Forums are the biggest thing I'll miss and by comparison the nearest thing for kids these days is probably YouTube or Reddit. However they are nothing like Forums in ways.

How I'll miss spending months earning my way to become a mod, talking about the community or a user in private sub forums, joking/gossip threads with other mods, talking about real life issues with Mom-Mods and Dad-Mods in private forums, and eventually meeting them irl. Customizing my profile with weird ass sigs, animated avatars and coming home to an organized list unread threads interesting to me. Sounds strikingly like Reddit but nothing like it, how strange.

MSN was awesome, but I think kids these days have better options here. Snapchat come close in some ways and does well for the mobile platform.

I felt the Internet was a smaller simpler place with lesser influence from cooperate agenda, state sponsored ideas, and other influencing ideologies and actors. The Internet has become less transparent, commercialized (not just ads) blurring lines between genuine and insincerity.

Social marketing companies specialize in astroturfing places like Reddit making it almost impossible to spot sponsored content sometimes. Try doing that on a Forum and you'll be spotted miles away and made an example of.

Examples of propaganda factories in Russia or Israel with high influence on social media is an example of one big problem Reddit or YouTube has today. It's far too easy to game larger social media networks and make it seem like the consensus.

In a weird way, reflecting on this, it really says a lot about who I am as a person to this day. Thank you for influencing this memory to come out of my repository tonight.

That's how it was growing up though, right? Avoid the popular stuff, find the group you feel accepted in, that's what the internet was to me growing up, found my place on it for some time being, hopped around here from there.

Sometimes I just pretend that astroturfers are the bullies of the internet, and I try to figure out new ways to be both lazy and smart in how to not succumb to that sort of influence. It's somewhat demeaning to basically be considered an information carrier to spread the message of some new shiny thing to buy. Ads. Ads make and break the internet.

When people push money around that way, I dunno. Seems short sighted. People purchase quality products and services, quality products and services are hard to make. Word travels naturally for things that are of intrinsically high value, overvalued things eventually have their bubble popped.

Even when things seem like the consensus though, I try to put on my 6th grader hat and remember what it's like to have an interest in the information people are offering, but also be skeptical and discerning and true to myself about my own feelings, before trying said service or product, and after.

Ads sort of treat people like once you get them hooked, you have them for good. And that's clearly not the case. Or it doesn't matter, because there's always another new set of people available to fool.

Internet has become the place to make money and find status. That's the opposite of what it was growing up and I think that is why it sucks. We all need to make a living, but all that stuff isn't life. Having the internet shift from being the place to escape to, to the place I want to run away from, eh. That's why I come here though. Reminds me of usenet and slashdot. I'm still on reddit, just, the only subreddit I'm subscribed to is programmerhumor.

Sadly, I don't think that's true. The overwhelming drive behind most buying decisions is price. That's why there are entire categories of consumer goods where you literally can't buy something well-made. Try to buy decent aligator clips, thumb tacks, a well made oven - the list goes on. Cheap and shitty drives good and well-made out of the market every time.

The proportion of geeks —and I mean as an entirely positive badge of qualification— has been very much diluted by all the other people who just want to take photos of their dinner and children in exchange for likes, shares, views, fame.

There still are geeks out there. They're still creating their own forums. Hell, the forum software we used as children 20 years ago is still out there. I refuse to believe that there aren't just as many miscreants chiselling out their own place on the web, eschewing Facebook and Snapchat and all the other dross that the rest of Generation Z are using.

It's impossible to quantify and so much harder to appreciate with all the noise on the internet these days but it's still there.

One of the things the web has done is disassembled the social and cultural barriers separating subcultures. "Geeks" and "people with lives" and "young people" and "people who use social media" are not separate and isolated sets, they do overlap.

And sure, there are people creating their own forums. And people creating their own forum software. Both get posted here from time to time. But as with the anime community, we really need to get past the elitist attitude that one cannot be a "true" geek, nerd, whatever and still interact with the mainstream. At this point that's like saying you can't be a science fiction fan unless you only read books published before 1975.

I never discounted that Facebook (et al) users also include geeks. We have friends and family too. Never suggested that there aren't geeks in all generations. There are, that was rather my point! They still exist, they're just dilute. Didn't suggest that geeks can't also be popular. Never suggested anything about "true" geeks, that's between you and your anime community. I did actually stress that by "geek", I meant the sorts of people likely to be able to do and enjoy this sort of development.

If it's the only way you can read it, /s/geek/people willing to learn and get stuck in/i

These threads pop up every few weeks now and it's getting aggravating. Here we are living in the promised land, as far as geek and tech culture are concerned, and people keep complaining that it's not hip anymore.

I miss Usenet :-) Back in the day, any FAQ posted to Usenet was gold. I always wondered, "How do these brilliant people know to make a FAQ and why do stupid people never make FAQs". And recipes. Every recipe posted to the internet was amazing.

Being older, I blamed forums for the demise of the internet :-)

Got to agree (or most were, anyway). In an early company where I worked (large Unix hardware and software vendor), when I first got to know about FAQs and had Internet access in the office (initially via long-distance dialup to the head office), I must have spent tons of hours poring over many FAQs that I got by doing "ftp rtfm.mit.edu" and then going to the FAQs section, downloading and reading them.

I even bought a book about using the Internet (I think it was Internet for Dummies :), also bought Modems for Dummies, to learn how to use my dial-up modem at home with my PC) and from one of those books, found this great resource called "Accessing the Internet by Email". It had ways of doing searches and downloads (of Archie, Gopher, and FTP, IIRC) via email - there were proxy / gateway sites that let you do that - and getting the results in your email inbox. I must have used up a lot of bandwidth (of both kinds :) trying out most of those techniques and getting (and reading) many of those FAQs and other interesting tutorials, documents, etc. For multiple programming languages and other software topics, as well as other topics. It was huge.

Many of those FAQs are still available at www.faqs.org .

