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.
Blank html Pages only containing pages of blue links to various SWF(flash) movies. Purple if I watched them.
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.
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.
Or stock videos
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.
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.
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.
I miss the simplicity and the focus on the information due to the technical limitations.
Websites just had the information, well presented. None of that blog spam with a massive story on how error code -21 could suck and seriously impact your business and that you should hire professionals. But anyway here’s a command copied from a 10 year old StackOverflow answer that hasn’t worked for 5 years and isn’t actually related to what you were Googling at all, but now you’ve viewed 3 advert videos, scrolled through 10 sponsored ads and closed 2 popups. Here’s the next article on error -22.
Also, downloads were “here’s the link to it on our FTP server”, none of that guess which download button is the real one, waiting 30 seconds for the download to prepare and having to sign up for faster download speeds.
A lot of it boils down to the users. Personally, I miss when the internet mostly consisted of us nerds.
Back in 1995 when I first got online, the web was very much a nerd domain. You needed a certain level of computer knowledge to get online, which really acted as a filter. It meant that most of us shared a certain level of understanding and the drive to use such a medium. We disagreed on Star Trek and Star Wars, but to the outside world, we were ALL nerds. Back then, the average person didn’t even think of going online.
These days, even the most tech illiterate can get online. In fact, they don’t even think about it; it’s that integrated in their daily life.
While growth also gave us nice things like large forums, web shopping, YouTube, etc… by and large I think we’d be better off if this was still a nerd domain.
I really miss those days.
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
mushroom! mushroom!
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
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.
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.
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.
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.
