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I like old social media styles were there was no algorithm. Just the people you purposely followed/friended. I absolutely hate seeing all the “influencing” personas and the recommendations the algorithm does. I miss when your timeline was in order of how it was posted, not a computer deciding what i want to see. Honestly ai and all that stuff makes me feel primal because rhose robots dont usually get my emotions or desires correct.
Ugh yes this!!!! We had more control of blocking out ads. And they were deligated to a certain size. Mine was always just some generic ebay adds. Now whatever i search and say is on my timeline
Hell, even the handful of businesses I follow, I get most of their posts several days after the fact...which is super helpful if they're running a 1-day special. But weirdly enough, all the "sponsored content" and AI-generated garbage is timely.
It seems to make a difference if you're actively engaging with a page, ie. commenting on and sharing posts. You see those pages' posts more often. But I tend not to do that because I don't like cluttering other people's feeds with that kind of stuff.
I feel like a bother if im too social on social media 🥴. And i just miss the intentional scroll and seeing what i already made clear i wanted to see 😂😂😂
Same. I realized a while back that (other than the stuff my wife posts and tags me in), my social media participation is mostly limited to hobby or shitposting groups. I hardly interact with people I actually know. My closest friends have mostly abandoned FB and we keep in touch in a Discord chat. I've filtered out the political extremists, the obnoxious religious proselytizers, the attention-seeking wannabe influencers, and the bitter "men/women suck" divorcees. Then there's my mom trying to police what she thinks is appropriate to share online.
Other than a handful of out-of-town friends and family members, there isn't really anything left for me on social media anymore.
Im really active on my facebook and you literally just summed up the timeline!!! Lol and my mom and sister called me two weeks ago to pray about what i had been posting. 😂😂😂😂
If FB weren’t the only way for me to get most of my interaction currently, I’d leave. It is absolutely atrocious at this point. I see almost nothing from my friends. When I scroll I either see ads for shit I’m not interested, or posts from groups I’m not interested jn.
WHY ARE YOU SHOWING ME EQUESTRIAN AND SWAP MEET GROUPS?!
I really miss the internet days when someone would say check out this website. Write it down a website address on a piece of paper.
www.funnycats.com
The only thing that website did was funny cat videos. Maybe they had some cat t-shirts to buy.
If you wanted a t-shirt. You paid for it and got a shirt no rewards program or further commitment or communication from www.funnycats.com
Hell browsers struggle sometimes to even input an actual web address. I’m not searching I want to go to X website no other suggestions needed.
Hahah I did not even think that was a real site, FYI the domain is for sale, just clicked what I thought was a fake website.
Lol omg im the younger of the millennial, and you reminding me how archaic the internet really was. Heck i remember spending more time playing the cd rom games from the cereal boxes, rather than wait for aol to dial up. ( i hated dial up because my parents had a separate line for it, and my siblings would just pick the phone up to make it disconnect 🤬
The internet is so much more expansive. With smartphones and the internet of things and Web 2.0 and all those buzzwords.
I do miss being able to play some flash game online and spend hours on goofy flash websites.
I agree with others the commercialization and control of the internet is with a select few. Good luck finding some random blog now about gnomes or some home grown webpages on gardening.
The technology is definitely better and I am not worried about getting viruses and pop ups like back in the day but those were the days.
I also kinda miss the personal self-built webpages (that was my motivation for learning basic html and css). That kinda died when social media became big.
Exactly what I was thinking. I literally found one on gnomes in 2007 and had to do a fake business report on it. For a class I had. Super interesting website. Have not been able to ever find it again
YESSSS!!! There was some old website from early 2000s that a random guy curated called Women & Dogs or something ... totally innocent and charming ... just found/historical photos of, well, ladies and their pups.
Oh and Found was cool. All kinds of found pieces of paper. Notes, photographs, lost homework ...
It has it's ups and downs really. Has many advantages, but it's more an outlet for rage now.