Also, just googled and found that the "Accessing ..." doc is still around. May still be useful to anyone who has limited Internet access or only email access, anywhere in the world:

Accessing the Internet by Email:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Accessing+the+Internet+by+Em...

2nd hit:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/

Let me log in through an external service where I can control my credentials and factor count. Ideally a pile of established OAuth providers and an open OpenID box.

If they get hacked and you lose that password, so what? They can only impersonate you on that forum.

If an identity provider has issues, the window of opportunity ends with the rollout of a fix.

Not to mention that I trust the security of my identity provider a lot more thorough than Mr Bobbins phpBB instance. Audits automatically instigated by changes in country, ISP, device, browser. Logs kept. Dynamic secondary and tertiary factors.

It's toxic and unnecessary data. Let somebody else handle it.

You care way too much for an account that you currently don't even have... is is really necessary? Worse case, you lose it and you are back a your current state, doesn't seems so bad to me.

And won't have with the current login method.

I'm not trying to convince you to follow my path here, I've just been trying to explain why I do what I do, in an effort that the guy advertising a forum I'm interested in might improve things enough to let me (and those like me) in. I understand that there are ways to do this, and that my way is an active choice.

If it comes to it, I'd rather go without.

I use a system of unique ids for these sites.

I recall it was pretty easy for people to just friend each other on MySpace. And to a lesser extent Facebook, but most people treat FB like a digital rolodex of IRL personal contacts and were more hesitant to just add any randoms to their friend list.

The only way you can get to be part of a community that feels intimate is where it is niche and hasn't become part of the internet mainstream. Forums centered around highly popular web figures are often very big.

But you can still find good forums. Forums that are built around very specific interests are more intimate and it's more conducive to comfortably talking to strangers and develop online friendships.

Also, this is just from my very casual observation, but forums built around interests that are not typically associated with more mainstream geek culture or tech culture, that are not privy to highly polarizing social views seem to have the air and attitude of the older internet.

Some example topics for such communities may be bird watching, crocheting, trade jobs like plumbing or modding/tuning for very specific older cars. These have a different demographic (usually skew older) and attitude towards conversation with strangers than the demographics that attract more people on topics such as gaming computers, comic books, anime, etc.

There were less people and it had a higher barrier for entry, so better signal/noise.

Now there's everyone and it's easy to participate, and the noise is defenning.

I remember making actual friends on message boards. Friends I eventually met in the real world. I don't think relationships like that are really formed online anymore. Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation. People (myself included) want upvotes, retweets and more followers. And now, real identities are involved, so they have to be professional.

Our communities are no longer ours... we're now talking on the servers of billion-dollar companies. Sure, back in the day AOL was a big company, and now we have stuff like Discord servers. But it feels different now. Most of the conversation has been sucked into FB, Twitter, Slack, Reddit, etc. Even this forum, which I do still like, is backed by a multi-billion dollar company.

Back when I started using the internet, there were no "celebrities". At most, there were community leaders, and their "reach" was within the same order of magnitude of the rest of the community. And to be one of those leaders, you needed to learn HTML and build a community the hard way. Nobody was trying to get famous, get more likes, etc. They just talked and made stuff and shared content and learned.

Sure, maybe it is just an age thing, and nothing has really changed. But I don't know... I feel like the Internet used to be something special, and now it doesn't.

(You should read this article: http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...)

I don't know how many of you guys are on-the-side petrol heads, but it's one thing that strikes me with the facebook generation - all the years of lost knowledge when everyone pivoted from car forums to facebook groups.

No longer can you quickly search up 'what's the best gearbox oil to use in my T56'... Oh no. It's an almost-hourly repetition of shitpost threads that contain no useful information for anybody. Need to know what diameter bearing you need? What part # for that o-ring? Good luck. And if you do happen to stumble across the hidden knowledge of a now-defunct forum, you're likely to be met with the next peril - images that are no longer hosted or available to see without the original uploader paying for an image hosting account on photobucket etc.

I feel like all the collective knowledge from the years of 1999 - 2009 is basically lost to the sands of time.

On /r/datsun all you really get is memes, and half-thought troubleshooting.

Old-car people inspire me to have a dedication to work-ethic, but also to thinking about the dynamics of how everything is operating. Its a whole different level.

People have become passive on the internet

Most social media seems actively geared towards making it harder for me to make friends like I used to, and the old IRC servers, though some are still active, are now either dead or filled with people who see all the changes as a 'good thing'.

I have noticed it, and my friends and I are slowly stumbling along in our own pursuit. Our own feeble exploration, if you will.

Our first step, has been the blog you can find in my profile. It is a blog... But it's powered by old .plan files that can sent through pandoc at regular intervals. Every user of the server I've set up has it happen. Or we can just use the ol' finger program to view them.

The shell, our shared shell, is becoming a place we can sit and experiment.

Other pieces of the puzzle are coming slowly too, I'm in the midst of writing two different messaging applications, and others have their ideas as well.

There are no bots... Because we all have our SSH keys, and know to invite each other. Hopefully it'll become more public, more inviting, but first we need to work out what exactly it is that we want.

There's an added problem of general noise on the Internet which limits the 90s early 00s type of 'signal'. Another aspect is that services used to be quite often hosted by or aimed at the technical/enthusiastic audience, nowadays it is predominantly aimed towards commercial general public.

The internet suffers from centralisation which for the early(ish) adopters creates overall noise.

I'd also like to add that abundance of bandwidth and endless content easily take the aim and focus on doing the cherry picked and well curated things that you used to do. Bandwith has also contributed to ease of bloat, for example today I can't imagine surfing the net without an adblocker, back then ads were fine and served their purpose without impacting the client side.

More generally I believe that larger populations, whether they be large cities or large online communities, will paradoxically make it harder to find others with very specific non-majority interests.

