My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
The worst thing was the cp, for sure.
Yahoo used to have these nsfw “clubs” where people shared porn and bizarrely enough there was even cp in a few of them.
removed by mod
I always thought the relative lack of people sucked back then.
Now I kinda wish it didn’t have as many.
The vitriol was more or less the same as it is now, though. It really was dependent on the spaces you hung out, and if they were actively moderated and had rules against such crap. All but one of the spaces I would spend online would have dropped the ban hammer on someone telling someone else to kill themselves or for using a slur/spouting hate speech.
But it was also easier to find spaces where that kind of talk was encouraged, too.
I was there way before “wild west”. Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.
But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.
Our “search engine” was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.
mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.
edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.
Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.
Or “help, I’ve been hacked!” And all it was is their browser homepage has been changed to something dodgy.
You had me at “Internet Explorer”
They’re only as strong as long as there’s persistence. But, that doesn’t mean that when it is used, it won’t have an affect. People have been getting arrested and charged for alluring people to kill themselves online. Whereas, back then, it felt like quite an uphill battle because everyone would’ve just told you to block the person or close the IM window.
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
It’s funny how common it was to come to a webpage that required a download to view the webpage (Flash, etc.) and now I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Realplayer and qt where always a pain to get installed correctly
RealPlayer…wow, that takes me back.
You’re making me remember codecs.
Remember when DivX finally unified us upon MPEG2 and that codec just worked? Forget Youtube videos, I’m talking just making videos in general usable on the internet.
Kids these days don’t even know what they’ve missed. Non-standard video formats. Ugggh. With everyone smoothly using mp4 or AV1 these days, life is so much better.
I remembered for audio projects, the .WMA format was the bane of everyone’s existence.
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.
Those were good days.
XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.
But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript’s function for “automatically fetch more data from the server”)
Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and “magic”, the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.
I don’t miss Java. Fuck Java.
You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.
So many good Java things in that old web…
Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first
It was indeed! I remember playing it that way.
I remember when XMLHttp first came out, such a game changer.
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
The system is down.
Checkin’ my email with the lightswitch rave,
Checkin’ my email, make your moms behave.
That logo appearing when the image wouldn’t load.
Price. My first ISP had no flat rate option.
$40/month for 10 hr/wk. And that was back when $40 was a significant amount of money.
internet explorer sucked then and still sucks now
iE doesn’t exist anymore, does it?
For companies that rely on microshit services, internet explorer is actually the duct tape and elmer’s glue that holds their intranet together
i think it was replaced by microsoft edge when windows 10 came out IIRC
Microsoft hilariously butchered the introduction of Edge, which showed a logo that was strikingly similar to IE. They’ve sworn up and down that Edge wasn’t like IE. But Edge, behaved similarly to IE. It took Microsoft a few years to finally give Edge it’s own identity and more or less, better functionality.
No tabbed browsing. At least not until Firebird, IIRC. Also, “110mb download? Shit, I’m going to have to leave the computer on overnight.” Then waking up to find the download failed for some reason.
Content.
There is MUCH more stuff of almost any kind on the web now.
Other than jokes, the internet used to be way better for jokes. Or at least, I assume it is. I don’t spend as much time these days looking up jokes like I did back then.
Christian and Scott’s interactive top ten list was a great one, anyone remember that? I might have even had a few submissions that made it in to the top ten over the years.
And rinkworks, loved the computer stupidities.
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it’s “GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!”
2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading Limp_Bizkit_-_nookie_4kbps_mp3.exe like you originally intended.
Which you try to play on your mpeg5 player
WinAmp, really kicks the llamas ass
Oh jesus tap dancing christ that takes me back…
I had a pager so that my wife could contact me when she was at work.
File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn’t have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you’d be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.
Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.
I remember going by file size.
A movie is 42 kb? Yeah, I don’t think so. Movie had to be 300 MB or higher to make me believe it might be legit. And then I started going by reviews, when available because that got to no longer be reliable on some files.
Nothing suspicious about ray_of_light.mp3.exe
A couple times I downloaded a “video file” on my Mac which, when played in VLC, just showed an image saying “Open this file in Windows Media Player”.
Yep, that would be malware looking to attack WMP and Internet Explorer.
The worst thing was the cp, for sure.
Yahoo used to have these nsfw “clubs” where people shared porn and bizarrely enough there was even cp in a few of them.
Fun pro life tip for Yarring purposes: Some of Ye Ol’ Networks™ are still around and glorious. I still routinely use DC++ for comic books lol.
you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Looks at Twitter and Facebook…
Uhhhh… Who’s going to tell them that’s still a really big issue? lol
Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin’ BonziBuddy…
