What do you miss from the old internet?
What do you miss from the old internet?
i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.
Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here's a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn't worked for 5 years and isn't actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you've viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here's the next article on error -22.
Also, downloads were "here's the link to it on our FTP server", none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.
A lot of it boils down to the users. Personally, I miss when the internet mostly consisted of us nerds.
Back in 1995 when I first got online, the web was very much a nerd domain. You needed a certain level of computer knowledge to get online, which really acted as a filter. It meant that most of us shared a certain level of understanding and the drive to use such a medium. We disagreed on Star Trek and Star Wars, but to the outside world, we were ALL nerds. Back then, the average person didn’t even think of going online.
These days, even the most tech illiterate can get online. In fact, they don’t even think about it; it’s that integrated in their daily life.
While growth also gave us nice things like large forums, web shopping, YouTube, etc… by and large I think we’d be better off if this was still a nerd domain.
I really miss those days.
There's a certain scrappyness that has been lost. I think back to SomethingAwful, Newgrounds, that sort of stuff where people just made things, didn't matter if they couldn't draw, some of the best things were stick figure animations. Even on Youtube now people are doing ad reads to camera like a 1950's talk show host.
I also miss the sort of folk mythologies that emerged from what I like to call the Contextless Era. The Napster/Limewire explosion pre-iTunes led to a lot of things being shared with no context except for chronically incorrect file names. Which is why at least one person who reads this sentence still thinks System Of A Down wrote a song about the Legend of Zelda.
I kinda miss the PC first internet. Just in general. I miss instant messenger clients. MSN, AIM and Yahoo! Facebook fucked it up. As Tom Scott once said, those style of messengers had the benefit of requiring users to log in, which meant being online was a signal you weren't busy.
The creativity and willingness to share.
Anyone could make a crappy site.
Anyone could fire up some phpBB.
People created a lot of stuff that mainstream commercial developers weren’t willing to invest time in. Think windows power toys, mp3 players or converters, game mods, all the little things that filled the gaps in mainstream OS and other software. Add the free stuff that people made like Blender or other specialized software that did what commercial software did but for free.
Flash games.
Linux distros.
Hobbies and how-tos.
There was so much stuff. Now it’s all mostly locked down under DRM or whatever.
Sites in search results actually had the shit you were searching for. These days it's scam bullshit or "removed" from the results. Otherwise I do kind of miss the old forum communities. Very little of that left anymore
We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn't.
- Don't feed the trolls
- Don't talk about internet memes in real life
- Stay anonymous, there's a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you're one of them.
- On the internet no one knows if you're a dog
There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn't really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.
I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said "The internet is leaking, this won't end well."
Didn't realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it's cool. It's so cringey.
People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being "cancelled". Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?
Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around "you just can't understand my experiences" rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.
When it went from "we're all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can" to "we're all wannabe celebrities that don't have time to explain anything to the losers who aren't good enough to understand our experiences" it all went to shit.
When sites were designed for desktop/landscape, instead of beig lazy and designing everything for mobile and not creating different desktop and mobile versions.
Also, social media not trying to be everything. Nowadays, every social media is racing to be the all-in-one platform for microblogging, forums, short-form video, long-form video, etc. instead of focusing on the thing they were made for and do best.
I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren't wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there's less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.
The creativity people were willing to share. Forums, DIY guides, blogs, neat yet crappy animations on Youtube. It's all kind of still there, but it's hard to find with how the internet is today.
It was full of passionate people who made things because they enjoyed it. Now, it's either how-to sites written by bots/keyboard monkeys, or you're fast-tracked to the #1 video. You have to really go looking for the human now.
I just miss when you could search for things on search engines and find what you were looking for. I miss when putting operators, quotes, and parentheses actually changed the search results.
I miss when AI wasn’t shoved into EVERYTHING. I miss when the internet was usable to be honest.
- less centralization
- obscure flash games
- random people's crappy colorful html sites
- being able to find random people's crappy html sites on search engines, despite not meeting the modern strict ranking criteria or being bloated with SEO
- being able to read fun, and sometimes unique and interesting ideas on said crappy html sites
- less DRM everywhere
- less commercialization and people trying to sell you crap (not saying less ads specifically because pop-up ads were everywhere)
- more people just sharing things for the sake of sharing even if it sucks
- anonymity
- just generally the more raw and people oriented feel and less of the corpo ridden EEE/data-sucking/cloud-for-everything/enshittification bullshit we have to deal with on a constant basis these years
The broadness of the internet.. Now its like 12 main websites and they are all time stealing scams with tedious or generic content
Not having to click some accept data mining cookie banner before I can see the site.
The lack of monetisation and the irrelevant ads that did exist were sat on the website itself..
Active forums. everything seems to be a subreddit now
There was no google. I used dogpile..
Stumbleupon and curated bookmark lists.. The fact I had hundreds of sites bookmarked and categorised.
