When the Internet Was a Place (2025)

Yeah sure, but it doesn't explain why. If I were to point out to anything, it would be monetization - starting from early ads ruining everything with pop-ups, through corporations gathering data, bad actors exploiting every little vulnerability to get some leverage, to users themselves aligning themselves with money; less and less people doing what they want just for fun, but rather adhering to corporate guidelines and ad strategies to get as much as they can out of this system. So much that other internet users who don't get anything out of it would also start behaving that way, maybe with hopes of getting a slice of the pie at some point. Maybe their next tweet will be a hit?

And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.

And a little while before that, the desktop computer was a mystical thing that could take you to wonderlands. I was truly an intriguing machine, instead of just another home appliance.

The internet was places. Plural. Places like watmath, ucbvax and the like. Real physical computers in places you'd heard of, and the amazing thing was that you could access them from elsewhere.

Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years.

Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that.

Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.

I think the big change has been a shift to massive platforms for everything - so before you'd have hundreds of little vBulletin forums, IRC servers etc.

Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc.

It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.

Every single discussion around UI is now laden with "this isn't 100% optimized for user interaction" like there's some rulebook dictating exactly what you have to do for your website to be useable.

There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.

I too am waiting for the pendulum to swing from clean corporate cookie cutterism back to dumb fun and I believe it's up to us to make that change. It probably won't happen on its own.

The article seems to repeat its thesis almost verbatim three times.

“This has resulted in fractured attention, anxiety, and sadly, a diminished sense of place and belonging even with the connectivity the internet could offer.”

Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing?

Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…

I guess I am showing my age, but no, the Internet was never "a place", for me and my ilk.

The Internet was just another network, albeit one that worked more reliably (most of the time) and with less configuration effort (most of the time) than UUCP. I didn't "go to the Internet", it was just another path to the computer on my desk, the most convenient way to get USENET. If I "went anywhere", it was deliberate, using Gopher or WAIS to find things then "visiting" a place with ftp. Or telnet.

The only "other place" I had then was the VT220 (? It's been a while) in the basement with the Gandalf (? ditto) modem, eventually replaced with a PC and a Hayes (? ditto bis). I had to physically go somewhere to access work, but then again, I had to physically go somewhere to access work even without remote/home access.

My then-me would say that the author confuses the Internet with "the world wide web as accessed from a personal device".

Perhaps if one was just the right age at just the right time, the Internet Was a Place, but for anyone before and anyone after it was just was and just is.

I remember my first time having a laptop with bluetooth and having created a PAN in something like 2001-2002, that was magical taking your laptop to bed and surfing the web. Now i think the pervasiveness of the internet is just a nuisance. I'm probably growing old.

The old web was not necessarily better in every way but it had a clearer boundary: you sat down, went online, did something and then left

i love those days where we uses visit internet cafes to play games and enjoys the internet through searching in google.com

Internet is not the web... And we do need to destroy boundaries to break walled gardens not creating new one for the joy of giants who knows their "oligopoly power"...

> In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet was a deeply physical thing, a location. One “arrived” at the internet with purpose and intention. It was an embodied experience.

As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true.

For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites.

I remember when Wikipedia was founded in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995.

Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).

The thing that kills me is how serious it's gotten. Can't joke around anymore, not unless you're doing it ironically.

Quick quiz! Who remembers off the top o'their head what Yahoo is an acronym for ?

As an aside - anyone else really dislike the typeface used on this page? I find it difficult to read.