How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?

Provider@feddit.de to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 224 points –
tim.kicker.dev

Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested

325

I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don't want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn't show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?

Video title: "How to unlock the demon door on the fourth level of Demon Smasher Elite"

"Hello, video game fans! Don't forget to like and subscribe! Last week I posted a video that isn't relevant to this video, but I need to drag out the time on this one to game the algorithm, so I'm going to rehash and plug that video. I'm going to shout out to my Patreon subscribers with ridiculous usernames I won't pronounce well. Now let's get to the part you've waiting for: I'm going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter. Okay, now you've skipped forward to what looks like the area before the demon door part of the stage, but I'm going to talk about some unrelated anecdote about this game or maybe the game devs, and then plug my Patreon account and mention a completely different game that I'll be streaming next. Oh and here's the five seconds of the video you wanted to see when I tell you to click the right mouse button on the hidden lever next to the demon door in order to open it, except you aren't seeing it because you skipped forward too far and gave up. Don't forget to like and subscribe! This video has been brought to you by Nord VPN."

Now let’s get to the part you’ve waiting for: I’m going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter.

About a month ago, I'd gotten back to replaying Suikoden Tactics, and there's this whole quest-accepting mechanic that's the easiest way to rack up skill points. But one of them is a series of "go get X out of the murder death ruins for me."

That place is pure ass and permadeath is a thing, so I'm not just going to go jaunting down to the final floor because I'm bored. And for the life of me, I could not remember which floor whatever item was even on in order to know whether it was worth trying for right now.

This game is old enough that there are almost no discussions about it. I'm rooting through abandoned forums from 2005 looking for gems. God bless forums from 2005 btw.

Somehow, there is a single video on this subject. It is a series of videos as the youtuber fights through the entire dungeon in one go. There is commentary. There are no timestamps. He does not split the videos according to floor. The information I'm looking for is somewhere in here, but I have zero guarantee he's even treasure hunting, so he may not mention it.

I could have cried.

Drives me crazy when I see this kind of format for things like programming. Nothing like pausing the video and trying to see what their code says.

I was all set to start bitching about the obligatory 10-15 minutes of "older, medicated suburban housewife shows off her whole yarn closet, every needle, which needle she likes (it's just pretty), her fingernails, pushes her state-mandated store, and then finishes off with an internet recipe story about how her gramgram was fleeing the war and had to knit jasmine stitch backwards to survive......before fucking up the stitch and never editing that part out. But it's ok because her hands were in the way the whole time anyway."

But I think you've found the only thing that has me beat.

I will at least use this time to implore any knitting/crochet peeps on the fediverse that if you or someone you love is uploading how-to videos anywhere on the web.....SHOW ME THE DAMN STITCH SO I CAN LEAVE. I HAVE PROJECTS, I DO NOT CARE.

I'll usually go with the length of the video in cases like this. Anything above 5 minutes is a red flag!

I still remember a video I found a year ago that was just barely over a whole minute. It was a guy doing one single really clear cable stitch in complete silence, and then the video cuts out.

I do not know who they are, but I will vouch for that man before god.

Doing a cursory search to see if I can find it again, the second video suggested to me is 26:44 long.

It probably disappeared into the ether because it was too short or lacked a backdrop of dried flowers and a cup of tea.

YT algorithm favors videos that are at least 10 minutes (they fit more ads in) so those get recommended more. As a result, runtimes get padded with fluff so you get recommended to more viewers.

That’s disgusting.

I feel like relying on the algorithms completely misses the human elements.

If I need an answer to something, I want my top results to be short and sweet. If I want a documentary or dj set, I don’t want a 3-10 minute version.

@4am @swan_pr
For me, it depends on the topic of the video.
E.g. there are "full courses" about "learning HTML/CSS" or "Svelte" or anything frontend development related, that work for me.

And I don't watch any youtube video on youtube anymore, but only use an invidious server, like yewtu.be - works like a charme (most of the time).

No ads, no tracking, no algorithm \o/

Of course, it all depends on the context. A tutorial for a specific knitting stitch can be done in under 5 minutes, other stuff not so much! There was also an interesting thread somewhere yesterday asking why don't people use their subscription feed on YT and the answers were a good representation of the user base here, ie: most do use it and avoid the algo at all costs! So I think we're all on the same page here, we search and use YT in a way that is most efficient but not the most common :)

@4am @swan_pr
Ended up transcribing a (good) sourdough bread recipe from a 19 minute YT that included a segment of the baker and his girlfriend biking to the beach to swim. I need baking tips - not a leopard bikini FFS!

@Nepenthe @Provider @bstix @Anders429 I need a tutorial to show me how you added bolded text to your post!

I assume it all works the same on mastodon, if it's showing up ok, so:

• Bold is 2 asterisks on either side
like ** this **

• Italics is either one asterisk on each side like * this * or underscores _ like this _ (does this show up italicized for you?)

• Strikethrough is ~~ two tildes ~~ and looks like this

Obviously just remove the spaces in between the symbols and letters, because I can't figure out yet how to stop markdown from working on here any other way, in order to depict it precisely

@Nepenthe @Provider @bstix @Anders429 Haha, I'm tempted to turn that whole thread into a piece of music with "I HAVE PROJECTS I DO NOT CARE" as the chorus. (I'm hearing it as some sort of electronic hardcore punk.)

If you can pull it off, you have my blessing. Better post it when you're done, though.

@Anders429 @bstix lol actually i watch videos for programming sometimes - what is really bad is getting a good look at that one knitting stitch that has a six letter abbreviation and only the worst text explanations WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH TAKING A PICTURE OF THIS

1996 is on the latter end of what I consider the early internet, but I really miss the Video Game FAQ Archive (GameFAQs) which was murdered by a thousand cuts culminating in the death of the gamefaqs.com domain. FAQs used to be so good, these days the same information is dispersed over 50 pages of an HTML "guide" that is more ads than information, and often for less complete information, if it's not just a YouTube video that's even worse and shows you things but doesn't explain them at all.

Same. I missed those days where you can just control F to the part of the page and get the info you wanted. Now it's wait for 2 ads to play, scroll through the intro and then a bunch of scrubbing to find it.

Has writing really become that hard to do?