That said, the internet has not been the democratizing force most of us believed it would become with curated and centralized social networks having arisen as dominant. I am convinced that this is still a fact that can be discerned distinct of the nostalgic pining. Individuals are pushing back a little (not consciously perhaps) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

Perhaps the main difference between forums and modern sites like Reddit, or Facebook groups, is that forums were a natural fit for slower, longer in-depth conversations. It's normal to have a forum conversation that lasts days, if not weeks, and where the posts all consist of many paragraphs. A site like Reddit is designed for older posts to sink. Same with anything that employs a "news feed" page format. Yes, forums are still around, but they're a shadow of their former selves, and often seem to have an old userbase.

It's not just nostalgia. There's simply more control and oppression, and less spirit of free inquiry nowadays.

Individuals are pushing back (a little not consciously) by opting for groups/smaller circles of friends and interests.

People familiar with North Korea have noted a similar withdrawal there to one's family and friends. While big tech and social media companies are far from murderous, they are getting more authoritarian.

As an American who grew up in a way that I felt was somewhat typically (but perhaps less so nowadays) suburban middle-class, I similarly appreciate reading thoughtful comments from people who grew up in different circumstances and didn't necessarily have it as easily as I did. Where I have most frequently encountered these voices is here and on Reddit and on Metafilter (which I first discovered here on HN). If I can dig up a good example, I'll add it to this comment.

Finally, when I think about that old spirit of the internet that I think you're talking about, and places where it still may prevail, I'd like to offer as an example Erowid. I'm not a contributor, I don't even read it that often. But it just comforts me that sites like this still exist:

https://www.erowid.org/

So I don't think the good old internet is dead. You just have to know where to look.

I still feel the old web/Internet a lot. BBS still exists, and it's not popular but shit there weren't a lot of people on the web back then anyway. phpBB still exists and plenty of the sites are still active. Logging into Guild Wars 2 feels a lot like logging into GW1 or DAoC or my favorite UO shard. Playing Quake is still playing Quake. There's nothing stopping you from having a UT2004 LAN party other than you not wanting to have a LAN party. Hell, MUDs are still a thing, and they're just as popular as ever.

Perhaps it's not the web that's changed... perhaps it's us? As they say, you can't go home again. Stopping by my parents house is still the same home I grew up in, but Doug and Rocko's Modern Life aren't playing on the TV anymore, and there aren't any freezie-pops in the freezer. Not because they can't be, but because I don't really want it to be like that anymore.

Every experience you loved, you can find again. If it seems like you can't, then you probably don't actually want that experience. You're looking for something far less tangible than an MSN chatroom.

I'm curious, what are the differences? I'm not on lobste.rs except as a casual observer and it seems similar to HN.

I have noticed, however, that despite the internet working better than ever in many ways (in terms of speed and capabilities), that it seems harder to make friends or meet random people. Let's take HN for example, I love this site, but maybe because the community is so big, it seems like I'm just an anonymous figure on here. I'm one of tens (hundreds?) of thousands that visit this site regularly. Do I learn a lot from HN? Of course! Do I enjoy the conversations and comments? Absolutely! Is the platform conducive to casual conversation among strangers in a way that facilitates getting to know someone else and how they think and view the world? No.

For that matter, neither is Reddit.

If I had to guess, it's the news feed mechanic that has killed real social interaction on the net. The news feed mechanic works, it generates clicks, it's constantly feeding you interesting and stimulating information and updates, but it's surface level deep. So much of making friends is being in a group that's small enough to promote shared intimacy and repeated interactions with the same people.

That's been lost with Facebook, Reddit. There is a lack of personality from one comment to another, no distinguishable visual factor to aid distinction or a contrast . I think Humans appreciate the slight difference to tell people apart. Aside from a username, maybe it is not enough.

You changed. So did I. The world did too, for sure, but the 17 year olds of today will miss the pure and uncorrupted world of 2018 when they turn 30.

Furthermore there is nothing to be learned or gained from observations of past conditions. Why would we want to recreate something worse than what we have now?

Well done, internet intention interpreter dolessdrugs.

Another classic example, the 30+ of today comment on YouTube videos from 15 years ago how amazing it was, and how shit the music of today is, forgetting that 15 years ago their parents said the exact same thing about the music of the day.

Who do you think is driving the music charts today?

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/06/kanye-west-ye-album-domin...

So at least in that regard it's arguably much worse than it was 15 years ago when many different genres were alive and well.

This is definitely a trend that isn't unprecedented: the popularity of grunge was in some ways a reaction to the homogeneity of music during the 80s. Rock was a rebellion against pretty much all mainstream music at the time it became popular. Our generation had indie rock. Music is definitely one arena where there are identifiable ebs and flows in terms of creative output and commercial dominance of a particular sound.

I suspect that a similar reaction to the ultra-commercialized nature of FB/instagram/reddit. There certainly seem to be enough dissatisfied people that we may see a 'kill your television' moment for social media in the next few years.

My personal theory is that the movement away from 'record stores' has really killed discoverability of new music and genres, and most of the new platforms just feed you more of the same music you already listen to.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next decade, you may be absolutely right about a backlash against the ultra-commercialised nature of some of our modern toys.

I used to find random forums and communities on a regular basis, and each had their own character. They were small enough that I'd quickly come to know various people in the community and establish a connection with them, whereas now posting always feels I'm broadcasting to nobody in particular.

Nowadays, I often write posts, think "wait, does this matter? why am I posting this?" and then just delete it. It feels like dumping words into the abyss.

This [1] Reddit thread filled almost entirely by a single guy commenting to himself is the best illustration of this that I've found so far.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/HighQualityGifs/comments/77d9ou/the...

Dunbar's number states that the number of relationships someone can comfortably maintain is about 150 or so. Sense of community comes from connecting with small groups. I do not feel a sense of community by chatting with strangers on /r/funny.

Decentralized forums or IRC channels run by small groups were much more accessible, and allowed you to connect with people and form relationships.

That all said, IRC channels and independent forums do still exist. Hobby forums are great (I personally love the Small Form Factor PC forum, great community[1] ).

But today, small groups are the exception and not the norm of the internet of the 90s and early 00s.

[1]: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/

My experiences online also gave me a big jump over most people on understanding the potential of the Internet. Despite my sermonizing a lot of my friends didn't see any value in getting online for a good three to five years.

