This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.
Thank you for that. This mod was awesome in LANs.
My son spends most of his time in small closed Discord servers.
The niche areas still exist, but a lot of them are hidden and invite only, or just intentionally or unintentionally not easy to discover.
To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.
There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.
It was easy to walk around your neighborhood, and find someone with a nice garden, who was having a garden party. You could present yourself by your handle (which was probably, or at least possibly globally unique), and join in, and maybe have fun at their garden party.
It was difficult to find gardens that you didn't care about.
When you found someone in the "gaming" garden, and then found them again in the "rally driving" garden (and you know they were the same person due to the nearly globally unique handle), it was fun and exciting.
Now there are a handful of giant gardens that I don't really want to go into for the most part. They're owned by old royalty, they're uncomfortable (for me), the only reason the garden owners want me to be there is so that they can make me look at ads, not appreciate the garden. Maybe my friends are there too, but all I see are people yelling about their small section of the (private) garden.
Sure I may still find my old friends in these weird giant gardens, but ben3212 is probably not my friend Ben who happens to have the favorite number 3212.
Hacker News is a relatively "smaller" community that is closer to the old internet.
Also the top streamer on tik tok / youtube shorts / ... are not likely posting here trying to get massive up votes on their content, as there aren't very many ways to monetize having the top post on hacker news, so while this interaction happened on the "current Internet" I know of one or two places like this on the current internet. I used to know of more, and I think I liked that better.
I know this isn't so different than "Also the clouds used to be different. They used to be whiter, and puffier! It was better then!", but here I am.
