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.
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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.
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.
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.
A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.
I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.
And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are “um,so”, and all we’re looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it… and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.
You also can’t ctrl-f a video. It’s by far the worst format for information.
Anonymity
Search engines with actual results, now every search is about trying to sell you something. Searching for a product used to pull up its manufacturer and specs, now its just where to buy it or something like it.
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.
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.
Link pages. Just people putting their organised bookmarks online.
Internet directories. All the topics organised like a library.
The modern Internet is very political. It’s hard to go anywhere without hearing about the same assclowns everyday. And there’s less variety in websites. Lots of websites are gone and are now just a Facebook,Twitter and discord.
The internet was always political. We just replaced the prevalence of some kinds of conspiracies and crazy statements with the prevalence of others. Bigotry of course was always there.
No SPAM. No ads. Only people with an IQ of above 100.
IQ is a bad measure of intelligence or decency of a human being. Academic advantage doesn’t automatically make you smart, or nice to be around for that matter.
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.
Heads up: Lemmy will either get less popular or more popular over time. Neither is ideal.
And while it never feels like it when you say it, but these are [going to be] the good ol’ days.
Don’t gatekeep the internet. That’s what lobbying ISPs and telecom companies are for. /s
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot that Lemmy was filled to the brim with Linux nerds. The most-common nerd-gatekeepers, right before tabletop players. Explains the downvotes.
Yes! My ex and I used to build all kinds of computers back then. Of course they used to blow up rather quickly. It was a slog trying to figure out where I left off once I got up and running again. Shopping - I bought all kinds of stuff on the internet back then lol. Enough said.
The early days of web shopping sure were interesting. I was a very early adopter compared to most people.
The very first thing I ever bought online was a flashlight back in 1999. Which was such a novelty at the time that I actually visited the two guys who ran that shop from a literal broom closet in order to collect it. I was like their third customer ever. These days they have 75 employees and around 7 million euros of revenue.
Collecting a web order seems silly now, but at that time it basically avoided a two week wait. Back in 1998-2005, if you bought something online in the Netherlands, you usually had to transfer the money by bank. Which took a few days. After that, they would send the product, which again took a few days.
In 2005 we got a new online payment method that let you transfer the money immediately, much like paying at a register. That made it way more convenient for everyone and you saw massive increases in spending year over year.
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.
Stumbleupon
I found so many cool sites with that addon back in the day. I fear a new version would be so ad infested and curated that it wouldn’t be worth it.
Cloudhiker is the new one.
Flash animation.
We seriously need a new scripted animation replacement.
