What do you miss from the old internet?

_number8_@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 260 points –

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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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.

And in terms of actual information per kilobyte, it’s often absolutely laughable compared to text.

Everyone’s using video for everything these days because that’s where the ad money is. Hooray, the tyranny of capitalism.

Exactly this! My hearing problems don't help the matter at all. Also they're painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.

whats up guys in todays video I'll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe

So today we're going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I'm doing a video on tying shoes.

Without further ado, let's jump right in.

So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it's something that you need to know. So in this video we're going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you're in the right place! We're talking about tying shoes.

So without further ado, let's jump right in.

So in this video we're going to talk about tying shoes .... [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]

This is so accurate. I end up hitting the 1-9 numbers keys to see at what chunk of the video they get to the real meat.

I guess the catch is that I'd prefer to watch a video for information because the experience is better than the absolutely ad riddled text news sites.

It's very easy to process an actual article and evaluate whether it actually does what I'm looking for enough to read it properly.

Video doesn't provide that. It's a bad format unless what you're doing is actually visual in nature. Reviewing a video game? Sure, provided you're spending meaningful examples of the actual mechanics. Reviewing a video camera? Absolutely.

If your video is just you talking at a camera, it almost definitely shouldn't be a video.

Googling so many "how do I do X?" type of questions have top-results of 10-minute videos where someone has their cluttered Desktop in full 1920x1080 and then they open the tiny command prompt in a small window (it's clear they have no idea how to record a video), where they clumsily type commands they clearly don't understand, and fumble through the entire process.

I just needed a single command. It should have been a 1-second result at the top of search, not shitty videos or SEO dynamically-generated shit site that are trying to sell me something.

I never thought I'd be one to watch videos at 2x but there's so much "content" out there that it helps to get through it plus lots of videos are padded anyway.

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.

Unless you're talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet

Yeah in the late 90s/early 2000s it wasn't that predatory in my recollection.

Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn't all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there's not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You'd look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.

There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn't a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you're looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.

The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.

Articles written for people not for search engines. I'm very familiar with SEO and you can see very clearly when article is created for ranking rather than movie readership. Unfortunately when 90% of traffic for many sources is Google you have no choice but to write articles this way.

God yes.

I’m a professional writer for a newspaper. We’re also occasionally asked to put up SEO commercial text for our advertising partners. And good god, they look like they were written by a lobotomised monkey on a malfunctioning typewriter.

Are you not called journalists anymore? Or are you just lying?

One can write for newspaper and not be a journalist. Columnist for example.

In fact, at our newspaper only about a quarter of the writers are ‘real’ journalists with journalism degrees, including myself.

From my personal experience (20 years in radio, 8 in newspapers), even most actual journalists don’t really call themselves journalists. I tend to refer to myself as a writer in general, since I also do commercial copy, I write reviews and handle all sorts of general writing and public contact.

Journalist is not a protected job title. Anyone can call themselves a journalist. Even that other poster. Because of that, I tend not to use it as a job title, since it’s been devalued a bit by everyone with a blog or vlogging channel calling themselves journalist.

I’m seriously wondering what the other poster’s point was…

Ah yes! The elusive columnist! None of those ever attended J school or are held to journalism standards. They can definitely print whatever the fuck they want without any sort of fact finding or double checking.

"We've all been there. You want to make a large batch of cookies for friends or family, but your KitchenAid stand mixer stopped working. When your KitchenAid stand mixer stops working, it inevitably leads to frustration. This is a common problem. Fortunately, there is a solution. I'll show you a quick and easy way to fix your KitchenAid stand mixer when it stops working.

Believe it or not, the first KitchenAid stand mixer was made way back in 1918..."

This is one of the few cases where I think having an LLM bot straight up plagiarize an article is valid. They're going out of their way to waste my time, so I'll gladly have a bot lift the two sentences of the 20 paragraph article that actually answer the question.

If they want ad revenue they can make articles for humans, or they can eat my entire ass.

It's often not up to publications but up to Google though. Finally Google is collapsing and taking all that spam with them.

One of the main arguments against LLMs is that content creation on the web will dry up but 90% of content of the web is already inaccurate SEO garbage. Maybe accelerationists were right this time.

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.

