If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss?

Matt Boehm

@molly0xfff
Algorithms of engagement didn't exist. RSS and blogging wasn't mediated.

freeformz 🏳️‍🌈

@molly0xfff are there really any “good old days”? Everything that is wrong now was wrong then (more or less), just on a much less massive, life disrupting scale. (I’ve been online since most online wasn’t http based - early 90’s - and BBS before that).

vashbear

@molly0xfff

I loved being able to click on "view source" and usually within and hour understand everything about how that page worked. Now its just .... Javascript Turtles all the way down.

Jeremy Hutchinson

@molly0xfff
For me it was when my feed was sorted by date, not some algorithm pushing for higher engagement at any cost.

I want to control what I consume. The golden age was when that was the default for all sites.

Paul Rosen

@molly0xfff I liked the home-made sites. I remember being astonished and delighted to come across a site that was just pages of jokes about banjos! I liked the "webrings" - once I found a site that was about a topic I was interested in I could just click "random" and see more. I liked that the web was not overrun by spam and ads. The social media was specific-topic message boards and they felt like a small group.

cizzo

@molly0xfff I miss when the Internet wasn't just another means of profiting off people but instead was a place to find people to talk about your hobbies and interests. All things seemingly now devolve into making money but I think that's just a product of countless years of income disparity between working class and the oligarchs.

Sayash

@molly0xfff It felt easier to discover more authentic and unfamiliar writing from new people. Today it feels like the filter bubbles are very strong and the writing is a lot more commercial / professional.

Trapper

@molly0xfff I miss webrings and chunky graphics! Things these days feel too smoothed out and polished.

It's kind of like the Windows 98-era GUI aesthetic; it felt tangible but not to the point of skeuomorphism. I liked when my computer was making consistent visual metaphors.

Jake

@molly0xfff Like so many other people: individual blogs with interesting things. When it felt like there was always *more* out there that was interesting and you just hadn’t learned about it yet. Google Reader, favoriting posts and sharing them with friends.

RealGene ☣️

@molly0xfff
Non-ranking search engines with advanced querying, aka Alta Vista.
Mostly I miss Usenet, which I preferred to the web.

Guillaume

@molly0xfff

I miss the golden days of forums, before Facebook groups

the golden days of Craigslist, before Facebook Marketplace

When we had to host our game servers and we could build communities, before instant matchmaking

I miss the days we could trust online reviews, before affiliate link blogspam and SEO gaming

I miss the days before every website and every app’s sole purpose of being became capturing and selling data about me, or filling my screen with of ads

I miss much more

Chris Alemany🇺🇦🇨🇦🇪🇸

@molly0xfff I miss being able to search. Be it Google, or further back into previous eras, searches used to find more than just wiki articles or endless howtos or best of lists plastered with clickbait and malware. That was about 10 years ago I guess.

And you can add to that the loss of people actually seeing the internet in original form rather than filtered and windowed inside Facebook.

Facebook is the Internet now for most... that is the death of the Internet.

Oscar Bazaldua

@molly0xfff personal blogs and RSS.
And by personal I mean the cool blogs that had an extensive article about C++ and then a picture of their dog.
Everything feels a little too professional these days.

CodeByJeff - Now with AI!

@molly0xfff I think you're talking about stuff like this?

mxk

@molly0xfff online communities structured around narrow topics with a website that consisted of a homepage, member area, forum and adjacent irc chat.

Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.

@molly0xfff Proper many-to-many threaded conversations on mailing lists that I could participate in, but also be caught up with at the end of every day.

RSS feed full of webcomics.

... I think that's what I miss, but I'm not sure I'd participate in them anymore. I never did figure out the best way to "sync" my reading "context" with my phone for either.