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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Provider @feddit.de

How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?

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

322 comments

  • 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.

  • 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 🤞

  • 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.

  • @Provider
    I'm sad to see how many websites are padded with words for SEO.
    You can often skip the first few paragraphs in which they just announce what they are going to discuss later on in the article.
    Just get to the point.

    • It's gotten so bad that I think we are inevitably heading to a future where we don't even visit websites, we just have 'AI' digest the site (or sites) and give us a summary of the information. This sort of thing will probably have even more negative effects on web browsing because it will create new perverse incentives for content designed to be ingested by LLM's instead of humans. Let alone the disruption on advertising revenue that drives a lot of the free web.

  • I totally don't miss all the flashing shit, and awful music on every site. Nor do I miss super long load times, but I do miss the more personal feeling. I also miss feeling like every click wasn't someone trying to get me to give them my money, or steal my info. Don't get me wrong, there were toxic parts of the internet back then, but I feel like its everywhere now.

    Oh, and I'll never miss that dial up sound, or dropping because someone picked the phone up. I also know popups and ads existed back then, but I feel like every site I go to now, I spend at least 45 seconds trying (often unsuccessfully) to close all the pop up and ads, just to attempt to read an article. Of course more pop up if you scroll to keep reading too.

    Basically, I mostly agree with the article.

  • I've been using the internet since 1999, when I got online using a prepaid card ($20 for 20 hours) with a local ISP in Australia and a 33.6Kbps modem (my phone line couldn't handle 56Kbps for some reason). There's a bunch of things I miss.

    A major one is that web apps and pages were a LOT faster, even though the connections themselves were slower. Computers have gotten much faster now, yet web apps are so much slower and way more unresponsive than they used to be. It's crazy.

    I also miss people all having individual web pages and blogs. It felt more personal. RSS was practically the only way to keep up with a large number of blogs, so a lot of people used it.

    On the other hand, these days I can download in 10 seconds what it took me weeks to download back on dial-up. I can download practically anything I'd ever need in a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don't miss the old speeds.

  • Maybe not the early internet, but I do remember 2004-2009 internet when message boards were king, communities were smaller, and everything just felt so much more exciting. I miss those days of having one community with 100-200 or so users who posted everything from "What song are you listening to now?" to a fanfic some guy wrote about Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

  • I didn't really "participate" in the internet in the early days, those being the early 2000s for me. Most of my memories from back then are of flash games and animations, had a lot of fun with those over the years.

    Most of all I think I just miss the pre-gamergate internet on the whole. Obviously there have always been bigots and assholes on the internet, but now they've really staked their claim and driven their hooks in deep. It sucks to watch everything I enjoy become part of the culture war and the most vocal parts of virtually every fan base that I would otherwise be a part of turn into raging pieces of shit.

    Though I suppose the internet already had enough evil in it to harass a bunch of actors from the Star Wars prequels to the brink of suicide well before gamergate, so maybe shit was just always bad.

  • I spent 95% of my time shitposting on one forum in the early 2000's. It was a similar experience to spending 95% of my time on reddit or one of the other major social media sites, except that crazy new ideas for social media didn't really exist back then. They were all traditional forums where everything is posted in chronological order. I remember occasionally sumbling across a threaded forum back then, where you could reply directly to a comment and start a new thread chain like lemmy and reddit can. That was about it as far as innovation went, or at least from what I remember.

    The other 5% where I was browsing those old web 1.0 sites with basic html and flash and all that stuff, I don't miss that stuff too much. It would be nice to browse through an archive of stuff like that once or twice for nostalgia's sake, but the modern internet is good too. I have no qualms with the modern internet.

  • @Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

  • I would adore having 1990's Internet back. It wasn't about media. It wasn't about ads. Wasn't about all sorts of flashy, colorful, mind-numbing drivel. It was just information, pure and simple. We still communicated. We still made friends around the world. But it was new, novel, and simpler. I remember when pop-up ads were invented and introduced. We thought that was bad. Little did we know what it would all turn into.

  • &TOTSE:

    Q: What is TOTSE all about, anyway?

    A: A lot of people have some weird idea that this web site is a Bad Place, a place for hackers, software pirates, and anarchists. The reason that they think this is that there are informational text files on here about hacking, piracy, and anarchy.
    However, there are also text files on here that discuss politics; democratic, right wing, left wing, libertarian, communist, and everything in between, but this is not a political web site.
    There are files on here that discuss Jesus Christ, Muhammed, Buddha, Crowley, John Smith, and "Bob", but this is not a religious web site.
    There are files full of short stories, science fiction, humorous articles, and great works of literature, but this is not a literary web site.
    There are files with information on rocketry, radio broadcasting, chemistry, electronics, genetics, and computers, but this is not a technical web site.
    This web site is about INFORMATION. All sorts and all viewpoints. Some of the information you will agree with, some you will find shocking, and some you will probably disagree with violently. That is the whole point. In this society we go to schools where there is one right answer: The Teacher's. There is one acceptable version of events: The Television's. There is only one acceptable occupation: The pursuit of money. There is only one political choice to make: The Status Quo.
    On this web site you are expected to make decisions all by yourself. You get to decide who and what to agree with, and why. You get to hear new viewpoints that you may have never heard before. On this web site people exist without age, without skin color, without gender, without clothes, without nationality, without any of the visual cues we usually use to discredit or ignore people who are unlike ourselves. All of these things are stripped away and the ideas themselves are laid bare.
    You will change. You will transform. You will learn. You will disagree.
    You will enjoy it.

    It's a shame now the modern internet has switched from anonymity to identity politics, from freedom to cancel culture.

322 comments