I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.<p>I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.<p>I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.
I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things.<p>A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".
I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking "Special" about our internet culture. Highly recommended.<p>This is one of my favourite songs now: [2]<p>It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14544192/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/k1BneeJTDcU</a>
Sadly, it’s the people.<p>The old internet had a filtering function where, because it was harder to use, people had to have some interest or skill to use it. So as a result, I think the proportion of people “online” had similar interest so more content was relevant and made by similar people.<p>Now everyone is online with more diverse interests and capabilities.
I actually enjoy today's Internet much more. I'll lay out the reasons:<p>1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.<p>2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.<p>3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.<p>4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.
Paraphrased from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, in which he referred to books but I think he captures the sentiment universally:<p>It's not the old internet you miss, it's some of the things that were in the old internet. The same things could be in the internet today. It's not the old internet you're looking for. Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.<p>The old internet was only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget...The magic is only in what the internet says, how it stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.<p>The old internet showed pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.
Below are some relevant articles I keep going back to that highlight the same phenomenon on the 'decay' of web as a platform (by decay I mean extreme commercialization, excessive bloat, endless tracking and whatnot) made by the linked forum post's author:<p>* <a href="https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/" rel="nofollow">https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/</a><p>* <a href="https://danluu.com/web-bloat/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/web-bloat/</a><p>* <a href="https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-dead-b36aaebe708d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/digital-diplomacy/the-world-wide-web-is-d...</a><p>Can't help but agree with most of their assertions.<p>Also, I just noticed that the author of this forum post uses 'internet' in place of what I feel should be 'web/world wide web' (just some pedantry from me tbh).
<i>Million Short</i> is a nice way to find some of these old websites. It lets you remove the first million search results from your query:<p><a href="https://millionshort.com" rel="nofollow">https://millionshort.com</a><p>The thing I <i>really</i> miss about the old Internet are forums. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, and other social media sites lack a certain intimacy. Everyone is somewhat hostile by default and there is no incentive to contribute to the community. It's very different and a lot less fulfilling than the Internet forums circa ±2000-2005.
Is there a term for when people reminisce something and think those were the days at the same time think everything contemporary has gone to the dogs?<p>Like my uncle who is an old car enthusiast who thinks ambassador was the greatest car ever made in India yet if you are really objective about it was truly a bad car (wrt milege, comfort, safety, design, etc).<p>I feel the same reading the comments here. Really don't miss anything about the old internet, especially the era of VSNL which was a downtime provider with some internet in between. Everything is much more amazing now. Want to learn anything from programming to chemistry there are hundreds of freely "animated" tutorials. God how easy my studies would be with the wealth of easy instant knowledge we have now. Add to that the amount of crazy content created everyday for every niche, it is just amazing (you just need to know where to look).<p>E.g. I just found out about two channels recently called Captain disillusionment and Great scott on youtube and I've learned so much about two really different things, things which I didn't even know I was even interested in.
It's just nostalgia<p>You could say that you 'miss the old _____' and apply it to almost everything in life and you will feel nostalgia for it, even to the point of looking for a way to get back to it and once you are trying it, you become meh and get back to the new thing, as you realize that it changed for good<p>This happens repetitively to me and my friends with tech/videogames, we are randomly chatting about how good it was some game (i.e) and we decide to try it again, some 20 minutes into it we are already pretending we are having fun when in reality we are bored/hating it<p>We might miss litle things, but it's quite hard to actually give a good reason to get back to something 'old' besides just nostalgia
Blame the gatekeepers and the users who made them, not the Web.<p>Only using FB or TW for content discovery is just the equivalent of starting a browsing session via Yahoo's catalogue — It's just that the ratio of lazy people using the Web has outgrown those who still take the effort of finding the nuggets. At the same time, it has become too easy to publish fluffy spur of the moment content and people craving for upvotes over meaningful discussion. I'm not against giving anyone a voice or leaving it only to the tech-savvy, but I can't say that zero-effort publishing has contributed to the perceived quality and original idea of the Web.<p>Do I miss the old Web? Yes, but only as much as I miss analogue photography. It's nice to get into that reminiscent mood while flicking through old screenshots made up of spacer gifs, but as I watch the world go by on four screens at a time while ordering groceries on the fifth and paying with my fingerprint, it's kinda nice to see how far we've come.
