Ask Lemmy

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.

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

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 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.

everything

I miss ICQ and all the security holes it opened.

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.

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 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.

Geocities. A platform where anyone, regardless of technical skill or any design sense could go wild about their passion.

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

I was so happy.

• 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

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

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.

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.

Usenet

Forums.

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

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.