> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.

It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.

It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.

This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.

I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.

In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.

Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.

I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".

This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.

I like the forums of the old way better than what we have now, Discord and reddit suck I mean, even back button on reddit does not work 50% of the time, lol. Hacker News is the only thing that we have left that's similar to what we had from forums of the old. And even then, I think I like those forums better. Remember Deja News before Google bought them. Shit like that, that was good.

Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…

That's when you ask what exactly was better and then you can tell whether it's just typical nostalgia or if there are genuinely things to miss.

The statement "[thing] is worse now than it was X years ago" is not something that can only be true at a single point in time.

What if [thing] is just contiguously getting worse? What if that statement has always been true regardless of when it's been said?

I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).