What's hilarious is even new platforms adapt the old ways - Discord now adapted "forums" but only if your "server" (which isn't even the right word, it's more like an IRC channel) is "popular" enough.

But you are 100% right, push notifications and the internet now being accessible by everyone has made fringe/niche websites and communities less common - it should have the effect that the people who are on these sites are the truly invested ones - but then it comes down to network effect, getting other people involved and marketing - which, sadly falls down to SEO, social media, IG tagging, Facebook posts and then the inevitable facebook group which always manages to replace the website itself eventually.

Many old websites were also ad sponsored, but they weren't smart ads, not until Google, I think - a main sponser paid for server bills and had the best real estate in an annoying banner ad in a margin or in a frame (ew!)

But, discoverability and getting people to participate - that is another silo/walled garden that is hard to break from now. Facebook and Google, does so much to really put you into the ecosystem, that is now "content creators" and if you don't have an "Internet Personality" then what are you doing?

The Internet is real life now. The Internet is truly Metalife.

"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."

No, this is context. This context is lost on a centralized platform, with boilerplate template and styleguides designed to commit feedback loops and go for addiction - e.g. the way facebook arranges groups, posts and not always by "newest" or the ones that are/have been most engaged - which in many groups can be of conflicting opinion or discussion.

The thing is, I wonder if in a decade or two would we miss that? I am from the same time period of you, and managed to hop on the old train of dial up, Windows 95' and ride it to Windows XP/Dialup-Cable modem which was another transformation that matches your time period and now that the mobile phone is the defacto computer - we have other things lost, such as the current generation inability to understand how a file system or file structure works.

"(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.)"

Same, and also 100% agree, and what comes to mind, is that we are not the market audience. Reddit is a private company that wants to make a profit -

It sounds silly, but when I need a sanity check on change and where we are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit wikipedia always helps and the first paragraph and the left margin gives me all I need to know - 100 million dollars revenue, clear marketing plan and of course A/B testing designed to ensnare new internet users.

That's it. The old websites were gold, we are victim to nostalgia, I miss the old ways for sure, and I'm glad I was there to experience them and the technical challenge that was required to go online, interact and contribute to different places (which are now archived forever, e.g. geocities, or IRC logs, or bash.org quotes.) - and now it's just repeating again.