It's probably more to do with discoverability and monetization. I'm generalizing a ton, but I feel like there isn't even a ton of super useful YouTube tutorials outside of beginner content because that gets the most views.

YES, this is such a peeve for me!!! I've developed an aversion to viewing video content unless it's for something I truly need to see done. And even then, I'm more likely to check wikihow and endure their gifs than I am to watch someone's video. It's just so overdone.

@bstix Yes. Also when you're blind, software tutorials in particular are either 15 minutes of nothing but music, or someone going "to do x thing, all you need to do is click this button, drag this slider to here, click this until it says this, type this into there, and you're done."

Yeah, you could skim pages, or read thoroughly, search in the text, easily jump back to the previous paragraph to skim a bit again, google (or DDG) for terms you remember from an article to find it again, etc.

Not just tutorials, I enjoyed reading tech or product reviews, like the original Anandtech when Anand was there, that all seems to be going the way of obnoxious youtubers.

This is one oft the longest Threads I've eher Seen in lemmy.

Yes. Unfortunately many comments are the same, because the mastodon users can't see each others replies. This comment somehow got trendy over there.

My inbox has about 200 replies telling me about video monetization and 100 just tagging my username.

@bstix @Provider

They're awful if you are looking for something that requires you to type commands into a keyboard or code into an editor.

The video window needs to be large enough to read it, and even then, you can't copy/paste anything from a video.

@bstix @Provider Strongly endorsed. For me, watching a video is possibly the least-effective way to learn how to do something. Learn to write or find someone to write for you if you want me to use your stuff.

@bstix @Provider 👏👏👏👏

I have resorted to going to the YouTube video page and reading the garbled bot translation underneath because it's still better than sitting through a video with a bunch of filler.

Has writing really become that hard to do?

The cynic in me says yes.

@bstix @Provider

Oh gosh, this! I am way better at picking up what is relevant to me in a text article while scanning a text than waiting for thing to happen in a video. It's so infuriating sometimes. Also, video streaming is using so much data that I would rather not do it when I am using mobile internet... So yeah, bring back text based tutorials...

@x0 I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.

@bstix @Provider I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing) but I can tell you that this not the first time I’ve seen this complaint and it has had an impact: I had several tutorials to produce this summer and planned on doing them as videos. As the summer approached I saw comments like this and switched to blog posts instead. So, I just wanted to let you know you’re not shouting into the void.

I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing)

This explains a lot. Most of the replies to this comment here on Lemmy are from Mastodon users stating the same thing about video monetization.

There's a few good comments from people who actually do need video tutorials for crafting, sports and DIY, or from being dyslexic, but most don't like the YouTube format.

One big hurdle for written blogs is to attract readers when Googles search engine has a preference for videos that makes them more money.

@bstix @Provider Same. I hate video tutorials. I play a lot of video games and sometimes I need to look something up, which sometimes means I get lucky and someone has written a decent walkthrough down, but often times means I have to start and stop a damn video over and over and over to get the information at the pace I need.

@bstix @Provider @gvwilson writing is as hard as it ever was, but monetization of ad-hoc tutorial content is far easier and more lucrative on youtube. People are literally being paid to pollute your search results with video.

I’m actually optimistic; I think eventually youtube will face too much flak for this kind of garbage, it’ll start affecting viewership, they’ll tweak the algorithm or the partner program to punish bad tutorials and there’ll be a renaissance of the written stuff.

@bstix @Provider This! I'm not sure who is more at fault. Is it that writers don't want to write or that readers don't want to read (causing writers to shift from writing)? Either way it is torture. I'm a fast reader. Videos go at their own agonizing pace. Who thought this was a good idea???

@bstix @Provider I'm not sure if it's my neural divergence, but I actually find YouTube demos/tutorials quite intimidating. I will always pick a written one if I can find it.

@bstix @Provider it really makes it hard to learn at your own pace. Rewinding the same part of a tutorial video over and over again to get what a particular section is saying is just tedious compared to a quick Alt+Tab to reread a paragraph.

@bstix The ones that annoy me are the youTube videos that are text on the video but just a music overlay... no verbal instructions at all and since Ic an't see the video period it is useless to me.

@bstix Yea, searching is basically slow, and unsearchable.

However, a proper setup tutorial has the virtue of being complete. People will typically forget to write 'import random' in their python docs, or 'systemctl restart transmission', because they think it's obvious.

With video tutorials, you get the whole thing, and you can literally see where you're deviating from the script.

Of course that's possible with written text, but I seldom find it.

@bstix @Provider it drives me insane that I can't type text into a box and have an article come back to me. I've found videos that explained a thing beautifully, and then I can never find it again because the phrase I remember wasn't in the tags.

@bstix @Provider I'm guessing a big part of it is that writing blog posts doesn't pay ad revenue these days. Also most text tutorials are drowned out by algospam and your content will probably get scraped and reposted with better SEO and worse ads the moment it's out. :/

@bstix 💯 embedded videos forced to fit into 256x256 pixels where you can't read shit.

@bstix @Provider I wish the videos would all simply have the written directions in the description so regardless of how a person absorbs best it's there.

@bstix @Provider I’ve been a programmer for over a decade. I inevitably spend part of every day searching the web for very specific or very general problems. Not once have I watched a video to find those answers. There is nothing more boring than watching someone else write a todo list app (seriously, stop making these) for exactly 10:01 minutes.

@bstix

OMFG this so much. Especially since most tutorials are ponderously slow and tedious. At the other extreme, are the ones with no subtitles and no sound where you are expected to follow a cursor flying around the screen clicking on things and are supposed to understand what happens. Those in particular should die in a fire.

@bstix damn, I thought I was alone with this. It’s incredibly frustrating that everything is a bloody YouTube. My theory is that people dream of those €€€s coming in from viewers.

@bstix @Provider I read considerably faster than people talk, so written information is a lot faster for me to get. Written tutorials are way better too because you can easily re-read difficult parts.

@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don't need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I'd have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.

The worst are the videos that are little more than a Windows desktop and a syntesized voice of a tutorial that could be written. Additional negative points for instructions writen on Notepad on the screen on that video.