Have you ever tried Kagi? It's pretty interesting and I'm giving it a shot.

I am using it, it is good for me. Don't miss google at all.

I'd like to have enough money to pay for Kagi :( their trial made me think it could easily replace Google for me

Googling something and being able to find answers to your questions that you can actually trust instead of being fed a mixture of AI generated articles giving garbage information, ads disguised as articles and pages blatantly trying to sell you something.

"Hello I'm dgriffith, a community support member here at (official support forum) and I'm here to help.

Have you tried formatting your hard drive and completely reinstalling your OS? That often helps when your icons are misaligned on the desktop.

If this post helps, please mark it as useful, thanks!"

Invariably, it's also marked as the accepted solution.

Every slightly unusual Windows issue that I research ends up at some Microsoft forum where this kind of post happens. Without fail.

I've genuinely seen a post where someone was looking for help because they had a problem with Windows and DISM /online /cleanup-image /restore health wouldn't run, it said command not found.

The marked answer from the 'Microsoft representative' was to run DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

These are bad too. But I was talking about those pages that show up on web results that when you consult them you realize that they're just a bot-generated page that uses snippets of other pages it picked up on the internet, (badly) dressed up to look like an article written by someone. Often when you read through it you realize it repeats itself with conflicting information too.

Adding before:2023 to the query helps on older stuff. For new stuff i have no idea, all i get is a torrent of SEO AI worthless junk.

Going to try this, but can you even use operators like this on Google anymore in a any meaningful way?

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.

Well that’s pretty much every platform’s lifecycle. Starts small, reaches a sweet spot and either implodes or sucks ass.

I was on Digg, I had a MySpace page, I was an early Twitter user, I had a Reddit account… who knows how long I’ll be on here. But for now, I’m happy to be one of the users on the upswing.

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.

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.

Personally, when I look at the average user on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter (at least the blue checks), etcetera, it makes me wish we actually did gate keep.

And here I thought Lemmy was smarter than Reddit.

I'm glad I could break that illusion for you.

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.

Wait was that not system of a down???

Called it!

No; the song - simply titled "Zelda" is from the album Rabbit Joint, by the band Rabbit Joint. Singer Joe Pleiman wrote the lyrics to the tune of the Hyrule Overture by Nintendo composer Koji Kondo.

Back in the day, little known bands would attempt an early form of SEO, they'd put the names of more famous bands or artists in the file names of mp3s they would upload. Say you were an obscure (and for my purposes, fictional) metal band named Scorn Town, you might upload your newest track as "Blood of the Night - Scorn Town (metallica).mp3" to kind of trick Metallica fans into downloading and listening to your song.

But you did a stupid: It's one of those songs whose title isn't in the lyrics, but you wrote the band's name into the chorus because you're trying to get people to know who you are. So people think the file name is of the pattern "Flagpole Sitta - I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well (Harvey Danger).mp3". Actual title - what you think the actual title is (band name).extension. So a lot of small time acts accidentally attributed their own songs to more famous groups by incorrect titles. Or their fans did it for them; any prank phone call skits were attributed to the Jerky Boys, and any white man performing stand-up comedy who was even slightly southern (especially Bill Engval) was credited as Jeff Foxworthy.

And because this was the contextless era, no one even thinks to question this and if they do they don't find anything because Scorn Town doesn't and never will have a website and even if they did Alta Vista can't find it. So it gets written into digital folk history at face value.

Pleiman's vocals did bear quite a resemblance to that of System of a Down's Serj Tankian, and Chop Suey was HUGE at the time. And some unknown individual uploaded Zelda by Rabbit Joint to Napster with a file name similar to "SOAD - Legend Of Zelda.mp3."

Similarly, "The end of the world" aka "H'okay, so. Here's the Earth, s'chillin..." was NOT made by Group X.

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.

People having their own sites. I'm sick of everything happening on platforms (yes including this one). I want to visit someone's place, not meet at the bar.

I'm dealing with this with my 10 year old daughter, all her friends have social media, Facebook Messenger etc.

I found delta chat, which uses IMAP email, but presents it in a chat format, she just needed her friends email accounts, easy. And it killed the desire for messenger.

We also recently setup her own website with a forum, so she and her friends can write stories, share images etc. We haven't got to her actually building her own homepage yet, but it's coming.