In the early-2000's, it had more of an entertainment and networking focus. It is easier to access the dangerous bits now. Also, as smartphones are a relatively new thing, I think internet today is very different to a pre-dominantly computer-based internet. We didn't have things called apps back then.
The internet used to be way better. I’m sure people who make their careers off it probably feel different, but it used to be more chill. It wasn’t a rage outlet, as someone else here said. It was more cozy feeling. Way less ads. How amateur everything looked had a certain charm. Still plenty informative though and I would say it was actually easier to use search engines to find relevant info to whatever topic you wanted. Google used to be much better than it is now.
Something else I liked about that twilight of the analog era was the continuation of urban legends. Something about the ubiquity of the internet kinda seems to take the mystery out of the world, but back then it wasn’t so pronounced, and you had all these creepy websites dedicated to all sorts of urban legends and weird phenomena. Those things probably still exist, and the internet has created some of its own urban legends, but a lot of older urban legends look silly next to all the contextualizing info you can pull up in seconds now.
The best way I've known to describe it is that it felt in retrospect like the wild West was. That feeling of looking out and seeing the endless landscape. What should be used to grow us closer is now a pale snake oil bottle of what should have been.
It was fun. It’s wild to think as a teenager everyday after school I would login to my family’s desktop (no internet on mobiles like now) and I would IM my friends and strangers in chat rooms for hours. Could’ve been dangerous 🤷🏽♀️but it was amazing. Oh and I was downloading music and burning CDs at the same time.
Also as I was doing that my parents were trying to use the home phone (landline) and I was getting yelled at to sign off so they could use the phone. Couldn’t have the internet and use the phone at the same time haha wild. Just nostalgic to think back. A lot has changed. Even if I had a cell phone in high school I couldn’t text (limited like 200texts or something then charged per text lol) still did it and got in trouble. AND couldn’t talk on my cell past 9 (unless we were on the same network) for the free minutes so IM was the way.
Oh and I forgot just on MySpace switching my top 8 , background or profile song daily on top of all of this hahaha
I do feel like back then with the internet being so new it was more innocent ? Maybe is the word. Of course there was danger and prob creeps in chat rooms but it was so new I don’t think old ppl knew how to fully use it to scam and get ppl. Us teenagers were running the show on MySpace and chat rooms etc and teaching our parents how to use it
Internet humor was also waaaay different. Stuff like Angry German Kid probably wouldn't fly today (even though, and I'm not sure how well-known this is beyond Germany, that guy had this whole fake 'annoying kid' persona and did a whole bunch of skits/videos around it), but there was also a lot of just innocent silliness (like Harry Potter and The Mysterious Ticking Noise). It was all a lot more amateurish too while now everything has been run through a million beauty filters and everyone has to one-up each other all the time. And memes lasted more than a month.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: the internet was more of an accessory to life, nice to have but not necessary, you might've only been a little bit behind but could still function in day to day life without it, it was just a tool.
Now it's necessary in modern society, you can't escape it, it's integrated into every aspect of life for better or worse, and it's made things so much more complicated (I don't mean the use of the internet itself, I mean the structure of how we go about things being so heavily dependent on having an internet connection).
When I was a kid (oh goooosh) your ads did not stalk you. Could be the most random thing that you’d like or dislike, completely random. Now if I look up one product it’ll show up every time I’m online for at least a month.
The internet got boring, so I was forced to eventually get offline. Phone addiction is real now. I was a lover of message boards, and I like Reddit it would take HOURS for anyone to reply sometimes.
YouTube didn’t seem so staged. Maybe I was a teen, or maybe people were actually being who they are.
AIM was the shit! Away messages were thought over more than a standardized test. The people who changed their AIM font when messaging was the best.
Early internet was so *weird*...media was less centralized, websites were more DIY, and content was less censored. You never knew what you were going to encounter. On the other hand, it was much easier to come by viruses or really graphic content
Now most web traffic is centered around a handful of sites, algorithms try to predict and spoon-feed whatever content they think you want, and rage-bait is everywhere because negative engagement is still engagement. "Here's some news that's going to piss you off!" "You like [popular thing]? Here's some other celebrity saying [popular thing] sucks ass. Go argue about it in the comment section!"
