[r113500]

Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs, oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was when the internet was still being run by the technological elite, for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet was distinctly different and inferior.

Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first, desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration, ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.

There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.

From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom removed from its greater context.

[nonrandomstring]

This "hinternet" is a cool concept, but there's something missing from its account.

On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the military and government - as rightful founders.

On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers and grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers in the new world.

The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a "woke" narrative.

But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the actual real people.

The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between 1997 and about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing money and power moved into the internet, along with a handful of rugged "entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around here).

The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and Charibdes, and now they are corralled into ranches, all lovingly watched over...

The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we have not solved many (indeed any) of the classical problems of freeloaders, tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I think "Web 3.0 and blockchain web" is dead (?)

A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is once again public, high-quality and large might be looking more closely at the history/narrative of the internet and who the real stakeholders are.

[adventured]

The people have their Internet already. They like Netflix, they like Amazon Prime, they love TikTok, they like Instagram, they like Pinterest, they like their various chat apps, they like their online gaming, and so on.

That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking.

There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be. They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage, bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they love dearly of course).

No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor! The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art, and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the masses want at all. Not even remotely close.

They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can insult people without getting punched in the face, and they can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub, and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired at/from Gaza in another thread.

The peoples Internet is already here.

[_Algernon_]

There's two types of wants. The low want of a heroin addict who wants his next fix, and the higher want of the same heroin addict who wants to get clean and a better life. These "wants" can both coexist. If you only use their actions to infer their wants you completely ignore the existence of their higher order wants. It's dehumanizing.

The people want the internet in the "next fix" sense. But I'd argue that the increase in mental illness globally the last ~15 years (starting a couple of years after the introduction of the iPhone) or even just the recent popularity of "digital detoxes" implies that there is a collective higher order want for a better internet.

[TeMPOraL]

Both you and GP are assuming people to be perfectly spherical rational actors in a philosophical vacuum. Under this assumption, people are indeed responsible for what they get, as the market only serves the demand. But that's not the world we live in - in our world, "revealed preferences" are bunk, because the suppliers have a lot of tools to control the demand.

The "hoi polloi" aren't born with fully fleshed out idea of "what they really want". Nor do they have much ability to communicate their wants to the market directly. Rather, their wants are in large part created by marketers, and the only signal they can send to the market (via "voting with your wallet") is their relative preferences for options available on the market. That is, they only get to choose from what's available. And what's available is under control of the vendors.

The way this relates to your "lower/higher order wants" is that my actions can actually communicate either of them. Where I spend my attention, or my money, can be driven directly by a high-order want - but I'm still limited to expressing that need only by choosing from a very limited set of actions or products that are available, and then my choice is also heavily biased by sales tricks and manipulative advertising strategies.

In short: I claim that the market is currently robbing all consumers of agency - "hoi polloi" and ${whatever the complement to that is called} alike. This is especially pronounced in tech industry, as commercial software resist commoditization - most apps and services are sticky and not interchangeable, so the UX decisions aren't being strongly influenced by competitive pressure. The vendors have an actual choice of how useful or how abusive they want to be. And they should get the blame when they choose the latter.

[nonrandomstring]

This is an insightful explanation.

I see a three stage change, from the pre-Bernays world of informational advertising and functional markets, to the post-Bernays world of contrived demand driven by psychological advertising, to what we have now.

Now we have policy driven economics in which technological goods are foisted upon the population and a post-hoc rationale of why they are necessary is relentlessly pushed as an explanatory narrative.

We're approaching the point where the "very limited set of actions or products " is so dominant that the only choice looks like abstinence; the "Luddite's" choice to not be abused.

[kevinsync]

What about the middle ground want of a heroin addict who loves heroin but wants pure, unadulterated, properly-dosed, controlled, trustworthy heroin from reputable, consistent vendors, accessed sanely and easily, taken quietly and unobtrusively, so they can float around and have a good time when it fits into their life?

Isn't that the dream of good technology and good internet?

People want the "next fix" internet because that's all they know. People would likely prefer a different internet if they ever had the chance to experience it.

[throwaway290]

You undermine the argument in favor of "better internet" with a terrible analogy from war on drugs.

