Ask Lemmy

user customisability. online profiles were awesome until like 2013 where it all became plain black or white backgrounds with a banner. you could have custom backgrounds or even entirely custom CSS in a lot of websites. I really love the theme my instance uses because a lot of Lemmy instance themes are plain and dull too, just default black or white with no creativity, unlike db0 with the crazy outer space and fire and shit. makes it feel more human.

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.

I miss how civil everyone was towards each other.

HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

Discovering new weird sites that were super entertaining to middle schoolers like myself. Not sure how to best describe them, but sites like homestar runner, newgrounds, albinoblacksheep. There’s countless more but I can’t remember the names off the top of my head. I remember liking Maddox a lot at that age, but I realized later he was basically a POS iirc.

Search engines that didn't require esoteric knowledge of an entire search language to get actually meaningful results.

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'll go with the algorithms. Google was greater than god, twitter and reddit were endless scrolling. YouTube is being pretty great still, except when shorts wakes up and chooses violence for the day.

Googling something and being able to find answers to your questions that you can actually trust instead of being fed a mixture of AI generated articles giving garbage information, ads disguised as articles and pages blatantly trying to sell you something.

The modern Internet is very political. It's hard to go anywhere without hearing about the same assclowns everyday. And there's less variety in websites. Lots of websites are gone and are now just a Facebook,Twitter and discord.

A click got a page.

Now you see spinny things getting content, the page jumps around, your mouse causes pop-ups to appear or the page to jump around even more. You start reading and the sentence is suddenly teleported to somewhere else.

But apart from that I love the new internet!

I've done a lot to make the web somewhat usable again via extensions and workarounds, so maybe that's why I'm not as frustrated as others.

I do use Linux, GrapheneOS, the terminal, and a lot of various tools to give me a far more minimal experience on the web by default. Ublock with paywall block filter lists, JavaScript off by default, duckduckgo lite search, and privacy redirect extensions shut out most of the noise. I even have sponsor block cut out mentions of sponsors on YouTube videos. So for the most part I just get pure content.

I do miss the culture behind the old web when people were more optimistic and experimental with what they would do with their websites, or just more minimal in their approach cuz they kind of had to.

I do miss the prevalence of old school discussion forums, and I'll always prefer IRC, XMPP, or Matrix over platforms like Discord.

The Fediverse, especially Lemmy, is a welcome breath of fresh air though. So the modern web isn't all bad.

Humans. It is difficult to find stuff online that is the genuine work of a human.

Even when something is written by a human half the time now it's wierd algorithmically driven clickbait or internet points driven in "jokes" and so on.

I just miss people and their interests.

The lack of massive copyright strikes, barely any intrusive ads, little to no subscription services, and the simplicity of everything. Now, you can't use music without angering a company, gotta pay for reading damn articles, and now you gotta sign up for an account in everything.

Avatar makers used to be extremely ubiquitous, now there's only the ones from Gaia and Solia.

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.

Interactions defaulting to positive.

Seems like I can't comment on anything without dealing with an akshually bro, someone tearing me apart because interpreted a certain way there's an exception, or just plain doing a drive by pity party and telling all of us that something sucks (cool story bro).

When sites were designed for desktop/landscape, instead of beig lazy and designing everything for mobile and not creating different desktop and mobile versions.

Also, social media not trying to be everything. Nowadays, every social media is racing to be the all-in-one platform for microblogging, forums, short-form video, long-form video, etc. instead of focusing on the thing they were made for and do best.

I spent hours on the Star Wars webring. Practiced jedi meditation, was convinced I could move stuff with my mind, and learned all about Kashyyyk.

Ytmnd

Sites in search results actually had the shit you were searching for. These days it's scam bullshit or "removed" from the results. Otherwise I do kind of miss the old forum communities. Very little of that left anymore

Having the time to waste on forums.

Infoseek

Cracked is still around. 🤨 They just... Suck now outside of some of the stuff they do on YouTube.

It's not really any specific thing I miss about the old internet, personally. Most of what I do is the same now as it was then. It's really the vibe and the fact more shit is owned by big corporate entities and not just some dude in his garage, attic or basement. That's why I like Lemmy. It's all garage/attic/basement people (well except threads but fuck zuck) 😋

If there were adverts, they were single still images that you could scroll past and forget.