That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.

Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.

So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.

“What’s there to do really?” they asked. Whatever annoyance somebody had with the state of the early web was magnified into a portrait of decline.

It was only for nerds. Or maybe too shallow with ugly amateur content. Or too commercialized already. Or maybe it was never going to be a successful platform for business because nobody is crazy enough to put their credit card number in an online form. Etc.

These contradictory complaints were all present back in the day, but in retrospect there was so much room for both technical and social growth that they just seem quaint now.

I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame.

The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting.

During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug.

And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this.

Neophilia.

And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.

One day you were considered a massive nerd for having your own computer, spending a lot of time on it, playing games on it, and socializing with others on it.

Seemingly the next day everyone was online and had their own email addresses. I remember being amazed the first time I saw website advertised on the side of a bus. It seemed like the world had massively changed overnight.

Now so many people have lived their entire lives with the net all around them and only hearsay about what it was like before.

People created websites without any specific goals.

Today, I became very cynical about the state of Internet. The big $$ companies took it over. people use it as a way to market themselves.

It went as a fun technology for geeks that the masses made fun of. The arrival of the masses changed everything.

It was an incredibly unique dynamic- access to incredibly diverse people from all over the world, but simultaneously tilted towards the intellectually curious and tech-savvy. It was maybe a little bit like the vibe of being on a college campus, even if you were talking about sports or the weather, the default level of knowledge, intelligence, openness and curiosity were far higher than the default in "real life".

There was this unique culture of "the internet" as a place separate from "the real world" that was heavily skewed by the demographics. It was a world where nerds were 50% of the population instead of 1%.

I didn't notice much optimism, rather pessimism that people continued to look down on 'nerds' and the annoying and slow Internet. Many of us were mocked for spending so much time inside staring at screens wired to the wall. Normal people didn't see its benefits, and many of us nerds used it mostly for gaming and to escape our limited friend options IRL.

It's great looking back to those days when opinions like his were, indeed, mainstream. I was in high school at the time and admitting you used the Internet was not something you did. It was something that would be forever geeky, text based, and for the domain of hackers and scientists only.

Things changed rapidly, of course, but I'd say it was more amazing that it DID take off with the general public than the fact we thought it wouldn't.

That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.

You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.