Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own ‘homepage’ (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem’s noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.
You were excited to get email because it was almost always from a human being who put meaning and intent into their message. It was like getting a handwritten letter compared to all the random terms of service update emails from a service you haven’t used in four years and emails from a service you didn’t sign up for because someone else thinks your email address is their email address and the outright spam in the filter.
Now everything is stuck in corporate silos and largely out of reach.
I miss the somewhat more decentralized and anonymous nature of the early Internet and the Web. People were more likely to have their own Web site with their own shitty personal flare. Services were more infrastructure than ways to monetize the masses. Everyone was busy learning and trying out new things instead of just mindless content consumption or broadcasting their basic-assed opinion.
Things seemed more substantial. But also anonymity granted people the ability to not be judged by their failures. So trying things was less personally risky and easier to fade away in time.
Maybe I just got old. I would love to get back there, though.
I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
Video title: “How to unlock the demon door on the fourth level of Demon Smasher Elite”
“Hello, video game fans! Don’t forget to like and subscribe! Last week I posted a video that isn’t relevant to this video, but I need to drag out the time on this one to game the algorithm, so I’m going to rehash and plug that video. I’m going to shout out to my Patreon subscribers with ridiculous usernames I won’t pronounce well. Now let’s get to the part you’ve waiting for: I’m going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter. Okay, now you’ve skipped forward to what looks like the area before the demon door part of the stage, but I’m going to talk about some unrelated anecdote about this game or maybe the game devs, and then plug my Patreon account and mention a completely different game that I’ll be streaming next. Oh and here’s the five seconds of the video you wanted to see when I tell you to click the right mouse button on the hidden lever next to the demon door in order to open it, except you aren’t seeing it because you skipped forward too far and gave up. Don’t forget to like and subscribe! This video has been brought to you by Nord VPN.”
Drives me crazy when I see this kind of format for things like programming. Nothing like pausing the video and trying to see what their code says.
YES, this is such a peeve for me!!! I’ve developed an aversion to viewing video content unless it’s for something I truly need to see done. And even then, I’m more likely to check wikihow and endure their gifs than I am to watch someone’s video. It’s just so overdone.
@bstix couldn’t agree more!
Most of my students preferred video, even if with very few exceptions slides + text was better for them (for the stuff we did).
Also *good* video takes forever to make, good text+image tutorials slightly less forever but the search is much easier!
The worst are the videos that are little more than a Windows desktop and a syntesized voice of a tutorial that could be written. Additional negative points for instructions writen on Notepad on the screen on that video.
You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.
@bstix @Provider @gvwilson writing is as hard as it ever was, but monetization of ad-hoc tutorial content is far easier and more lucrative on youtube. People are literally being paid to pollute your search results with video.
I’m actually optimistic; I think eventually youtube will face too much flak for this kind of garbage, it’ll start affecting viewership, they’ll tweak the algorithm or the partner program to punish bad tutorials and there’ll be a renaissance of the written stuff.
OMFG this so much. Especially since most tutorials are ponderously slow and tedious. At the other extreme, are the ones with no subtitles and no sound where you are expected to follow a cursor flying around the screen clicking on things and are supposed to understand what happens. Those in particular should die in a fire.
@bstix @Provider God yes. I recently bought a bottle of rum that has a ridiculous ball valve built into the neck so my first attempt to pour it yielded nothing. Googled it & a YT video came up—something ridiculous like 7 minutes or longer—that could have been handled by a single sentence on the label. (Or better yet, not using a ball valve)
@bstix everyone wants to be a movie star
Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.
Less ads.
Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.
I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn’t an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people’s accents.
I think it would be the separation between “real life” and “online life”.
Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.
Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.
I miss the anonymity that was the “default”, when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.
Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.
Totaly agree with you. Used to say ‘online money for online things, offline money for offline things’
There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I’m pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.
Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little “bus” that somebody could “drive” and all move to a different web site together.
Oh. My god. Why did I never know about that. That would have been incredible. I feel honestly robbed now T_T
That shouldn’t be too hard to recreate. Maybe somebody already made it
It’s one of those things that makes me wish I knew more than ‘hello world’ level coding; I would love to resurrect this.
Honestly for something like that asking ChatGPT would get you at least a quarter of the way there. And besides, starting a project is the best way to learn a new skill.
that sounds like a lot of fun, reminds me a bit of the online world in the Megaman Battle Network series. always loved the idea of a virtual “3rd place” if you will.
That’s really what it was like.
Nowadays it would be overrun with bots, though, I bet.
People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.
There was Internet before Web servers.
When I think of the early Internet, I’m usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.
If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.
Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.
There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.
It’s been downhill ever since.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Edit: typo
I never used usenet but I really appreciate being able to view discussion forums from when back to the future came out.
So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn’t very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.
Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn’t make it. RIP PhotoVine.
What’s sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.
I mean, it’s great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it’s all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It’s not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It’s monotonous. It’s artificial. It’s driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it’s not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there’s lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don’t already know about it?
What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.
Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.
Look up flashpoint. Bring your nostalgia to life.
Does it run in Firefox?
Its a separate program. Basically flashpoint is an archive portal. Or you can download the whole x number of TB yourself.
Any Stick RPG players out there? Xgen Studios had quite a few classic flash games.
I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.
Back in the mid 90’s, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft’s Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don’t miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don’t miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).
Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn’t a thing for quite a while.
I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I’ve used ever since in various careers over the decades.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That’s when I noticed a big shift in online communities.
Damn, you just reminded me I downloaded some sick games onto my TI-84 back in high school. I gotta find that thing, I can’t quite remember most of the games besides Tetris.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet.
Agree 1000%. In the early 2000s the internet was a sanctuary from mainstream society, and more cohesive in many ways. Now, all of the real world’s problems have become manifest online. Not in the fediverse yet though 🤞
I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.
Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you’re doing or selling you crap.Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.
Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They’re being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.
I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn’t always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.
Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It’s work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.
In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging
You didn’t have to subscribe to everything
In 3 letters:
“a/s/l?”16/f/Cali
Always.
Which always meant 35/m/detroit basement
But those guys were fun to talk to nonetheless.
And then you would openly answer that you were ten. And then a 16yr old would offer to date you on Runescape.
I actually really miss topic-oriented chat rooms. I know they don’t seem to be liked/used at all whenever a site adds the ability, but back during AIM they were really the coolest.
I thought it was so fun to just go see what kinds of rooms someone had opened that day, or sit and listen to people. I could talk to complete strangers about my hobbies and we would even learn from each other, and often continue talking for months to a year.
I wasn’t exactly allowed to have friends, or in fact even speak to non-family, so the ability to socialize like that so often in my free time and then eventually come to know regulars at a favorite forum meant everything to me.
This was also way before all this shit, when (at least in my neck of the woods) being as clear and civil as possible, accepting nuance, and providing viewpoints/links were considered far more important than “whoever incites the mob first doesn’t get doxxed.”
I credit what debating skills I have entirely to the amount of time spent lurking on the forum and watching two specific users fight each other every time they met.
You should get on discord! It’s like the instant messenger of our youth but with more features. You can find a discord for every hobby.
I’ve been on discord for almost a decade, lmao. Appreciate it. Unfortunately, my experience with “a discord for every hobby:”
• Two thousand general servers. Your theme is 18+, furry, 6th grade goth/weeb, or all three.
• Remainder don’t have a description, or don’t have a name/description that’s at all explanatory.
• Whatever server you do join will either start out snubbing the newcomer (dealing with that now), will already be dead (half my list), or WILL, without question or exception, die in 6-12 months (the other half).
The last time I went looking for hobby groups, the only server in existence I could find for one of my favorite games seemed active as hell, and was entirely in a language I wouldn’t be able to converse in. I’m still upset like a year later.
I also think, generally, it hits a spot that’s close to that, but it’s not quite that, in large part for the server lifespan thing. They’re expected to be more stable, but because of that, joining them feels like a bigger commitment than popping into a random AIM chat for 2 secs. Leaving one is a big statement.
I’m curious whether this might be a reason places just end up as a husk instead of seeing new blood like a revolving door like one would have expected.
There’s a whole server-specific atmosphere sometimes, some of them have miles of updating rules and other have none. I joined one semi-recently that had a trigger board paragraphs long and while I would be fine with any one of those individually, I was amused and horrified to find the specific combination of member-submitted triggers left me completely unable to talk about my life.
90% of my existence, past and present, was upsetting to someone, and all I could do was talk about birds or something and send extremely careful memes while I waited to be yelled at.
Everyone’s known each other for a while but the standard format REALLY doesn’t lend itself to in-depth discussion as much as it does to chatting, which pushes the subject higher out of sight. Meaning the usual scenario is a place for a bunch of longtime friends to get together and talk, as long as they’re talking about absolutely nothing of import. Which is fine for a good while.
Creating threads is a thing now, but I’ve never seen anyone use them aside from to harass a user or see what they did, and no one wants the amount of threads a forum typically has, crammed into a discord menu.
I’m not aiming for slander, if I couldn’t stand it I wouldn’t have been in it for so long. But it really is the bastard love child of forums and chat and the combination carries some drawbacks if you’re hoping for either one.
Ah yes. Back when people were entirely willing to dox themselves in a chat room with a bunch of strangers, in the hopes that maybe you could engage in some “cyber.”
I’d hardly call it doxxing, especially since you lied like 95% of the time about at least one of those things lol
