what do you miss about the early internet?

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?!

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.

Being able to find people's personal home pages in search engines and not just business websites trying to sell you something.

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.

Companies not tracking my every mouse click

The old memes.

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...

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.

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.

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!

FORUMS. Those were literally my life and SO fun