The Olde Internet

Joan Westenberg misses the internet:

The real internet. The one we used to have. Before it all got so much less – and somehow so much more – complicated.

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The one that existed before terms of service. The one that existed before social graphs. The one where being a User meant having a degree of respect, not being treated like a retention/churn statistic.

I Miss The Internet

The article goes into a lot more aspects of the internet that changed over the last two or three decades, but that part made me think about something else I read recently:

I’ve been thinking about online vs real-life communities, and how in the real-world, there are many aspects that separate individuals, but also groups apart from each other. And yet, I’d estimate that most people feel more connection to people in the real world than on any online community.

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We’ve gone from having small local communities, to what can feel like at times, having the entire world in your living room.

Small Communities

Sure, those who jumped onto the social media bandwagons, from MySpace onwards, did face all the problems created with algorithms and engagement metrics and millions of people online on the same website. But that “older” internet didn’t go away. Small communities didn’t go away.