Asklemmy

I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don't want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn't show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?

Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own 'homepage' (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem's noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.

People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.

There was Internet before Web servers.

When I think of the early Internet, I'm usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.

If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.

Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.

There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.

It's been downhill ever since.

Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

Edit: typo

I think it would be the separation between "real life" and "online life".

Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.

Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.

I miss the anonymity that was the "default", when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.

Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.

I remember:

• CompuServe chat rooms
• Playing Neverwinter Nights, the "original MMO" some say, on CompuServe
• Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
• Usenet and FTP
• mIRC
• Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
• Penny-Arcade
• Something Awful
• New grounds
• stickdeath.com
• Rotten.com
• Ogrish
• all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
• Fark
• Digg
• Reddit

Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.

There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I'm pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.

Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little "bus" that somebody could "drive" and all move to a different web site together.

Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.

Less ads.

Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.

I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn't an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people's accents.

So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn't very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.

Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn't make it. RIP PhotoVine.

What's sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.

I mean, it's great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it's all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It's not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It's monotonous. It's artificial. It's driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it's not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there's lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don't already know about it?

What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.

I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.

Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you're doing or selling you crap.

Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.

Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They're being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.

I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn't always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.

Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.

Fun fact: You can recreate a lot of this by starting your own website. Remember all the quirky, niche stuff you could stumble over? Large corporate sites forced all of that onto their server and baited people with millions of views and money. Everything not viral was punished and hidden away. But we can still jsut put stuff on the web for free or for a couple of bucks with a webhoster somewhere. It's work, it serves small audiences and it might be totally overlooked. But it will be YOURS.

In that sense, promote your blog or website here: https://feddit.de/c/blogging

Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.

Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.

Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”

Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?

Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.

Good times.

I've been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.

Back in the mid 90's, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft's Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don't miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don't miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).

Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn't a thing for quite a while.

I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I've used ever since in various careers over the decades.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That's when I noticed a big shift in online communities.

@Provider
I'm sad to see how many websites are padded with words for SEO.
You can often skip the first few paragraphs in which they just announce what they are going to discuss later on in the article.
Just get to the point.

You didn't have to subscribe to everything

Before social media any website could have a sizeable of users. This meant that there were many websites with a sizeable community. Nowadays outside social media there are only dead blogs filled with ads and junk.

I miss usenet and webchats, mostly, and the fact that communities were smaller and you could feel you could actually contribute. Now it feels like you can already find what you wanted to say. And the opposite of it.

What I Definitely don't miss is: popup with ads, the HTML Tag, the "under construction" images on websites that would never be updated ever again, and images that would take minutes to download.

What I know I will miss from 2020 in 10 years: contents written by actual humans instead of AI.

In 3 letters:
"a/s/l?"

I've been using the internet since 1999, when I got online using a prepaid card ($20 for 20 hours) with a local ISP in Australia and a 33.6Kbps modem (my phone line couldn't handle 56Kbps for some reason). There's a bunch of things I miss.

A major one is that web apps and pages were a LOT faster, even though the connections themselves were slower. Computers have gotten much faster now, yet web apps are so much slower and way more unresponsive than they used to be. It's crazy.

I also miss people all having individual web pages and blogs. It felt more personal. RSS was practically the only way to keep up with a large number of blogs, so a lot of people used it.

On the other hand, these days I can download in 10 seconds what it took me weeks to download back on dial-up. I can download practically anything I'd ever need in a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don't miss the old speeds.

The dial up modem sounds. I don't know why, but I genuinely miss them

I also miss the reduced footprint of mega companies with their "we are the internet" monopolistic tendencies. They still wanted to be the entire internet, but they weren't.

I miss when Google's motto was "Do no evil".

I miss when Usenet was for something more than downloading porn and pirated content

I miss Geocities and everyone having their own shitty webpage

I don't miss IRC and netsplits, or images that would load line by line and rearrange your page as they did. I don't miss JavaScript popup ads or websites that played looping wav files with no easy option to stop them.

