Do you think I'm outright telling falsehoods? Which part do you think is false: that the internet had many millions of users in 1992? That the internet pre-1993 was completely non-commercial with absolutely zero ads and no paywalls?

Again, this confuses me. I was pointing out that the current rate of change is not obviously more rapid than about 100 years ago. If you are trying to provide a counterexample I think you've failed to establish one, and if you weren't I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, other than a generic "gee, the internet has come a long way in the last 30 years". I don't think anyone would claim it hasn't, but I don't get your point, I guess.

I'm not outraged at all, just surprised. I don't have enough time to explain something like that on HN (especially to someone who may just be trolling or acting in bad faith, not saying you are but you could be) and I don't feel the need to because the evidence that the internet has a positive effect on society and the economy are so overwhelming and just a few google searches away anyway. That's like asking why science or education are a good thing for the economy. Have a nice day :)

Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.

I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.

> That seems like a lot of people to me?

Yes, that's true. 20 million Americans is a lot of people.

But in 1996 the population of US was about 265 million, so I was completely right to say that "quarter of century ago most people even if heard about the Internet they haven't had a chance to use it yet".

> Not sure why you've now decided to go for snark and being snide?

Not sure why you have decided to oppose what is clearly true and accurate statements with illogical sentences. You could have just ignored it or even downvoted if you decided it worsens overall quality of HN content.

But you decided to write false, illogical responses and you should by now know how it ends on HN.

Yes, but not from how it was in 1999.

I've heard this claim a lot, with 0 supporting evidence. Do you have any?

My own experience is that there are thousands of content-rich, high-quality blogs still being written by real humans, because I regularly find and bookmark new ones weekly, without even looking for them, so: please provide evidence for this claim that runs counter to my lived experience.

Show me the lie. ;) I think the Internet was a better place before Eternal September, when it was the exclusive precinct of relatively affluent white male nerds.

Accessibility has only made it proportionally worse ever since.

I don't like it, but I think elitism is right.

That's quite an absurd statement to make. I can easily find people right now that find no interest in the current internet, it's literally impossible that in the past it would have been different with way less interesting things to do on it..

There's a huge bias in what you state. I have no doubt that plenty of people who got access at the time found it interesting, but the thing you ignore is that theses are the one that found it interesting that got access in the first place.

Like sure email are incredibly useful, but to send to who? It's is right now that I can send them to 2 billions users, but in 1996, that was 16 millions... kind of much less useful, the chances are most people you knew, didn't knew anyone that was on it at the time... thus literally useless. FTP are nice, but plenty didn't used computers at all, sharing files meant nothing. I know so many right now that have trouble sharing files, yet FTP still exist... no chance they would have shared any in the past.

You are now on that team, the ones that don't have any use for it right now. It's fine that you don't find it interesting, but please don't be that old grandpa that scream "get out of my lawn" please...

> The early Internet was infinite times more fun.

Curiously, I've seen tons of people having fun with cryptocurrencies, in different ways, you are just not part of it...

I think this is a argument is incorrect. You can still print flyers and hand them out (or even mass mail them!) and none of that cabal can get close to stopping you, this argument assumes/pretends that the internet eliminated all other forms of communication, it didn't. Those methods still exist and have a larger reach than they had then. Communication is more resilient than it was in the 1700s, not less.

> I'd like to know how you're going to do it.

I'd make it look like an email chain and forward it to my grandma.

No, it was an honest question, because I'm having this conversation with you without any of those services impacting me.

My opinion as a whole is simple, the internet is an additional medium of information sharing. We have more means of communicating our ideas (even without the internet) for cheaper than we have in the entire history of humanity.

Never in history have the mediums of communication of the day been required to communicate what you ask them to. Sure, you could print a pamphlet, but I guarantee you'd rather have it in the Boston Gazette.

You can. And I made that point myself. The issue is the signal to noise ratio and the way search engines rank sites. Finding those gems I described above have become harder than it used to (in my personal opinion)

> less corruption

I very much disagree that there’s less corruption now the web has taken off. Or at least if there is, I disagree it’s directly related to stuff getting published on the web.