Dodgy assed chatrooms.. Asl.. Creepy question In hindsight.
I dont miss under construction banners, color clashing sites and low resolutions
When ads were smaller, unintrusive, only occasionally animated.
When pop-ups were the worst thing because little scrolling banners and side bars of ads were the normal way that sites paid their bills.
the anonymity.
Decentralization
Reddit swallowed any community simply due to inertia. Everyone is already there, why build your own thing?
I miss when web communities were more disparate, and each community had their own inside jokes, memes, and jargon.
Now every web community just uses the exact same mishmash of memes from Reddit/Twitter/4chan, and most web communities end up being indistinguishable from each other.
I miss the old facebook where we post to each others' walls and poke the on occassions. It felt more genuinne and wholesome. :(
Old internet lacked the following, which made it better:
- Scrolling shenanigans (fixed scrolling points, pointless animation and content position that changes with scrolling)
- Navigating pages that doesn't create a history for you to easily back-forward them
- Everything can be easily monetized
- Using javascript for page layout that could be done with plain html
- The worst kind of intrusive ads, notifications and cookies
- Everything looks samey and "professional"
- Centralization
- Surgically precise SEO
Content wise, I think points 3, 6 and 7 are the main reasons why we "don't have as much interesting content". Too much focus on looking professional, on being marketable, on being profitable. 7, centralization, is how facebook, reddit and others pretty much killed several smaller forums
I love that neocities.org exists, you can make your own website and have a domain there for free, much like the old days of geocities. The problem is that your content won't be found unless you advertise it elsewhere.
In a way, I suspect the centralized corporate internet is much like the difference between humans living in several, sparsely populated villages, where things and people feel more "connected", vs living in large urban sprawls, where you're surrounded by people and stuff, but hardly interact or care about most of it.
I miss the appreciation that was shown to developers and content creators not so long ago. I just get the impression that people take everything for granted these days, even when it comes to extraordinary things that are created by just a few people without the support of multi-million dollar companies. Maybe that's just a misperception on my part. But anyway: Support Lemmy, FOSS and all those awesome content creators!
I miss when normies and politicians were scared and confused by it so they left it alone. When computers in general required some skill and knowledge to use so there was a natural barrier to entry.
Discovering new weird sites that were super entertaining to middle schoolers like myself. Not sure how to best describe them, but sites like homestar runner, newgrounds, albinoblacksheep. There’s countless more but I can’t remember the names off the top of my head. I remember liking Maddox a lot at that age, but I realized later he was basically a POS iirc.
The golden age of webcomics was at the same time as the golden age for individual fan forums. I made a lot a friends that I still have and even met my wife on some of those forums.
This something we cannot bring back: when we were all new to this, it felt so unbelievable. Suddenly we were casually chatting with people thousands of kilometers away, who were of a completely different background. I'll never forget when I (living in Germany with a turkish migration background) was talking to a US based Neonazi who said that he had nothing against turks, but he heard turks where the nxxxers of Germany. I mean, that was not a pleasant conversation, but it was just so unbelievable that this was actually happening. It felt like everything was possible now. I mean back in 2001 I thought "Hey, let's hear the other side" and just went on the talibans website. Just a few years earlier that kind of insight was simply impossible. The internet just felt borderless.
A lot of things were terrible though, like "asl" or when any wrong click could easily land you on a disgusting and deservedly illegal website. Crazy times.
I kinda miss forums. I still use forums sometimes but it's not the same. I miss the old YouTube. I miss the Internet feeling niche back when everything was still new on the Internet. I still love the Internet and always will.
My crush coming online. Miss you, •..••´¯``•.¸¸.•
psyko_love•.¸¸.•´´¯`••..•Anonymity
a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it
This. Someone doing something weird/smart/stupid because they thought it would be cool, and then documenting it because they care.
Now that kind of shit is on YouTube, monetized, and totally without charm. Most importantly, it isn't documented well enough to reproduce. It's bullshit.
Monetization can fuck off. I want my weird passion projects back.
Cracked is still around. 🤨 They just... Suck now outside of some of the stuff they do on YouTube.
It's not really any specific thing I miss about the old internet, personally. Most of what I do is the same now as it was then. It's really the vibe and the fact more shit is owned by big corporate entities and not just some dude in his garage, attic or basement. That's why I like Lemmy. It's all garage/attic/basement people (well except threads but fuck zuck) 😋
I've done a lot to make the web somewhat usable again via extensions and workarounds, so maybe that's why I'm not as frustrated as others.
I do use Linux, GrapheneOS, the terminal, and a lot of various tools to give me a far more minimal experience on the web by default. Ublock with paywall block filter lists, JavaScript off by default, duckduckgo lite search, and privacy redirect extensions shut out most of the noise. I even have sponsor block cut out mentions of sponsors on YouTube videos. So for the most part I just get pure content.
