<story><title>Are We Watching the Internet Die?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>INTPenis</author><text>People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference.&lt;p&gt;That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.&lt;p&gt;Today it&amp;#x27;s EVERYBODY. And they&amp;#x27;re really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they&amp;#x27;re consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.&lt;p&gt;So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we&amp;#x27;ll be a miniscule minority.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swatcoder</author><text>20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL&amp;#x2F;CompuServe&amp;#x2F;Prodigy&amp;#x2F;etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook&amp;#x2F;Twitter&amp;#x2F;etc.&lt;p&gt;That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden&amp;#x27;s arbitrary&amp;#x2F;anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re talking more about the 90&amp;#x27;s which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.</text></comment>
<story><title>Are We Watching the Internet Die?</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>INTPenis</author><text>People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference.&lt;p&gt;That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.&lt;p&gt;Today it&amp;#x27;s EVERYBODY. And they&amp;#x27;re really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they&amp;#x27;re consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.&lt;p&gt;So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we&amp;#x27;ll be a miniscule minority.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jihadjihad</author><text>20 years ago was 2004 my guy not 1994</text></comment>