Comments
Early internet felt more like a community. A few years ago, I came across a book that is on the same wavelength. It used to be that being connected meant you were in an alternate world from the rest of everyone; now it's kind of the opposite.
Maybe it's my age, but there was a sense of shared exploration of the unknown that I don't feel anymore.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jess-kimball-leslie...
By cookiengineer 2024-05-309:00 > but there was a sense of shared exploration of the unknown
What I loved about the old internet is that private people had their little corners on the internet where they shared their excitement for whatever niche topics they were interested in.
It was a "hobby" and research internet, not a commercialized one. So many geocities and funpic blogs were so awesome because you randomly discovered new areas of research and interests.
People were sharing the URLs on post-it notes, I still have the first note from my uncle when he was super excited about the all new MIT OpenCourseWare, and we coordinated our downloads of those courses to save bandwidth.
All the file sharing communities were also more of "what do you want to learn", and that's why there were also chat rooms where people were asking about some niche book nobody had in stores anymore or that was too unpopular to be found.
Pretty much everything I know about electronics, computers, IT, development, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology etc I learned on the internet because at the time it was full of open research.
Now, 25 years later, it feels like we are being taught to be click monkeys that have to be kept dumb because if we would get too smart, nobody would make money off us.
It's the complete opposite :(
By johndavid9991 2024-05-3022:17 I feel you on this. Technology-wise, the world is more connected, but people are more distant than ever. I don't know what happened, but there are people that I was very close with personally years ago. We are connected on Facebook, but I always disconnect from them. Maybe it's my age, too, but I just don't see the current connection as genuine anymore. The excitement is not there anymore, and maybe we got used to it already, I don't know.
By muzani 2024-05-3010:10 I like cutting edge tech because it's sort of the same. Early Facebook was an awesome community. So was IRC. So was reddit. So was Clubhouse. And Threads... for about a month, now it's far more toxic than Twitter ever was.
My favorite era of AI was GPT-3, pre-ChatGPT, but it seems like we've long blown past that. The RAG tools community is still quite fun though.
By bodiekane 2024-05-3011:56 The best thing was that the internet was made by and for smart people.
It was an incredibly unique dynamic- access to incredibly diverse people from all over the world, but simultaneously tilted towards the intellectually curious and tech-savvy. It was maybe a little bit like the vibe of being on a college campus, even if you were talking about sports or the weather, the default level of knowledge, intelligence, openness and curiosity were far higher than the default in "real life".
There was this unique culture of "the internet" as a place separate from "the real world" that was heavily skewed by the demographics. It was a world where nerds were 50% of the population instead of 1%.
By Turboblack 2024-05-3011:17 I found the Internet already at the Polytechnic at the turn of the millennium, but it was the IRC, there were web chats, a lot of interesting independent resources from enthusiasts. Now I’m doing this, but I see that those who are nostalgic for those times mostly only talk about them, few people make pages in HTML3.2 and use clean code. I recently created a CMS that integrates both modern computers and those that existed then, you can administer the site even from an 8086 computer running DOS (I tried to do this, I can even show screenshots, but here answers with a link seem to be prohibited). I published CMS on various platforms, about a hundred platforms, on Github the HamsterCMS has already collected 35 stars, and I continue to develop it. A friend and I set up hosting where you can place such pages, the system is already pre-installed, you go to the admin panel and just create pages by choosing a template, and there are already half a hundred different templates. There is an imitation for retro, and simply adapted for Internet Explorer 5, and the Links browser for DOS. we are doing a lot to revive that Internet, and we want it to coexist with the modern one, and not go down in history as just screenshots on Wikipedia