When I got a Palm Pilot phone in 2003(?) and showed them I had Internet access on it they were incredulous. These same people who were late to the Internet laughed and said why would you ever want the Internet on your phone?

This was more early-1990s, but my first internet was a BBS out of Bradley University in Peoria. Ah, the sweet scream of ZTerm on a Performa.

Still, there are communities like that out there now, and quite a few of them are where they always were. Forums are less popular, but active ones do still exist, and some have good communities. Same with IRC and mailing lists and chat rooms and whatever else.

And while it's unfortunately centralised, I guess Discord has become the 'place' for many of these communities too, with the better ones being basically an old school forum in chat room form.

There are places out there.

We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.

I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.

If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?

And while I agree that we're the first digital natives, I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

Who knew a textarea and a notification system could become so troublesome?

See, I think this is where we didn't apply lessons that we should've learned. A good moderation policy and good moderators are arguably essential to the life of a good forum, but Twitter is and always has been disastrous at it. It's a global forum thread or IRC channel where the trolls have completely free reign.

Reckless, "greed-is-good" neoliberalism.

We have slowly morphed from "users of the internet" to "a product of the internet".

The internet, today, is so interested about what I do every second. This made every common man a celebrity. A friend recently said she's aware of her data being used to snoop on her, but she refrained to stop it citing that it gave her "momentary happiness" to stay on social networks. I practically couldn't deny what she said.

While I follow ('ed) a few discussions over internet, the moment I turn my phone screen on, I get disrupted by the numerous feeds from social apps ending up forgetting what I had to look at. I keep confining me to the same space eventually.

The internet is following the greatest blindfold of democracy: "Set strict boundaries for individuals of the society and let them argue within those limits infinitely. Keep them busy with controversies within those boundaries so that there isn't time left to think beyond the limits"

I have learned to have my own agenda of looking out for my own needs and husbanding my time to invest it in things that matter to me. This turns out to not be conducive to the kinds of conversations I used to have.

I'm lonelier than I used to be by quite a lot. But my life overall works better.

I don't know how to get both things. I wish I did.

This has mostly always been true in my life, both online and off. I'm just much more aware that I am merely being bled by people who will do absolutely nothing in return for me and who will, in fact, shit all over me if I bring up my needs and wants at all. They explicitly expect a woman to do nice things for free for them. Expecting something in return offends them in the extreme.

I'm quicker to cut people off than I used to be. It doesn't lead to the kinds of mutually beneficial relationships I desire, but I spend far less time feeling bled for my time, energy, expertise and wisdom by people who explicitly think women should give those things away for free and who saw zero problem with that abusive expectation even when I was literally homeless and going hungry. That was not their problem and how dare I suggest they should care about that.

You can still participate in IRC! It's still alive and kicking. Look at the channel in list in freenode.net, it's huge! Most of it is focused on tech, but there's plenty of non-tech channels as well.

Try checking out communities using Discord. I started participating in a couple anime-related groups and I met tons of interesting people through that. I eventually got invited to a private Discord where many members hang out, but it's more casual and personal than the public server, and it's been a blast. I've learned tons of things about their different cultures, and I'm hoping to meet some of em at events later this year or next. Although I haven't met with anyone in real life yet, it turned out one member actually lives live like 20 mins, so we actually planning on meeting soon, when we don't have any big real-life issues on our plates.

It turns out a few of the people I've been talking to recently are Muslims, and I didn't know much about their beliefs, so it has been a highly enlightening experience. They recently stopped fasting and were celebrating being able to eat during regular hours again.

One of the people I've been talking to is from a middle-eastern country but had family in Qatar, so he's visiting. Did you know that apostasy is illegal there? Oh, and they also block porn sites! This is an image of what you get when you try accessing a porn site in Qatar [0].

[0] https://i.imgur.com/1a9lDDi.png

There still are communities: Some on Facebook groups, more on Twitter or Tumblr, but increasingly found on Discord. Find a Discord related to some topic (a game, a fandom, a hobby, a city), and you'll find that casual chatting, meeting new people, people arranging to meet up, etc.

"Where do these people hang out these days? If they just want to have a nice chat, unrelated to work, about the stuff that interests them?"

Discord, a Facebook group, maybe a Twitter group chat. Seriously. There's more people doing what you miss today than at any time in the past, but they're not doing it in the same places.

That being said...keep in mind it's much easier to make friends in your teens and early 20s than in later life. I struggle a lot to make connections, not because the opportunity isn't available, but just because I'm a lot more closed off than I used to be. Some of your nostalgia is for the internet of yesteryear, but some of it is for the you of yesteryear, and that's not going to be recoverable by installing a new chat client.

I've spent the last four or so years hoping around dead phpBBs and empty IRC channels trying to find a community that reminded me of the pre-Facebook communities.

So far Mastodon reminds me of a kind of async-IRC for the 30+ crowd who don't have time to idle in an empty channel all day. Plenty of conversations, and If feel like I'm starting to recognize repeated posters and strike up conversations again.

Agree. The problem for me is that if I happen to find a small community, I still wonder if I'm missing out on something else.

Back then if you found an nicely made forum in your language, that was it. A couple 100 people and no real alternative to them.

Maybe that's why dating seems to be so hard. It's possible to meet a partner from literally all over the world. Where is in old times you were more or less limited by the village you happened to live in.

I don't want to chose good people... I want to have them slightly "forced" on me and learn to live with them. :/

I'm older than you. I spend half my time trying to explain what is this feeling. It's so ironic that every golden age is killed by itself in a way. We're all pushing for 'better' until we realize that it was just as neat as it should before.

Maybe it's just relativism from psychology, call this general roots. At periods of your time you imprint signals. Minute details that will always make you feel at home. Whenever I run win95, winxp, linux 2.4 I feel so chill. Even though on paper, linux 4 / systemd have 320 extremely valuable features... still there's a 'better' effect. The other day I registered on a phpbb website .. felt cool. No php7 generators or DI based modules .. but I couldn't care less.

