Commons, Digital

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The old internet died long

before these centralized services appeared. The old internet was when we

ran our own servers, built and hosted our own websites, and we were

truly free in the wild wild west.

Its easier than ever to run your own servers, but today few do.

The

old internet is dead (for now) and it looks more like the BBS era

today. But we innovated past that then, and we will innovate past that

now.

I am greatly looking forward to all of the decentralization

work that is in progress from the numerous people on HN and the

internet.

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I thought similar. To me

what Buzzfeed are calling the "old Internet" here is something I very

much remember bemoaning as the "new Internet" in which dedicated

protocols such as NNTP and IRC got displaced by brattish commercial

upstarts whose web-based versions had 10% of the quality-of-life

features and about 5% of the community etiquette. However they displaced

everything that came before them because you could embed images, have

an animated avatar and (most importantly) not have to delve into the

world of finding a client of choice and connecting it to your ISP's news

servers.

What I find myself missing more than anything else is that news server was something you

paid for, either as part of an ISP package, as a dedicated service or

your university tuition fees. The commercial model was purely the

provision of that resource - not selling your data, nor being a vector

for targeted political ads. There was no incentive to make the basic

mechanics of discussion worse or promote flame wars in the name of

"engagement" or "monetisation", and while I'm sure the smaller community

size played a part things seemed to bump along with a far greater

degree of civility and allowance for misunderstanding.

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I started college, and discovered the Internet, in fall of 1993. An epoch infamously known as "Eternal September" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).

The old-timers on Usenet and IRC at the time thought that me and my

classmates were idiots. That we killed the "old Internet".

From my

perspective though, the "old Internet" died when Deja News sold out to

Google. When phpBB forums started replacing Usenet, and ICQ or other

chat apps started replacing IRC.

From the perspective of those

newbies, the "old Internet" died when phpBB forums were replaced by

LiveJournal pages and blog comment sections. When ICQ fragmented into

AOL, Yahoo, and MSN instant messengers.

Those people saw the "old Internet" die when pages and blogs coalesced into early social media.

Those

people saw the "old Internet" die when social media took on its

contemporary shape (e.g. YouTube videos becoming more professional and

SEO-oriented, clickbait, photo and video-based social media surpassing

text-based social media).

This article is just some person at

Buzzfeed, writing a eulogy for the "old Internet" as understood by the

generation of people who have jobs at Buzzfeed.