She hasn't experienced mass social media yet, so having her own (sub)domain with a forum, her email@domain, etc is exciting for her and is letting her express herself on a platform that me and her can both fully control.

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.

Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now

which is honestly and deeply confusing. because on the internet no one knows you're a dog! (oh. you got back to that two sentences later)

i just don't go in for identity. at all. no one knows i'm a dog, and i like it that way.

Don't get me wrong, identity is important. Even on the internet it can make sense in certain contexts like if you have a community for people of that group. There's a time and a place for that.

But in most contexts it's really unimportant in internet conversations.

But with the rise in social media it's become the most important thing on the internet to the point where people can't express ideas or accept an idea without it being connected to a person's identity. Back in the day when everyone was pseudo-anonymous there was a death of the author kind of thing on everything so it was 100% about ideas and 0% about identity.

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

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.

Tbf that first one is more a result of web devs kinda slapping an "adjust for mobile/desktop" line into the page files to save time for other tasks the middle manager is breathing down their neck about

I think there might have been a secondary shift.

Era 1: we have things like media queries or some unholy Javascript hoisting to adjust layout as the page size changes, But the site targets 1024 pixel wide or larger screens as the default and subtracts or hides items as it shrinks.

Era 2: we kept the tools but assumed a 350-pixel wide phone is default. When you take it to a desktop, it reflows the text wider but doesn't add back, for example, the menus that were hidden behind a hamburger icon on mobile.

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.

A click got a page.

Now you see spinny things getting content, the page jumps around, your mouse causes pop-ups to appear or the page to jump around even more. You start reading and the sentence is suddenly teleported to somewhere else.

But apart from that I love the new internet!

Every damn time i go to a fandom page, I have to wait a few seconds for the content to quit dancing around as it loads in whatever fandom garbage loads. We have height and width attributes for a reason!

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.

The internet felt alive back then. Now...it feels like the dead internet theory is real. Please don't let this wonderful federated site become dead :'(

Humans. It is difficult to find stuff online that is the genuine work of a human.

Even when something is written by a human half the time now it's wierd algorithmically driven clickbait or internet points driven in "jokes" and so on.

I just miss people and their interests.

Clickbait is for noobs who don't realize tags have all the potential they need.

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.

I miss that site a lot. Miss getting way too high in college after finishing homework and spending many joyful hours there

  • 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 Flash games are what I actually miss the most, but all good points. My coworkers and I would pick a game from addictinggames.com every week and compete. No micro transactions, no intrusive ads, just mindless fun.

Motherlode was such a fun game. Thats what got me into game dev.

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 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.

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.

Bulletin boards. I'm not the biggest fan of Reddit style boards. Because voting can hurt discussions. Due to users can just downvote you and call it a day. They don't have to tell you why and how you’re wrong. So less discussions.

Downvotes are fine and good, but downvoting affecting the visibility of your content is insane. Screw Reddit for that.

A mechanism to promote quality on-topic content and demote noise can be pretty valuable, especially somewhere with a high population. The original thinking on Reddit (and I've been there long enough to know) was that people would use voting as moderation, not agreement or disagreement.

An upvote was to mean "content like this belongs here" and a downvote the opposite. There were no comments at first, but it reasonably applied to them as well once they were added. Unfortunately, votes are too simple and too opaque to maintain a norm like that. Were I designing a discussion system, it would probably use labeling like Slashdot rather than simple voting.

There is no way possible you can make humans actually follow that principle. People always dumb things down as much as possible, and "I like this" or "I dislike this" is default. That's the problem.

Sure there is; you can make the UI require it.

Make what UI require what? I think there is a misunderstanding here.

Make the UI require a label/reason for a vote, like Slashdot.

Slashdot doesn't have a downvote. It has labels like "off-topic" and "flamebait" that serve to lower a comment's score. It's possible to misuse them of course, but that requires an active decision to do so; the obvious action is to pick a label honestly.

Lack of big corpos infecting everything.

The Fediverse is the closest thing to early internet rn, I fear for it because of the whole Threads thing

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.

Too much focus on looking professional, on being marketable, on being profitable.

So you don't like SEO...

your content won't be found unless you advertise it elsewhere.

