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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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blank html Pages only containing pages of blue links to various SWF(flash) movies. Purple if I watched them.
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.
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.
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
mushroom! mushroom!
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anonymity
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.
