Asklemmy

The days before everything became enshittiffied, before 6 or 7 giant corps took over, the days before social media became a cesspit of slanging matches & false lifestyles, the days when search engines worked & displayed what you searched for not what they think you want to see, the days before shitty algorithms clogged your feeds up endlessly with shit that you searched for once during a conversation you had with someone at work, the days where news sites showed news headlines not bullshit clickbait lies, the days before evil corps tracked every move you make, the days before you were forced to have a shitty app for everything.

The days when going online was fun & interesting. I hope Lemmy continues to bring back some of that fun!

Ebaumsworld days

I like the internet a lot now but I miss the Flash era. So many game devs creating so many unique bitesize concepts. I still play many of them on flashpoint but every now and then you get hit with the depressing realization that its over. Like watching old taped cable and realizing you can't actually change the channel.

Before the questionable fake content and the pollution of websites by intrusive ads.

First decade of google. After that all censorship and wokeness broke loose.

Anywhere from the 90s to the mid to late 2000s because that's when you saw the most personal websites being made and what I would consider the golden era of Newgrounds. Now, I wasn't able to experience the personal websites of the 90s, but through various means I've seen some really cool personal websites from back then.

The few years before social media and the iPhone.

I used to love doing web design. Was perfect career for me, a mix of creativity and coding. Websites then were art, creative, took risks. Then cms became standard, sites all looking the same. Sites are more user-friendly now, but I miss the wild, weird internet of its early days.

The best era was 1993. I'd spend maybe 1 hour a day and read every new thing there was to read on the web.

Things went quickly wrong after you couldn't read every webpage update before new updates. The www was no longer human comprehensible.

The Fediverse, today.

But no not really. If you are on Tiktok or shit like that suddenly there are actually people living close to you. Connecting to people you can actually meet is important.

'99-2009, the best time for me..some aspects are better now (cheaper, faster, more stable) but search engines are absolute shit now and social media is a stain on society. The never ending need for increasing profits year on year kills everything in the end... It's killed so many good aspects of the net.

Early YouTube and early Facebook were really good. I liked old Facebook, as well as the timeline update. I miss Joe it used to work. I don't use it or any other equivalent social media because none of them work like that anymore. Lemmy is the only social media I use and that's more of a discussion board rather than keeping up with IRL friends.

Early YouTube comment was great before it got inundated with ads and sponsorships. I miss the silly humour you don't really see that much anymore. The last good era of YouTube was the height of youtube haikus, that sadly, like a lot of things, got replaced by tiktok content.

Livejournal in the late 90s-early 2000s. God I made such great lifelong friends there. Nowhere else has had that level of intimacy.

Well, have a nap, then FIRE ZE MISSILES!

It was obviously when Homestar Runner was at his peak (the character himself, the webseries named after him, and the website it's hosted in all at the same time). This guy literally changed the accents of some people.

I'd have to do some digging to come up with the year, but I can describe it. It was after WWW happened, and all sorts of web content and communities took off. Search engines, like Altavista, had no algorithms except trying to find the thing you were looking for. Everything was free because it was ad supported, but (and this is key) the ads were no worse than what you'd see in a magazine: no popups, no sites making it impossible to hit the back button, etc. Maybe the worst thing was something would blink.

Once the war between ads getting worse and ad blockers avoiding them happened, everything went to hell. People making content had to come up with different business models, search engines started pushing paid content, paywalls started popping up, and the user experience went down the toilet.

2006-2012 - Torrenting was king and you could easily get anything you wanted.

Now you need to set up a VPN and hope you can trust it then find good torrent sites that are more hidden.