There are plenty normal, highly functional heroin users whom we don't know about because they hide this (since it's prosecuted). The poster examples of abuse are not them however, which helps justify prosecution. On the other hand there are people with mental issues who will get addicted to anything, if not heroin then weed, if not weed then gambling, if not gambling then social media, etc etc. Maybe "dehumanizing" is trying to ban every potential vice rather than fixing the issues that lead to misuse. The cause vs. the symptom.

[nonrandomstring]

I'd highly recommend "The Myth of Normal" by Gabor Mat\'e as the long version of this position.

But beware, once you accept its premise one must concede by the same token, those who prey upon the vulnerable in society, whether they are heroin farmers and dealers, or addictive app developers, are cut from the same moral cloth. The "legality" or "illegality" of the end product is immaterial, only the social effects.

[throwaway290]

It's also true. But I don't think this is the best analogy to support the idea of "better internet". Also, you can consider that people who prey on vulnerable are maybe also subject to issues. If not then why prey, right?

[JohnFen]

> The people have their Internet already. They like [...]

Those are the things that have literally no value me. You'd think the internet would be large enough to address pretty much everybody's needs, including mine, but it's getting pretty clear that it's not.

[Apocryphon]

Kuro5hin, Slashdot, heck- The WELL all still exist. Old-school platforms and communities are on the internet. So do old-fashioned personal websites. They might have a pittance of users, but they're out there. Is that not what you want? But what you can't want, is for a large amount of people to use them, if they have no inclination to.

It'd be great if everyone started making their own Neocities site. Or even just drop contemporary social media and join the new Friendster (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38021802) or Spacehey. But the cultural impetus just isn't there.

[JohnFen]

> But what you can't want, is for a large amount of people to use them

If I have a bias about audience size, it tends to be toward "smaller is better".

[Perceval]

rusty shut k5 down 7.5 years ago after years and years of being a deadbeat dad to the site – wasn't even willing to keep a static archive of the site up

[TeMPOraL]

That's the economies of scale at work. It's more profitable to address larger markets with cheaper and worse products, than a smaller market with better but more expensive products.

Now, given the near-zero up-front costs to making software, there should still be enough room for all the niche needs, but the annoying thing is, the computing ecosystem itself - the hardware, the software platforms (OS, browsers) and even the tools used to make them - it's all being optimized for the mass market / lowest common denominator. As silly as it is, professionals can't get good tools, because the tooling is caught in the gravity well of more generic, mass market products.

The part that really gets me is how this starts making effective use of computers ("bicycle for the mind" stuff) impossible. My go-to example: it doesn't matter if you figure out how to make fully open source & open hardware smartphones for nerds. Even if you make them competitive on price and power with mass-market products. It doesn't matter that you somehow hired John Ousterhout and Edward Tufte to make the maximally ergonomic and functional apps for the platform. I'm still going to buy a regular locked down smartphone, because I need one to be able to use my bank account, and my bank - like all other banks - demand you use a locked-down device from a major vendor, with full device attestation ("because security").

The freedom of computing stops at the network.

[nonrandomstring]

> As silly as it is, professionals can't get good tools, because the tooling is caught in the gravity well of more generic, mass market products.

This also happened in hardware.

Back in the day we could design wide range devices using quite widely available "mil-spec" semiconductors and components - a common difference was in logic circuits where you had 74-series in consumer and commercial (0 °C to 70 °C and −40 ° to 85 °C temperature ranges) and milspec 54-series that would suffer −55 °C to 125 °C.

Following something in the 90s called the Perry initiative IIRC, the rules changed to test-based performance that enhanced "market supply" rather than prescribed manufacturing methods, so after STD-883 almost all wide range components disappeared.

Sure if you're NASA or the US DoD you can get stuff made, but increasingly everyone has to source from the same few commercial suppliers. The upshot is that if you're organising an Antarctic survey, or going into the desert it's almost impossible to kit our with modern gear that won't fail. You're stuck trawling eBay for some 1980s Soviet stuff.

[krapp]

Except "the masses" do create extraordinary art and educate themselves. Really, we're in the midst of an artistic and creative renaissance on all fronts and in all media, specifically because of the capabilities you hate about the modern web. You just aren't aware of it because it thrives on platforms you would never be caught dead on.

