I wanted to suggest a kind of alternative for discussion. I think there was something magical about the early web in that it offered a new way of interacting with the world that did not previously exist. It was difficult or impossible to find people that shared my interests (etc) before it, and usually that meant to just kept a large part of myself internal. I agree we have also changed, and there’s nostalgia involved, and that the internet does exist still the way we remember and even ion more ways we don’t appreciate but our kids will.

However i think there is also a bit of frustration that that initial burst of excitement did not continue to develop. When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them. Posting semi anonymously to HN with people i may never speak with again is a HUGE improvement over life before it, but it’s still a very limited experience. With facebook and reddit we have imho suboptimal platforms that have captured much of this magic and perhaps stunned their growth. I don’t mean to be pessimistic and the current internet is absolutely improved on uncountable ways from the one we remember. I suspect a bit of the frustration is some people’s inner belief that we could have something even better and somehow we are stuck.

That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?

And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.

The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that people have weird fringe interests and that there is literally dozens of us.

It’s never too late

isn't the internet's fault

An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.

I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.

It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)

As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.

I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.

That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.

I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in behind a lot of other more important things that I don't have enough time for as it is.

I've noticed this has become a far more important equation with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit. Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of course typically when you're young you have fewer responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and properly you allocate time accordingly.

Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time. How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me of time, are a far greater annoyance with that understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you can think you understand the value of your time; when you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around wearing the expense of time across decades.

Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned. Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50; blink, blink, you're dead.

Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s, depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your telomeres as they keep getting shorter.

Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years remaining to do things that really, really matter to you, and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the next, something more valuable, something more interesting, a new experience perhaps.

I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's the reversal of the experience dulling concept of repetition, that people long for; every time you do something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do; repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward the past in part due to that sensation of everything being vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the early addiction when the high was far better, before repetition eroded it).

We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience of a new big world to explore online for the first time, that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because people half my age experience the same sensation of missing what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs, same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young people today will be longing for the exciting early days of TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it, because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience queue moves in one direction.

If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning, the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things that I find interesting. And that means not burning much more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of that.

http://phroxy.z3bra.org/bitreich.org:70/0/con/2020/rec/energ...

The last surprise is when you come

gradually to realize that nothing

surprises you any more.

And that, I think, was the handle— that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Yup. "Today's IRC" — the place for kids to idle around and make friends — isn't Discord; it's Minecraft. (Not that weird; Minecraft is a low-stakes graphical MUD, and MUDs have always served double-purpose as chatrooms.)

And "today's GeoCities pages" — shrines for an individual's personality, beliefs, and curated tastes — are now sprawling multimedia affairs split between a Twitch/YouTube streaming channel for community-engaged events; an Instagram/Snapchat for live stories/high-engagement lifelogging; a Discord/subreddit for async community engagement; and a Wordpress/Tumblr site with a comissioned custom theme to hold evergreen reference stuff, longform supplemental materials for videos, etc. (And maybe a Squarespace/Shopify/Redbubble store, too, if there's anything to sell; or a Bandcamp/Patreon, if the published online material is itself the thing to be sold.)

(Tangent: the number of different pieces of "heavy infrastructure" Internet plumbing required to make the modern approach to a "shrine of personality" work, should be a hint as to why people don't just make plain websites any more. They want to interact more with their audiences/fans/communities, and with higher fidelity, than a plain website / comments section / forum can offer; even more than a heavily-built-up Sandstorm.io instance could offer.)

Minecraft doesn't have that same constant flow of novel game-elements to match the number of hours people invest into it; and so most play in Minecraft is a lower-key "post-game" kind of engagement with evergreen mechanics — the same "maintenance" kind of play that you see in e.g. Animal Crossing, together with the "practice" kind of play you see in the speedrun community. That kind of gameplay is extremely amenable to being interrupted for socialization. It's like gardening in a community garden.