@bstix @Provider I was one of the guys who used to write those, for Microsoft and others. I was at Microsoft when the boom dropped and most and most written documentation projects in favor of minimal on line help files and CBT (pre-video scripted feature demonstrations. The project (the Word for Windows technical manual) was shuffled to Microsoft Press, which didn't want it, leaving me in the middle. Fun.

@bstix @Provider I’m dyslexic and even I can’t stand these Youtube tutorials. The irony is probably that the script they write to make said tutorial is likely many times more useful than the tutorial itself, just because it’s a video…

@bstix couldn’t agree more!

Most of my students preferred video, even if with very few exceptions slides + text was better for them (for the stuff we did).

Also *good* video takes forever to make, good text+image tutorials slightly less forever but the search is much easier!

@bstix @Provider I was trying to work through an online class on Python, and every hour video included ten minutes of encouraging the viewer to keep at it, and five minutes of lame puns. The actual instruction was fine, but text would have been much easier.

@bstix @Provider
Totally agree, it's awful. I recently noticed that the YouTube android app seems to have built in auto-transcription that is often (but not always) searchable. I haven't been able to find this on the desktop webpage, only on the mobile app.

@bstix @TechEnthusiast 100% This is especially annoying when I’m trying to find out how to do something in Python or whatever programming language I happen to be playing with. I am blind and use a screen reader. If the text is written, I can review word by word, line by line, character by character, ETC. This is important when trying to learn programming.

@bstix @Provider God yes. I recently bought a bottle of rum that has a ridiculous ball valve built into the neck so my first attempt to pour it yielded nothing. Googled it & a YT video came up—something ridiculous like 7 minutes or longer—that could have been handled by a single sentence on the label. (Or better yet, not using a ball valve)

@bstix @Provider yes, even written tutorials with a few photos.

Also, I cant remember coming across a written tutorial & abandoning it because of how it's written, but there's been multiple times I've left a video because I can't listen to that presenter any more.

@bstix @Provider oh god I hate it when I try to look something up and the only thing I can find is some awkward person going "so uh, you uh, click on this and then, uh, type uh that." Like why can't they just type somewhere in a blog or forum or something "type X in a console"?

@bstix @Provider A 3 minute video where someone shows you how to change your car's headlights does tend to be better than a text description.

But it's no longer a 3 minute video. It's 25 minutes with a 5 minute sponsor segment, 15 minutes of faffing about, 3 minutes to plug pateron, 1 minute of intro and outro, and then 1 minute where they show the changing of the lightbulb but they cut away to a wide shot so the host can be shown clowning around and you can't tell what he did.

@bstix @Provider From a creator’s perspective that sounds rather ungrateful. Why not be happy that people take the time to create free tutorials at all – in the way they see fit? We look for tutorials because they shorten the time we would otherwise need to figure things out. So it’s weird to say “you helped me save 2 hours of trial-and-error, but it took 3 minutes instead of 1, so damn you!”.

I get what you're saying; but it often feels like a "bears favour". The content creator wants to help and promises to help, but end up just wasting my time and not helping at all. It's a lot easier to glance a document or webpage to see if it contains the thing you're interested in, whereas in a video you'll have to sit through it all before you can tell if it even contains the information.

@bstix I don’t think it’s because writing things is hard but people have become increasingly passive. Why sit down and read for an hour when you can just have someone explain it to you in only 15 minutes

Personally I prefer to go at my own pace when I have to learn something. Videos just aren't good for that.

@bstix @WideAperture

It has always been an issue for published tech writing, that it is often obsolete by the time it hits the shelf.

But the bigger problem is that developers began to nurture an ‘oh, they’ll figure it out’ attitude and stopped thinking of instructions as necessary.

My biggest issue is interfaces have become some international secret code of mystery glyphs hiding functions several levels down in unexpected corners.

I mean written on a webpage, not published in book. The early Internet had lots of pages where people would write tutorials about their hobbies and tech instead of filming themselves mumbling into a headset.

Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own 'homepage' (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem's noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.

You were excited to get email because it was almost always from a human being who put meaning and intent into their message. It was like getting a handwritten letter compared to all the random terms of service update emails from a service you haven't used in four years and emails from a service you didn't sign up for because someone else thinks your email address is their email address and the outright spam in the filter.

@Mechanismatic @rayman30

Yes, agree and remember. I lived in very many different places in the late '90s. Often, the only method of communication was email. No landlines sometimes and certainly no cell phones.

I can't remember the last time I got a personal email. I get some rather lovely ones from my colleagues, but a personal email is a letter, and nearly as extinct.

Lmao me too, a stats counter with like 13 visits

15 of those were me

And then my co-student refreshed the page a 1000 times for laughs and the counter went up, because I didn't install a cookie with an IP check.

Now everything is stuck in corporate silos and largely out of reach.

I miss the somewhat more decentralized and anonymous nature of the early Internet and the Web. People were more likely to have their own Web site with their own shitty personal flare. Services were more infrastructure than ways to monetize the masses. Everyone was busy learning and trying out new things instead of just mindless content consumption or broadcasting their basic-assed opinion.

Things seemed more substantial. But also anonymity granted people the ability to not be judged by their failures. So trying things was less personally risky and easier to fade away in time.

Maybe I just got old. I would love to get back there, though.

People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.

There was Internet before Web servers.

When I think of the early Internet, I'm usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.

If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.

Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.

There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.

It's been downhill ever since.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Edit: typo

I never used usenet but I really appreciate being able to view discussion forums from when back to the future came out.

Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.

Less ads.

Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.

I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn't an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people's accents.

I think it would be the separation between "real life" and "online life".

Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.

Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.

I miss the anonymity that was the "default", when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.

Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.

Totaly agree with you. Used to say 'online money for online things, offline money for offline things'

oh i miss the separation of internet/real life

I remember:

  • CompuServe chat rooms
  • Playing Neverwinter Nights, the "original MMO" some say, on CompuServe
  • Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
  • Usenet and FTP
  • mIRC
  • Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
  • Penny-Arcade
  • Something Awful
  • New grounds
  • stickdeath.com
  • Rotten.com
  • Ogrish
  • all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
  • Fark
  • Digg
  • Reddit

Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.

original MMO

[types out an emote describing how my MUD character is laughing]

FYI: it was a MUD. The number of connections it allowed at once was the big selling factor, I think. To this day, it's the only MUD I ever played with a subscription fee. On top of the ISP and dial-up phone charges. 😵‍💫

These days, I sometimes hop onto Materia Magicka. It's a more modern MUD, but it's been around since I was in high school and it's pretty fun.

Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.

They had to make an announcement at my elementary to stop this since it became a trend to try your first name .com and someone's ended up being porn.

Yeah that happened to me, but I just wanted to play Supermunchers…

There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I'm pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.

Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little "bus" that somebody could "drive" and all move to a different web site together.

Oh. My god. Why did I never know about that. That would have been incredible. I feel honestly robbed now T_T

That shouldn’t be too hard to recreate. Maybe somebody already made it

It's one of those things that makes me wish I knew more than 'hello world' level coding; I would love to resurrect this.

Honestly for something like that asking ChatGPT would get you at least a quarter of the way there. And besides, starting a project is the best way to learn a new skill.

that sounds like a lot of fun, reminds me a bit of the online world in the Megaman Battle Network series. always loved the idea of a virtual "3rd place" if you will.

That's really what it was like.

Nowadays it would be overrun with bots, though, I bet.

So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn't very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.

Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn't make it. RIP PhotoVine.

What's sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.

I mean, it's great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it's all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It's not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It's monotonous. It's artificial. It's driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it's not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there's lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don't already know about it?

What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.

I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.

Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you're doing or selling you crap.

Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.

Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They're being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.

I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn't always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.

Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.

Any Stick RPG players out there? Xgen Studios had quite a few classic flash games.

Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.

Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.

Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”

Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?

Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.

Good times.

I've been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.

Back in the mid 90's, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft's Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don't miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don't miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).

Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn't a thing for quite a while.

I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I've used ever since in various careers over the decades.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That's when I noticed a big shift in online communities.

Damn, you just reminded me I downloaded some sick games onto my TI-84 back in high school. I gotta find that thing, I can't quite remember most of the games besides Tetris.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet.

Agree 1000%. In the early 2000s the internet was a sanctuary from mainstream society, and more cohesive in many ways. Now, all of the real world's problems have become manifest online. Not in the fediverse yet though 🤞

Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It's work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.

In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !blogging@feddit.de

Good bot

(...do we say this here?)

I want to be on record as being kind to our robot overlords, so I'd say "good bot" for good measure.

@Provider
I'm sad to see how many websites are padded with words for SEO.
You can often skip the first few paragraphs in which they just announce what they are going to discuss later on in the article.
Just get to the point.

It's gotten so bad that I think we are inevitably heading to a future where we don't even visit websites, we just have 'AI' digest the site (or sites) and give us a summary of the information. This sort of thing will probably have even more negative effects on web browsing because it will create new perverse incentives for content designed to be ingested by LLM's instead of humans. Let alone the disruption on advertising revenue that drives a lot of the free web.

I totally don't miss all the flashing shit, and awful music on every site. Nor do I miss super long load times, but I do miss the more personal feeling. I also miss feeling like every click wasn't someone trying to get me to give them my money, or steal my info. Don't get me wrong, there were toxic parts of the internet back then, but I feel like its everywhere now.

Oh, and I'll never miss that dial up sound, or dropping because someone picked the phone up. I also know popups and ads existed back then, but I feel like every site I go to now, I spend at least 45 seconds trying (often unsuccessfully) to close all the pop up and ads, just to attempt to read an article. Of course more pop up if you scroll to keep reading too.

Basically, I mostly agree with the article.

Before social media any website could have a sizeable of users. This meant that there were many websites with a sizeable community. Nowadays outside social media there are only dead blogs filled with ads and junk.

In 3 letters:
"a/s/l?"

And then you would openly answer that you were ten. And then a 16yr old would offer to date you on Runescape.

I actually really miss topic-oriented chat rooms. I know they don't seem to be liked/used at all whenever a site adds the ability, but back during AIM they were really the coolest.

I thought it was so fun to just go see what kinds of rooms someone had opened that day, or sit and listen to people. I could talk to complete strangers about my hobbies and we would even learn from each other, and often continue talking for months to a year.

I wasn't exactly allowed to have friends, or in fact even speak to non-family, so the ability to socialize like that so often in my free time and then eventually come to know regulars at a favorite forum meant everything to me.

This was also way before all this shit, when (at least in my neck of the woods) being as clear and civil as possible, accepting nuance, and providing viewpoints/links were considered far more important than "whoever incites the mob first doesn't get doxxed."

I credit what debating skills I have entirely to the amount of time spent lurking on the forum and watching two specific users fight each other every time they met.

You should get on discord! It's like the instant messenger of our youth but with more features. You can find a discord for every hobby.

I've been on discord for almost a decade, lmao. Appreciate it. Unfortunately, my experience with "a discord for every hobby:"

• Two thousand general servers. Your theme is 18+, furry, 6th grade goth/weeb, or all three.

• Remainder don't have a description, or don't have a name/description that's at all explanatory.

• Whatever server you do join will either start out snubbing the newcomer (dealing with that now), will already be dead (half my list), or WILL, without question or exception, die in 6-12 months (the other half).

The last time I went looking for hobby groups, the only server in existence I could find for one of my favorite games seemed active as hell, and was entirely in a language I wouldn't be able to converse in. I'm still upset like a year later.

I also think, generally, it hits a spot that's close to that, but it's not quite that, in large part for the server lifespan thing. They're expected to be more stable, but because of that, joining them feels like a bigger commitment than popping into a random AIM chat for 2 secs. Leaving one is a big statement.

I'm curious whether this might be a reason places just end up as a husk instead of seeing new blood like a revolving door like one would have expected.

There's a whole server-specific atmosphere sometimes, some of them have miles of updating rules and other have none. I joined one semi-recently that had a trigger board paragraphs long and while I would be fine with any one of those individually, I was amused and horrified to find the specific combination of member-submitted triggers left me completely unable to talk about my life.

90% of my existence, past and present, was upsetting to someone, and all I could do was talk about birds or something and send extremely careful memes while I waited to be yelled at.

