Been doing this for 20 years.
I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.
All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.
I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.
Yes it was more whimsical, yes I miss it, but no point talking about it anymore, that part of life is over.
All the little niches can be your personal Web.
There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.
Craigslist is alive and well.
PayPay is weird but who cares.
The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.
That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.
I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.
- The past is another country.
The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
Burning Man may have peaked by now. But looking back, most would agree it still had a lot of good years left in it in 1998.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.
Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.
There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
just don't participate in it and do your own thing.
Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.
Write for yourself, not for "engagement".
Do your thing.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).
I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.
A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.
the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason
it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
People aren't nihilist - social media is.
People aren't shallow - dating apps are.
The world isn't shit - late capital is.
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.
Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.
Step 3: Read more books.
Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.
Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.
PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.
A long time ago there was a french saying "noblesse oblige", or the german pendant "Wohlstand verpflichtet".
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
Truth is everything rots over time, there is no escaping from entropy.
Instead, reads like you're blaming the victim. Shoulda worked harder in school!
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages
This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.
You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
Let's be honest here, how many of these "specialized ultra-nerdy communities" are closed off Discord servers?
I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.
There is a lot of fun stuff still there, but a corporate search engine might not point you to it.
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
Wasted potential is a mournful thing.
Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I miss the old forums the most. The group mind on Reddit is just regression to the mean.
The rest I tried to cut back as much as possible for my own mental health.
I can't get of YouTube completly even though most of the time I hate myself after doom scrolling. Sometimes I still find genuinely interesting stuff there.
It was not without its dark sides. I remember at a young age seeing beheading videos, which were super easily available, even if not looking that hard, predators going wild in irc chats and the primitive online gaming of that time, several incidents of people on a webcam being encouraged to kill themselves via overdose, then that going viral, gore sites, etc. Addictive flash game sites riddled with porn ads. All of that stuff is still out there but a little harder to find. Back then there was a certain kind of exhibitionist spirit with the content, which wasn't all "fun" necessarily. But even with all of that, I do believe the web was better.
It sucks the fun out of pretty much anything.
I'm sure it's an age thing. Author must be younger than I. But really, with the benefit of hindsight, the gates of evil opened with web 2.0. "Democratization" lead to strong platforms, walled gardens and the rest of it.
People don't see any point in "creating content" in the form of a website or an irreverent blog site anymore. It takes too much time away from school or work obligations. Their friends couldn't care less about it. Worst of all, there isn't a guestbook to receive feedback from like-minded internet strangers that isn't riddled with spambots.
If someone is doing it, it's because they want fame; that's the only worthwhile payoff for putting yourself out there, and it creates misaligned incentives that result in inauthentic expression: generic meme pages, terrible video skits, standup comedy clips that are 90% tedious "crowd work" because they don't want to reveal their actual stage material.
- [0] https://spacehey.com/ [1] https://mmm.page/, https://neocities.org/
functionmouse•1h ago
make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having
jonhohle•1h ago
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
coffeebeqn•55m ago
fragmede•44m ago
armchairhacker•41m ago
doctorwho42•36m ago
joe_mamba•25m ago
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a recent phenomenon in western societies.
simianparrot•19m ago
joe_mamba•18m ago
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a McMansion, a recreational boat, etc if your needs are just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter, but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's the only entertainment they can afford, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function.
dgellow•15m ago
armchairhacker•10m ago
ModernMech•35m ago
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
mjhay•24m ago
geodel•1m ago
opto•16m ago
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
Folcon•3m ago
I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?
dgellow•12m ago
grahamburger•9m ago
joe_mamba•23m ago
Rinse and repeat.
funimpoded•19m ago
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
DocTomoe•10m ago
If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
DivingForGold•45m ago
brightball•12m ago
The early dialup and BBS world was magic and it pulls everything completely off of the standard channels.
neilwilson•58m ago
It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.
It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
soopypoos•5m ago
summa_tech•55m ago
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
fragmede•38m ago
dgellow•8m ago
the__alchemist•49m ago
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
sevenzero•13m ago
So 99% of posts on Hackernews, got it.
dgellow•10m ago
the__alchemist•5m ago
thinkingtoilet•38m ago
MSFT_Edging•22m ago
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
Folcon•10m ago
And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?
For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area
This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging
dogleash•16m ago
B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"
I don't really get how B follows from A. B is true, but A wasn't implying not-B.
bradley13•12m ago
I recently retired. I've programmed for 50 years, both for work and for fun. My son asked: so what's your project? I had to think about it, and I've decided to learn GPU programming - something completely new to me.
With AI as a tutor, this will be massively easier than at any time in the past. In some ways, the state of AI now is reminiscent of the state of the internet 25 years ago.
Waterluvian•6m ago
Nothing about what I did was impressive. I’m a novice at best. But I haven’t felt so fulfilled in such a long time. I had a serious moment of thinking, “I wish I could quit my career and just repair electronics for people.”