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 Because it's still fresh, I'd say I miss that microscopic sweet spot between window.open()-based popups, and the new world order of floating forced-videos and passive-aggressive GDPR-compliance-farce modals.
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@molly0xfff there's old sites I used to go to for my dopamine fix, but also old social sites.
think like old flash games,
or some old forums. But I can't remember for the life of me what the place I spent most of my time was - the thing that made me revisit it so often.
Sure I edited wikipedia or watched youtube or used twitter and reddit... but there was another front page I used to have. and another place with all my buddies that's not there anymore.
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@molly0xfff I miss the things that are impossible at scale and will never happen again: lively online spaces with minimal context collapse & at-scale malice. Online lowers the costs & friction, so once everyone's online, it's so cheap to be a bad actor at scale. Not just spam and nation-state stuff, either.
It's great that access is nigh-ubiquitous; the old ways were exclusive & that sucked. But the only online space I still love (DW) is basically tumbleweeds & that's why it hasn't broken.
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Jason Woodwardreplied to Molly White on last edited by [email protected]
@molly0xfff I miss the (less) SEO / (minimal) clickbait era
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@molly0xfff I miss the feeling of interaction and interconnection:
- Every site/blog had RSS and you could follow them easily.
- Many sites had comment sections that were not garbage fires.
- (Non-Reddit) forums for just about any hobby/interest—you’d stumble upon great little communities like secret gardens (there are still a couple in existence)
- AIM—different than texting. Availability, away messages, handles, interoperability to ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, etc.I can talk at length about this.
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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.