Everyone's known each other for a while but the standard format REALLY doesn't lend itself to in-depth discussion as much as it does to chatting, which pushes the subject higher out of sight. Meaning the usual scenario is a place for a bunch of longtime friends to get together and talk, as long as they're talking about absolutely nothing of import. Which is fine for a good while.

Creating threads is a thing now, but I've never seen anyone use them aside from to harass a user or see what they did, and no one wants the amount of threads a forum typically has, crammed into a discord menu.

I'm not aiming for slander, if I couldn't stand it I wouldn't have been in it for so long. But it really is the bastard love child of forums and chat and the combination carries some drawbacks if you're hoping for either one.

Ah yes. Back when people were entirely willing to dox themselves in a chat room with a bunch of strangers, in the hopes that maybe you could engage in some “cyber.”

I'd hardly call it doxxing, especially since you lied like 95% of the time about at least one of those things lol

I miss usenet and webchats, mostly, and the fact that communities were smaller and you could feel you could actually contribute. Now it feels like you can already find what you wanted to say. And the opposite of it.

What I Definitely don't miss is: popup with ads, the <blink> HTML Tag, the "under construction" images on websites that would never be updated ever again, and images that would take minutes to download.

What I know I will miss from 2020 in 10 years: contents written by actual humans instead of AI.

I've been using the internet since 1999, when I got online using a prepaid card ($20 for 20 hours) with a local ISP in Australia and a 33.6Kbps modem (my phone line couldn't handle 56Kbps for some reason). There's a bunch of things I miss.

A major one is that web apps and pages were a LOT faster, even though the connections themselves were slower. Computers have gotten much faster now, yet web apps are so much slower and way more unresponsive than they used to be. It's crazy.

I also miss people all having individual web pages and blogs. It felt more personal. RSS was practically the only way to keep up with a large number of blogs, so a lot of people used it.

On the other hand, these days I can download in 10 seconds what it took me weeks to download back on dial-up. I can download practically anything I'd ever need in a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don't miss the old speeds.

my phone line couldn’t handle 56Kbps for some reason

Good old pair gain!

The dial up modem sounds. I don't know why, but I genuinely miss them

I also miss the reduced footprint of mega companies with their "we are the internet" monopolistic tendencies. They still wanted to be the entire internet, but they weren't.

I miss when Google's motto was "Do no evil".

I miss when Usenet was for something more than downloading porn and pirated content

I miss Geocities and everyone having their own shitty webpage

I don't miss IRC and netsplits, or images that would load line by line and rearrange your page as they did. I don't miss JavaScript popup ads or websites that played looping wav files with no easy option to stop them.

I can still tell you how fast a modem is connecting by the sound. Though I was less accurate by the time it got to k56flex and v.90 56k speeds.

I also miss the reduced footprint of mega companies with their “we are the internet” monopolistic tendencies. They still wanted to be the entire internet, but they weren’t.

Especially this. The web was just different without all the bloated pages with dozens of trackers.

@Provider

So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.

Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”

Good grief I’m old.

Maybe not the early internet, but I do remember 2004-2009 internet when message boards were king, communities were smaller, and everything just felt so much more exciting. I miss those days of having one community with 100-200 or so users who posted everything from "What song are you listening to now?" to a fanfic some guy wrote about Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

no advertising, no annoying influencers, no extreme security, every kilobyte was precious + netscape logo

i miss all the charming chatrooms, blogs and this realy oldschool selfmade homepages.

Also i miss MSN a little bit but Discord is a close enough experience.

Sadly after Facebook got popular all of these went downhill realy quick...

Discord isn't close to MSN Messenger at all. Facebook Messenger is a bit closer IMO, but I think people are just accepting that MSN will never come back and nothing else will fill the void it's left in the internet.

depends on how you used MSN back then. For typing with online friends i mainly used chatrooms, MSN did the job for voice- and videocalls, sharing "funny" videos and pictures (now we would call it memes), links and other media. Later with Windows Live Messenger i played allot Uno and other featured games there.

So Discord filled up all these things i used MSN/Live Messenger back then close enough.

Salad Fingers and Flash games. Always a fun time. Diablo til 1AM then ripping the power chord out suddenly when mom screamed, "Go to bed!". Power chord was also ripped on jump scare videos. Lazy daisy in a lemonade swimming pool and I blow smoke out my ears.

AOL chat rooms with strangers. Meeting my step-sister online first. Learning what a stuck up bitch she was as early as the response, "glasses?????"

Downloading crazy shit on Limewire. Ruining computers. Also my mom sitting up for hours on message boards, for boy band fan clubs. Me getting a Livejournal and making friends with a lot of shit that in retrospect was wildly inappropriate for a teen. Also making up shit about my brother in Livejournal that my family would read and act upon. Oops. Sorry bro.

Also that angry note he left me after taking the blame, "I know what websites you've been to you 'Playboy' you."

Anyway, I put on my robe and wizard hat.

It used to be much more decentralized, peaceful, not-for-profit. No systematic tracking (No GA.js). No affiliate/Google Ad infestation.

Individual users had their own small, cozy, hobby websites, not for monetizing - purely writing about whatever they were personally interested in, not trying to increase page views. A lot of good, pure, text-based websites, which perfectly worked without JavaScript nor cookies. Early webmasters were able to type clean HTML directly and fluently using a plain text editor, not depending on centralized platforms, so page load was super-fast, not bloated.

Individual users themselves owned the Internet, so to speak; were not owned by centralized platforms.

Porn pics that loaded line by line, from top to bottom. There was a real sense of mystery and tension.

And images in general.

It's funny cause it led to a whole type of meme (where the bottom of the image is shockingly different) that never works anymore.

I loved when the image turned out to be a progressive JPEG, where you got to see the whole image right away but it was super blurry. Then as the image continued to download, more details were revealed. It was kind of like a real-life version of the “image enhancement” tool that was in every crime drama later. It was also fun to try and guess what the really blurry parts were before the image fully downloaded.

It really was a great format when I surfed the web with my 14.4 or 28.8 modem.

I was on prodigy and it used to be only vector art. I remember when I downloaded my first photograph on there. Line by line until a baseball player emerged. I instantly realized that this was going to change everything and within 24h had naked pictures sent to my deskjet.

It was very user generated. And the search engines facilitated that, giving you very diverse results. This was long before the utter decline that is the current "authoritative" sources boosting. Now we're all herded into a few large web sites and social networks. It's a very sad state of affairs.

