In the beginning (of the Internet), it was a giant bubble, much like the current AI hype. There was a flood of corporate money developing various services and protocols, and random people were able to take advantage of this speculation to build an internet that didn’t yet need to be profitable.

Then the dotcom bubble burst, and the only companies who made it out alive were the ones who figured out how to both offer the free services people wanted AND rake in cash for shareholders: data harvesters. (I remember a quote that I thought was from a Google engineer, but I haven’t been able to find it, but it was something like, “with enough datapoints, every problem is a regression problem.”)

Smarter Every Day likened the phenomenon of harvesting everyone’s data to pay for the services everyone wants to use “for free” to the advent of the internal combustion engine. Yes, it made industry possible, but at great cost to society. So they wondered, is there an “electric motor” for the Internet? A “renewable energy” we can use instead of relying on harm to fund things? To me, the Fediverse is the electric motor, but we haven’t yet figured out the renewable energy part. It’s still barely competing on funding through donations, which cam fluctuate or go away based on various factors.

I don’t think we figure out how to have a “better internet” at a large scale until we figure out how to fund it without data collection.

“The internet is a store, but it used to be a library.”

It was owned by itself and the communities that were built upon it, instead of the megacorps.

The internet used to have moderators. That word means something different today. The internet was better when moderators would ban trolls. They’d ban users being assholes even.

It was better when content was real and genuine. I’m not even talking about AI. Content today is created for purely to push quantity. That’s not to say the quality wasn’t bad before.

You have to be real misled to think the problem with the modern internet is CloudFlare captchas and not Facebook or Reddit.

Note the old internet is still out there it never went away. The tildeverse is small but runs like the old internet. They have personal websites and IRC and shell accounts. All ran by and for the community.

Back in my day memes weren’t just screenshots of tweets or comics!

Also, we need to bring back people knowing internet laws.

What made it great? Neither corporations nor everyday people had any interest in it. Nothing was tracking your every click. Netiquette was a real thing.

Oh my sweet summer child, Facebook has always been part of the new Internet.

The Internet has existed since the 1960s. At the time, it was a distributed network for storing documents. Email was invented as a way to send a file from one person to another, but people quickly realised it was more useful for asynchronous conversation. Usenet and IRC later arose, also as communication tools. The WWW began in 1993 at CERN as a way to store files and make them easily viewable by anybody.

Most of that was before my time, but I’m old enough to remember when the web was new. Email had existed for ages, but had only been used by American universities and DARPA. For most people, it was a brand new, futuristic communication system. People had actual personal conversations over email. We developed genuine friendships with people all over the world. Entire new types of jokes were formed.

On the WWW, which is what most people mean when they say Internet, HTML was a much smaller, simpler language. There was no PHP, no JavaScript, not even CSS. There were no rules, conventions, or expectations, and scant documentation; we were all making it up as we went along, and if you saw something cool on another site, you pressed Ctrl+u to view the source code and figure out how they did it.

Websites at the time were gloriously hideous. Objectively modern websites look better, but there was a craftsmanship in ye olden dayes. Nowadays, websites are built with CSS frameworks, which means they all look the same.

But the web was also distributed back then. Now, as someone put it, we have four huge websites, each full of screencaos if the other three. Back then, we talked to each other on forums, over email, in IRC channels and newsgroups. Those all still exist, but people have gradually abandoned them in favour of social media

But social media is crucially different from the old ways. Forums are built around threads; accounts exist, but the basic unit of interaction is the conversation.

The basic unit if social media is the account. You don’t follow conversations, you follow people. As such. there is an inherent push towards cultivating a persona and performing for an audience above having a genuine discussion. Sure, there were a few people who used Usenet that way (Kibo comes to mind), but social media encourages everybody to be Kibo.

And as others have said, SEO also devastated the web. SEO is as old as search engines. Used benignly, it’s simply a way to ensure people looking for information your site provides land on your site. But it turns out that it’s a deal with the devil in which the devil doesn’t even fabe to sign a contract or provide any services. Google, through its algorithms, decides what web pages people can find. Big sites spend money hiring people to make webpages with no intention of showcasing expertise, but in showing up on the first page if a Google search. Small sites run by enthusiasts are crowded out.

This was probably inevitable, but it’s still unfortunate.

Still, there are alternative search engines that focus on the small web and replicate the early days of searching. I use Mojeek and Marginalia; only if (as frequently happens) they don’t turn up useful results, I resort to DuckDuckGo.

People were here for two things primarily:

1. For entertainment, and they found that online
2. To share in their passions with others. (And porn)

It wasn’t about money. Nobody wanted to be a “streamer” or an “influencer”, they just liked X and wanted to go online and participate in X. People shared memes because they liked memes, or the website/community they shared them on, not because it brings you to their page where they can sell you something.

People made flash games because they loved gaming and wanted to create something and share it. People made blogs and vlogs just to share what they’re up to. People made tutorials and guides because they were good at something and wanted to help others. Sure, many websites had to do things like run ads to pay the bills but it didn’t feel like every step you took you were bombarded by someone trying to make money.

the old internet was better

there was no security and Reddit, Facebook, and MySpace were the best

Oh sweet child, when we say the internet before times, we’re talking about WAY before that bullshit

The internet used to be a library. You could visit where and when you want, browsing information relatively undisturbed.

Now; every corner of the internet is trying to sell you something, with many of them stealing your information in an attempt to leverage it against you to coerce or even force you to pay up.

I miss when an adblocker was a foreign concept, because it used to be a solution in search of a problem. Now ads are so invasive and overwhelming that browsing without blocking them is unbearable - if you can even browse without having to signup and subscribe to yet another ‘service’.

I remember the tail end of the old internet. And no, it was not my MySpace or Reddit. It was forums and it was personal websites. I wouldn’t say it’s better per se but it was definitely more fun. There was no money in the internet and so there was no incentive to market anything. People just did what they wanted. Even companies mainly just had fun stuff on their websites.

On the other hand, damn was it hard to find literally anything. The only way to find new things was through word of mouth.

If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine.

That wasn’t the old internet. That was web 2.0. The old internet was before corporate social media.

My view is that SEO ruined the Internet. Once search results became a thing people gamified it just pushed actually good content out of reach.

Problems of the past could be dealt with, e.g. pop-up ads could be defeated with a pop-up blocker. But you cannot “defeat” not being able to find valuable content in the first place.

And today, with LLMs, it’s actually just outright impossible to search for new things without having a preconception of what your actual destination is.