It's probably not all nostalgia, you can really tell how internet became a social business from a fun on the side, everyside is monetized, full of warnings, hyper complex. And very rarely so for the benefits of the user, mostly to avoid harm from stupid businesses.

Thank god IRC (and others) are still the same.

I moved around a lot between 18 and 30 - About 30 different properties, 15 different towns, five major cities, a few countries.

Something I learned over that time is when you return to a location you once lived in, it never matches up to whatever memories you have. People have moved on (a particularly stark lesson in university towns, which churn ~30% every single year), businesses have shuttered, public spaces have been redeveloped. Even the road/path networks have changed. So it's not possible to turn those fond memories back into a current experience. Of the things that DO match, a significant number of them will be negative elements that your memory had kinda hidden away. We tend to frame memories of our environment as fixed, with a sense of timelessness that doesn't match how those spaces evolve over time.

The same thing applies to Internets. There's a BB I posted heavily on in the late nineties that's still active and largely unchanged. But having recently started posting there again, it's just not an enjoyable experience. All the personalities are in a different phase of life (as am I), the central theme topic has aged badly, and the level of activity is low enough that there's rarely any point checking in daily. Worst of all, as someone that gets flighty at the first whiff of stagnation, going back to something so far in my past brings up a strong negative reaction. Even though it's just a bloody forum.

I guess all of this is obvious and not hugely insightful, but it leads me to the conclusion that it's not worth pining for the Internets that was, because the reality of returning to that would not be as awesome as our memories suggest. If anyone wants a taste of that today, stuff like TOR, freenet, and I2P echo a lot of the Web 1.0 feeling and community.

In relation to the internet, summer never ending was never a thing.

Eternal September¹ is a thing.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Looking back, I'd estimate that it took another 4-6 years before the usenet I met in those years died. Some obscure parts held on longer than others. It was an influx of trolls at the same time that legitimate traffic slowly died off. Back then, I blamed the web forums that were starting to divert and diffuse participation.

I hadn't yet come to appreciate the insatiable need for humans to form ranks and piss on things. To not only root their identity and self-worth in the exclusive, the new, but to try to salt the earth and deny others the use of unoccupied ground.

Now, I recognize more cycles and waves to everything. I have an almost, but not quite, Buddhist outlook on the nature of things. But, it doesn't bring me satisfaction nor clarity. It's hard to put to words, but is more defeatism or morose nostalgia. It's hard not to think that the imagined mountains of youth aren't really sand dunes that slip and flow to consume every step of a futile climb. All this activity and change may be the thin layer of growth on coral, or the irregular fringe of a petri dish.

I regularly meet people I follow in person if they come through my town, or if I come through theres. And, when I make a new acquaintance, we stay in touch and learn more about eachother in preparation for our next chance encounter. My group of friends is lager than ever, though we don’t meet in person as often as a traditional local relationship.

I think it's due to the popularity contest that has taken over our communication mediums. Everything is based upon likes, stars, upvotes/downvotes, retweets, and shares. This social influence leads to herd behavior and conformity.

I too greatly miss the tight communities I used to participate in across IRC, chat rooms, and topic-specific forums where people simply voiced their opinions and had discussions. They still exist in pockets but the communities are much smaller today. If people were out of line, they were kicked out. If they continued, they were banned. Discussion manipulation was generally limited to bumping forum threads to the top. Today a malicious actor just needs a small bot network to complete control opinion on upvote-based discussion platforms.

Are you a user? Is it worth joining to have Community - driven conversation?

Joined LongNow and it has a nice series of seminars and hints of community, but no chat or comment culture.

It got a heck of a lot cheaper for home users. People forget just how much online access used to cost. It also got a lot more users, and many services seem to want huge numbers of users, rather than being happy to serve their niche well. Finally, when you're dialing up at 33.6 or slower you make an effort because every second counts.

Here's a page from 1988. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7

Compuserve charged $11 per hour and had "more than 250,000 subscribers".

The Source charged $8 per hour and was popular for its conferencing system "parti".

Delphi charging $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.

BIX charge $9 per hour.

I hadn't heard it put quite so clearly before: First, Tech Cos turned conversation into big-business by corralling everyone into their platforms, then the the second wave came and turned these "walled-gardens" into game reserves. I can't imagine how little of twitter's volume is not bots, ads, self-promotion, and trolls - paid or otherwise.

Online we're already living in a dystopian future.

1) Everything has been commercialized.

Even in the tech world most posts aren't to inform, illuminate, or even just show off something cool. A huge number of tech blog posts are really just ads to build a company or personal brand.

2) Propaganda

Propaganda infects pretty much every semi-political discussion on the web and it has lead to most sites having a single accepted viewpoint on major discussion points and serious hostility towards the out-group.

The water has been muddied so much that the average person cannot dig down and find the truth.

I've personally had to take a holistic counter-examples based approach.

I grew up on forums, and began programming with php on them. I'd love to see something similar to them take over slack.

Everyone makes mistakes, and the sooner people realise that in this modern, lose your job because of a twitter post society, the better.

1993 was the September that never ended, when AOL invaded usenet and the world fell apart. At least if you talk to those who were on the internet before then.

People have always longed for the good old days. Those days weren't much different to now, it's often just your perspective that's changed, and you don't miss the good old days, you miss being a carefree teenager

Church used to be a source of it for people, but it has a lot of obvious negatives and there are limited options without religion involved.

Children probably also take a lot of people off the map, but I think that doesn’t have to be true either given the right solution.

Sports, activity interest groups fill the void a little.

But there's so little downtime as an adult these days it's a chore.

Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, and 4chan a bit only now they're talking about Firefly, the Expanse and Star Wars.

SF and anime fandom is bigger, more diverse, more involved and more complex than its ever been, but you're going to have to go where the people are to find it and engage with it, and you've already admitted you avoid going where the people are.

