Echoes of an Older Internet

Introduction

In seventh grade, I started developing a moustache. Tufted down produced a fuzzy chevron above my lips, a gradient of onyx black at the corners fading centerwise to a perceptible soft grey. I started shaving months before most of my peers, wielding my first razor cuts with more than a touch of pride.

You’d think that the testosterone coursing through my veins would puff my chest, but other hormones at work produced new anxieties about the fullness of my newfound facial hair. Plaguing me most were the cheeks: broad expanses that screamed child, neophyte, not-haver of chest hair. My quest for emotional solace led me to a site called Jeff’s Beard, an online forum whose look and feel epitomized the internet of its time.

Its layout was boxy and busy, coded in HTML and not optimized for ease of use. The main site functioned as a directory that funneled visitors to user-generated threads where the action took place.¹ Threads typically took the form of questions and inspired spirited, (usually) friendly discussion replete with genial advice and vigorous debate. You’d see the same power users in most threads, easily identified by their profile pictures, usually selfies of older Rip van Winkle types.

Appended below profile pictures and accompanying each user’s post was a digest of their vital statistics, including time on the site, comment volume, and rank.² Power users patiently inculcating newbies with folk knowledge that it was assumed a fully fledged member of the community would have internalized. Much of the advice for young, insecure folks like myself boiled down to “come back after you’ve let it grow for thirteen weeks,” but there were neat tips such as using extra firm hair gel to achieve a ‘stache of vaudevillian proportions.

Jeff’s Beard met a virtually calibrated version of Hoffer’s definition of community: it was a tightly knit group of humans with a shared passion occupying a niche. This cozy corner of the Interwebs likely would have persisted standalone for years if it weren’t for a little upstart called Reddit.

Reddit

Image Credit: Startup GTM Substack

In its annual report, Reddit describes itself as “a community of communities, driven by interests and passions.” Its user interface looks like a souped-up version of the old Jeff’s Beard, featuring siloed networks of users dedicated to specific interests (e.g., crypto, cat GIFs, or Adventure Time). On Reddit, you can post, interact with others, and learn more on just about any topic you can imagine. Reddit has upwards of 70 million daily users, a market cap of over $35 billion,³ and an extraordinarily distinctive culture. While it has a direct message feature, most Reddit users⁴ interact with each other superficially in comment threads. Following another user has essentially zero effect on your experience, and, unlike most social networks, its quasi-anonymity means Reddit has not been a viable platform for influencers.

Throughout its nearly 20-year history, Reddit has displaced and replaced online communities such as Jeff’s Beard via a few characteristics that make it uniquely adapted to consuming said communities. These generally fall into (1) doing things that old internet forum sites did, but better, and (2) operating with a finely honed business acumen.

Old Internet Forum Features Reddit Has, But Better

• A forum-based interface that is clean and user friendly. Contrast this with older forum sites that looked to have been coded in two hours by Josh Baskin from Big, and those that are still around today don’t have anything close to Reddit’s mobile experience
• Allowing subreddits to have their own community norms, rules, and policing while enforcing platform-wide policies that help keep the site relatively sane. Older sites had mods, but there were always a few bad apples lurking, trolling, and baiting others
• Self-selecting for passionate users, question askers, & others with genuine interests. Reddit’s voting mechanism and post ranking algorithm take this a step further, playing a principal role in driving sustained engagement
• Improved content discovery, where Reddit makes it significantly easier for users to find posts that may be relevant to them. Older sites might require navigation through murky depths to find relevant content, intimidating new users and creating information silos
• Enhanced, gamified social interaction that keeps users engaged, both by encouraging them to post with a high degree of quality⁵ and by uplifting the most engaging content. In older sites, the few metrics available to a user (e.g., number of comments) are just not that interesting

Key Features of Reddit’s Competitive Strategy

• A platform-based business model that generates ad revenue, which Reddit then reinvests in feature improvements focused on user engagement and infrastructure developments that support scalability and resilience⁶
• Successful capture of younger generations, who become lifetime users of Reddit and might never think to venture further into sites like Jeff’s Beard⁷
• Leveraging network effects, where more users = more content for users to engage in, and the resultant diversity in subreddits appeals to a whole spectrum of user interests (rather than a one-to-one match as with Jeff’s Beard)
• Willingness to work with third party developers that enhance Reddit’s user experience even further. Older forums were entirely closed systems⁸

To its complex web of subreddits Reddit attracts vast hordes of users, only the most avid fraction of which might have found their way to the Jeff’s Beards of old. As Reddit has grown so have countless digital third spaces fallen into disuse, yet some stalwarts of the old internet still exist. These sites soldier forth with admirable, almost delusional defiance in the face of a ravenous Reddit. My personal favorite outpost of times gone by is Sputnikmusic.com.

Sputnikmusic.com

Sputnikmusic.com homepage

I’ve intermittently haunted the halls of Sputnikmusic.com since I was in high school, when I first started trawling the internet looking to find new metalcore albums. Sputnik is a forum for music lovers to rate, review, discuss, and discover music. Per Google Trends, the site is clearly losing its relevance, though this decline has slowed somewhat in the few years since COVID-19.

Other than recently published reviews, news pieces, and new comments, the site provides very little in the way of direction. There are a few gamified aspects,⁹ but the experience remains as analog as it gets in the mid-2020s. The site hasn’t accepted new users for a while now, its forum feature ceased working entirely after the site was hacked over a year ago, and its creator-owner (the mythical MX) does not appear to have logged in for over two years.

Is this ship as tightly run as Reddit? No. But this haphazard, youth-run hostel vibe of this website is a virtual home for many.

Like me, many of Sputnik’s users have been visiting the site for a decade or more, and even as it slowly coasts into the Digital Great Beyond the site maintains a distinct culture, tangible social strata, and multigenerational lore. Unlike on Reddit, user-to-user interaction is a cornerstone of the Sputnik experience, and user-made album reviews and lists frequently receive hundreds of comments. I’ve lost count of the threads I’ve seen where users seek non-music-related help or advice from their fellows, and on the sad occasion when a user passes away, the entire site mourns, with users frequently setting up Go Fund Me pages to raise money to cover funeral costs and support families.

Of course, the site is a brilliant place to discover and talk about new music. I’d guesstimate that over 80% of my music taste owes itself to Sputnik one way or the other, and I honed my writing chops early on by posting my own reviews of albums. There’s even a well-defined genre of music called Sputnikcore, consisting of the artists most uniquely favored by the site’s denizens.

Even in an age where you can’t turn over a rock without hearing about Spotify’s commodification of music, Sputnik remains as influential as it gets for an underground music scene, as Staff reviews feed into an album’s Metacritic score and are regularly mentioned on Wikipedia.

To me, Sputnikmusic.com is a throwback to an older time, when it first became possible to have extended conversations with the few dozen other folks on this Earth who cared as deeply as you did about lo-fi atmospheric black metal. Though I concede that a user-friendly, continuously engaging platform like Reddit is more accessible, when we lose places like Jeff’s Beard or Sputnik, we have fewer places to engage truly with folks with whom we share odd affinities for the world’s minutiae. Instead, we might just have to go outside.