this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.
A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it's just promoted content. Second--related to the post--is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people's behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don't know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.
I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I've ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.
I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.
We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.
Yeah, I want to interact with people who are making/sharing stuff for the love of the game, not trying to be influencers or sell me something.
Capitalism Enshittifies The Internet - Scammers and Influencers Version©®™ 😂🤣
Very nicely put
That last line is a powerful analogy and exactly how it feels.
Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.
Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, "install our app!", etc. We didn't have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.
AKA, the Internet matured and became corporate like every other form of media before it.
You're not describing the old Internet.
So what are they describing?
The 2000s internet.
26 years ago is pretty old, in relation to the lifespan of the internet
What's before then then?
That would be the classical era of the internet, just after the baroque internet which in turn followed the renaissance internet.
If you go back further you'll find the internet of late antiquity, the ancient internet before that, then finally the pre-internet which we can only study through physical media since it was the era prior to the earliest known examples of the internet.
What percentage of people do you think had the internet in 1995?
Not 0? This chain is confusing. I guess a lot of you are young and me pointing out a truth really bothered y'all. Sorry gen Z.
The first public web browser was in 93. Get over yourself.
I can't imagine getting emotionally invested in something so meaningless, but OK. I'm over myself.
Well, you certainly seemed invested enough to act like a pedantic dickhead, adding nothing to a conversation other than pointing out how long you've been around and experienced you were in the internet before it was cool.
Lol what? You inferred all that from a couple of sentences? Yeah I'm the one with problem...
In the US it was about 8%, most other countries were lower. Just 5 years later, Canada surpassed 50% internet usage, with the USA not far behind. The pace of change over the 90s was astronomical; there were *no webpages in 1990!
So it absolutely makes sense to separate the "old internet" from what existed in the 90s.
The oldest people in Gen Z were 3 years old in 2000, so I don't think any of them are speaking about that old internet from experience.