And the "elites" are the ones who created the toxicity of web and gaming culture and made bank on all of those pedestrian forms of entertainment... which they themselves also consume.

[r113500]

thanks to the bbc brit, the subthread essentially culminated in your comment. I'd like to clarify that this dichotomy didn't exist in my original. "technology elite" like somebody hinted elsewhere in the thread, could be a dirt poor kid from underprivileged background, whose accidental access to a computer was the only means of escape from the oppressive reality. at a certain level of technological sophistication one could gain capabilities and access that make one belong to a select group, making one part of the elite. from this perspective, "the masses" are literally everyone else who wasn't on the internet in the early 2000s. yes, by weight and numbers there will be an inordinate amount of talented individuals among them. there will also be perhaps an even bigger number of complete and utter mediocrities. since the person you're responding to doesn't use the term "elites", I can only assume it's everyone you don't like, because some of them would've been technological elites, who then became financial ones, but then some of them would've been financial elites, who remained financial elites never becoming technological ones, and yet by the power of their capital they've exploited technology. they are I guess bad. most of the humanity are good, because a lot of talented ones make art. what a pointless subthread, god damn.

[krapp]

>what a pointless subthread, god damn.

Welcome to Hacker News. You're being weirdly hostile and pedantic about a reply that wasn't even to you. Please touch grass or whatever it is the kids say these days..

[r113500]

jeez, krapp, you've been posting on hacker news since like forever, doing drive by hate posts in random threads all the time, and you tell me to "touch grass". I'll change the password on this bad boy, and won't interact with you fucks for at least like another half a year. /but you're here forever/

[Belopolye]

Bravo. I am reminded of the “noble savage” concept whenever I read that the people will rise up and support the libre Internet, if they would simply be introduced to it, from pseudo-vanguard tech-literati.

Dialectical virtualism?

The market has spoken, and the market prefers locked-down platforms and subscriptions.

[nonrandomstring]

No, the merchants have spoken.

I'll say in the same spirit that Margaret Thatcher said "there's no such thing as society" [0] that;

There's no such thing as markets.

[0] Please read the full quote (and for extra fun replace the word society with markets). Thatcher was saying something far more subtle than the sociopathy she is credited for. Markets have just replaced "society" as the ideological symbol of those who need something to get on their knees before, or blame.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/context-for-margaret-thatchers...

[Belopolye]

I don’t agree. Conceptually “the market” in this context is just individual purchasing decisions in the aggregate.

The people, voting with their dollars, have decided that they simply don’t care about privacy, libre software, etc as much as we wish they would.

[nonrandomstring]

Perhaps you might agree if you expand your view to encompass more than money. The words "just" and "aggregate" are where I think something important is missed. Collapsing the whole of human life and its myriad vectors of complexity down to one scalar, one single "dollar value", and then based on that making pronouncements about whether people value "privacy" or "security" or whatever, seems child-like to me (The idea. Not you. If you really hold it I hope you can move beyond it.)

"Markets" are like Father Christmas and "The Tooth Fairy"; a comforting one-dimensional idea that ought to serve us for a while, and then be discarded for a more mature perspective on the world. We must all try harder to find words that puncture the suffocating veil of "economic realism" that seems to hold back so much thinking.

[nonrandomstring]

There's a huge amount of truth in what you say. Hence I used the pejorative "Hoi Polloi".

But you can probably tell I once worked for the BBC. And what might look like elitism (of the kind I wouldn't apologise for) is really hope for wider humanity in spite of the Rupert Murdock effect, in spite of a concerted 50 year assault on education, and in spite of the misappropriation of the internet as a giant firehose for diarrhoea. The West's self-devouring and terminal-stage enshitification is quite the spectacle.

So when we look at "the people" and say this or that is "what they want", something recoils inside me. Do we know that? A perpetual cycle where people know what they like and they like what they know is not a stasis or fact of the world but a precarious place of comfortable mediocrity we've come to be. A local minima. There are other places. Cultures have flourished. And sometimes they wane.

The Internet (big I) was more than just a lot of wires, it was an idea. Maybe some fragments of that idea are still alive, I don't know.

[hyggetrold]

> So when we look at "the people" and say this or that is "what they want", something recoils inside me. Do we know that?

The famous (controversial) Indian teacher Osho had a saying on this: "Democracy. Government of the people, by the people, for the people...but the people are retarded."

