tell me what you miss about the early 90s to 2000s internet (its peak) before it became a cluster of incomprehensible nonsense…
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what do you miss about the early internet?
12 Replies
Reply by MacBackYT
posted
Barely any tracking. Also how it looked too. Now we got lots of oversimplification and roundness in places like Google. Take the new log in screen for example, why does everything need to be ROUNDED?!
Reply by eva ˚✧ ゚.
posted
updated
ill go first as someone who only experienced the tailend of it (2003) i miss flash games, ourworld, the old youtube layout, not having my search bar flooded with shein and temu… i miss when moshi monsters was still active and very much alive! i miss writing on wattpad before they introduced paying premium. i miss collecting webkinz and being excited to go home and log on with my friends! i miss when creepypasta was still popular.
Reply by SafeInSanity
posted
Being able to find people's personal home pages in search engines and not just business websites trying to sell you something.
Reply by Bordox500
posted
Just how un-monetized everything was, nowadays every website tries to get anything out of you and sell it. The internet used to be a place of knowledge, fun and connection, now it's the same 10 websites that all have subscription plans, ads, free trials, tracking, Algorithms, ect... I feel like a lot of potentially great things are hidden behind the mountains and mountains of mindless content, or simply aren't "profitable" enough for them to survive on websites.
Reply by Carboniferous
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Reply by Zime
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Reply by Black Market Stray Cat
posted
mostly just how small, cozy, and low-stakes everything felt. communities were more segregated, but it was a good thing because there was a place for everyone, you just had to look. there were tons of small communities dedicated to more esoteric/specific subjects, but they also never quite felt dead, either.
nowadays i'm always afraid that one thing i post might start some giant argument or something. usually i just get ignored a lot, which is fine, but it used to be easier to find people i shared interests with online...
Reply by Virtual Insanity
posted
Search engines which actually helped you find what you were looking for. Finding random sites people had made about their hobbies. It's difficult to think back, but I'd guess most of my Internet Exploder windows (yes windows, not tabs) were for different sites, compared to these days where a large portion of my browser tabs are for the same few websites. Going on-line to do something specific for an hour or so then disconnecting, going out to play and leaving it all behind. The anticipation of connecting while the modem made its screeching sounds. Definitely the lack of tracking and the greater feeling of anonymity.
Reply by Virtual Insanity
posted
Oh, and (at least as far as I could tell) there were no AI / bot generated websites, it was all content made because someone wanted to put that content out there, not because something guessed that it might get lots of hits. Check out the Dead Internet Theory if you've not come across it already.
Reply by ArtshineAura
posted
the customizability mainly, but also the lack of an algorithm pushing you to content you might like. its so much more fun to explore the internet and bounce from site to site through clicking links that go to another website and or webring!
Reply by 𝐻𝒜𝐼𝐿𝐸𝒴 𝒢𝐿𝒪𝒪𝑀𝐼𝐸
posted
Reply by XxLie_AbilityxX
posted
^^^same omfg!! i lived on forums XDD
i also miss being able to stumble across weird websites, like obscure pokemon fan websites and blogs that i was way too young to be on unsupervised. everything was just less centralized around these corporate giants, and even now i feel like earnest early internet culture is probably gone for good, which is both good and bad considering how awful ppl could be back then (flashbacks to being sent gore vids and being sexually harassed online at 13,, yikesss).
i feel like the solution isnt to revive the old internet necessarily, but to take notes on what worked and carry that into the present. ppl are too high-strung nowadays, but at least they care when someone does smthn unacceptable. its a double edged sword i think. ppl will denounce others on grounds of being cringe or smthn they said like a decade ago, but they will also rightfully call out creeps and bigots.
so yeah in conclusion everyone be more open-minded and nicer to each other, stay away from big social media corporations, thx <333 or dont, whatever XD