Reading this made me nostalgic for the old internet and sad about what it's become since.
I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.
Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.
I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.
I am reposting one of my favorite Quora adventure stories for the sake of posterity:
What is the strangest thing you've seen at the airport?
By Aurelio Germes: The strangest thing I've seen was to find nobody not even police or security at the airport, so I took a plane and left the country without anyone noticing it. It was at the international airport in Malabo, island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea.
It happened that I had missed my flight from Malabo to Madrid departing on Sunday and I didn't want to wait a whole week for the next weekly flight, so I decided to call a pilot in Cameroon and charter his plane to come and pick me up in Malabo and take me to the Douala airport in Cameroon where I could more easily catch a plane to Paris. We arranged date and hour of his arrival to Malabo.
On the date agreed I went to the international airport only to find out that it was closed since that day no flights, neither international nor domestic, were scheduled. There was nobody there not even a guard or a clerk, but it was already too late to cancel the trip. The only way out was to jump the wall surrounding the airport and wait on the runway until an aircraft arrived, and that's what I did.
I didn't have to wait long. A small plane with a French pilot arrived and soon we were ready to fly to Douala with me in the copilot seat. We could not take off in our first attempt since a door of the aircraft opened unexpectedly when we were about to take off, but we succeeded in our second attempt.
Due to lack of security, nobody noticed that a plane had arrived at the international airport and left with a passenger.
That's incredible. I have one of my very very distant relative who nearly caused a diplomatic incident in Ecquador, because he was on some organised trip to Colombia and someone told him that just over the border there are some great waterfalls that are worth seeing, so he got to the border, and from my understanding bribed the guard to let him through since he didn't have a visa or anything, came back two hours later only to find that the guards have changed and the new one wasn't interested in a bribe but was very interested in getting him arrested for not having the proper visa or documentation. This was long before cellphones were a thing, so basically he had to convince the commander of the jail where he was held to contact someone higher up so they could contact his country's embassy and for whatever reason they ended up sending a military helicopter to pick him up and bring him back to Colombia.
You say this while literally looking at a post that fits what you desire. The old internet isn't gone,
it's just surrounded by a newer, often uglier (but not always) internet that's more commercialized and gamified. That's just how large human social and economic systems develop over time. The old is if anything given even more potential eyeballs, tools and space in which to continue being appreciated, while the new, among all its defects, also comes with its own opportunities.
It's a bit self-absorbed to think that something that provides a livelihood and means of communication and community to billions of people should disappear because it overshadows a few interesting old things that a smaller number of people enjoy.
That post is from like 2008. Where is stuff like this still being posted today?
And my main complaint is exactly that view of the internet as "providing a livelihood", or in other words, just being another venue of capitalist value extraction.
It stopped being a medium of genuine exchange of ideas and started being yet another money making scheme. What made it special in the early days was precisely the non-commercial nature.
The old internet is still there, it just hasn't scaled as quickly as everything else. And frankly, we have a role to play if we want to preserve and nourish it. You say you liked the site. Drop the author a thank you note. Amplify it beyond pressing the "up" arrow on HN. It's not just about the author: show others that this kind of stuff is valued.
Today, the signals young content creators get is that they can make dumb videos on YouTube or TikTok and get 10M subscribers and ad revenue, or set up a geeky blog that will get 100 views a month. But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.
> But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.
Given the intentionally addictive algorithms and psychological manipulation used by the big tech companies, I think at least some of the blame can be placed on them.
I miss the days of blogs and forums and authentic content like this.
Today it's all hyperpolished platforms filled with clickbaity influencers. Every step of the way, somebody's trying to extract as much money as they can.
I can't help but think that we in this community played a big part in turning it into what it is now and that thought fills me with regret.