I do miss the culture behind the old web when people were more optimistic and experimental with what they would do with their websites, or just more minimal in their approach cuz they kind of had to.
I do miss the prevalence of old school discussion forums, and I'll always prefer IRC, XMPP, or Matrix over platforms like Discord.
The Fediverse, especially Lemmy, is a welcome breath of fresh air though. So the modern web isn't all bad.
This is my favorite part of the old web.
Search engines that didn't require esoteric knowledge of an entire search language to get actually meaningful results.
Link pages. Just people putting their organised bookmarks online.
Internet directories. All the topics organised like a library.
OLGA - the OnLine Guitar Archive.
It was a huge collection of free guitar tablature. Mostly txt files cobbled together by enthusiasts. The first time I used it, it was only an FTP server. It was rough, sure, but it beat the snot out of the ad-riddled, subscription models we have today. There was a version of Time in a Bottle that I learned half of twenty five years ago and I have never managed to find the rest. It drives me crazy because it was a really good version. Someone had put the two guitar parts together to make a better sounding, hard-as-fuck to play single guitar version. Every version on the Internet now is some dumbed down PoS, or the OG that needs two guitars.
I miss how civil everyone was towards each other.
Having the time to waste on forums.
Widespreadness of local provider networks even if you have not paid for the internet access. You could literally download and watch movies, play games and etc by just using DC++ for local provider network file sharing, servers of which they freaking hosted by themselves.
The lack of massive copyright strikes, barely any intrusive ads, little to no subscription services, and the simplicity of everything. Now, you can't use music without angering a company, gotta pay for reading damn articles, and now you gotta sign up for an account in everything.
user customisability. online profiles were awesome until like 2013 where it all became plain black or white backgrounds with a banner. you could have custom backgrounds or even entirely custom CSS in a lot of websites. I really love the theme my instance uses because a lot of Lemmy instance themes are plain and dull too, just default black or white with no creativity, unlike db0 with the crazy outer space and fire and shit. makes it feel more human.
Having to turn it on to use it. Now it’s inescapable.
Geocities. A platform where anyone, regardless of technical skill or any design sense could go wild about their passion.
From online community to a meetup.
The ease of piracy. Literally type whatever you want into any search engine.
I am going really old internet here but the sense of adventure. I had something called the Internet Yellow Pages because search engines didn’t really exist yet. And going to these sites using ftp, Archie, gopher, etc., you never knew what you were going to find.
1900HOTDOG from two of the Cracked diaspora, TVs Seanbaby from the internet and Beef Digests runner up for Salami Slab of 2014, Robert Brockway!
And the associated podcast, The Dogg Zzone 9000.
Lack of privacy invasion and surveillance
Legend of the Red Dragon
I'll go with the algorithms. Google was greater than god, twitter and reddit were endless scrolling. YouTube is being pretty great still, except when shorts wakes up and chooses violence for the day.
I would be on various forums for different hobbies of mine. They were relatively small and you'd recognize other uses frequently, and there was drama between each other. It was fun lol.
Blank html Pages only containing pages of blue links to various SWF(flash) movies. Purple if I watched them.
Infoseek
The send of novelty and usefulness that came with the use of the internet. Especially with things like messengers. Irc. Forums and online multiplayer games.
No AJAX
I don't know if anyone told you this but 1900hotdog.com is run by ex-cracked people like Sean baby and Brockway. Their podcast is a jam. Go read the articles.
Pop Up Blockers.
It's 2024 and popup ads are everywhere despite being legislated away in the early 00's.
Fuck ads, and fuck pop up ads more.
everything
I spent hours on the Star Wars webring. Practiced jedi meditation, was convinced I could move stuff with my mind, and learned all about Kashyyyk.
I miss listening to ska mp3s on Winamp while playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on that new IMDb website and pausing briefly to chat with a friend through one of my many IM accounts logged into Trillian.
People understanding the horrible sound I consistently make in public
Livejournal. It still exists but is pretty dead save for Russian people. I made the best friends of my life on there, and writing there was more helpful than any therapy.
Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don't miss the slow speeds.
Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.
Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson's comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek
I didnt start really using social media until I was 15 (2015) (not including when I briefly used FB when I was 13 and having an account on the official Warrior Cats message boards when I was ~12), but even then it seems like people were a lot more chatty? I feel like I got more positive comments on my shitty art from that time than I sometimes do nowadays.
And also the fact that so many people nowadays share their full name how they look irl. I'd much rather keep that shit private unless it's someone I trust and seems especially dangerous nowadays, and now there's a worrying amount of minors doing it.
Corporations, governments and very political users has sterilize the Internet. You can't be edgy/tell edgy jokes without being called racist, sexist and so on. Also the Internet is being walled garden by said parties. Due them closing down sites. By removing the ways the sites can keep themselves going, like cutting off payment processing companies.