The lack of ads. Were there ads? Of course there were. A reasonable amount with reasonable placement. Websites still functioned as intended without content being progressively more blocked on your screen, and they rarely required interaction to deal with them. Nowadays, if you can get a site that's not paywalled, the text field is so small you can only see a sentence or two between the bullshit.

A reasonable amount with reasonable placement.

I... don't think we used the same internet. There were pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing ads, "you're the millionth visitor" ads, "hit the monkey" ads, ads with sound, ads with drive-by ActiveX malware that'd silently install onto your PC and use your modem to call premium phone numbers (to make money for the scammers) while you were asleep, ads that popped up "Windows messenger" alerts, ads with malware that phished bank details (when nothing used SSL and before 2FA was a thing), etc. You may have just forgotten about this since it's been a loooooong time :)

Ad networks like Google AdSense/AdWords were a huge improvement over the garbage we used to have to deal with. At the time, they were just basic text ads or 468x60 banners (which is a long-deprecated ad size now)

Yeah, I remember all of that. It usually went hand in hand with sites I shouldn't have been on lol. But who knows, you're probably right. It's been a lot of years.

Larger sites were sometimes OK, but a lot of sites (both small and large) eventually wanted to make money quickly (especially during the dot com bubble), and started showing ads, unaware of the fact that the sketchy ad networks of the time would show malicious ads.

Pop-up ads were ridiculously effective (high clickthrough rate) since they literally popped up above whatever you were doing and you had to do something (close it) to continue browsing. This was before adblockers and even popup blockers.

Interesting. I remember there being fewer ads but the ones that did exist were worse. Bright colours, flashing, blink tags, 3-frame epilepsy inducing animated gifs... "You are the 10000th visitor!" Some in the mid to late 90s would pop-up new windows or even start autoplaying sound...

Audiogalaxy Satellite. This was THE BEST mp3 service available. It was an index of privately run FTP servers. It was 97, I had just gotten cable internet. I went to spring break for a week, left my server up with a 1.5 ratio. Came back to a hard drive full of shitty late 90's pop. Literally full. Which wasn't saying much since my HD at the time was maybe 2 gigs.

I didn't really "participate" in the internet in the early days, those being the early 2000s for me. Most of my memories from back then are of flash games and animations, had a lot of fun with those over the years.

Most of all I think I just miss the pre-gamergate internet on the whole. Obviously there have always been bigots and assholes on the internet, but now they've really staked their claim and driven their hooks in deep. It sucks to watch everything I enjoy become part of the culture war and the most vocal parts of virtually every fan base that I would otherwise be a part of turn into raging pieces of shit.

Though I suppose the internet already had enough evil in it to harass a bunch of actors from the Star Wars prequels to the brink of suicide well before gamergate, so maybe shit was just always bad.

I certainly don't miss all the exploits, viruses, and general lack of security. Security and privacy online are very recent. Back in the day, everything was transmitted in plain text and browsers and extensions were full of holes that were easily exploited. Your computer could get a virus just by opening a webpage.

Yeah in like 2010 or 2012 I discovered an old laptop with windows 98 on it. I put it in network and went to a rather known website which delivered warez (cracks) with old internet explorer to experiment and just by loading the page you could tell this windows installation was gone. IIRC correctly the screen was instantly flooded with windows message boxes and shit. I anticipated and unplugged the Ethernet cable in like 2 seconds. Laptop froze and never booted up again.

It was fun. It was creative. it was free. It was optimistic and people were pretty chill.

Now the internet is all abotu the bottom line. 90% of the traffic/people on it are bots and scams from malicious people trying to make a easy buck by fucking over people.

I remember just the sheer wonder and awe. The raw thrill of exploration.. It hadnt been corprotized yet, So there wasnt any real ads or anything. Just a vast existence that felt like raw, unexplored territory, every keystroke unveiling a new and wonderous world hidden just behind the next hill.

Websites had visitor counters, which further enforced the thrill of exploration when you stumbled upon a website that had a visitor counter in the single or double digits. Discovering the bleeding edges of human civilization, where a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent had dared to tread.

The raw exhilaration of it all causing time to seemingly stop for you, until you realize 36 hours has past in the blink of an eye, and suddenly crash for 12+ hours of sleep.

There is no magic to the web anymore. Its just..a utility. Boring, and sterile. Dangers more from the corporatization and ads thananything else. Changing constantly only in the pursuit of shifting trends expressly and only for the purpose of improving metrics.. because getting 30,000 hits that'll never come back looks better than 5,000 people that regularly engage.

God fucking hell I'm depressed as fuck now.

The thing I remember is the thrill of realizing how.much.stuff. was out there (even though by current standards it was tiny). There was a repository hosted by WUSTL.EDU that had a ton of software source code, binaries and other stuff; you could submit requests to it by e-mail and back would come your files uuencoded, split across multiple e-mail messages. You had to cobble the pieces back together before you could decode it.

I had completely forgotten about that particular method of file delivery. I wonder how many other things I don’t remember as well?

@Dubious_Fart

Visit counters! That was such a big thing for a while.

And does anyone remember web rings?

Webrings were so great. Never knew where it was gonna take you next.

A great way to discover new websites before search engines were a real thing.

God I wish I could go back 30+ years and experience the fresh and innocent internet again.

but at least my depressions increased, so I got that going for me.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next "rank". Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you'd have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

oh-god-oh-god-oh-god.... FRAMES. I had forgotten all about that shit show. It seemed to bring out the Bigendians and Littleendians in everyone. So much screaming. Frames, man.

I miss text centric internet. I was interested in Linux from like age 12. But I only had one computer and was scared to install it. Well I got tricked on irc to fuck up my windows install. Left with some Linux install CDs and little other options, I went for it. My modem wasn't supported, but luckily I had a little bit of money stashed and went to office Depot to grab an external modem I knew worked.

And after struggling to get windows to work well on that old hand me down computer I was blown away. Especially when I found lynx. It opened webpages so fast. Got AIM working, got irc going, and had everything I needed. Started to learn more about the system and the internet was a wonderful place. Loads of information, but you had to seek out the things that interested you.

