[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.