The Internet of the 2000s was warm
The 2000s were a strange time.
The Internet back then hadn’t turned into a giant shopping mall where around every corner someone is trying to sell you something, subscribe you to another service, or push ads for success courses.
It was more like a small provincial town.
You visit a site built by a single person and literally feel the presence of the author. Crooked design, terrible HTML, animated GIFs, guestbook, hit counter, “About Me” section, cat photos, and an article on configuring FreeBSD mixed with a barbecue recipe.
And it was wonderful.
Every website was alive.
Today people open an app.
Back then people opened someone else’s small world.
Forums were like cozy bars where the same people could talk for years.
Nicknames were more important than passports.
A person might not be known by face or real name, but they were respected for articles, software, helping beginners, or for another wild experiment.
The Internet back then was like a young organism.
Cells divided actively, forming new tissues, connections, communities.
Today’s Internet resembles an aging organism with severe atherosclerosis.
Blood vessels of information have gradually clogged up with a few giant platforms.
Instead of millions of independent sites, a few megacorporations emerged through which almost the entire information bloodstream flows.
Social networks became something like a chronic inflammatory process.
The organism is still alive, but a significant portion of energy goes not into development, but into endlessly maintaining its own activity.
In the 2000s the Internet was chaotic.
But chaos is a sign of life.
An embryo develops chaotically.
An ecosystem develops chaotically.
Only a corpse is perfectly ordered.
Back then you could register a domain at night, write some crazy service, post it on a forum—and a week later half of the web knew about it.
Today that requires marketers, budgets, ads, SEO, SMM, analytics, dozens of metrics, and approval from algorithms of several corporations.
Earlier the Internet was closer to garage engineering.
Today it resembles the pharmaceutical industry.
Giant corporations release carefully dosed information drugs, while algorithms ensure the user consumes content strictly in the required concentration.
But despite all this warmth, one shouldn’t idealize the past.
The Internet of the 2000s was terrible.
Slow.
Constantly crashing.
Full of junk.
With awful search engines.
No normal video.
No cloud services.
No proper maps.
No modern IDEs.
No GitHub.
No neural networks.
No ability to gain access to almost all of humanity’s knowledge in seconds.
Nostalgia is generally very much like phantom pains after an amputation.
The brain remembers pleasant sensations and diligently forgets everything else.
It remembers the warmth of forums, but forgets modems.
Remembers home pages, but forgets searching for needed info through dozens of dead links.
Remembers the atmosphere, but forgets how technologically primitive everything around was.
So no, the Internet didn’t die.
It simply grew up.
From a noisy teenager it turned into an adult organism.
Yes, in the process of growing up it lost part of its naivety and romance.
But in return it gained unbelievable capabilities.
Today one person can spin up infrastructure that twenty years ago would require a whole company.
Can train artificial intelligence models.
Can launch global services.
Can access knowledge and computing resources that previously were available only to states and top corporations.
The Internet of the 2000s was warm.
But today’s Internet is damn powerful.
And if I were offered to trade modern tech back for that warm era, I would decline.
Because romanticizing the childhood of civilization is interesting.
But living is still better in an adult world.
