For me, the internet has already lost its magic by the time the mid 2000s came around, well before Omegle came out in 2009.

For me, the magical period was the early 90s, when I was growing up.

In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?

It seems more about the magic of childhood itself than anything to do with the technology.

This was something that turned out to trigger nostalgia of the 'old internet' between both me and decade older friends when exploring the fediverse, we realized that to us, the old internet was mainly defined by a stronger sense of connection/genuineness with other people's content because even if deplorable, it was mostly unfiltered. A similar feeling was evoked for me by Kagi's 'small internet' option.

So, I think the current generation might miss their 'old internet' only in the sense that by the time they're adults it'll probably have gotten even more sanitized.

This is a sentiment repeated by almost everyone who finds their niche in the fediverse. Once you settle in, you get that early internet magic of simply connecting with people. The fediverse is all about talking to or showing things to other people.

It's pretty interesting what happens when you talk to people instead of just posting into the void. Interactions become purposeful and meaningful because it's clear there's a real person on the other side.

It really does feel like the earlier internet when we all posted anonymously on small forums with a few thousand users total. There's a sense of community.

There's also a really strong selection bias right now. People who use the fediverse are much more likely to be people sick of modern social media and want to return to the old days. So they went out and they goddamn made their own social media and made it feel like the old days.

I think it's a great place to hang out right now. It'll be interesting to see how things evolve over time. There's a push to bring back small websites, blogs and forums and I really hope that takes off.

Is this true? Maybe you just don't know the right places anymore. Im sure there's all kinds of crazy, basically unmoderated shit going down in discord or roblox or vrchat.

But at least with the former we still have to be a bit reserved since discord can also be pretty heavy handed with moderation. It effectively suppresses less sanitized content in the sense that if your discord grows past a certain size, it's much more likely to catch their attention. So the old internet type content we have there is mostly a handful of private discords from friends with a handful of their friends there. At that point we just ended up setting up a matrix server for stuff we'd rather not leave to the whims of discord.

VRchat has the benefit that if you aren't in public, you're free to do anything. But that does still sort of mean that you need to know the right people to get into those circles, since public is generally unenjoyable, being filled with screaming "Quest kids" (and even if they weren't screaming, it's obviously awkward to be hanging out with children as adults).

Actually, I'd guess that it's probably easier for people to find themselves in such weird spaces today. There's a lot of resources and guides out there, and if you want to, you can most likely find them.

Will be interesting to see if kids who grew up with TikTok et al. will, as adults, view it as affectionately as we view our childhood form of the Internet. I do think there's something to be said of an overall trend toward more consumption, less production.

I think this couldn't be further from the truth. You could argue that the production has been heavily centralized, but I think today more than ever we see kids in their early teens making videos on YouTube/TikTok, etc. It's different from other people's childhoods where you'd make geocities website or customize your myspace page or write blogs but it's still production nonetheless.

You are correct, but there is a disappointing shift in the nature of said content.

GeoCities sites and the like were at least labors of love. Your site looked like shit but that's ok, nobody's going to see it anyway.

Tumblr was performative garbage that bridged LiveJournal/Myspace and Instagram. Your site looked like shit but if you say something controversial enough, you'll get a lot of views.

The YouTube/Instagram/TikTok crowd only optimize for engagement, to get as many views as possible. Everything is so over-the-top. You're not making anything out of love, you're making what gets you attention. Your content is professionally-polished and staged to attract eyeballs even if you have nothing to say. (No wonder everybody has an identity crisis; everyone's a child star that's been living for the camera since they got their first iPhone.)

Note: All of this based on impressions/vibes, would be keen to hear any stats if people around have ‘em on hand!

I'm not knocking people liking it -- its like people liking SuperBowl ads; just because something is the very much marketing content doesn't mean its not fun and entertaining. But, the idea that becoming "quite commercialized" is a potential way it might go downhill in the future seems to miss that it is very much already there.

I’m not treating anyone’s experience as gospel in any case. There are no important decisions I’ll be making off this information.

Nowadays, I’m sure that 95% of all content I see is made by a media company for hire, mega corporation, or, most recently, word soup from an LLM where, in a strange twist of fate, I’m just a lab mouse in a giant, AI created A/B test trying to determine which option gets 0.2% more clicks. The age of casual creator is mostly over. Everything you do must be to build or enhance “your brand” and its a full time job to keep up with huge teams that automate the churn of information regurgitation, otherwise you’ll never be able to get enough of a following to qualify for perks that actual content creators make - and we’ve not even gotten to compensation yet. The gold rush of making money selling your brand online is over and it has been enshitified much like everything else novel and interesting in the world and on the internet.