[bad_user]

We often look down on "the people", but the masses have more wisdom than the elites, even if societal consensus can sometimes lead to terrible solutions to problems.

Democracy is nuanced, much like reality, and this bothers people.

[hyggetrold]

> the masses have more wisdom than the elites

I used to think this way also but in recent times I have become less sure. Maybe the easiest way to explain my thinking is to recall that line from the movie Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky animals, and you know it."

Obviously the truth is way more complex than that but I really do doubt the wisdom of the crowds.

A different example might the guys who wrote up the Constitution of the United States. More people were illiterate than literate back in those days. The founders were a small elite, but they created a framework that has served millions of people for a few hundred years.

In any case, yes, democracy is nuanced. It is the best system despite its flaws. And to be frank, the real issue with democracy is that it's run by people...and hardly any of us walk on water. :)

[kodisha]

> The Internet (big I) was more than just a lot of wires...

Yup, it was a series of tubes :)

[willi59549879]

why is it so important that internet is capital? in english it would all be lower case to be gramatically correct, in german all nouns are capital

[nayuki]

> The Internet standards community historically differentiated between an internet, as a short-form of an internetwork, and the Internet: treating the latter as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the former as a common noun with a lower-case first letter. An internet is any set of interconnected Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet

The Internet is the biggest internet, the biggest connected component in the graph of computer nodes.

[sangnoir]

> [...] terminal-stage enshitification is quite the spectacle.

I see you're an optimist. I believe things can - and will - get worse for a looong time.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, I expect a whole next level of enshittification to be enabled by mandatory device attestation.

[pdntspa]

And we are all worse off for it.

Let the "people" have their mobile apps. Keep computing hardcore!

[oldbbsnickname]

Most problems stem from users conflating for-profit corporations for public commons. Nonprofit co-ops must provide critical infrastructure.

Who exactly is this prerogative "freeloader" you throw around so casually? Is there some service or good denied others involved?

[nonrandomstring]

> Who exactly is this prerogative "freeloader" you throw around so casually? Is there some service or good denied others involved?

Spammers would be a good example. They freeload on the mail routing network. Their actions deny service, as bandwidth, storage and wasted time to millions of ordinary users.

[williamcotton]

For any readers, “Scylla and Charybdis” is the OG “rock and a hard place.”

[bryanrasmussen]

you mean - for any readers from the unwashed masses surely?!?

[r113500]

you misunderstood the concept, brought in your own windmills, and then successfully attacked them. I guess it generated an interesting subthread, even if it did derail my point into the tired "internet ain't what it used to be!" direction. god, I was hoping what I said was more subtle than that. other people in the thread have done better, even managed to use google to search the original posts on oblomovka so that they can reflect on the point, instead of just typing things.

but to your "people's internet" point, the real communism has clearly never been tried! it's not the people that want TikTok, it's the power structure. left to their own devices they built cathedrals!

[nonrandomstring]

Sorry if I stole some of your thunder there old chap. I don't think I "misunderstood the concept" but rather found it wanting and moved the discussion on. The focus was your precis of the term "hinternet" which I found very interesting and so addressed.

Where it landed (perhaps thanks to TeMPOraL) was actually quite exciting in my opinion, that, in the words of The Jam:

   "the public wants what the public gets."

That's something different from the tired old "internet ain't what it used to be!" trope. Isn't it? : That the entire "market theory" of the internet (and maybe technology in general) is mostly myth.

> real communism has clearly never been tried!

Not sure I follow how a vibrant, diverse, bottom-up, self-governed Internet would be akin to "communism", but then you've got your own windmills to tilt at too.

[r113500]

the public's wants are always reduced to trite generalizations, so maybe it's not about thunder, maybe the upset is that one can generate lively conversation easily by exploiting trite dichotomies, and that such a behavior is distasteful. everybody has an opinion on the hoi polloi from the vantage of their phantom high horse. a chat gpt could write the rest of the thread.

"real communism has clearly never been tried" is a set expression, from the internet. it's a variation on doing the same thing, but expecting different results, with a touch of ideological stubbornness, "this time around if we let people choose, they'll choose a very different internet, from the one they chose before, i'm sure of it, because I believe in people". of course the reason I choose this particular set expression, rather than some other one is to play off your comedic choice of terminology "people's internet". they have "people's internet" in "people's republic of china". you know? I'm not saying communism bad, it's a funny phrase. jeez, you brits used to be keen on subtle humor.

