Ask Lemmy

The golden age of webcomics was at the same time as the golden age for individual fan forums. I made a lot a friends that I still have and even met my wife on some of those forums.

a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it

This. Someone doing something weird/smart/stupid because they thought it would be cool, and then documenting it because they care.

Now that kind of shit is on YouTube, monetized, and totally without charm. Most importantly, it isn't documented well enough to reproduce. It's bullshit.

Monetization can fuck off. I want my weird passion projects back.

The wonder of discovery. Before decent search engines you would go from link to link, use web rings or have someone send you an address. If you came across a community you liked, you stuck around. The small scale of it, yet the fact that it was global. Hard to describe..

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.

Stumbleupon

I found so many cool sites with that addon back in the day. I fear a new version would be so ad infested and curated that it wouldn’t be worth it.

Reddit swallowed any community simply due to inertia. Everyone is already there, why build your own thing?

the anonymity.

Decentralization

The goddamn chatrooms mate now all i can find for the life of me is sext rooms with lust zombies 🥲🥲🥲

Bulletin boards. I'm not the biggest fan of Reddit style boards. Because voting can hurt discussions. Due to users can just downvote you and call it a day. They don't have to tell you why and how you’re wrong. So less discussions.

From online community to a meetup.

Widespreadness of local provider networks even if you have not paid for the internet access. You could literally download and watch movies, play games and etc by just using DC++ for local provider network file sharing, servers of which they freaking hosted by themselves.

• Usenet
• uucp

When ads were smaller, unintrusive, only occasionally animated.

When pop-ups were the worst thing because little scrolling banners and side bars of ads were the normal way that sites paid their bills.

I miss the old facebook where we post to each others' walls and poke the on occassions. It felt more genuinne and wholesome. :(

Flash animation.

The send of novelty and usefulness that came with the use of the internet. Especially with things like messengers. Irc. Forums and online multiplayer games.

Not really old internet but Google search results were actually good a few years ago, now it's utter garbage, maybe because I've stopped using chrome and installed ad blocking and anti spying addons, same with Facebook, my feed just recently became filled with some weird cheesy simp oriented content with a hint of red pill

Having to turn it on to use it. Now it’s inescapable.

Lack of privacy invasion and surveillance

Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don't miss the slow speeds.

Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.

Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson's comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek

Articles written for people not for search engines. I'm very familiar with SEO and you can see very clearly when article is created for ranking rather than movie readership. Unfortunately when 90% of traffic for many sources is Google you have no choice but to write articles this way.