If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss?
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@molly0xfff Chatting about pro-wrestling, sci-fi, X-files, and Magic the gathering on Usenet and early webforums.
Scrolling through Usenet listings to see if any new groups had opened up.
Mostly it felt _knowable_ even if I hadn't visited certain websites, I could find them, and they'd be accessible. There was a logic to it, even the undiscovered parts.
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Sarah Jamie Lewisreplied to Molly White on last edited by
Mostly I miss:
- the large number of semi-public topic-focused spaces (e.g. irc channels, forums)
- the large number of content-deep websites run by individuals / small groups - and the search engines that indexed them and made them discoverable
(approx: late 90s early 00s, falling off in 06-07)
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@molly0xfff @lisamelton independent publishing. About a billion fewer people. Protocols over walled gardens. Discovery. Experimentation by everyone. Diversity of ‘lanes’ (ie, not everything was the web). Not being exploited a billion times over simply by visiting a website.
Things I don’t miss: an entire office sharing a T1 line.
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I guess I could do it still, but going to geocities to find final fantasy art on a dedicated fan page was nice.
It seemed more hand-made, more for us.
Or finding a website that someone hosted on their own, not affiliated with any platform, and then sharing that with friends. Seemed like whoever made the website had their piece of internet real estate and owned it.
On that note, I think he still exists, but wasn’t there a guy who did flash art, and it was great?
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@irenes @molly0xfff yes, I miss USENET orders of magnitude more than I miss any era of World Wide Web. Does anyone else besides me remember Lynx, the browser for hypertext without images (or really any formatting)?
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@matthewmaybe @molly0xfff we still use it (only in rare situations though)
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@molly0xfff myBB forums, lots of good friendships there. and even up to the dominance of XMPP and interop chat clients!
and a reliable google search
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Just found a great article on it: https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
It was more like a forest. Wild. Chaotic. And surprising. Requiring exploration and delighting when you found a new village.
Now it’s more like a city. Busy, noisy, full of adds and well trodden streets.
As a result, a muscle I’ve lost is how to find villages of people that care about a specific thing. I don’t know how to join a new forum and start talking. It’s like I’m on a street with everyone passing each other by.
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@molly0xfff I have been too online since I was a teenager in the 90s. Made Geocities pages, lived on IRC and ICQ, used newsgroups, etc.
I don’t really miss it. It’s always been balkanized (various chats, various phpbbs, slashdot, digg, something awful). The same arguments around moderation.
The tech was just awful. Browsers had splash screens they loaded so slowly. JPEGs were progressively loaded. Flash and Java abounded. Security was nonexistent.
But no outbrain. I do hate outbrain.
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@molly0xfff
- Usenet in the 90ies (esp. comp.lang.java). People with the same interests and helping each other
- Altavista and then early Google
- Websites with reams of content written/curated by a single person (some still exist and still new ones get created e.g. https://otokano.com/colors-by-pigment/)
- StackOverflow (still quite good) -
@molly0xfff I miss search engines showing me only results that actually contained my search terms (and didn't try to guess what I "actually" meant, didn't show me barely related results, didn't force massive numbers of ads, videos, "similar searches" or other junk and actually did respect when I used searches that included quotes or negatives etc. In short Google (and a few other search engines) of the late 1990's early 2000's.
Then I could actually do a search and find no results and trust it
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@molly0xfff
Algorithms of engagement didn't exist. RSS and blogging wasn't mediated. -
freeformz 🏳️🌈replied to Molly White on last edited by [email protected]
@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).
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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.
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Jeremy Hutchinsonreplied to Molly White on last edited by
@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