[nonrandomstring]

I sympathise with you. It's sometimes hard to get the conversations you want on the internet. But then you have to take people as you find them right? And try to learn something, even (especially) where that's uncomfortable?. Sometimes it's bloody awful. But I come here because I _get_ something; Not knowing what certain demographics think about contemporary issues is worse than knowing and being upset/offended, and I genuinely need that intel to get a fix on what I'm doing.

> a chat gpt could write the rest of the thread.

That's a low opinion of our fellows. Be careful what you wish for. In a few years a forum like this might be untenable for that reason. What keeps it going is precisely the "faith in people" you seem at odds with. Let's not assume it's ideological stubbornness to imagine things could have been different or that they could be different in the future.

> subtle humour

Now I really sympathise. I'm frequently at the sharp end of trying that, and you must know it almost never translates in this forum. Mainly because there is so much sarcasm and double-think that nobody (even the authors) are unsure whether they are making one point, or its opposite.

Respects.

[sph]

I'm struggling to understand from your explanation what is this "hinternet".

The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I look at it.

How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?

[itronitron]

By way of analogy, 90's internet was like exploring a town where you could wander around and check things out, and some open lots had billboards with ads on their property. Every property had a list of other properties that you might want to also check out.

Current internet (hinternet?) is like walking through the same town but now there are fences around everything and posts with security cameras at every property boundary. When visiting a property now you are required to show your face and maybe ID, and also have to sign up to get a rewards card. When visiting a property you also have people with clipboards following you around and taking notes which they pass to people with clipboards at other properties.

[cfeduke]

From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:

It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]

As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.

Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.

Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.

1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/

2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb

X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html

[WWLink]

There were also tech sites that reviewed computer hardware in writing. Sometimes with pictures. There were websites with video game walkthroughs - also in text, with pictures! There were websites with silly things people wrote about, and funny stories, and the usual tinfoil hat stuff. But the tinfoil hat stuff was secluded away on a tinfoil webring on angelfire.

There were tons of stores. Usually the more legit ones partnered with yahoo shopping or whatever. I remember buying Pokemon Yellow from a video game store based out of Canada lol. I think it was called dragon.ca? There were TONS of places. Some would take a week to ship but you usually got your stuff. :D

IRC had something for everyone. Those networks had tens of thousands of people online at any given time, talking about everything from tech to trash (literally) lol.

There were also web directories. As I recall, google started off using one of those as a source.

There was also stuff like AOL that had its own little ecosystem of corporate-sponsored stuff.

[Apocryphon]

All of that still exists, just in reduced numbers. Browse Neocities. Or search Wiby.me

[massysett]

I just went to Google and searched “recipes”. The top link is allrecipes.com, where the homepage leads me to numerous recipes. No stories.

It absolutely exists for commercial gain. It’s also a lot more useful than what existed 30 years ago.

[TeMPOraL]

> How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?

The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy.

EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on benefit for the user (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet is that which comes from focusing on making money. Now, focusing on utility does not preclude commerce - in fact, the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange for something of value. Focus on value provided includes figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast, focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from making things good, as fraud and abuse have much better ROI.

[neuromanser]

Can you expand on "hard-to-use internet of the 90s"? Beause I honestly think it is in most ways harder to use nowadays.

[sph]

It is often described as such. I was 13 when I got my first dial-up. With all the free time and excitement I had, it was very easy for me to get into, and certainly more fun than whatever today's internet is.

So to be honest, I do not understand the common slander and mischaracterization of the utterly vibrant pre-2000s Internet, in all its beauty and awfulness.

[soderfoo]

Best I could think of is the dropped connection whenever someone picked up the phone in your home.

[sph]

Or whenever someone typed +++ATH0 in IRC :)

[itronitron]

you had to read stuff

[saltcured]

From the context, I assume it is a pun on hinterland as borrowed into English. Here, it is mostly synonymous with backwoods. The hinterland may sound more literary than folksy, or may emphasize an unexplored or less navigable zone rather than merely natural or undeveloped.

