If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss?
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jeraldina:python_logo:☁️replied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff for "being online", it'd probably be local BBS (Smitty's Place!) then IRC and the vast new world of communication these brought. Plus bigger hubs like Prodigy and Compuserve. You could dial in from a hotel! Carmen Sandiego!
For the 'web', the era of "this website is UNDER CONSTRUCTION!", starfield repeating backgrounds, java music players for mod files or midi files. At that time, a website felt more like someone's room, slightly messy, rather than polished marketing and perfection.
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@molly0xfff I liked the pre-social-media web around 2000-2010 with lots of personal websites, blogs, and forums where I was interacting with a small-ish number of people.
A few days ago I also noticed that even material from university courses seems to be harder to find these days. Before professors would host it on their websites. Now it’s often available only to students
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Dave Alvaradoreplied to Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm: on last edited by
@tob @JasonW @molly0xfff hey now, no need to dunk on web design back then. Nobody was trying to look "professional", we were all just playing and having fun.
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Victor What The Cat Dragged Inreplied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff my first job out of college was in IT before the internet. We setup some Token Ring and Arcnet netwoks, then Novell. As gopher dimmed and www rose I was excited to get onto the Internet which required understanding how to install and configure the stack. Now I can't wait to get off the internet because it has become so hostile and aggressive in data gathering and behavioral control. The peak for me was closer to gopher than to #surveillancecapitalism certainly. I miss nerd civiliity.
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@molly0xfff I miss having RSS feeds of blogs. There are still some about, but it used to be that EVERYONE had a blog. Now, everyone's on social media, and most the social media is way down the enshittification curve.
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@Researchbuzz @molly0xfff that WAS pretty great
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@molly0xfff It felt like there were *more* websites? All of them small and niche - really catered to a specific set of interests.
I was a mod on a Green Day fan site. I was a mod on a small fan fic website. I built a Harry Potter fan site and connected it up to heaps of other HP fan sites. I spent a lot of time on Neopets and Habbo Hotel. Forums! So. Many. Forums.
And all of these sites looked different and functioned differently.
Everything now just feels and looks the same.
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@molly0xfff What I miss the most is the "good old days" of the Internet (which I first got access to in the mid-90s) that were driven by protocols more than "sites" and "apps."
Which meant much more choice of user interface (mailreaders, newsreaders, IRC clients, etc), and the not having to have a separate browser tab (we barely had browsers, much less tabs!) open for every different forum, chat system, etc, etc you interacted with people on.
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@molly0xfff what I miss from the old web, I revisit in Hypnospace Outlaw.
Happening upon winding journeys through passionate knowledge dumps, niche humor, and/or grassroots community, all tenuously connected through links from webrings, forums, and/or irc messages.
Modern algos’ peddlings feel like fast fashion compared to the old internet’s antique shop. Sure there was technically less there, but it felt more infinite, with more charming possibility abound. All found instead of given.
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@molly0xfff I think that pretty much everything on and about the Web was better, in some real sense of the word, in 2007 than it is now. The Web really peaked around 2012, but 2007 was the last time it felt like it wasn't out to get us and we were out to get them.
* We were generally trying to invent new, not replace old with " but over HTTP"
* We were generally ok with the non-dynamic Web Site
* Individual creators and ideas mattered more than corps and agendas
* it still felt cool to code -
@molly0xfff in 1994 we were talking about hacking the HP48 calculator in the comp.sys.hp48 newsgroup and Dave Arnett the designer of the calculator chimed in. I was in a country which five years before was behind the Iron Curtain. The ability to connect with everyone ... it was an undescribable heady feeling.
It lasted for a while... IRC and forums took over from Usenet but it was similar. It ended somewhere around 2012 (Facebook IPO) - 2013 (Vine launch, Google Reader shutdown).
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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.
