It felt like actual tool or big box filled information you could dug through and find stuff you needed. It wasn't restricted by corporate greed or policed by variety of groups who were trying to impose opinions, policies or "culture" on other people claiming at the same time it's for everyone's sake. It wasn't of course a perfect place but it wasn't commercialized as it is today - and that's what happen: the years of simplicity we're done and it was necessary to make the Internet appealing and accessible to average people, by a certain price.

Seeing the monopoly of Google in browser sector, the whole predatory ads sphere, manipulative social media and the attitude corporations and politicians have towards ordinary people regarding the technology, I don't think I want to see what will be the next big thing in the evolution of the Internet and related tech.

It was a tiny, tiny elite who were online compared to today.

As late as 2003, 90% of the world was not on the internet.

Internet culture represents the average person now whereas it didn't at all up through the first Internet bubble and bust.

Not by today's standards. Typical messaging services with teenagers were utterly filled with what we'd now call 4chanish or spouting hate or cyberbullying. That culture isn't really compatible with prim and proper normal parents and other parent-like people that are now on the internet and throwing their weight around.

It’s way more likely to me that this is simply because the Internet used to be the (nearly) exclusive domain of people who were culturally like you: educated, technologically sophisticated, libertarian-leaning affluent white males. Not that you’re necessarily any or all of these things, but if you were around for “the uncensored Internet” you likely felt comfortable with that as your cultural in-group. I say this as someone who is many of these things, and was also around in the “good old days”.

These days people of every cultural background get a seat at the table. That changes things. And that’s to say nothing of the advent of professional, anonymous astroturfing and disinformation campaigns.

Going back would be an abject disaster.

You didn’t make a point in your reply.

You may have missed it in your rush to downvote me.

I did not downvote you at all, I replied because I wanted to discuss it with you. Others have replied, and I think its really interesting you think an unruly playground needs to be moderated. Others have pointed out you just "go to your corner" or dont engage so to speak. But you seem to think it needs to be moderated. I am not saying you are wrong I 'm curious as to why.

The problem is that I can “go to my corner” but I can’t stop people with no intention of playing by any set of rules from coming with me.

We’ve gone to our own corner here on Hacker News. And yet there’s moderation to keep discussion on-topic and respectful. In my estimation you likely choose to participate in this corner of the Internet because of the moderation of both link submissions and comments. Without it, HN would devolve into a cesspool over time like every other attempt at unmoderated forums that’s been tried. Well-meaning participants would be driven out by trolls, spammers, and angry people with an axe to grind.

I disagree, I come here because the articles I see and comments are read are reached by consensus. Bad comments are normally at the bottom of the page and easy to ignore.

There is shadow banning on HN and I disagree with it, but I should be able to make the above generalisation of why HN seems to work with less moderation than expected.

On sites like 4chan, there is some moderation, but again, the few interesting comments that exist get automatically highlighted by the engagement that occurs within the page. Moderation does not allow this to exist, census does. Moderation just helps but I argue the site would work without it, and thats how the internet used to work. Even newgroups that used the wrong mechanic to handle consensus based uploading, and suffered from spam , had content that was good and easy to find, without any moderation that I could see.

> There is shadow banning on HN and I disagree with it, but I should be able to make the above generalisation of why HN seems to work with less moderation than expected.

I respectfully suggest that HN has significantly more moderation than you believe it does.

I had not realised but I will take your word for it - thanks.

I think I missed it too. I didn't even downvote.

Conversation at dinner with a group of your friends and their friends is going to function a lot more smoothly than one at a table of atheists, christian fundamentalists, Jews, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Americans, Russians, Chinese, Tibetans, Israelis, Pakistanis, Indians, liberals, conservatives, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, fascists, anarchists, environmentalists, trans people, cis people, homophobes, racists, sexists, “the woke”, narcissists, sociopaths, frauds, manipulators, trolls, geniuses, average people, and imbeciles.

The Internet might have seemed “better” back then and like it didn’t need moderation. From many people’s perspective it probably was. But that was likely a function of the reality that most people on the Internet at the time had a lot in common with one another.

We don’t get the benefit of that luxury today.

I disagree with your take -I don't see it being a question of moderation. You had many of those groups online (if not all of them) in the 90's and 00's. Unlike today, if you didn't like the forum you were on you could go to another one where you fit in.

There was a greater diversity of social gathering places.

Now -there's facebook, twitter, reddit and HN.

Moderation has ALWAYS been a factor and that's not what made the old internet better.

What made the old internet better was that it was open and more diverse (in terms of viewpoint and choices). The new internet is basically (on a social level) a few social media corporations which are becoming increasingly sterile.

Being on the internet and unmoderated doesn't mean you have to engage with everybody. The idea is that you get to choose what sort of conversation to engage in, and who to /ignore. Hardly different from "real life", except that the internet gives you a larger pool to engage with and better tools to deal with it.

The problem isn't you choosing to engage with everybody. It's everybody else choosing to engage with you and those you want to engage with.

If every discussion on HN was derailed by bad actors, you'd go somewhere else. If there was nowhere else moderated to go to, you'd probably just stop engaging altogether.

I don't think you’re wrong in pointing out that the internet is likely more homogenous the further back in time we go. It’s a hard thing to be wrong about with respect to any scene. But I don't think I agree that it means that we must bend on principles of freedom of expression, digital civil liberties, and anti-censorship and anti-central control. And if definitely doesn't mean the internet wasn't possibly still the most diverse place on the planet even shortly after its inception. Now that the internet has taken the world stage, we must continually fight and push for the society we want to build, for what’s right, really. We must educate and in certain ways indoctrinate. Otherwise we risk losing our values to the swaths of normies—especially now that other cultures are vying for their own version of comfortable.