- Usenet. Eternal-September.org still provides free access.
- Scorefiles / killfiles were brilliant
Yeah, Lemmy is more or less just a new way to do what Usenet has been doing for decades.
This may be too new but Justin.tv
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We could create a personal website without having to pay and without giving up personal details. Everything was anonymous.
Search engines actually found what you were looking for. No censorship or bad suggestions or trying to sell stuff.
Always finding something new and interesting, not being limited to a few commercial websites.
People were much friendlier and open to share.
God i hate how utterly useless search engines are now
That’s why I just use a metasearch engine (a public searx instance). It’s not perfect, but it usually pulls what I’m looking for from the cached web pages of other search engines and doesn’t let them know I’m searching.
The basic privacy. You could post on a forum and it was just you and the people on the board talking. Today you post anywhere and it’s the whole world looking at the conversation.
Privacy was worse back then but search engines got better since.
Demon Torrentz. Also, the absence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Threads. Did I miss anything?
Is that like XiaoXiao?
I just searched about it. It sounds like original newgrounds. Sounds awesome
Just search YouTube you stick death. You’ll find a bunch of stuff.
Oh! I remember that!
AOL with its You Got Mail 😭😭
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You’ve Got Mail, the romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks is a very weird time capsule.
I did some tech work for a wealthy old guy and his wife. They used AOL Gold Desktop Browser as their web browser as of late June 2023. His issue was caused by him using AOL. I put them on chrome with Ublock and bookmarked aol email. They should probably have a password manager with 2FA but switching from AOL to chrome was a big step.
Probably boomers
NO SOCIAL MEDIA. I belive that Facebook has made the collective humanity a lot stupider. Groupthink, sheeple, influencers, contrails conspiracies…
We had social media, it just wasn’t cancerous like Facebook. It was more fun like MySpace, forums, blogs, IRC, etc.
What we didn’t have was algorithmic social media. That needs to a die a fiery death in the depths of hell.
If it were up to me, algorithmic curation and promotion based on viewership history would be outright illegal.
Rotating gifs all over every homepage
The lack of ways for cooperations to gather information about internet users.
Pretty much. I feel like everything is out to track you and to try and sell you garbage products. And if your in the US you have no rights to tell these companies to remove your data. Unless your in California.
I miss not having the expectation of every social media being so heavily moderated and sterile.
The old internet was like walking down a busy city street. You might walk by someone doing something absolutely batshit crazy, but you just think “Weird. Moving on.” and go about your day because getting emotionally invested would be dumb. The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they’ll get what’s coming to them.
It’s not all bad, but I miss the sort of “wild west” feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn’t real life.
It’s not all bad, but I miss the sort of “wild west” feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn’t real life.
Well… We have lemmy and kbin now, without algorithms promoting stupid shit like in social media.
It’s a weird feeling not being targeted with content and ads. I forgot what it was like.
The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they’ll get what’s coming to them.
This. Probably the most thing I hate about today’s internet, bunch of over-protected snowflakes who get offended by anything.
And what’s worse is how that’s spilled into everyday life. Movies like Blazing Saddles and Revenge of the Nerds would get obliterated if they were released today. Everyone’s immediate reaction to something they find unseasonable is to go absolutely nuts and cancel it instead of “huh, whatever.”
I still think we need to take most of the safety signs down and let darwinism take its course.
I kinda miss the days of the internet being a bit of a gamble, where you might see cute puppies or someone shoving a Mason jar in their ass (back on the easier internet). Those days are gone, unfortunately.
Net neutrality
The internet itself.
Get off my lawn.
A lot of what I’d mention has already been said, so I’ll add the lack of influencers.
I liked forums. It was a bit easier to develop a close rapport with a small group of users than I’ve found on Reddit or Lemmy. Small Discord servers can replace that to some extent though
I’d like to bring back the absence of some things.
Nothing was “mainstream” because it was all still weird, and populated by people with a sense of curiosity and adventure. I’d like the absence of ‘normal’ back.
Corporate presence was minimal. They sometimes had their own websites, and a few had flash games and/or media sites mostly as a PR thing. But that was the extent of it. The main corporation involved was the phone company whose bill you’d have to pay. I’d like corporations to step back and to let people take over again.
And finally, customer service and other business functions. They moved those over to the internet to save a ton of money, but the quality of services plummeted as a result - hurting employees and customers. But they save enough money that they’ll never go back, and it also allows businesses to market to a far wider customer base than they can honestly provide for. Scamming people is the new standard because it’s so easy to get away with when expectations have gotten so low.