Its still there, its just buried under all the other crap.<p>As more and more people generate content, more and more bullshit exists. Unfortunately, Google etc. - despite all their big announcements - can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.<p>Where's the semantic web that was promised? I wonder if we're still paying for the mistakes that were made with the whole XML stuff ...?
There are two mutually exclusive views of the web. As a set of protocols set to allow individual humans to share information about things they love and the web as a set of protocols to make a living.<p>Profit motivated web presences want views, they want attention, they need nine 9s uptime, need to be able to do monetary transactions absolutely securely, and they want to be an application not a document. They live and die on the eternal wave of walled garden's recommendation engines because that's the network effect and that's where money flows. It doesn't matter if this means extremely high barriers to entry because money solves everything.<p>Individuals' websites are freeform presentations about the things that person is interested in. They are the backyard gardens of the mind and the most important thing is lowering the friction from thought to posting. There's no need to get tons of traffic instantly (or ever), they're mostly time insensitive.<p>The old web (and other protocols) still exist but they're much harder to find because they are not constantly updated. The time sensitive search engines deprioritize the static sites or even drop them after a handful of years.
Yes, but still, thats almost always the case on any new information conduit. Early adopters use it as a novel means of expressing what was not possible with the old means. After adoption, it becomes a commodity, and the pendulum swings again.<p>I understand a platform cannot be compared to the internet, but I believe the comparison still holds true. Will early snapchat users remember and miss their early experiences 10 years from now?<p>Positively (ideally) the internet is not a platform, and it can transport anything, not damping future and novel means of expression.<p>EDIT: But, lets not forget (since I easily went for rational dismissal) Missing something is completely subjective feeling, a valid assertion, and nothing we discuss would have made the author not miss it.<p>Let's reflect on how difficult it is to fight the endless resources poured on making us engage (and our natural tendency to accept commodities because they are either easy or addicting). I miss napster, I align conceptually with peer to peer interchange, but still, I use spotify. Movies, I still prefer playing directly from bittorrent (even when I know that sequential downloading is harming the swarm).<p>Ultimately, I just want the network to be neutral and for protocols to never be banned. A neutral network needs not to be subsidized by corporations.
I think the big change, which the author hints to at the end, is one of scale. It's not that the cool kids joined the internet; it's that absolutely everyone did. The internet went from being a small town of people, to a city of people in the ~90s, to a world of people in ~2010s. The internet can no longer contain a single culture; it's too big. It will always from now on be acultural, since there are simply too many people using it for too many reasons.<p>As result, you now need micro-internets to have a culture. An example of one was YouTube near when it started. And you see the same issue repeated there as YouTube grew from a city to a world itself. There was a lot of controversy around the YouTube year in review videos YouTube released in recent years, because everyone felt misrepresented. That's because YouTube now contained too many cultures to represent in one video. It, like the internet, no longer contains a culture because there are too many people using it for too many reasons.<p>Let's look at cars as an analogy. When cars were first invented, the only people who owned/used cars were enthusiasts. There was a barrier of entry (technical knowledge and interest/passion) that selected a subset of the population to create a culture. As cars became easier to use, that "selective membrane" disappeared, so there was no longer a culture associated with car ownership. Similarly, as the internet has become easier to use for not technical, not passionate people (in part due to websites like Google, Facebook, etc.), there is no longer a selective barrier separating internet-users from everyone else, and hence there is not, and can never again be, an "internet culture".
Remember the “back in my days” talk about some old stuff that you didn’t know or fully care about, or in some rare cases sparked some curiosity? Time is brutal and some of us have become that old dude. Scary. Cycle of life and evolution vs. nostalgia I guess.<p>I’m cuttently soldering a rs-232 to wifi modem (<a href="https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-232-wifi-modem-for-under-10-using-esp8266-and-zimodem-firmware/" rel="nofollow">https://subethasoftware.com/2018/02/28/wire-up-your-own-rs-2...</a>) to get my amigas back online. Pimiga is nice but too far from that 1:1 experience. Lots of telnet BBS out there.
