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

Molly White

If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?

No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.

Jason Weill

@molly0xfff I miss the era of personal web sites started out of genuine admiration for something, rather than out of a desire to farm a few advertising pennies

Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm:

@molly0xfff I like the web now, but "the good old days" are basically everything before Facebook. Especially the 90s where it felt like a playground with unlimited possibilities and everybody was having fun.

(I know not everyone was having fun, it just felt like that).

geoffeg

@molly0xfff Information density. Not just less padding on content, but the simplicity of the content. Pages that were mostly lightly-styled html with some images.

Irenes (many)

@molly0xfff most of the sites we visited were run by individual people whose personality was all over them

a few really BIG ones were run by groups of like five volunteers, in aggressively counter-hierarchical ways

Jeff

@molly0xfff For me, it's before Enshittification started. When I could still trust that a website would not eventually always try to abuse me or my data.

Irenes (many)

@molly0xfff we will say that what we miss about the 1990s internet was as much Usenet and mailing-list culture as it was "the web"

Dave Alvarado

@JasonW @molly0xfff definitely this too. Geocities/MySpace sites dedicated to some fandom or another with no concept of monetization.

Arne Visscher

@molly0xfff I feel like people used to do more stuff just for the heck of it and not for clicks or monetary gain. Just making stupid flash movies voor shits and giggles for instance. As per usual shit went downhill when money became important.

Irenes (many)

@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.

jade pixel

@irenes @molly0xfff When I think about “hacker culture” it’s this right here.

Tom Bellin :picardfacepalm:

@dave @JasonW @molly0xfff and no concept of design!

Jeff Sikes

@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.

Jonathan Dierksen

@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.

Daniel Schaaff

@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.

Calishat

@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)

Random Geek

@molly0xfff

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.

Emily Nakashima

@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.

jeraldina:python_logo:☁️

@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.

Mario Sangiorgio

@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