i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
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user customisability. online profiles were awesome until like 2013 where it all became plain black or white backgrounds with a banner. you could have custom backgrounds or even entirely custom CSS in a lot of websites. I really love the theme my instance uses because a lot of Lemmy instance themes are plain and dull too, just default black or white with no creativity, unlike db0 with the crazy outer space and fire and shit. makes it feel more human.
It’s one of k my biggest criticisms of Lemmy. No ability for communities to customise themselves. Reddit’s redesign is awful, but at least allows a little customisation, and classic Reddit with its custom CSS was awesome. It hurts rpggreentext greatly not to be able to use CSS to show…the eponymous greentext.
Lack of privacy invasion and surveillance
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
mushroom! mushroom!
badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger
narwhals, narwhals, swimming in the ocean…
Poooork is the meat of kings…
It’s a snaaaake!
Argh, Snake a snake. Snake a snake. OOOOO, It’s a snake!
Flash. :(
Wait, what. Someone misses proprietary software that was rightfully killed in favor of open standards?
I think it’s moreso the things that came from flash lol
All the really weird non-commercial stuff that was made in Flash.
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!
Every damn time i go to a fandom page, I have to wait a few seconds for the content to quit dancing around as it loads in whatever fandom garbage loads. We have height and width attributes for a reason!
Legend of the Red Dragon
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.
Unless you’re talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet
Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn’t all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there’s not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You’d look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.
There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn’t a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you’re looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.
The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.
Yeah in the late 90s/early 2000s it wasn’t that predatory in my recollection.
You mean you didn’t accept the invitation to the porn chat on MEGA?
Pop Up Blockers.
It’s 2024 and popup ads are everywhere despite being legislated away in the early 00’s.
Fuck ads, and fuck pop up ads more.
Forums. I found forums the most engaging, interesting structure for “social media” that has ever been invented. I actually tended to get to know the people on them over time.
I have no idea why we ditched that structure in favor of “platforms”.
Forums were great but the friction to find and join new ones was very high.
Also reposts killed forums.
New posters asked the same 6 questions over and over.
Here in Germany forums are still quite active. I have several forums I actively use.
The thing with forums though, is that they oftentimes end in drama. People really do get to know one another over time on forums and that often leads to meltdowns on a scale you don’t have on lemmy or similar pages.
There are still some forums around but they are usually very niche. I frequent a few especially when I get banned from Reddit lol.
Anonymity
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.
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.
Have you ever tried Kagi? It’s pretty interesting and I’m giving it a shot.
I am using it, it is good for me. Don’t miss google at all.
I’d like to have enough money to pay for Kagi :( their trial made me think it could easily replace Google for me
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.
Tbf that first one is more a result of web devs kinda slapping an “adjust for mobile/desktop” line into the page files to save time for other tasks the middle manager is breathing down their neck about
I think there might have been a secondary shift.
Era 1: we have things like media queries or some unholy Javascript hoisting to adjust layout as the page size changes, But the site targets 1024 pixel wide or larger screens as the default and subtracts or hides items as it shrinks.
Era 2: we kept the tools but assumed a 350-pixel wide phone is default. When you take it to a desktop, it reflows the text wider but doesn’t add back, for example, the menus that were hidden behind a hamburger icon on mobile.
OLGA - the OnLine Guitar Archive.
It was a huge collection of free guitar tablature. Mostly txt files cobbled together by enthusiasts. The first time I used it, it was only an FTP server. It was rough, sure, but it beat the snot out of the ad-riddled, subscription models we have today. There was a version of Time in a Bottle that I learned half of twenty five years ago and I have never managed to find the rest. It drives me crazy because it was a really good version. Someone had put the two guitar parts together to make a better sounding, hard-as-fuck to play single guitar version. Every version on the Internet now is some dumbed down PoS, or the OG that needs two guitars.
OLGA rocked. I’d forgotten all about it.
Have you checked the internet archive? No guarantees, but if anyone in the world has a backup of an old text- based site… it’s them.
It’s been a while since I tried to find it. I should give it another shot.
Having the time to waste on forums.