It’s like nostalgia for old TV shows. You have found memories but then when you watch them again they were really crap. I also remember images rendering line by line, expensive phone bills, crashy browsers, popup storms, going through 15 pages of altavista results before finding something useful, etc
Has anyone tried Gemini?<p><a href="https://gemini.circumlunar.space" rel="nofollow">https://gemini.circumlunar.space</a><p>I looked around a few days ago and I find it really neat. Its minimalism makes it unsuitable for all the trash that has ruined the modern web <i>as a simple information store</i>. It uses the principle of least capability to create an environment where mere information takes center stage. Not even supporting images means memes can't even take hold, let alone real-time adtech.<p>The only flaw is that it's still a client/server protocol, which means closed silos and more passive forms of adtech could still invade.<p>(The modern web is however an acceptable thin client for single page apps that interact with services. I look at HTML5+CSS+JS as the new VT100, a terminal protocol for talking to remote machines.)<p>The other part of the modern Internet that reminds me of the old Internet is small independent podcasts. I listen to a number of these, and the high information content and lack of bullshit is reminiscent of the web before Facebook and adtech. There's also an implicit principle of least capability in podcasts. It's possible to insert ads, sure, but it's also possible to skip them and it's hard to make it impossible to do that. The medium is non-interactive and almost non-scriptable. There is an effort right now to walled garden podcasts, and I urge everyone who cares to resist it by using podcast apps and aggregators that are not pushing this.
This is a classic. It was put up 18 years ago, and still has plenty of relevance: <a href="https://www.internetisshit.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.internetisshit.org</a>
Admittedly, I miss the “old internet” too, however I have hope we can build it again.<p>As I see it, there are two main issues to solve:<p>1) It’s no longer trivial to build a “home” page that fits one’s diverse interests. People are lured into frameworks which prescribe a certain level of structure. How do we make it easy for people to freely add content to their “pages”
, in whatever form they envision?<p>2) The “early” internet (or what is left of it) is largely outranked now, as the methods by which we discover new information has been heavily commoditized by industry. Parallel to this shift, people have moved to podcasts, news articles and videos for their daily content. The group of people that consume text is no longer the majority. In many ways, each new social media platform is attempting to recapture an aspect of community/shared experience that has been achieved before. The good platforms extend this reach, the bad suffocate it. A truly decentralized internet experience has the potential to foster diversity, but our best and brightest are figuring out how to capture this value with variations of digital signatures rather than novel and groundbreaking tech.
I agree, and I think some comments are apt to note that we have as (grown, adult) people changed, and what we're seeking is really, on some level, a lost part our former selves (cc: In Search of Lost Time) —- at the same time, however, it _is_ pretty difficult to make these "garish" (as op puts it) spaces today. (Whether or not it's important that the internet is "garish" is a separate argument —- my short argument is I prefer, and would encourage, a greater ecodiversity in the internet landscape.)<p>Anyway -- I think, despite HTML + CSS + VPS services still existing, the alternatives —- the Well-Styled & Gridded Squarespace sorts, and the plug-n-play platforms like Twitter/Facebook —- are so easy to use that we've come to have disproportionately more cleaned up, mall-like spaces than not. I think.<p>About a month ago, I did a Show HN for <a href="https://mmm.page" rel="nofollow">https://mmm.page</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27128424</a>) that was my (small) attempt at creating a platform/tool to help people more easily create these spaces. It's still in alpha, but the Discord (link on homepage) is quickly growing with ppl who have this same frustration.<p>I have a feeling we'll see more and more counter-2010s-platforms platforms emerging over the next few years... platforms that try to correct our overcorrection toward cleanliness and order and optimization and profit, etc. etc.
Strange, as this author misses the internet that they remember from the mid-90s and I miss the internet from the days before people like the author even knew what it was.
There's a search engine that indexes only traditional HTML based websites at: <a href="https://wiby.me" rel="nofollow">https://wiby.me</a>
I blame Facebook and Apple. The old Internet was doing great right until the "Web 2.0" idea combined with everyone getting access to it. First app installed on their new iPhone? Facebook.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS/iPadOS)#Of_All-...</a>
I understand where the author is coming from. I run a Ministry website (Industrial music website), and have since 1994. Used to be, and still is the place to go for information, however it doesn't even show up in google searches, and yet generic lyrics sites, or other non-detailed sites do. It's a completely different time.
OP here:
I didn't thought that this story will blow up. That's great.<p>To clarify, I didn't wrote the article <a href="https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-internet.57195/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/i-miss-the-old-intern...</a>. A guy named Jonathan Scott Griffin wrote it.
