to. There used to be so many fun communities, now everything is Facebook, Reddit, etc. We used to make fun of people who took the internet too seriously, but nowadays the internet really is serious business.<p>I think the dawn of smartphones, high-speed wireless data, and the internet being in everybody's pocket is one of the primary drivers behind this.
One paradox of Google's era is that we needed it when the web was full of websites like this that would pick our curiosity and feel good but hard to find. That's why we all flocked to it .. it made it easy. But it shaped the system to make people please search engines now that the web is a socio-economic platform and everything is formatted and structured for ROI... making Google's original job meaningless.
My homepage from 1995/6.<p><a href="https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/" rel="nofollow">https://blakespot.com/homepage_1996/</a>
I was just listening to 'Internet Sucks' by MC Frontalot and it basically has the same message. The old internet was amazing and I also miss it.
> Although many websites like Vane's exist on the clearnet, it's getting increasinly harder to find them through the commercial smog thrown up by Google.<p>This is true, and is one of the big reasons why I don't use Google search -- it tends not to surface the sites that I am most interested in finding.<p>Other search engines don't have the problem so much.
"I2P, TOR, and DAT" is an interesting callout in the article. Purposefully removing the search engine as a way of opting out of internet "homogenization" is an interesting counter-culture move. I would be very interested to see if it's possible to reclaim the individuality on the Old Internet using these protocols.
Any good tips&tricks to find this personal sites without exactly knowing what you are searching for?<p>The crazy part is I have google but I tend to visit my 5 (mostly more commercial) news&tech websites nowadays.<p>Gone are also the days with my well structured bookmark lists.<p>Only thing I do nowadays is to keep a personal list of Markdown notes for all important topics to look up.
So, not sure what is meant by “old internet “ ... is meaning 1980’s BBS ‘s ? Because the equivalent of those probably still exist for those who seek. Is meaning 1990’s and early noughties? Or is meaning the noughties in their entirety?
Any good guide or recipes for hosting your own website over a major ISP (Spectrum, Comcast, etc.)? I currently host my site on GoDaddy, but I find simple things like providing https and certificate are a monthly recurring charge.
Similarly named discussion from a while back <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552</a>
There's still great creative stuff on the clearnet, you just need to know where to look for it: <a href="https://neocities.org" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org</a>
remember Hipster Runoff?<p>apparently, he was "The Last Relevant Blogger"<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the-last-relevant-blogger" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ypwezb/hipster-runoff-the...</a><p>including posts such as:<p>- Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet<p>- U, Me, And Every Concert We Attend: How We Grow Older With Concerts<p>- My job/career does not align with my true personal brand. [Generation Y and the mainstream workplace]
and here i thought this was going to be about compuserv or prodigy. those experiences, along with aol, were the means by which many people experienced "the internet" in the "olden days". the only place i used the "internet" was at the computer lab in my school...all my friend's parents had signed up for one of the walled gardens and had no idea what else was "out there".
I generally agree with the author's sentiment regarding "the Old Internet". However, using "voat" and "thank goodness" in the same breath raised a red flag for me about the author and their motives. They mentioned being kicked off raddle.me for posting links to their site (the one that's currently linked to on the top of the HN homepage); maybe that was with good reason and not a result of gatekeeping?<p>For example, from _Men and Women and Marriage_:<p>> In contrast, from what I've observed of women's behavior, most women marry for money. Some of them marry several times for money. You see, women understand why marriage exists. It exists to ensure that women will be provided for while they raise their children. This is why so many marriages are dissolved after the children leave home. From the woman's perspective: no more children, no more reason to be married.<p>Perhaps, in addition to the conveniences, opportunities (learning, employment and otherwise), etc. the "New Internet" has afforded us, making this sort of trash harder to find is a bit of silver lining.