This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.
I was part of a group of high schoolers that found each other on IRC and ICQ. We built out what became Day of Defeat-another HL mod. We followed CS-were early adopters of their betas and realized we could also mod. We were fortunate that we had parents that let us build on a very wild internet . I know a few from the group made it with Valve-I kept in touch with a couple- and my parents stayed involved but I dropped it before Valve moved a few out to an apartment. If there was a way to find those channels/chats again… awesome time to come of age while being completely naive to how the world operates. To have that level of dumbness and overly eager confidence again
Seems it is not just about geeks VS general population but rather the classical case where success (ease of access) & popularity inevitably bring failure. Few open (loosely or not actively moderated) "spaces" left. No wonder given the general attitude of the, lol, "invaders". :D
In the past - you pick an IRC server and a room and 4 out of 5 times you'll learn something interesting, have actual fun with ppl you don't know and just enjoy the interactions. Now similar experience can happen only in closed/invite only or hard-to-find groups. The mainstream ones (different "social media" services) seem filled with people who want only to show off while remaining as alienated (and as consequence hostile) from one another as possible. Good or bad - the old Net is dead. The new one is predominantly for making money and BS.
The same trend can be observed virtually anywhere. In the past - people experimented with games, lots of cr@p titles but also pure gems, games that last. Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again. Anyway - it is what it is, the good thing is there are still meaningful places and people worth reading/listening to, just way harder to find through the noise. News.y seems one of the few remaining and open islands.
To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
> Today? AAA titles that repeat the "successful" pattern, over and over again.
Nope. Maybe that's what you see because you don't have the time to check for diamonds in the coal mine but there are a ton of indie games being released every day. Many trying random concepts.
Yes modding is not en vogue nowadays but frameworks like rpg maker, godot etc allow a lot of people to experiment and materialize their ideas (good or bad). And that's without factoring in what LLM will allow when some get trained on those tools and related tutorials.
I'm just basing my views from what is available on Steam. I think there are a lot more experimental games and genres being developed and shared in those channels I don't have the time to discover and enjoy.
"the old internet" seems to still exist. Today they're the semi-private discord/slack/mattermost/matrix servers that mostly replaced IRC. Some are large enough that separate channels on them are their own communities - for example like Hangops.
Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
Honestly, this is partially why I actually love a lot of what's on Hackernews. This site still seems to have a big proportion of old school geeks within it's population, and it feels like one of the only places left for good discussion that i've found on tech.
It’s kinda funny right? You’d expect the number of comments to rise with the number of users, but aside from a few highly controversial topics we still have posts on the front page that barely get to triple digits comments, if even.
I mean partially, i've still not really noticed a post that has more than 1000-3000 votes on a daily. As a comparison to other social media, that's miniscule
I don't meh. This site has had a huge change now that it's become a sort of GenXer geek culture icon. I had originally come to this site to escape the stupid Natalie Portman sliding my bowl of grits Weird Al worship that was on Slashdot but it came back here and everyone who was into that culture joined this place too. A particularly uncharitable part of me wonders why folks who are so displeased with the state of greater social media are willing to override norms of other sites just to chase their particular idea of social media but of course that is the basis behind Eternal September.
There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.
Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.
The server browser is deliberately hidden, neglected, and full of spam on the modern versions of CS.
It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.
There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.
This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.