I wonder what the original blogger really meant by it. The discussion here seems to be focusing on either an axis of academic vs commercial or high culture vs pop culture, or maybe conflating the two. This isn't really about the level of development nor navigability but some other more abstract quality or purpose.

The developed land could hold a grand cathedral, a brutalist housing block, or a luxurious department store. The hinterland could have a frontier mission, a rustic cabin, or a trading post.

[r113500]

danny's meaning didn't have this romantic component. it was specifically "bad internet as experienced by non-technologically sophisticated users in the early 2000s", as opposed to the "wild internet". the example that he gives is something like spamassassin with naive bayesian filter, which meant that power users at that point in time "won" against spam, while naive users were still getting tons of spam in their inboxes. I personally always thought that it's play on "hinder net".

[JohnFen]

> How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse)

That wasn't at all the internet I had in the 90s. I know that part of it existed, but there were really great parts, too.

[sph]

Certainly. Forums, IRC and personal websites made the 90s Internet more fun to explore than anything else we have today.

I had a group of 14 year old friends on a public IRC channel, before cat-fishing, bots and nonces became the norm. Met my first (real life) girlfriend there. I learned about the magic world of OSDev browsing webrings. So many personal websites of people talking about their micro OS. Countless forums for all the interests a teenage boy could ever desire.

The internet felt HUGE. No one could possibly see a thousandths of it in their lifetime. And then it started to shrink and shrink...

[r113500]

think of it from a subjective experience of somebody who was "from the internet" in the early 2000s (because that's when Danny coined the term):

mIRC made irc easy, jabber was already a thing, you're have a bunch of bookmarks (in non-monetized, non-ad supported online services) to high quality content, you're posting on forums, you get your news from blogs of intelligent people, etc. etc. the internet you're interacting with is great!

alas you have technologically unsophisticated users joining in and what they are experiencing is "hinternet": banners everywhere (we had adblockers), spam all the time (we had spamassassin, and our host Paul graham just invented naive bayesian spam filtering, which at least early on worked spectacularly), phishing and trickery (the computer told me to put my credit card, or similar). it's a miserable broken experience, that potentially results in your information or money being stolen, and all kinds of other indignities.

I'm saying that modern internet is more like a hinternet of old than it is anything else, but we are all forced do t use it.

[dsco]

It’s basically what computer illiterates (which is growing, not declining because of mobile use) endure on windows desktop computers. At some time they’ve clicked the wrong link, managed to install a toolbar in their browser - and slowly it’s been infested with random dark patterns. I see it fairly frequently when relatives call me about computer issues.

[PaulHoule]

You’re lucky if it works with an iPad and that it doesn’t make you sign your life away to Verizon or T-Mobile the ur-Carrier (sic).

I alway get voted down when I use words like “phonish” or “phonishness” but I feel that smartphones made life worse not better and made people serve computers than the other way around. Here’s to the next platform.

[Obscurity4340]

This is an interesting thing. Honestly can't remember the last time I saw an ad or easy phishing thing. Like obv in your junk mail but thats literally the extent of my exposure to it, everything else is curated and "good" or probably aligns with your concept of the priveleged netizens/areas even though Im poor as hell. Knowledge wise I suppose I rich so there's that but there's also seems like a tradgedy of the commons type situation that depends on all the tech-illiterates to be the meat shields for advertising and paying for things like YouTube

[tootie]

This is the difference between building a website as an experiment for an untested audience and running a modern business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-responsive text content isn't worth much.

[Aerroon]

But they all suck on mobile!

Using the internet on a phone is a terrible experience. Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things, they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space, they move the focus around at random etc.

You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell me that the people making the website never use phones themselves. The amount of times I've found that button helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI patterns.

HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube.

Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month or past 12 months".

There are a million small things like that that are wrong with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.

[tootie]

Sure, anyone can screwup, I'm just saying "mobile first" is valid business strategy. A lot of the annoying things like ads and whatever are just never not going to be annoying. It's kinda their raison d'etre. Things like date filtering on google results probably get so little usage there's no incentive to make them fully available. Very few apps are built to optimize utility, they're built to optimize revenue.