I made some really good friends that I would chat with for hours on end. Really helped me through an otherwise pretty not good childhood. Helped me learn a lot of stuff. And it wasn't ad filled, hyper tracking oriented, walled garden garbage.

Also, goatse.

I spent 95% of my time shitposting on one forum in the early 2000's. It was a similar experience to spending 95% of my time on reddit or one of the other major social media sites, except that crazy new ideas for social media didn't really exist back then. They were all traditional forums where everything is posted in chronological order. I remember occasionally sumbling across a threaded forum back then, where you could reply directly to a comment and start a new thread chain like lemmy and reddit can. That was about it as far as innovation went, or at least from what I remember.

The other 5% where I was browsing those old web 1.0 sites with basic html and flash and all that stuff, I don't miss that stuff too much. It would be nice to browse through an archive of stuff like that once or twice for nostalgia's sake, but the modern internet is good too. I have no qualms with the modern internet.

I miss there being lots of pages people would go to, lots or things and communities to explore. I understand there's probably more pages in total now, but I still feel like users mostly gravitate the same ones.

I would adore having 1990's Internet back. It wasn't about media. It wasn't about ads. Wasn't about all sorts of flashy, colorful, mind-numbing drivel. It was just information, pure and simple. We still communicated. We still made friends around the world. But it was new, novel, and simpler. I remember when pop-up ads were invented and introduced. We thought that was bad. Little did we know what it would all turn into.

@Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

I think what I miss is the novelty of the internet. The fact that it was fairly new was what made it exciting, whereas now the internet is old hat. That being said, a lot of the issues people complain about today's internet existed back then too. There were pop up ads that were annoying as hell, but fewer ad blockers. There was spyware and adware, which if you click the wrong thing would track your every move to add even more pop up ads. There was less security and awareness about that stuff back then, so it was easy to become a victim of spyware and adware. Hell, I remember when I first accessed the internet, it was through AOL, which was a major corporation back then with it's own browser and ecosystem that was designed to keep you on their webpages and seemed disinterested in letting you explore the web beyond that.

Early on, as a kid, AOL basically WAS the internet for me. Why would I ever need a browser? And when we first got non-AOL internet, it felt so barren--where do I go!? Where are my chat rooms and IM friends!?

90s, slow (56kb/s) and expansive (4$/h) connection, PC was an instrument to do a single specific search at day without distractions. That's all. Game change was the subscription to monthly plans and speed up to 2mb/s.

&TOTSE:

Q: What is TOTSE all about, anyway?

A: A lot of people have some weird idea that this web site is a Bad Place, a place for hackers, software pirates, and anarchists. The reason that they think this is that there are informational text files on here about hacking, piracy, and anarchy.
However, there are also text files on here that discuss politics; democratic, right wing, left wing, libertarian, communist, and everything in between, but this is not a political web site.
There are files on here that discuss Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Buddha, Crowley, John Smith, and "Bob", but this is not a religious web site.
There are files full of short stories, science fiction, humorous articles, and great works of literature, but this is not a literary web site.
There are files with information on rocketry, radio broadcasting, chemistry, electronics, genetics, and computers, but this is not a technical web site.
This web site is about INFORMATION. All sorts and all viewpoints. Some of the information you will agree with, some you will find shocking, and some you will probably disagree with violently. That is the whole point. In this society we go to schools where there is one right answer: The Teacher's. There is one acceptable version of events: The Television's. There is only one acceptable occupation: The pursuit of money. There is only one political choice to make: The Status Quo.
On this web site you are expected to make decisions all by yourself. You get to decide who and what to agree with, and why. You get to hear new viewpoints that you may have never heard before. On this web site people exist without age, without skin color, without gender, without clothes, without nationality, without any of the visual cues we usually use to discredit or ignore people who are unlike ourselves. All of these things are stripped away and the ideas themselves are laid bare.
You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.
You will enjoy it.

It's a shame now the modern internet has switched from anonymity to identity politics, from freedom to cancel culture.

When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn't get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord).. IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things.. there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.

Static websites, they may have looked terrible, but all that dynamic loading nowadays is infuriating.

Also I feel like I can't find things on websites anymore. 9/10 times it seems easier to just use a search engine to find the specific part of a website, instead of using the sites navigation. I remember that being different around the 2000s.

@Provider Search. Can't find anything these days. I get so frustrated with the results being completely irrelevant and or obvious ads. I used to get 100 pages of results and have to narrow my search with operants like AND or "specific phrases". I used to feel like I had all this knowledge at my fingertips if I could just word it right. Much of it is still out there, I'll just never find it

This Tumblr post has some helpful links

https://www.tumblr.com/myalgias/721490730516922368/cea-tide-ladyshinga-im-sorry-friends-but

Relatedly, I miss getting only a handful, or even zero, results from a Web search. That, in itself, was useful information: The keywords for which I have searched do not exist on the Web; I can stop looking now. I'll never forgive Google for fucking up search so badly by including "similar" results. Why do I need hundreds of pages that have nothing to do with what I want to know? It's just a giant waste of time, but, of course meant more clicks in their site.

Off the top of my head, I miss that games used to have LAN play built in, and you could use apps like Kali to play ipx games over the Internet with a built in community

It was glorious. Websites made with a texteditor. Fansites for games and TV shows. Ever pic took a good while to load line after line (we mid-boobies now!). IRC chat and slapping fish around. Usenet for serious discussions and help. Picking up a girl on a X-Files messageboard. A while later my mind was blown away by MP3. You could do what?! Download music. A track for only 30 minutes?! Wtf! Oh yeah, and MP3 encoding was done on the command line without gui. The mid 90s internet was awesome.

i think most of what i did was play freddi fish, pajama sam, and backyard baseball/football

@Provider Written recipes where you didn't have any images or photos and didn't have to scroll down 14 pages of life story.

Just require a list of ingredients (using metric weights as only about 2 countries in the world use spoons and cups as a measure and every cook has scales), followed by a list of actions with time and temperatures where required.

Traversing web and ftp sites by simple, progressive, suffix removal from the address. Sometimes very interesting what showed up that way. Security was spotty, an afterthought often.

I remember my Technology teacher in high school (1998-ish) showing me what websites I could go to for downloading full albums for free. He initially showed me a directory just filled with Pink Floyd tracks.