That's the opposite of better. Better is made with soul, and often for free.

Google has come full circle. Early Google succeeded in part because of nonintrusive ad words, scamming over banner ads. Now, Youtube.

In the early web, you were just a poorly chosen search term and click away from some truly awful media.

Apparently the feed was behind or something, and he was personally offended.

I learned a lot of things that day, none of them good.

Now the Match Group owns all the dating websites and successfully shittified them. Social media in general has been basically a big loss, with Reddit charging for API access since they don't want to lose revenues, Youtube trying to block adblockers, Twitter promoting Russian propaganda

there's evidence to suggest that there were two separate events from different strains at the start of the pandemic

this doesn't disprove the lab leak theory, but then they would have to be studying two separate very related strains and it would be strange if they just kept leaking different strains

You could, of course, take it as proof that the lab leak happened at around the same time as lineage B, while lineage A is from bats

The Iraq war had a decent amount of opposition before it happened, there were like 100K people in San Francisco for the protest I went to.

For what it’s worth, I always point out that my parents fondest pre-30s memories we’re drinking, smoking and blasting music while riding in the back of a pickup when they were 16-20. All of which is illegal now and will get you years in prison…

> In 15 years, are people going to be talking about the current internet as the time when the magic was there?

I remember seeing stats/meme that you will hear the best music in your teens and early twenties. It is because in our teen years, things make big impact on us.

So it is likely that the internet and other media has similar effects and todays teens will be reminiscing about current internet when they are 30+ or so.

Late 90s and early 2000s was my age of internet exploration.

That is to say the idiots back then were almost smarter than the average user today

But, separately, my own experience is that there is a particular quality to those places where people need to pass a barrier of entry to get in and those are still happening all over the place. I played against highly-skilled players on day 1 of the PS4 launch, had intelligent conversations on Clubhouse when it was invite-only, and regularly find people with clear minds inside certain pay-only doors.

I think the early internet was just that effect on a scale that was more impactful to the public where now everything is so siloed and fragmented.

Media conglomerates and tech oligopolies make it seem like people are “idiots now” but humans are humans and I don’t think that’s changed in the last few decades.

TCP/IP was standardized in 1982 and commercial ISPs didn't exist until 1989

I arrived ca. 2001 and found enough high-quality content (folk songs, math puzzles, some books already digitized) to feel like I had discovered a giant library. And it kept growing: Wikipedia arrived, various forums and magazines appeared (most were crap, of course, but there was no shortage of good ones).

As far as I can tell, things started getting worse around 2008, with places such as geocities closing down and social networks rising; then the deprecation of Java and Flash kicked the floor out of some of the good old parts. Other things were still improving, though, up to 2015 or so. It's only recently that I see most "culture production" locked in perennial closed gardens with unaccountable moderation. I wish I could point to some places still on the rise other than arXiv and LibGen...

What had I missed from the 90s that didn't make it into the 00s?

IRC was a big one. Back when you hopped on a server, typed in #cityname, and joined a lively realtime conversation with folks in your area. That was cool.

I’m too young for usenet, but I’ve been hearing about how cool and amazing it was for like 25 years now. Apparently the web never quite managed to capture that magic.

I used Omegle when it first came out and I was in college. I thought it was amazing, and lost interest in it for awhile as one is wont to do.

But I decided to check out the site again and I tried out "Spy Mode" some years ago (my late 20s or early 30s) where someone could choose a topic or ask a question and then two other random people would talk about it. It was fun and chaotic and had the energy that 2009 Omegle had again. I enjoyed it quite a bit. People would sometimes answer the topics and sometimes have their own openings and such. It was chaotic without the negative vibes of many other websites that used to be more fun.

The random matching combined with the private one-on-one conversation structure had an advantage of not having a popularity algorithm OR the ability for one person in a bad mood to derail your conversation. So aside from the moderation attempts to stop spam on the back-end, the two participants could choose what they felt was acceptable in their conversation.

Sadly, about a quarter of the topics on Spy Mode were spambots linking to questionable sites (likely related to the law enforcement quotes in the article), and when they took down Spy Mode and reverted everything just to plain chat, the spambots were almost all you could talk to with regular Omegle. (I've never used the video chat so I have no insight there)

Definitely downhill in a distinct way, and now with stricter liability for site owners that larger sites can tank with lawyers, I think it was inevitable that the whole thing was going to collapse soon anyway.