So you actually don't care about SEO, but want better content?

I don't hear anything about you creating content. The issue is, content creators make more money with SEO and monetization. That's why they do it. If you don't pay, they don't care what you want.

Don't you remember that most Geocities sites sucked and were hard to navigate? Every other page said "under construction". You are currently on a network that has much better content and interaction than those sites.

Post more if you want more content.

I don’t hear anything about you creating content.

Oh look, it's the "you can't complain about X if you don't do X" fallacy! It's a cheap ad hominem, if I'm not mistaken. I have created and freely shared a number of 3D files for printing under a different handle, which you may argue isn't "content", I have also answered several questions on AskGodot, again on a different handle, before the site overhaul. I could go on, but that's beside the point, because your phrase is just an attempt in bad faith to derail the discussion and shut down my voice because I "don't count", because I "don't create content".

content creators make more money with SEO and monetization

Which, allow me to point again to one of my complaints about the current internet: Everything can be easily monetized. The easier it is to get money creating "content", the more it becomes a flood race for the money.

You are currently on a network that has much better content and interaction than those sites.

True to a certain extent. The interaction on some of the current sites feel like a checklist of dark patterns. I also have to wade through a continually growing swamp of auto-generated shit, whether AI or not, to find good stuff. Such prevalence of low quality content decreases the likelihood of me even wanting to get out of my "comfort bubble" of known places and creators.

Post more if you want more content.

This makes no sense.

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.

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!

The wonder of discovery. Before decent search engines you would go from link to link, use web rings or have someone send you an address. If you came across a community you liked, you stuck around. The small scale of it, yet the fact that it was global. Hard to describe..

I met so many interesting people that way. And I loved the creativity of their blogs. It's gone like the corner candy store (which I actually remember).

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.

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.

I found a BBQ site that had a webring the other day.

I was so happy.

Could you elaborate a little please?

A webring was a group of sites that shared a common interest that agreed to link to each other, so that you'd browse around in a circle between them.

Nice, I'm sure I've encountered that before. Thanks for explaining

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.

Crazy times indeed. My cousin brought home an Egyptian guy she met on the internet in the early 2000s. Turned out to be just fine but it seemed sketchy at the time.

The goddamn chatrooms mate now all i can find for the life of me is sext rooms with lust zombies 🥲🥲🥲

Discord? Lmao

Discord is a cancer and totally different vibe.

Just depends on your friends I guess lol, much like any other communication platform meant for smaller groups

Well my friends only use insta and snapchat and i can call or text them . Chat rooms are for the chat with internet randos fun or atleast it used to be now IRC is dead and i can't even get any answers there.

Meanwhile my friend group mainly hangs out in discord, we have several text channels for specific discussions, and often hang out in the voice channels after work to talk and play games together.

I have several discord channels that are more geared toward specific interests, but I mainly use those for specific answers, rather than as a place to chat with people.

My crush coming online. Miss you, •..••´¯``•.¸¸.•psyko_love•.¸¸.•´´¯`••..•

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.

I miss the lack of misinformation. I remember when the news was relatively unbiased. Now everyone is selling fear and outrage.

Forums.

For sure. They’re still out there, but not like they used to be. Supplanted by things like Facebook and Reddit.

Yes I miss the forums I used to visit. I was a moderator on a couple and it was a bit of a slog but still enjoyable. I started using the internet in 1996/97 and watched it evolve all these long years. It's definitely morphed into a corporate wasteland.

I've been using the internet since the mid 90's but never really saw the appeal of forums, but maybe I never had something I was "into" that warranted being on a forum a lot. My only usage was support forums and I always found them annoying to use.

I personally see sites like Reddit & Lemmy as the natural evolution of forums. You still have the concept of a topic (subreddit / community) where people can make posts, but the comments are displayed in a better format.

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.

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) 😋

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.

  • Usenet
  • uucp

Which is why I’m excited for the fediverse because it’s the closest thing to Usenet since Google decided to buy and kill it.

Search engines that didn't require esoteric knowledge of an entire search language to get actually meaningful results.

Forums. I found forums the most engaging, interesting structure for "social media" that has ever been invented. I actually tended to get to know the people on them over time.

I have no idea why we ditched that structure in favor of "platforms".

