Ask Lemmy

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People having their own sites. I'm sick of everything happening on platforms (yes including this one). I want to visit someone's place, not meet at the bar.

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

We had rules that we pretty much all agreed on because we knew things would go badly if we didn't.

• Don't feed the trolls
• Don't talk about internet memes in real life
• Stay anonymous, there's a bunch of freaks on the internet! Also, you're one of them.
• On the internet no one knows if you're a dog

There was a whole self-deprecating nature to it. We knew posting on the internet wasn't really a positive activity. It was just a guilty pleasure. We knew it was all nonsense and nothing posted on the internet should be taken seriously.

I remember when it first started cropping up where people were saying internet meme type things in public. Someone said "The internet is leaking, this won't end well."

Didn't realize how prophetic this was. Now not only do people feed the trolls, the trolls get paid really well through monetization. People have T-shirts with dumb internet memes, and awkwardly say them out loud thinking it's cool. It's so cringey.

People shitpost under their own name and get super upset about being "cancelled". Maybe you shoulda done that anonymously, dumbass?

Identity is the most important thing to people on the internet now. Your identity matters more than your ideas now. It was better when we assumed everyone was a dog mashing on a keyboard and you had to explain out your ideas rather than ending discussion with sentiments around "you just can't understand my experiences" rather than making an effort to explain them so others can understand.

When it went from "we're all losers trying to explain things to each other as best we can" to "we're all wannabe celebrities that don't have time to explain anything to the losers who aren't good enough to understand our experiences" it all went to shit.

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 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.

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!

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 just miss when you could search for things on search engines and find what you were looking for. I miss when putting operators, quotes, and parentheses actually changed the search results.

I miss when AI wasn’t shoved into EVERYTHING. I miss when the internet was usable to be honest.

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.

The internet felt alive back then. Now...it feels like the dead internet theory is real. Please don't let this wonderful federated site become dead :'(

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.

• 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

the anonymity.

The broadness of the internet.. Now its like 12 main websites and they are all time stealing scams with tedious or generic content

Not having to click some accept data mining cookie banner before I can see the site.

The lack of monetisation and the irrelevant ads that did exist were sat on the website itself..

Active forums. everything seems to be a subreddit now

There was no google. I used dogpile..

Stumbleupon and curated bookmark lists.. The fact I had hundreds of sites bookmarked and categorised.

Dodgy assed chatrooms.. Asl.. Creepy question In hindsight.

I dont miss under construction banners, color clashing sites and low resolutions

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.

Decentralization

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.

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

I miss when web communities were more disparate, and each community had their own inside jokes, memes, and jargon.

Now every web community just uses the exact same mishmash of memes from Reddit/Twitter/4chan, and most web communities end up being indistinguishable from each other.

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

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.

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

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..

I miss the appreciation that was shown to developers and content creators not so long ago. I just get the impression that people take everything for granted these days, even when it comes to extraordinary things that are created by just a few people without the support of multi-million dollar companies. Maybe that's just a misperception on my part. But anyway: Support Lemmy, FOSS and all those awesome content creators!

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.

Flash animation.

I miss when normies and politicians were scared and confused by it so they left it alone. When computers in general required some skill and knowledge to use so there was a natural barrier to entry.

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.

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.

This something we cannot bring back: when we were all new to this, it felt so unbelievable. Suddenly we were casually chatting with people thousands of kilometers away, who were of a completely different background. I'll never forget when I (living in Germany with a turkish migration background) was talking to a US based Neonazi who said that he had nothing against turks, but he heard turks where the nxxxers of Germany. I mean, that was not a pleasant conversation, but it was just so unbelievable that this was actually happening. It felt like everything was possible now. I mean back in 2001 I thought "Hey, let's hear the other side" and just went on the talibans website. Just a few years earlier that kind of insight was simply impossible. The internet just felt borderless.

A lot of things were terrible though, like "asl" or when any wrong click could easily land you on a disgusting and deservedly illegal website. Crazy times.