You need to accept that everything that used to be hip and exclusive to subculture is now mainstream and infested with millennials and normies and social media and that it's ok. They love their stuff just as much as you and I do.

edit: and Discord. I forgot about it because I'm old, but Discord is also a thing.

I think the first two words are your problem. "It's all". The internet isn't "all" anything. It's incredibly diverse. If all you see is that stuff, you need to change your approach.

I spend lots of time on Twitter having very productive discussions in my field. I rarely if ever see bots, "influencers", hate speech. Occasional bickering, a bit of "identity politics", I guess - but that's because I chose to opt into it.

And there are lots of great Slack channels, and StackOverflow, and Github Issues for conversations about things that interest me.

I think the things you want on the Internet are still there, you just aren't finding them for some reason.

My social circle is full of people like you - but I'm a furry - maybe you should seek out the local scifi or furry community around you - I promise you, that you'll feel right at home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I actually use /list and join new channels from time to time!

Twitter was always useless for me for having a conversation. It's just shouting short phrase into the void hoping someone will shout some other short phrase back. It's roughly equivalent of ICQ status message. Little text you could attach to information whether you are online or not. Technically you could have conversation through that but it is more like passive-aggressive shouting match in a large room full of other people than actual conversation. Twitter is exactly that for me and I refuse to participate.

And Facebook forces you to have one exposed identity and glues it to your face and your mom. So it's useless for conversation purposes because you won't dare to say there anything ever. I still have an account if only to see what my family and friends are doing with their lives and using messenger because nobody installs even skype anymore.

Pretty much old conversation systems from my point of view faded away into their most limiting and stupid parts.

Bye bye ICQ or your local equivalent of that experience.

And forums got digg treatment. In the old days you could say whatever you thought and you only risked that some people will mute you or you get kicked out of that forum right away. Now everything is gamified, you get downvoted, you are loosing karma, your post fades away for everybody, gets buried. And it hurts much. To much to risk expressing any opinion you might think is controversial. Because cost is loosing points you learned to care about, loosing standing on a platform, the only platform. There's no second HN, no second reddit.

Instead of providing personalized tools for muting trolls and their feeders forums transformed into gamified, mob-policed states that keep everybody in check with self-censorship. The only people that break through that are straight up racist, sexist trolls that don't care about anything and anybody. People with most extreme views. And then everybody else can say: "See? That's why we can't have nice things. That's what we have downvoting for."

Modern internet is different. It's better in many aspects. Youtube is modern marvel for hands-on learning. But freedom of expression definitely suffered.

Sitting down after dinner and having a few deep, interesting conversations with friends and random strangers was enlightening, and so rare these days.

The quality takes time and to respond 10 conversation at once is really exhausting. It's not anymore about joy of internet, what I feel is there is too much of it. Everyone is instantly connected and about 40% of new generation is basically addicted to smartphones and to internet, that's totally different feeling than before when you do it out of curiosity. The old generation recognize it and probably try to limit their time online, that's the reason why forums and blogs are not maintained today's, it takes time and effort to produce something valuable and this days not many people have even time to read it...

Is there a place on the internet for personal relations? Not for politics, not for hooking up, not for seeing who has the most informed opinion about something. Just for talking to the same people every day, help them out and be helped. I see some of that on smaller Discord servers.

The really odd thing I've been noticing though: that outside (real life) its much easier to expose yourself to that kind of "random world" that the internet felt like in those times. Like, walking in the streets and seeing what people are talking about in bars I can expose myself to more interesting[1] (to me of course) opinions than the front page of the biggest subreddits.

But, if you are an introvert like many of us, you probably won't say hello and make new friends that easy. And its not about joining the chess/dance/coding club either, because I don't want to hang out with people just like me. I'd rather hang out with strangers actually.

[1] Also, the factor that it is in my city makes this relatable, local, etc. Now that I mention, BBSes were also a local thing.

Facebook is constantly trying to outgrow what it should be, and the more it does this the less nice it becomes.

Twitter I have little issue with though, amazingly.

The feeling of meeting real people went away for me after my FidoNet days. You had to wait up to two days for a message from Canada to Germany to arrive. It was frustrating but it was great. Dial-up BBS' were all the rage before a regular geek could access it from home. Even FidoNet-Email-Gateways existed.

So I guess every generation has its own frontier stories. For you, it was the internet, for me, it was dial-up BBS', for others it was disk swapping, building a simple computer from scratch or feeding paper strips to a warehouse-sized monstrosity.

Still, it's pretty obvious that we as a whole of humanity are not prepared to converse civilly on a global scale.

It also incentivised the participants to play nice within those rules because splitting off and starting a rival forum was kinda expensive and a pain in the arse.

By making things cheaper, and paid for by some big company somewhere, we've lost that.

I think Twitter is an inadequate replacement, because on Twitter you don't just sign up and post a thread for everyone to see. You have to convince people to follow you first. Once you have done that you get exposed to many parts of Twitter beyond just your niche -- politics and memes tend to spread like wildfire. Twitter has other strengths but it's targeted to a wider group of people, not just young men with narrow interests.

Reddit is a great place for talking about hobbies, but it is fairly anonymous. Maybe it would be different if you could have animated GIF avatars and massive signatures! I'm mostly a lurker there but I'm sure you can make great friends on Reddit, especially if you reach out.

These days a lot of nice communities seem to be forming on Discord, for things related to games, programming and similar nerdy interests.

There are more people than ever on the internet, and not everyone hangs out on Twitter. I'm sure you can find your channels if you just look.

All of my transgender support communities have been gutted and destroyed by hate speech and people going "YOU HAVE A MENTAL DISORDER, FREAK". I really used to enjoy my PHPbb & other forums for real groups of caring people. Anonymity let the hate flow. I feel those communities have since moved to Reddit -- just like mostly everything else.

The centralization & ease of access (it's in everyone's pockets) is really what turned the tables.

It's fun to do internet archeology. https://wiby.me/ is a fun search engine.

Don't get me wrong but isn't this the whole problem? Previously forums were run for fun. People were not worried about pumping out ads to make money. And if everything is about grabbing eyeballs for the ads...why not argue just for the sake of arguing to grab attention?