Forums were great but the friction to find and join new ones was very high.

Also reposts killed forums.

New posters asked the same 6 questions over and over.

Here in Germany forums are still quite active. I have several forums I actively use.

The thing with forums though, is that they oftentimes end in drama. People really do get to know one another over time on forums and that often leads to meltdowns on a scale you don't have on lemmy or similar pages.

There are still some forums around but they are usually very niche. I frequent a few especially when I get banned from Reddit lol.

Link pages. Just people putting their organised bookmarks online.

Internet directories. All the topics organised like a library.

I miss when most people didnt have access to internet 😀

Yeah, back when there was a small barrier of effort to get to the internet. It didn't really keep anyone out, but it meant that if you were here it was because you wanted to be, not because it had been made as easy as possible to access in an attempt to lure you in and extract data through every pore of your being. Lemmy feels similar, in that you have to make an account on an instance and thats slightly harder than clicking a single button to sign in with FB or Google.

I miss being able to share the cool things I find IRL. I made the mistake of doing that once with a beautiful little grove in a state park. The post went viral on insta and within a week the spot had been trampled flat and the rangers had to put up chain link to keep people out. Just awful.

7 more...

badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger

mushroom! mushroom!

badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger

narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean...

Not really old internet but Google search results were actually good a few years ago, now it's utter garbage, maybe because I've stopped using chrome and installed ad blocking and anti spying addons, same with Facebook, my feed just recently became filled with some weird cheesy simp oriented content with a hint of red pill

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.

Have you checked the internet archive? No guarantees, but if anyone in the world has a backup of an old text- based site... it's them.

It's been a while since I tried to find it. I should give it another shot.

Interactions defaulting to positive.

Seems like I can't comment on anything without dealing with an akshually bro, someone tearing me apart because interpreted a certain way there's an exception, or just plain doing a drive by pity party and telling all of us that something sucks (cool story bro).

It's so frustrating.

I wish people could delete replies to your own comments (something at least Facebook does right). You should have a right for your intended discourse not to go completely off the rails.

Flash. :(

If there were adverts, they were single still images that you could scroll past and forget.

I do remember a small point in time where you could set your browser to not open videos. Now thanks to javascript, every fucking page has about 10 advertisement videos going on them. What the web has turned into is absolute shit because of advertising.

I keep seeing this sentiment. Am I the only person who remembers pop up ads? Was that a fever dream? I remember those being all over the place in the late 90s and early aughts. All with geocities style colors.

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.

Agreed. And I only meant this symbolically. "The net was better off when nearly all people there had a minimum of education and discipline." - Better?

Back then, if someone produced stupid ideas like they pop up today by the millions a day in X and Facebook, you got properly booed, and people learned to avoid this one source of trouble.

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.

Usenet

Being able to host something without it being attacked a bazillion times per second. Being able to host email simply, spam being a non issue.

And yes, Usenet, of course. Fucking everyone was on Usenet.

Specifically usenet before "eternal September".

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.

It's one of k my biggest criticisms of Lemmy. No ability for communities to customise themselves. Reddit's redesign is awful, but at least allows a little customisation, and classic Reddit with its custom CSS was awesome. It hurts rpggreentext greatly not to be able to use CSS to show…the eponymous greentext.

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.

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.

The ease of piracy. Literally type whatever you want into any search engine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You’re right on the money.

The reason why the early web worked so well is exactly BECAUSE of that early adopter profile. Getting online was a nerd thing; it had a filtering effect of who could get online. And the ones that did all shared that same passion for the platform. There was an assumed baseline of shared knowledge and shared culture.

Today we consider such things problematic. Back then, that was just how it was. And why it worked.

Personally, I miss it.

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.

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.

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.

Avatar makers used to be extremely ubiquitous, now there's only the ones from Gaia and Solia.

Picrew is still a thing!

True, though you can only do so much with Picrew. You used to be able to make whole costumes with programs like IMVU, Millsberry, and even the avatar maker on Yahoo Answers. Now it's just the two, and you need an account to use the Solia one.

Oh yes, good point. Gosh, I haven't thought about IMVU in years.

I played it once or twice (give or take another few times), discovered all of its secrets and embraced the community by the second day, almost the next thing I knew it was gone.

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.