this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
72 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd have to do some digging to come up with the year, but I can describe it. It was after WWW happened, and all sorts of web content and communities took off. Search engines, like Altavista, had no algorithms except trying to find the thing you were looking for. Everything was free because it was ad supported, but (and this is key) the ads were no worse than what you'd see in a magazine: no popups, no sites making it impossible to hit the back button, etc. Maybe the worst thing was something would blink.
Once the war between ads getting worse and ad blockers avoiding them happened, everything went to hell. People making content had to come up with different business models, search engines started pushing paid content, paywalls started popping up, and the user experience went down the toilet.
I loved that period where WWW was buzzing with naive excitement and USENET was still popular for having conversations, it was a good time.