If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss?
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Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)replied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff the main thing I miss is people actually going to a variety of websites. I remember when Wordle just came out (and wasn't owned by NYT) somebody said that if there is going to be a web3, it'll just be people actually going to websites again, like they were with Wordle, and that resonated with me.
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@dave @tob @JasonW @molly0xfff At least we didn't do light grey writing on white background
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@molly0xfff .clearfix {
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@molly0xfff Molly, it was nice when you could find information and not fight through every solicitation, related or otherwise, trying to separate you from your hard earned money. It is even worse now that bad actors are everywhere trying to scam you, con you, steal your Identity, etc. No one can be trusted.
The premise behind Battlestar Galactica is worth a moments reflection. The network in that world almost brought humanity to extinction. Only an air gapped (not networked) ship saved us.
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@molly0xfff in the 2000s I had a geocities website listing my favorite online flash games. I wrote it by hand after learning HTML from davesite.com and it had sparklies following your cursor around. Is that the good old days?
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@molly0xfff I might be romanticizing childhood, but I feel like there was a moment there where it was about sharing knowledge, information, content for the sake of *sharing* those things; for a sort of greater good. When it was about presenting accurate information, not making sure a particular page shows up for specific keywords. One page lead to another totally surprising page, and it was all pretty awesome. (1/3)
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@molly0xfff for me, the thing I miss most is the up-front feeling that the web was built by people and for people.
Rationally, I know that people are still building the web, but everything feels so smoothed over and dehumanized now.
And when I ask myself "why does this exist" about most websites now, the answer is "to make money [on ads/investors]" rather than "because someone thought this should be on the web"
Kind of an abstract answer, but everything is so featureless now.
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@molly0xfff stumbling into hand crafted databases people curate on things: Shoelace tying. Birds of their city or state. Releases of early unixes. Models of some manufacturers hardware. Feels like it ended in ‘03 and the relics lasted until ‘16
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@molly0xfff The sense that there was a whole frontier of completely different sites out there. Yahoo! choosing a “cool site of the day,” because there *could* be a cool new site every day.
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@molly0xfff you could right-click + view source and actually understand what was going on. That's pretty much impossible now
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@irenes @molly0xfff
I miss the early 1980s Usenet. I learned massive amounts by asking questions and getting back ideas on where to do further research.I remember '!' addresses.
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theotherlinh :aim_logo:replied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff the optimism.
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@molly0xfff I liked index pages that were less than 20 MB payload and didn't require several cores of a CPU to render. Oh and stuff that didn't require async loading for every single element. Of course that was back in dialup days (~27 MB/2 hours was my maximum possible throughput if the modem negotiated a good v90 connection, occasionally I saw 6 KB/sec!)
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@molly0xfff pedestrian CSS, little to no JavaScript, and the only tracking was a simple counter at the bottom of a page.
I also miss all the old forums I was on.
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@molly0xfff My good old daze of the Internet were pre-web, which is why I said before 1995 (when it seemed to me everyone discovered WWW and the signal:noise ratio dropped).
It was hard work then, but I always went back for more.
I had to order a 9-pin plug and solder my first modem cable, and that meant a friend dictating pin numbers on a rotary dial phone--like a savage
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@molly0xfff pages that were functional without JavaScript enabled.
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@molly0xfff I miss the technical barrier to entry that usually kept the internet nerdy without being hateful. The worst thing you got were flame wars about Star Wars vs Star Trek and there were no memes clogging up the discourse.
Communities were small islands instead of vast oceans of social media. There was no "reach" so trolls upset a handful of people before being kicked, instead of infecting the entire internet. People made actual friends on those forums too.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Mx. Aria Stewart on last edited by
@aredridel @molly0xfff one of those few surviving artifacts from when the internet was weird and human, made by and for people
https://www.horg.com/horg/?page_id=3281 -
Chance N. Counterreplied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff When the internet was mainly accessible to “computer people,” and a baffled public kept their distance, the tone of online discourse was generally less ignorant. Flame wars were as nasty as ever, but public spaces only devolved from cafeteria arguments to barroom brawls when everybody and their dog took to the web. Barriers to entry helped as much as they hurt by gatekeeping; access to anonymous, unfiltered communication doesn’t seem to have done humanity many favors.
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@molly0xfff I miss chat systems with status messages. E.g. it's 2am and I'm up and bored and chatty. I set my status message and see who else is up. And I miss mutli-system chat clients before all the walled gardens locked down.