(Analogy for socially-mediated entertainment for the pre-MMO-era kids: it's like getting together with your friends with a bunch of individual LEGO sets you got for your birthday to construct them all; vs. getting together with your friends to play with the same big old tub of random assorted LEGO bricks you've had for years. Building the sets favors engagement with the novelty of the work, over social engagement with your friends. Building from a tub almost forces social engagement with your friends, as that's the mechanism through which any consensus arises as to what you're going to be spending your time doing.)

Many multiplayer online games played today have a heritage that comes from the MUDs. Minecraft is certainly one of them and fills a similar niche, though to categorize it as a MUD seems strange, unless any multiplayer virtual world with an ROG-like element is also a MUD.

I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.

> Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.

Is it? How can you tell? I would expect there to be more... but also it's less encouraging to do all that work, and people not be able to find it...

Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.

Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.

Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.

In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.

Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.

This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.

[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...

The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.

> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)

Can you elaborate please; an example?

Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.

Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!

Here are a couple of the best things that I think the internet provides, both of which have been around basically since its inception:

1. Instant communication ie. email and instant messaging

2. Free sharing of knowledge ie. scholarly articles, and yes, Wikipedia

If you have an Android phone and have ever used the Google news feed (from AMP), then you've seen what I think are the worst parts of the internet today. As far as I know it's grown more and more prolific over the years:

I'm talking about content that's created solely as a vehicle for advertising. It's either speculation (which may provide some value) or simply "reporting" on information that has changed hands many times. In other words, while the original source might be available on the internet, you will never find it because it's been re-reported by ten thousand other sources that all want a slice of the ad revenue.

Proliferation of misinformation, both accidental and intentional, goes along with the above, though there are other opportunities for this as well (like social media).

There are countless pros and cons that I don't even know about of come in contact with, but I would agree on the whole with the idea that the internet is a poorer tool for good than it was, at least 15 years ago, and probably 20 as well.

https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/9999-in-10000-mobile-apps-...

But where? The venues where that happened are gone. You can have a public discussion with 100.000 eyeballs, but not the kind of more intimate, local environment that were earlier boards and chat rooms.

Edit: Plus the oldschool, geeky stuff like BBS, usenet, mailing lists, IRC etc... that still exist but are usually limited to technical people and subjects.

Thank you for writing that. I also expressed the same sentiment a few months ago about getting older distorting my perception of tech's evolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897792

Now look at the window of the MacPro 2013 to 2020. And it felt like nothing. How long has Windows 10 been a thing? Feels like only yesterday we finally moved all production off of Linux 2.6

Time really telescopes

2000 to 2010 felt like a huge jump, and it was -- you had the explosion of broadband, enabling huge MMOs like WoW which was a life-absorbing phenomenon for me, and computers and GPUs went from scrawny, green-board things to beefy, pro-sumer luxuries blazing with LEDs. Fat client IMs and social media redefined how we connected to people online.

Compared to that, 2010 to 2020 feels like an inertial flatline. We dropped Skype for Discord, which is the best IM since WLM (yet still inferior in many ways lol), GPUs have gotten beefier since they're purely parallel compute machines (and yet nearly 70% of people still have a 1080p display according to the Steam Hardware Survey[0], a resolution that was readily available on LCDs 13 years ago!). Motherboards have more LEDs than before, and look more and more like exotic alien space cities, which is awesome. SSDs have gotten... slightly bigger. Ray tracing and VR, which seem like the only major innovations of the decade, are both kind of here, but only kind of, and not enough for a WoW equivalent or genre to capitalize on. The games we play or their graphics haven't changed significantly. I started using Linux and learned exponentially more about tech than in the prior decade, and I now play those samey games on an open source OS, and that's cool. :p Crypto came, and a lot of security lessons have been learned in the tech world. That's nice. But it feels like bacteria filling out the blank spots of a petri dish that's stopped expanding.

0: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Computer advances follow network bandwidth increases. Network upload bandwidth has been stagnant for almost 20 years.

Give everybody symmetrical gigabit and watch the sparks fly.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-talks-buy-discord-m...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxJd7aoFM4

"You know why America was so great to you when you were 12? BECAUSE YOU WERE 12!"