> email and IM connecting people around the world like never before

Email and IM have existed long before the web (decades before in emails case), nevermind being available around the period of the early web that we were talking about.

> just focusing on negatives like fab, Twitter, etc creates a very one dimensional picture

I totally agree.

The reason it was written that as was because I wanted to offer a counterbalance to the previous post rather than a balanced and impartial commentary. However you’re right that the reality is somewhere between the two arguments.

> I actually thing that’s a bad thing

I think you’ve completely misunderstood my point because you’re arguing the same point I made with using language that suggests I was opposed to those points you’re making.

Also you seem to be confusing “web” with “internet” in some of your previous remarks and also suggesting I’m totally against the web in its entirety; neither of those points are true (in fact I’m very much pro-web)

Of course not, the person who wrote that has absolutely no concept of the modern Internet user, and probably thinks themselves materially better than them.

Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party.

I think you're conflating people from that world order and how they interpreted the internet, with how the internet actually was.

> User-generated content lived in the fringes of the Internet in those days. It was the plebs' place. The unwashed.

User generated content was a large majority of the content of the early internet. Usenet. MUDs. Email. Forums. Random people's university websites.

They probably don't use the Internet.

Then I am too. I've been on the internet for longer than that, and I certainly don't recall this being the norm. It's possible it was in the corners you frequented, but not the ones I did. But unless you have some data that speaks to this being the norm across the internet and my experience being the exception all we have is anecdotes and mine cancels yours.

given the statistic cited earlier of over 5 billion people using the internet and there are 7.8 billion people in the world, 1.4 billion of them in China, which has slightly over 1 billion on the internet, 1.4 billion in India, which has evidently 759 million on the internet, etc. etc. I think it is most likely that we find the largest concentrations of people without internet in non-Western countries and in less developed regions.

>My example is a bunch of old people

There are nearly 270 thousand people age 75 and over in the world, that age being also over the age of retirement in many places. I doubt you are actually discussing people that are 75 and over.

How old are these "old" people that don't use browsers?

Consider that IE6 was released in 2001, 22 years ago. Someone 33 years old at that time would be 55 now. Probably a good age for a legislator.

I never said it was unlikely that people don't use browsers, but given the statistics outlined above it seems statistically unlikely that there would be a significant concentration of them in any group legislating the internet, although you seem invested in the idea that this is so.

Do I think it is possible that if I went to your family reunion would I meet someone who did not use browsers - sure - also if I went to your city council meeting. Assuming 12 people on the council a naive calculation of 5 billion internet users on the planet would lead me to saying maybe 5 don't, but given the other factors outlined here I would think it statistically strange if it were more than 2.

What percentage of people at your family reunion, and city council meeting, do you think do not use browsers and if it is anomalous in relation to the statistics outlined here - how do you account for this anomaly?

on edit: also I live in Denmark, every politician here knows how trains work and has probably spent a significant amount of their life commuting on trains.

on second edit: regarding your previous example of encryption; the difference between encryption and a browser is the difference between lithium-ion batteries and Electric cars. The first is a functionality of an application, the second is an application.

Pretty much everyone has an understanding of the application and what they do to make it work, hardly anyone has understanding of how the underlying technology works. It may be useful to have people who know how the underlying technology works to legislate on it, but not knowing how HTTPS works or how the browser interprets the file formats it receives back from a request is not the same as not knowing what a browser is and I originally responded to the suggestion that people did not know what a browser is.

Regarding old age - I can see that in the U.S the median age of U.S. senators is 65 and the median age of representatives in the House is 58, so in the case of those age 65 I would be willing to suppose there is a larger percentage of them who do not know what a browser is - so maybe 40% of those over 65 do not know, and with vanishingly smaller numbers as you get closer to 50.

There's 14 senators 50 and younger, I bet all of them know what a browser is.

Are you and I from different universes? Are you forgetting about the .com boom (and subsequent bust in 2001)? Internet was mainstream well before 2005.

You also seem to be convinced that it was dangerous - it honestly wasn't. The concept of doxing, credit card fraud and integration with modern crime simply weren't there until after it became mainstream. Got any actual citiations or data?