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 it was pretty great, as an impoverished kid, being able to hang out with leading experts in all sorts of topics and treated with more respect than we got from the people physically around us. really extremely great. that's by far the biggest thing we try to pay forward.
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@irenes @molly0xfff When I think about “hacker culture” it’s this right here.
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Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm:replied to Dave Alvarado on last edited by
@dave @JasonW @molly0xfff and no concept of design!
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@molly0xfff A smaller web. It was fine if your post or website wasn't visible or even findable by masses of individuals - that wasn't the point. It was discovery and community once you found your spot. Enjoying the discussions in front of you. Today, we must consume everything all the time all at once and be infuriated if we can't.
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Jonathan Dierksenreplied to Molly White on last edited by
@molly0xfff Visiting a website for news about video games and seeing news... not a bunch of SEO game "guides" or AI generated garbage.
Also the days when Google would experiment with fun, playful stuff for more than a year and leave it up and running even if it wasn't immediately successful.
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@molly0xfff I miss old school Internet forums and I miss the hey day of blogs. Oh and search engines not being polluted by seo nonsense.
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@irenes @molly0xfff Remember that wonderful mid- 90s infrastructure when you could do any all kinds of crazy stuff via email? I mean things like Web searching and even Gopher if I remember correctly (I wrote an article about it at the time and it's somewhere in the junk drawer of my brain)
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years ≤ let's say 2010 (wiggle room of a couple years either way depending on context because my naivete was unevenly distributed)
The feelings but not necessarily objective facts I miss are
1) "online" still being defined, so there was potential everywhere I looked;
2) a expectation that fellow travelers in that exploration of potential were either friendly or really obviously trolls;
3) one's "real name" was strictly for offline use and shopping cart order forms;
4) the consumer Internet and surveillance capitalism could be avoided with a minimum of effort.
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@molly0xfff I miss the feeling of interacting with content on a "pull" basis — actively choosing to click a link and deciding where look next — vs. the flood of content that is constantly *pushed* to us now.
I used to have that sense of following a breadcrumb trail and discovering new things. Now I'm a curator of a flood of homogenized stuff, and it feels as though I'm expected to just to sit back in my chair and consume each piece indiscriminately, no matter the quality.
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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).
