Every time I see one of these old pages (sometimes again, but also sometimes even for the first time,) it just makes me painfully sad. It's been very challenging for me to deal with the loss of the "old Internet." I am relatively young, so for me most of my "old internet" experience was actually around 2000-2010, not the preceding era, which I mostly only experienced indirectly or in small bits. And yet, it's such a stark and absolute difference from what became of the Internet since, and I don't think I'll ever get over losing the way things were. I grew up with it. It could be harsh and inappropriate, but it was very free and fluid, rebellious and free-spirited, and a very effective respite from the challenges of real life, and I definitely wouldn't have had my hobbies, skills, interests, and even friendships flourish so much without it. There's just no way.

There are countless different attempts at explaining what went wrong (and multiple proposed causes: social media, the fall of search engines, the advertising industry, the rise of monetization, the increase in populous on the internet, etc etc etc.) but as time goes on, I just wonder: why does it have to be this way? Some of the websites I have the fondest memories of had maybe 20 truly active members. Nowadays, there are at least 10-20 times the number of people for any given niche who would love to return to form, but no matter how hard you wish for it, it never seems to work that way.

I've come to the following conclusion: The ultimate, first-order reason why the "old internet" is dead is because the influx of people entering a given niche community decreased below the level of replacement. And I believe it's due mainly to two things:

1. Search engines lost the war to SEO SPAM. There is too much monetary incentive to be #1 in the index. For example, if you Google about some niche thing, say a video game or hobby, the first few results have become mostly either near-SPAM content or highly corporate content. Niche, quality websites have taken a back seat. Pagerank died.

2. Meanwhile, the Internet landscape changed dramatically too. People started carrying around phones. Instead of going home and logging onto a desktop or laptop computer, you fundamentally started interacting with the internet in a different way: the internet came to you, in the form of notifications on your phone, and you could start browsing literally any time you wanted, whenever you had some down time, anywhere. In addition to this shift, big players like Facebook, YouTube, et al. began to optimize for "screen time" and "engagement"; people's attention has been monopolized. They had less attention left over to dedicate to smaller niches because social media websites offer effectively infinite amounts of engagement and are engineered specifically to keep you going.

With less people paying less attention, everyone left, and we're now here.

The worst part is, even if you want to leave social media, and quit platforms that don't respect your attention, the web as a whole have been molded by them. Most of the people you will deal with come from social media, so there's always this 'backchannel' of communication going on wherein drama festers, and the vast majority people you will deal with will already be squeezed of their attention from simply being there. If your community doesn't maintain a presence on social media, there are swaths of people to whom it effectively does not exist for, making it even more challenging to avoid. Modern community software has been infected with some of the modern "best practices", like Discourse, the forum software: it has implemented a few gamification elements like badges, and nags to try to get you to come back. I think that in moderation these elements aren't inherently horrible, but I want literally none of them. When I had the most fun online, forum software was built to perform its core functions, not built to try to boost engagement. If you have something truly great, you will NOT have to remind users to come back. They will not forget.

Some people seem to try to escape to alternative protocols like Gemini, but I think they're missing the point. Yeah, sure, artificially, it sort of recreates some of the scrappy, "experimental" nature of the older internet, but that's not the problem; the problem is the world around it, that we're living in. If you could simply escape back to the way things were, you wouldn't need a gimmick like an alternative protocol to catch on. All you really need is a discussion forum and/or IRC server, a handful of random people who don't know each-other by anything other than some weird aliases, and a common interest to bond over. It's all you ever needed.

But it's probably never happening again, because the internet is real life now. Even if you could just select for "random folks who use the internet the way we used to use it", it would be hard to escape the world we live in, where everything is unavoidably connected, even when we don't want it to be. It's an unwelcome guest that invites itself to many interactions even if all parties would prefer if it didn't, leading the the weird situation where seemingly everyone agrees that something is stupid and pointless, and yet nobody seems to know how to stop it from happening again next time.

And thus, all we have now are these weird memories. Seeing these classic webpages fills one with emotions, because you know that it was crafted by someone who cared. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just staring at an old, obsolete web page and ascribing to it properties that don't exist, and that things were actually "just as bad" when you think about it, but I know deep down that's just an attempt to cope with what we lost.

That's probably also why I find myself hanging out here. Even though it's certainly far from perfect, and it's definitely a far cry from the close-knit niche communities that I've been in which have created lifelong bonds, marriages, businesses and more, it's still quite a refreshing difference from a lot of other places online with its JavaScript-light experience, lack of gamification/nags/etc., and deft touch for moderation. (And I mean sure, it sounds a bit circle-jerk-y, but when you compare HN to Reddit, especially with the "new Reddit" interface, it is disturbing how much worse Reddit is than it used to be, and it's not even that bad compared to a lot of the Internet now. I don't think I'm exaggerating.)