I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.

If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.

Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.

Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.

I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.

I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.

I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.

I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.

> I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:

The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.

That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline becomes the topic everyone just starts pointing to their early years on the internet as the golden age.

I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."

I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...

The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.

Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.

I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.

"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'

All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.

2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.

I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.

If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.

until mid 00s broadband internet was not widely available outside US/Europe/Japan. At one point I think over 10% of the internet was just Russia. Even today Russia and Japan make up about 5% of the internet each. you can see this in early 4ch culture especially

this meant most of the people on the internet were middle class suburban from the developed world, educated, literate, and technical. importantly, 3rd world bot farms and relentless content grinding had not yet taken off. that is a big difference

Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

Money getting into the net as created many problems

I feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is

I also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.

I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.

By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.

>I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.

Oh hello, me! ;-)