>The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person
I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users.
The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak.
Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on.
You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.
The early web was largely academic, not corporate. I was there when it switched over. You’re describing a time period after the dot com crash as the early internet, but it was around before that and was quite nice actually. I was a kid back then, we learned in junior high school how to upload our hand-edited websites via ftp over dial up internet, and the companies that intermediated the internet to us were ISPs not advertising companies. I suppose AOL was an exception but nobody I know used it and would have been made fun of for doing so.
I think you've misread the comment. They never called the "more corporate" era of 10-15 years ago the "early web", they were describing it as distinct from the even earlier "early web", which seems to be the same early web you're fond of.
I think the two of you agree about those time periods, they were just pointing out that they believe the peak sad, stale, corporate internet period was not now, but actually a decade or so ago.
FWIW I agree with them. I think people who romanticize the early days of the internet are quick to dismiss what we have currently just because it isn't exactly the same as what they remember. There's plenty of online spaces that have the same vibes on today's internet, and they have the same or even more users as they did back then (because there were a lot less overall users back in those days - like multiple orders of magnitude less - a small slice of the pie today is bigger than the whole thing ~30 years ago), they're just in different places and in different shapes.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers.
Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC).
Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules.
Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between.
Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit.
Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized.
True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily.
Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.
>Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media
No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now?
If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.
No, the "normal guy" was downloading Napster and Limewire and 100 other applications from fly-by-night publishers, following folklore suggestions on how to get everything they could for free, getting into messy encounters on Craigslist, visiting independently hosted warez sites, infecting their PC with all kinds of crap, etc, exactly because it was easy and exciting and inviting to do so.
Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes.
Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.
And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines.
Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.
I was in college even earlier, and living in a third world country to boot.
Every single soul in my class was pirating music online.
Napster was a blip (too early, very few had pcs) and only the tech saavy used it, but Kazaa, Soulseek and Limewire were absolutely huge among my cohort.
Btw I asked German friends my age and pretty much all of them have a similar experience.
and another 20 years prior to that, we had mixed tapes, from a friend who had one of those dual deck tape recorders, or VHS copies (alas poor Betamax) from that friend who worked in the video store that had access to multiple video recorders.
Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).
I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users.
The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak.
Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on.
You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.