I have come to the conclusion that two factors are necessary to a social media site truer to the original feel of the internet. One is smaller communities, in which individual posters can recognize one another, whether they are named or pseudonymous; another is categorization by interest, rather than preexisting social connections.

Reddit nearly manages this, but, being motivated by profit, has failed to stem the tide of idiots onto its platform. Solving the problem of overpopulation while bringing many users to a site is something I'm not aware of anyone having done.

I don't have a lot of interest in implementing yet another social media site, but if anyone knows about such a place, I would love to hear about it.

This alone makes me wonder how people can just say "oh, it's not the internet that has changed, it's you" when people clearly remember a better and more social time which seems to have a cutoff point around the hyper-growth of Reddit. I remember my super-early teens being defined by phpbb forums via Invisionfree for video game clans, browsing Newgrounds, 4chan, and ytmnd, and just being a part of the given community. Not to mention just hanging out in Star Wars Battlefront/Team Fortress/Battlefield (194)2(142) public servers and just chatting & blasting, eventually settling down to either one or two servers where you feel most at home. "Where everybody knows your name."

Now forums are Reddit and Facebook. "Niche" forums are huge ones like RPGCodex and what used to be Neogaf (awful place) and SomethingAwful. Sociability in video games means you have to constantly roll the dice in terms of 9 to 11 other humans because matchmaking and MMR is the new normal; who knows who you'll get and if they're not enjoyable to be around, maybe you'll be stuck listening to them whinge because you're both on the same MMR level. I could go on, but I can tell you for sure that while there were definitely awful things back then, they're nothing in the face of the current web.

I don't miss IRC anywhere near as much as I thought I would, though. Going back recently made me realize that some things have changed for the better.

Overall I think the idea of voting on comments and submissions has made the world a much worse place.

I find a lot of joy in a restricted, slow network with people who actually care to be there (have no money to gain, have to go through some effort).

I find this in the deep web. I think it resembles the early internet a lot.

https://discord.gg/H9Jkc7p

Some steps 1. Find some interest in something: a game, an art, etc. 2. Find some discords that are active with some people 3. "Meet" a lot of people, discuss, etc.

<3

I do the same thing for Parks and Rec and the Office (US), both of which had subpar first seasons in my opinion.

I think you nailed it. All these things you mentioned can still be found, and can give the same feelings to teenagers now. The channels used are different, because these evolve with each generation, but I bet the young people who are going through the same stage now will be nostalgic about it decades later as things will definitely be different.

Part of what I miss is the wonder that was the internet. Everything that happened was happening for the first time. Real time chat, online gaming, etc. as well as learning the fundamentals of many things such as programming and computer science. Now when I sit down to learn a new language it doesn't feel like it did when I first learn VB, C, Java 2, Perl, etc.

The last "new" thing that I remember being truly excited for was when virtualisation became something you could do on consumer hardware (VMware, Virual PC) in the early/mid-00s. Now I see new things like VR but I don't really get so excited for it.

Hardware is amazing now (I am writing this on a laptop with a six-core/twelve-thread i9 CPU, 32GB RAM, a GPU with 4GB RAM to itself and 2TB of solid state storage) but it is just better hardware, it doesn't have that exciting new factor to it.

I remember feeling so damn excited when I upgraded my old desktop to 768MB RAM. Everytime I booted it up and saw the RAM check in POST scroll up to 768 I got giddy with excitement. Almost a little adrenaline rush. Now not so much. I guess I really am just getting old!

I regularly go on Slack and Discord servers (and still some IRC) but they feel different to me. I think it is the 1000+ members whereas back in the 90s/early-00s you had maybe 100-150 members in a channel and you would know most of them to some degree. Same with USENET in that you would often have conversations with the same people, it didn't matter how many people read that newsgroup it was only those that were active and that was usually a lot smaller in number. Often a couple of dozen in the newsgroups I frequented.

OP if you fancy a chat pop along to cpplang.slack.com and join us in #off-topic, doesn't matter if you're not a C++ programmer. We welcome mostly anyone in that channel and they are a nice bunch.

Far more thrilling than having Windows 10 invade itself onto some modern soulless fucking lounge bar. I mean hardware.

Now that the internet and the devices for accessing it are fully mature it's the new television.

Maybe VR is the next niche where mostly geeks will converge until fully matured with a headset in every household. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Looked up effnet stats the other day to find out there's only 20k users there these days. Not sure how many it was back in the day, and I was more of an undernet guy... but seems small today.

Contact details are in my profile... we can reminisce via email (which is effectively going the way of the Old Internet, especially as the millennials take over).

There is something very nostalgic to dialing up to your aol account and opening up a chat with random people. Playing conquest for the first time... wow. I don’t normally live in the past but had to fire up UO playlist this morning.

A lot of us are hanging out in person at the local hackerspace/makerspace, physically building and sharing and teaching, because the online experience no longer holds the magic it once did.

Alas, telneting to freenet finland where de could get a free email address... ... And discovering stuff inside ftp servers that mirrored shareware, and GNU software you couldn't use at home because you ran windows 3.51

It felt like the wild wild west, ir the ultimate frontier.

I regularly visit Lainchan and a couple of boards at 8chan, and everything's like the communities of the 90s. I actually met some people IRL and it was great. You guys should try finding some of these small communities.

As to how to make friends in your 30s - pick up dancing. Salsa, bachata, salsa cubana, kizomba all are build on idea of social dancing. You go to a party and dance with random people. Try it.

I just climbed over that hump a little less than a month ago and have similar feelings. My tech/internet journey started where lots of others probably began, with games. I remember picking up the magazine Maximum PC and being awed at the stories and reviews of different computers, video cards and games. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 at the time and was just beginning to understand how computers functioned and could be built, piecemeal, so the magazine felt like a major discovery.