I made a few friends from there, most temporary, but one remains who I am very close to. We never would have met in real life, and honestly I don't think we would get along in person, but we talk almost every day and both our lives are better for it.

But I think that this truly is a material loss for the internet.

For me it was yahoo chat rooms that filled the need, this omegle founder had created to solve.(at least till it got filled with bots) The real question is what will a teenager/(mostly exploration instinct person) today will use and will they even be able to anonymously talk to a stranger to share perspectives??

I don't know, perhaps because I have passed the majorly exploration instinct stage due to life's responsibilities and commitments, but I sometimes worry, that there's no such tool anymore.

Not sure if this will be true for Internet, but seeing how it already trends in that direction, I wouldn't be surprised. Fully expect today's teenagers reminisce about NFTs, Bored Apes, TikTok as their Internet's magical period.

The 90s were special in a certain way that is very different from how the Internet was in 2010.

I enjoyed both. I could call both of them "magical periods". Just different.

One could look at the current AI innovation as a different magical period.

Its reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1227/ or people saying "kids these days"

A lot of monumentally good things have come from the last ~20 years of technological change, but the Internet breaking out into something mediocre people could exploit has done damage. And that’s a range that encompasses everything from minimally qualified marketing consultants to people drifting by on MBAs to (sorry) serial entrepreneurs who focus more on the launch than the idea.

> Because generational change will be an important theme in our story, we should pause briefly here to consider how social change and generational change are interrelated. As a matter of simple accounting, any social change—from the rise of rap music to the decline of newspapers—is always produced by some combination of two very different processes. The first is for many individuals to change their tastes and habits in a single direction simultaneously. This sort of social change can occur quickly and be reversed just as quickly. If large numbers of Americans, young and old, fall in love with sport utility vehicles, as they did in the 1990s, the automotive marketplace can be quickly transformed, and it can be transformed in a different direction just as quickly. Sociologists sometimes call this type of change “intracohort,” because the change is detectable within each age cohort.

> The second sort of social change is slower, more subtle, and harder to reverse. If different generations have different tastes or habits, the social physiology of birth and death will eventually transform society, even if no individual ever changes. Much of the change in sexual mores over the last several decades has been of this sort. Relatively few adults changed their views about morality, and most of those who did actually became more conservative. In the aggregate, however, American attitudes toward premarital sex, for example, have been radically liberalized over the last several decades, because a generation with stricter beliefs was gradually replaced by a later generation with more relaxed norms. Sociologists call this type of change “intercohort,” because the change is detectable only across different age groups. Precisely because the rhythm of generational change is slower paced, it is more nearly inexorable.

I almost want to say that you're arguing internet disappointment (perhaps "perceived enshittification") is a predictable, generational intracohort phenomenon that applies to _all_ familiar aspects of one's life and not, conversely, an intercohort phenomenon through which generational attitudes remain constant, and the world changes around us.

On second thought, I don't think this is the right dichotomy to codify the common sentiment you've expressed. If somebody more learned happens by, please assist.

Edit: I think the term I am looking for is "Age-period-cohort analysis (APC analysis)," which I know nothing about.

People forget, but early reddit was pretty racist.

For every lovely flash animation on sites like albinoblacksheep, newgrounds, etc, there were dozens of deliberately-shocking animations with gratuitous violence, ___ism and nudity.

My take is that this is that these dark sides have a silver lining that everyone, even kids, intuitively recognize: if a site is full of content mainstream corporations wouldn't want to be associated with, the content you're getting is almost certainly not the product of mainstream corporations. What you're consuming there is someone's passion, and the barrier to your passion appearing on someone else's screen is as low as possible.

It is for this reason everyone waxes poetic each time a site like this shuts down: this was a site by regular people, for regular people. Its flaws are our flaws, and so we believe that its beauty is ours too.

So if nothing else the sentiment is very real.

...for those too young to think the magic died with Eternal September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The corporatisation of net ruined it.

Not much can survive the incentive of profit.

(Not sure what it means that these examples are all approximately dead to a lot of their previously most active users. That’s actually distinct from Omegle, unfortunately; most of their active users had remained perfectly happy with the platform.)

In my eyes during the golden age of the internet that I think of, you could still do that... bad actors now and then but not a huge % and we were all excited just to play together and enjoy how cool everything was.