You can still find things in open directories, but it doesn't have that same feel of being wild woolly and free.

I miss early social media like LiveJournal weirdly. 1999-2005-ish was wild times.

I also remember hosting DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" which was a mix of The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album on my website as protest. The album was released for free, no money was made from it, yet Dangermouse was sued and banned from distributing it.

I had a whole list of Blogger sites with full albums, bootlegs and mixtapes in all genres. It was wild and fun.

@Provider
I miss Listerv culture. I grew up with mimeographed APA fanzines, and mailing lists were the most pure implementation of that kind of community on the Internet.

Seemed like any interest, no matter how obscure, had a welcoming Listerv community online. If you knew how to find it.

E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.

Where did people use to share their emails to be contacted by strangers?

Penpal websites. I guess they’re like dating sites. You made a profile, write some basic info about yourself, and people could send a message through the site. They’d include their real email in the first message so you could reply directly. It’s very basic.
There were tons of genuinely nice people to write with back then. I’m sure these days it’d be nothing but scammers and bots.

it used to be more difficult for a smooth brain to tell everyone their opinion.

IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities

I remember going over to my buddy's place. He had this hovercraft game and it was the most unplayable garbage ever, but it was fun because you were racing against other people on the internet. You were lagging so hard and getting maybe 10 or less frames. Garbage experience, but an experience nonetheless lol.

Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.

I miss the days before it became all corporatized. The days of the early world wide web and gopher made the internet a whole lot of fun. I had a blast with usenet and internet relay chat as well. Even email was freaking awesome. I remember getting excited when I'd receive messages. Thankfully that excitement is getting rekindled due in a large part to corporate's own hubris. The growth of the fediverse is making the internet fun again.

Yeah, digging into the fediverse is making things feel fresh again.

It's giving everything a new spin since it's all interconnected in a way only the open web could achieve. For example, I've upvoted and replied to this from Mastodon.

If it's already this awesome, I can't wait to see where it's headed.

It being much less busy with the general populace and corporation

I don't miss anything about it. And certainly not the modem dial sounds I knew from memory/intuitively.

Imagine having to dial into the internet and having to wait 30s with beeping and whooshing sounds.

/e: It seems OP question was stated more broadly than the linked article addresses and people seem to reply to.

Did anyone else play digimon quest to save the net? That was one of the first online games I played on dial up.

I remember the pre-facebook era, it was about the same as now just less visually appealing. Ads were worse; they were able to redirect people to pay per view (on your phone bill) sites without notice; if you had a windows pc viruses could literally be installed by visiting a website; installing crackz was a gamble of wether you were infecting your pc or actually getting o play a game; downloads took an entire night and a day for an album; albums actually were sold per song; songs cost money; YouTube didn’t exist so TV was god; we called Friends via landline and listend to them to walk down the stairs as their mother held the apparatus in their hand, waiting to be relieved from her duty. That and most of my now bosses made most of their money scamming people and their competitors. It’s much more civilized now - trust me

I loved all the creative free geocities and angelfire websites other people made for their cyberpets and fandoms.

IRC and playing Warcraft “online” by dialing my friend’s house. One time we messed with a telnet client. That was neat.

You guys remember pMachine (evolved into ExpressionEngine)? That shit blew my mind when I got it installed. No more Adobe Pagemaker.

I remember when you could use a credit card generator (I actually learned whatever "algorithm" to create valid Visas as a party trick) and sign up for porn sites for free. Then you could download a crappy, compressed, ten second video if you waited for what seemed like forever.

Now that I think about it, that aspect of it was terrible. Thank goodness I'm alive now and didn't die before free HD porn was readily available on tap.

I do miss ICQ. And running BBS softwares.

@Provider

USENET

Specifically, alt.hacks, which concerned ways to simplify computing (as it was called) tasks - or everyday life tasks, too.

Especially the ob-hack.

There was a rule that to stay on topic, every post had to have a hack of some sort. An obligatory hack, or "ob-hack". So a fun sort of footnote to postings quickly evolved, as follows:

"...and that's how a bill becomes a law, and why so much of the Internet has already been privatized.

ob-hack: connect the turbo case button to the enable/disable pins on an option card to reclaim the IRQ or interrupt."

@Provider I miss how people have lost the art of self-curation. Those of us who remember took to the fediverse like a duck to water. People who don't have that skill hate it here.

I miss the dial-up sound. I can't really put into words why. It was like looking at a progress bar I guess.

I also miss hosting, just because it was the few things I could organize without having to like...organize I guess. Like the group just needed someone who could figure out how to get it to work.

Like the other guy said, written FAQs. Used to go onto gameFAQs all the time. I still go there sometimes, though it's only really useful for old games now.

I dunno where everyone is getting all this ad-less crap from. This was before adblock and even before a lot of spyware/malware protection was implemented. Modern ads still aren't as aggravating as getting Windows System Alert ads. And that stuff could be put onto your PC so easily....

I always liked the dial-up sound. I don't know why it's so often reviled. Yes, it sounds like multiple minutes of demonic screeching being played backwards, but it was my demonic screeching. It was the sound that meant you were about to have fun.

@Provider It's the "Just call!' of the internet. Somehow, people think that having an extended interaction is peoples' preference.

I would kill for a transcript.

@Provider I miss the freedom of the old Internet. It truly was INTERnet as everything was connected to everything. Geoblocks, censorship, blacklists, etc were almost non-existent. It felt like an open global world where everyone was welcome and everyone was free to decide who they wanted to talk to.

I kept thinking "wow, this is what the future is like" and naively expected the offline world to eventually follow. I guess it was very naive.

Imagine a bookworm that suddenly has access to an effectively infinite library that they can access almost any time that they want. And it felt like there was a lot to explore and didnt feel as centralized. I.e today it feels like youve got 5 maybe 6 really big sites rather than hundreds, thousands, millions of distinct and potentially interesting places to explore.

Do I want that back? Yes and no. I miss the feeling of wonder and of exploring the unknown but I do not miss dial up. If your internet connection were 100x that today youd think something was wrong with the connection. i.e horribly slow. Images would take minutes to load, songs hours, video was unthinkable.