And at about the same time I learned that a game called Diablo 2 was in development by the company whose games I already adored, Blizzard. I learned that there were websites that speculated on and followed the game's development, so I started to visit those sites (namely diabloii.net) to satisfy my curiosity. That ultimately led me to the forums and to creating my first website, which I put together well before the game ever came out, devoted to a guild I wanted to create.

And then I started to follow Warcraft 3, which led me to more forums and IRC. IRC was the big one. It was like stepping into an entirely new universe. A universe of people from around the world that could talk in groups and communicate instantly about any topic. That was a real eye opener, which led me to just about everything else in nerddom. I co-created websites, setup servers, worked on a game mod, talked with programmers and artists, learned about linux, dabbled with scripting... The floodgates were open!

There's no question that the internet played a major formative role in my life and has had a huge impact on what I believe, who I've become and how I understand the world. But when I look at today's internet I see a very different place. Since 2016 I've been giving a lot of thought to how its popularity has changed the way that it operates. The promises of commercialization and politicization have brought many elements to bear that simply didn't exist to the same extent when I was growing up. The ongoing war for users and messaging seems to encourage cloistered spaces and inner-facing pairings (ie: exclusive instead of inclusive).

Then again, maybe I'm just joining the ranks of old dudes yelling at kids to get off their lawn and reminiscing about the good old days. I'd love to hear from the people that are growing up online today. I'd like to know what their experience has been like and if they've found their own fonts of wisdom and information that I have never seen.

I am very nostalgic of the early 2000 internet (I'm also 30). I spent a majority of my free time making anime websites. I met a lot of friends through affiliating with their sites.

Not only that, but on all the various forums I participated in and later (2004) through World of Warcraft.

I miss it all.

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries) there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet", just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did 33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days); just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those "create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Instant messaging was engaging. It meant that I was sitting there, actively logged onto AIM with my status set as available. Now, with present-day alternatives on mobile, that level of presence seems like it's missing.

Others are always available but not. I could receive a reply on Messenger immediately or in a few hours. It definitely goes the other way, too. I may reply immediately or not. People are always available for conversation but conversations seem harder to have.

fediverse[1] is a great escape from the modern internet. it has its problems, but it feels a lot like my early experiences with the internet.

[1]: https://fediverse.network/

Anyone remember SmarterChild, the original chatbot?

Something I think isn't said enough, is that despite everyone understanding what "convergeance" meant (it was actually the topic of one of my first lectures at university in 1979) it's one thing to understand, and it's another to actually experience it and get some deep sense.

For instance, I knew the flatter protocol design implications of TCP/IP meant "same everywhere" which was a huge relief after living networks with a distinction between LAN and WAN in protocol terms: But I didn't really think "everywhere" meant built into the doors of fridges.

Mentally, I think a lot of us made unnecessary, arbitrary distinctions between systems which felt like toys and were sold as such, and systems bought to "do work" -in fact several universities deliberately went out and got amigas and did both low level coding, GUI design, and just banged the bejesus out of them as cheap terminals to Vax 11/780s.

TL;DR being there was more than just being alive at the time. You had to learn to think in new ways too.

A secondary factor was spam getting out of control IIRC.

I wish uuencode had never been invented.

It is no longer an egalitarian happy place for the exchange of ideas

Facebook and Google are not the Internet, they're just websites same as any other.

You won't find as many 'home pages' as back then, in that sense the likes of Facebook have done real damage, true. The sheer expansion of the 'net means you'll find plenty of interest outside of the gardens anyway so instead of pining for days long past I'd suggest to gear up for the here and now and for days to come when the blight of Facebook and their ilk are nothing but bad memories.

Just look at how Youtube and Spotify captured everyone's attention despite torrent infrastructure being easier and better than ever to use

If you’re missing the old internet, try hopping on some discord portals (basically “meta servers” that you can find other servers through) and just see where they take you.

In fact if you're not Vint Cerf, you shoudn't be allowed to post

Get off my lawn

I’m 43. I got on the internet in 94.

The internet now is much better in every way than it was at <insert point x>.

Most of the discussions and sharing you seem to miss is now in the very platforms you have rejected. Twitter in particular is great for communities like Babylon 5. You just need to choose who to follow.

The key thing is don’t be the guy who hates new things. New things are different but they really do work. Try them!

Tried Reddit. It has some good content but omg so much noise. So. Much. Noise.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that. Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh, and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your soul to it.

Tried HN. That one works ok so far, a lot of smart people here. Content is mostly limited to specific domain, but that's OK.

Still, all those new things didn't make an impact on my life like the old internet things did. Maybe it's me that is different now.

I won't say internet is worse now than it was then. But it's different. Some for the better (working search! Wikipedia! free university courses!), some for the worse.

P.S. I got on the internet when Windows was sold on floppy disks :) I actually used gopher.

And yet it works. And intellectually it makes some sense too: it is very rare that a single thought actually takes more than 280 characters (and maybe a picture) to express.

(Hey, I think FriendFeed was the greatest social network ever built. But there are good reasons it lost to Twitter, and they make a surprising amount of sense)

I don't see what happens on Twitter as "it working". Tastes differ I guess.

> it is very rare that a single thought actually takes more than 280 characters (and maybe a picture) to express.

I guess that depends on the thought. Twitter is full of the kind that take a short grunt to express. But do I really want them? I've found I can do very well without them.

Tried Facebook. Nice platform to see pictures of cute animals. And an occasional meme. And keep up-to-date with latest developments among who went where and ate what, whose kid/dog/cat done what, and other things like that. Never try to discuss something serious there, it's hopeless. Some thematic communities have good content, but the only way to find them is by luck. Oh, and of course it will track you to the end of your days now that you sold your soul to it.

That can be pretty easily split into two thoughts anyway.

If it doesn't work for you that's cool.

But that doesn't mean it would be better split by some weird interface into separate pieces, each paragraph floating around detached from the next. When I see people trying to fit their good thoughts into that format and then resorting to all kinds of third party tools in order to reassemble the resulting mess back into coherent text - I can't help pitying them. Why would they subject themselves and their thoughts to this kind of torture?