I tried to find him because I want to send him a message that I have posted his article on HN. I found his medium profile <a href="https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-griffin-5f9e3316eb4e" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/about-me-stories/about-me-jonathan-scott-...</a> (not sure if it's him).
I remember the backlash against unique designs where everyone said they just wanted plain sites, with the information in focus. Now when big parts of internet basically have become standardized and sterile everyone wants these unique designs back.
Some Tor hidden services, or `Onionland` as it's called are very similar to the early web. For some reason a lot of the pages look like Angelfire[0]. I can't figure out why though. Perhaps the technical challenge of setting up an .onion was so hard that the webmasters were glad just to have <i>something</i> hosted and the bulk of their energy was spent on the hidden service and they didn't spend 5 hours creating a Javascript single page app in their free time.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire</a>
It’s now mostly “top 10 whatever-you-search for”, or pages that generate automated comparisons. People unconsciously craved for authentic experiences after supermarkets, and chains. And same goes for the Internet.
I’m 14, and internet wise, I wish it was the 90s. I coded my website, blog occasionally, and get noticed once in a great while. I chat on open platforms, and like decentralization and freedom from corporations.
I miss the pre-Internet and especially the Time Before The Web. I can still hear the sound of my dial-up modem connecting to local BBSes. Telnetting into a MUD. Porn at 2k/second. Compuserve.
Nostalgia? Yes. Was it better? No, just different. But the Internet and Web’s advent felt like waking up to see a freeway had been run through my residential street. And there was no going back. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of those days to someone who has only known the Web and Internet.
Come say hi at the Midnight (<a href="https://midnight.pub" rel="nofollow">https://midnight.pub</a>) if you miss the old internet. :) I built it for those reasons.
To a certain extent, Wikipedia has replaced a lot of the old Geocities sites for a certain subject.<p>The sort of nerdy/obsessive detail is still there, it's just kinda centralised on a fairly bland website. Your opinion on if this is an improvement or not depends on your affinity for animated GIFs I guess :)<p>The Geocities style stuff still exists, it is just the discovery is harder now as you will find the Wikipedia page first and then probably stop reading.<p>Things like webrings we're kinda cool for discoverability.
Missing it other times too:<p><i>I Miss the Old Internet</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518</a> - Oct 2019 (306 comments)<p><i>Tell HN: I miss the old internet</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334552</a> - June 2018 (221 comments)
I had been in DOS for almost a decade when I got my first (dial-up) unix shell. I had been using ported unix utilities (MKS Toolkit) for some time so it was somewhat less painful than being thrown into the deep end. Now I have a terminal Debian container on my Chromebook and can wax nostalgic whenever I wish. And no, I do not conflate the internet with the web...
It is still possible to find great communities outside of the corporate monopolies and fun websites, you just have to dig and spend time on the internet. Sometimes it is hard to escape your bubble of watch-time-increasing or addiction-inducing algorithms of giant ad-filled sites. Some sites cause addiction due to community and some due to algorithm.
While I agree, there is still great content to find online, content of the type he refers to, it is just damn hard to find. To discover it I use alternative search engines and custom built crawlers.<p>There should be more portal sites, just links to quality content. Used to be many of those, too.
> All these wikis have the same layout and are just dull, devoid of emotion.<p>Probably he's talking about Wikia (or, by their new name, Fandom), which indeed is pretty much always the same layout as Wikipedia plus a literal shitload of ads.<p>What killed off the other sites? Mostly the fact that whenever emotions run high (and the more invested people are in a fandom, the worse it gets), you <i>will</i> have a bunch of scriptkiddies or actual capable hackers that will DDoS or hack your site off the Internet. I don't know many people who are willing to deal with this shit for a hobby project, so it is only logical that most of the creators have either left the fandom entirely or migrated their content off to some centralized platform.<p>Additionally, people on the consuming side were tired of content vanishing into nothingness when its creators died, lost interest or were unable to pay the hosting bills... which led them to seek out centralized platforms, as (as ugly and ad-ridden they may be) at least promised some form of reliability.
I have never seen the old internet but looking at the remains of it, it does appear really interesting.
It is sad that the most popular search engine throws complete garbage at you when there still exist fabulous websites with real content.