Maybe not the early internet, but I do remember 2004-2009 internet when message boards were king, communities were smaller, and everything just felt so much more exciting. I miss those days of having one community with 100-200 or so users who posted everything from "What song are you listening to now?" to a fanfic some guy wrote about Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

@Provider

So many of these responses about the “early days of the internet” are talking about websites.

Does WWW really count as “the early internet?”

Good grief I’m old.

websites like this on every topic imaginable.

Being young.

Salad Fingers and Flash games. Always a fun time. Diablo til 1AM then ripping the power chord out suddenly when mom screamed, "Go to bed!". Power chord was also ripped on jump scare videos. Lazy daisy in a lemonade swimming pool and I blow smoke out my ears.

AOL chat rooms with strangers. Meeting my step-sister online first. Learning what a stuck up bitch she was as early as the response, "glasses?????"

Downloading crazy shit on Limewire. Ruining computers. Also my mom sitting up for hours on message boards, for boy band fan clubs. Me getting a Livejournal and making friends with a lot of shit that in retrospect was wildly inappropriate for a teen. Also making up shit about my brother in Livejournal that my family would read and act upon. Oops. Sorry bro.

Also that angry note he left me after taking the blame, "I know what websites you've been to you 'Playboy' you."

Anyway, I put on my robe and wizard hat.

i miss all the charming chatrooms, blogs and this realy oldschool selfmade homepages.

Also i miss MSN a little bit but Discord is a close enough experience.

Sadly after Facebook got popular all of these went downhill realy quick...

no advertising, no annoying influencers, no extreme security, every kilobyte was precious + netscape logo

I totally don't miss all the flashing shit, and awful music on every site. Nor do I miss super long load times, but I do miss the more personal feeling. I also miss feeling like every click wasn't someone trying to get me to give them my money, or steal my info. Don't get me wrong, there were toxic parts of the internet back then, but I feel like its everywhere now.

Oh, and I'll never miss that dial up sound, or dropping because someone picked the phone up. I also know popups and ads existed back then, but I feel like every site I go to now, I spend at least 45 seconds trying (often unsuccessfully) to close all the pop up and ads, just to attempt to read an article. Of course more pop up if you scroll to keep reading too.

Basically, I mostly agree with the article.

It used to be much more decentralized, peaceful, not-for-profit. No systematic tracking (No GA.js). No affiliate/Google Ad infestation.

Individual users had their own small, cozy, hobby websites, not for monetizing - purely writing about whatever they were personally interested in, not trying to increase page views. A lot of good, pure, text-based websites, which perfectly worked without JavaScript nor cookies. Early webmasters were able to type clean HTML directly and fluently using a plain text editor, not depending on centralized platforms, so page load was super-fast, not bloated.

Individual users themselves owned the Internet, so to speak; were not owned by centralized platforms.

expired

Porn pics that loaded line by line, from top to bottom. There was a real sense of mystery and tension.

It was very user generated. And the search engines facilitated that, giving you very diverse results. This was long before the utter decline that is the current "authoritative" sources boosting. Now we're all herded into a few large web sites and social networks. It's a very sad state of affairs.

The lack of ads. Were there ads? Of course there were. A reasonable amount with reasonable placement. Websites still functioned as intended without content being progressively more blocked on your screen, and they rarely required interaction to deal with them. Nowadays, if you can get a site that's not paywalled, the text field is so small you can only see a sentence or two between the bullshit.

Audiogalaxy Satellite. This was THE BEST mp3 service available. It was an index of privately run FTP servers. It was 97, I had just gotten cable internet. I went to spring break for a week, left my server up with a 1.5 ratio. Came back to a hard drive full of shitty late 90's pop. Literally full. Which wasn't saying much since my HD at the time was maybe 2 gigs.

call me crazy, but I miss chat rooms and "A/S/L?"

'course I was a teen at the time, so maybe that's why.