This is especially important for introverts like me, that if they have to put their real name on something, for example a comment on Facebook, they think about it 100 times, while being anonymous they are more inclined to share things with strangers. You don't have to worry about what people thinks about you, or about prejudice that people have based on your age, your social life, your job, because nobody knows who you really are. The only thing that matters is your contribute to the discussion. I still remember discussions that I made with people that I only recognize by a username, and they were so interesting, much more interesting than everything you can find on Facebook.

In the old days you were told to never share your real name on the internet, to always pick up usernames, nowadays companies forces you to register with your real identity, Facebook can even ask you to provide a photo of your ID, and YouTube won't let you watch content for over 18 if you don't identity yourself. There are even countries that would like to force internet companies to ask for the identity of the people!

In the old days internet was a place where an introvert that didn't know how to relate with other people in real life could have escaped to share it's interests with other people freely and without any anxiety. Nowadays it's no longer like this, unfortunately. Forums are desert, nobody still uses IRC, and everything is a Facebook group or something like that on a social media platform where I don't want to sign up. Even websites in the old days had comment sections, nowadays you want to comment? Do it on Facebook. There are only a few exception of course (one of this is this website, that I like a lot for exactly this reason).

The only website that still maintains the old web philosophy, and the only social media that I use, is Reddit, that still doesn't require you to register with your real identity. But I fear that it will not last for long...

Also in the old internet there was a spirit of collaboration and community that I never saw in the modern web. You were a newbie in something, for example using Linux? Sign up to a forum, or ask on IRC, and people would have helped you, helped solving the problem, for free, only for the gratification on doing so. And most of the time even the person helping you to solve the problem learned something new in the process! It was fun for everyone. Nowadays even on the few forum that remained, go and ask a newbie question, and they will tell you "just search on Google", make fun of your ignorance, or something like that.

That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.

> That sense of community is there with discord, you gotta use that.

Not in that sense. Discord is mainly a platform where you do voice chats. It has four disadvantages:

* not everyone wants to talk, for whatever reason, being introvert, not knowing the language so well to have a conversation, not having a microphone on the computer, and a ton of other reason

* a forum is public on the internet, someone that is not subscribed to the forum that has a similar problem could read it and find the solution, everyone could register and ask something. Discord servers are not.

* forums are textual content, that is preserved in the years. Sometime I have a problem with some old hardware or software and I find my answer in a response in a forum from 15 years ago. It's something that is indexed by search engines, of course even if forums were public, you cannot index voice chats.

* the forum had an asynchronous nature, as most of the old web had (take the email, for example). It means that I can start a discussion, and then go back to it when I have time. In the old days I used to check my forums at most once or twice a day, on the evening, check the thread I was following, maybe respond or simply read. Discord is synchronous, either you participate now or you don't.

Also when people say "use a discord", they are really referring to a text chat discord. It's the new IRC, with all of its good and bad parts. Almost nobody is using audio chat.

Discord's audio chat is mostly used in small groups of 3+ for parties in multiplayer games where quick audio communication helps a lot. It's the new teamspeak / ventrilio.

Here is a couple examples of community discords:

https://discord.com/invite/buildapc

https://discord.com/invite/obsproject

There has been a general response to withdraw into more private & semi-private communities although, as a response against the internet outrage mob that could ruin a person's life. That is a big shame.

I don’t know if this is true, but personally I wasn’t even aware Discord had voice chat support until I read your message.

So what if it was hard to read with 20 blinking GIFs and an autoplaying music player, it was YOURS.

The worst things about Facecrook are not it's monopoly, ok that's the worst, but I rather dislike that blue boring nav bar, 5000 friend limits (their graph DB can only handle that many or what's the bottleneck? cheap bustards!) and the generally lame mainstream design of the whole building. Like, who approved "pokes"? Even Friendster was hipper than Facehooked.

The landscape is very different; I'd argue society is not in a better position as a result.

I might as well say that I know that this isn't true because they don't know what the Internet could be... all they know is the centralized cloud.