From the thread:<p>> If you've never had to configure a sendmail.conf you've had it easy.<p>Been there, done that. Even with the usual .mc files and m4, once I had to dive deep into the rabbit hole of sendmail.conf to figure out what was going wrong.<p>Nowadays, I just use Postfix. :)
I believe the main reason the internet has turned out this way is because of flawed economic incentives. It's a winner take all game ruled mostly by American corporations. The individual blogger, Usenet contributor, IRC moderator, or open source software creator never got a piece of the cake. As the internet became mainstream, the incentives to engage in these kind of activities vanished.<p>I hate to be the guy to bring up crypto since it never ends well on HN, but I believe that if the internet had had a "payment layer" that rewards early users from the start it would've turned out very differently.
Nostalgia never changes. In 20 years todays kids we will be lamenting how everything was better, more fresh, more fun and more innocent back in the 2020's.
This sentiment of missing an older internet is one reason like like Hacker News. Slash dot was great in the day. Digg was so great in the day. Then the early days of Reddit were great. I’ve been her for over ten years and Hacker News is still good.<p>So thank you to the team that runs Hacker News and everyone who comments for making it a good place to come to.
I haven't seen anyone mention my observations yet: The internet used to be a place we <i>visited</i>. Now we <i>live</i> there. <i>Life</i> was the abundant, fun thing, and like any mild intoxicant, 30-60 minutes of internet enhanced <i>life</i>.<p>We shuttled ideas between life and the internet, (let's look up how to make fireworks! Let's find girls online at other universities!) but money was much more difficult or impossible to transfer. We used to send a check to an ISP like several other mild media such as telephone and cable. Now we burn through electricity to verify our payments.<p>And not everyone was on the internet. It wasn't easy or immediately rewarding. No slick salesman put a phone into your hand for $50 and gave any dickwad keys to the universe. You had to put some effort into it and earn your place there. You had to put together a number of pieces of information from other experts, persistently asking questions and taking chances. It was a nifty club with other lucky, brave, dedicated, skilled people. We considered ourselves <i>grateful</i> and (more or less) treated it with respect, vs taking for granted that the space would never offend us and conquering territory for ourselves (social media) and filling it with lies for our own selfish ends (fake news).<p>Now <i>everyone</i> is there (...Here!) <i>all the time</i>. It's like living in a subway station. Yes you can have fun there, but surely it's better to be outdoors mostly and re-enter as desired.<p>It was not unlike an intimate relationship's honeymoon, versus living together and suddenly required to have a productive partnership and responsibility. Sure, it's fulfilling for many people, but the carefree, easy days are over. Yes, you can still go to html5zombo.com, but don't stay too long! Your bills are in that other tab. And the camera in your child's pre-school in the other. And you've got to finalize your purchases or the Amazon delivery window closes. And you've got to research everything finance related. And double-check all the news because lies abound. And don't forget to maintain appearances on linkedin. And keep learning, because everyone else is learning and they'll learn more than you. And your school is analyzing your child's every breath and keystroke.<p>That phone screen and browser window are the new eyes through which you're looking at the world. We have left the world behind and now <i>nature</i> becomes the 30-60 minutes of unknown amusement and delight we dream of rather than our proper home. Try to count how many half hours go by this week in which you a. are awake and b. don't touch the internet. It's not the internet we miss, it's its subordinate relation to the real world we miss.
If you miss the old internet, then don't be two-faced and support big corporations that centralize it and act as ministries of truth. That's not what the old internet was about.
OK Boomer.<p>You might remember this one:
<a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/shakedownstreet...</a><p>"Maybe you had too much too fast. Maybe you had too much too fast.
Or just over played your part.<p>Nothin' shakin' on Shakedown Street. Used to be the heart of town.
Don't tell me this town ain't got no heart. You just gotta poke around."
For me, it's Reddit which has killed the internet. It (along with Facebook Groups) has sucked the oxygen out of internet communities. It favours recency, but only at the thread level, so new comments in old threads will never be seen but new threads with the same conversation will always pop up.<p>This causes one of two effects: old timers leave communities because it's just the same repetitive threads over and over, and communities become dominated by newbies; or, worse, old timers develop lexicons of inside jokes and memes, and the community becomes impenetrable to newcomers who might otherwise have a lot to offer.
Every time they add a new law to control the Internet, it more then likely is a bad day for everyone. (Except for the Gov. and corporations, of course.)
"I miss old ATX."<p>"I miss old [X]."<p>There's no point to sentimentality. Zeitgeist is always missed. You can't go back without a time-machine.