[darepublic]

Try Firefox with ublock on mobile

[r113500]

I'm curious about this type of response. it sort of implies that I don't know why things have changed the way they did. the causality is implicitly in the original also. we have a lot of mobile first websites, because most people use phones to access internet. and all the bad things happen on the internet have reasons behind them like that, because it's an emergent dynamic process. emails are to be collected, for they are a valuable tool in sales pipeline. things buzz and blink because it's easy to hack human attention system, which is also why casinos do it. but that's kind of, like, not what the comment is about.

[ParetoOptimal]

> There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication, but they are of mixed success.

Mastodon comes to mind, whose openness allows me to browse it from emacs with mastodon.el.

Removing full or even useful content from both RSS and notification emails comes to mind as well.

[dannyobrien]

Link to the piece if anyone finds this in the future: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/15/the-hinternet/

(It was both strangely broken in my WP database, and also I think my website was down when OP write this. Sorry!)

[gipp]

> You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.

Wow, I just assumed it was some kind of auth flow the government runs themselves and never did any research

[shadowgovt]

The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we'd assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a citizen."

It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks themselves" until the cash clears, and most cards have a loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on the credit card having different value than bare cash), in spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the monetary system are something a government should have as a core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce (on top of government taxes; the private tax atop the public tax).

[rando_dfad]

>The US government loves outsourcing technical problems and hates developing that stuff in-house.

No, no they don't. They would love to build in-house, but are constrained in what salary ranges they can offer.

The other challenge US government faces is that they continuously get their chain yanked by congress. I've read many stories of (corporate) management incompetence over the years, but they mostly pale in relation to the ability of congress to completely change priorities and goals every 6-12 months.

Even the most disfunctional corporation has some kind of force/attraction towards having a product line with an outward semblance of consistency and cohesion.

[spiralpolitik]

No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing things in-house.

Fix that aspect and the situation will improve significantly.

[TeMPOraL]

Arguably, they did in the past - and the current situation is an immune (over)reaction to that. Outsourcing is easier than figuring out how to get something done while navigating around all the regulations and CYA measures, so that things look fair to the people (otherwise they'll make a ruckus), and/or can't be easily portrayed as unfair by your political enemies (who will try to trick the people into making a ruckus).

[piperswe]

login.gov is the government's (quite fantastic) auth flow - id.me is a private one that the IRS contracted. I wish there were a rule that all online government services needed to use login.gov, but alas it's optional.

[eep_social]

They’re supposedly working on it [1] but I don’t have any sense of whether they’re likely to succeed. In particular, the IRS is beginning to onboard to login.gov and the goal is to be fully migrated away from ID.me at some point.

[1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2022/02/irs-...

[r113500]

it's quite cyberpunk, in a dystopian sense, I don't think most people realize. it can of course be framed as benign and I'm sure there are protective policies in place. but you know, if you take a sweeping look from a distance, the fact that the login system for government website, which every single citizen might at any point be forced to interact with, has a profile option (enabled by default) to "receive emails featuring ID.me offers and discounts" seems quite insane to me.

[n8cpdx]

An internet for the technical elite… sounds like gopher (if more people used it)

[matheusmoreira]

Less users is probably a feature.

[KennyBlanken]

> forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at all

Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an opportunity to bash Apple?

Apparently most of HN is not aware that multiple Android manufacturers implemented hardware destruction features when a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?

[r113500]

I'm not hn, and primarily it's because I don't believe that pseudonymous conversation generates interesting dialog. I mean user a says something, user b misunderstand, user c attacks user b's misunderstanding. in aggregate it's fun to read, if you don't have a goal, but mostly it's just an opportunity to read your own clever writing.

dearest Kenneth, I did not mean to single out apple or iPads. it's just that in my circle nobody uses androids (and my circle is predominantly non-tech!). I've not even seen an android in a very long time. I've spent some time trying to "libre-ify" chrome books, and discovered, like you said, that the devices are heavily locked down, with multiple tiers of mystery chips (for your protection!) ensuring that you can never really de-google them. but when I think "locked down consumer device for checking your mortgage account" I think "iPad", because that's all and exclusively what I ever see.

[charlie0]

Don't we technically still have the non-hinternet in the Darknet/Tor? I've been there a super long time ago and I don't remember it being any better.

[throwaway290]

Thanks for recommending Oblomovka, great read.