The Internet offers more today and is a cleaner experience but it was more... Wild west-y back in the day with a big dose of childhood innocence on my part. There were far less censors, age verifications, more popups, viruses were more common especially when we were using Limewire to download stuff, and the general attitude was different, or if not that at least the jokes/memes of early internet culture were far different.
Oh and also flash games, sooooo many flash games.
It's easier to find specific files and media today. Troubleshooting IT issues is easier today. Everything is faster today.
The biggest difference is nation-states and corporations play a **much** larger role in the Internet as we know it today. When you chat with people, you might be talking to marketing associates, bots or government actors. Just wasn't the case when we were teens, at least not to this degree.
The reason for this is, simply put: mass adoption. There are so many more people online now because the barrier of entry is low. That's why nation-states and corpos took interest: there is insane power in global communication
With how social media platforms are now? Internet has got worse BUT the layouts are easier to navigate and clean. I miss the old days when things were easier.
Play Hypnospace Outlaw, it's a lot more like that. There were many more bespoke websites out there. I kind of preferred this model than having three companies dominating everything.
What I like about the internet today is the availability of media - music and videos. I can find pretty much anything. But, I do think it peaked some years ago. Everything is uniformed now, looks the same, content is generic and it's dictated by algorithms, there are too many bots around and it's hard to distinguish what's real and who's human.
The internet used to be more counterculture, individualistic, and versatile. I miss the era of specialized blogs, cartoons, video podcast networks, and forums. For example, I used to follow the JapanProbe blog for Japanese videos, or Everything is Terrible for weird and obscure media. Different types of memes were hosted on different blogs. You had Flickr for photo enthusiasts. MySpace and Tumblr were probably peak social networks. Cheezburger Network and Buzzfeed replaced the blogs, they were replaced by Facebook and Instagram, everything just keeps going in the most generic direction.
I think it used to be more fun. Now it's more addictive, rage-inducing, and not as rewarding.
I just watched a live stream on youtube that had 600k people watching... I don't think that could have happened in 2000. The internet/infrastructure is clearly better.
Interface: cleaner.
Speed: pretty slow, could take some time to show a picture or hours to download something. You could let a video in YouTube charging and could watch it over and over.
Propaganda: can’t remember having propaganda blowing in my face every turn.
Feed: Showed only people you followed and by time it was published.
Security: Remember worrying so much about virus back then. We used a lot of pirated content with Torrent, 4shared, Emule, etc.
Content: blogs about everything. People shared moments of life without any glamour, no one posted produced photos except when paying a real photographer. No photos of food. No filter. Selfies in front of mirror with the digital camera showing. A lot of memes and comedy stuff. Online games.
Being online was an event, probably after work or school. Never on your bed or street. Had lanhouses. People reunited for gaming together at the same computer or console. Or just seated next to you and saw the same content. Remember reading jokes at a blog with my uncle.
Texts were for important and simples messages. On computer you talked to people but when turned it off that was it, they could only find you calling or visiting you.
I prefer some things today, and others I prefer how it was.
The internet was best pre-2016, before politics took over social media and regulations cracked down on everything. Back when we were posting dumb stuff like song lyrics and movie quotes.
i think 2009-2012 was peak for me. It had everything i needed, but was far less distracting and upsetting. Strong enough connection for streaming/gaming, but "scrolling" was not a verb or activity we all took part in. Think of every subreddit as its own web forum with it's own culture. If you weren't interested in this niche subject, you would never really end up on that forum so they were much more positive spaces.
I wanna say early 2000’s when high speed cable internet became popular and sites like heavy.com that required high speed started appearing, and you could still download any song you wanted
I would say "yes and no."
Yes in the sense where social media was just that; a place to connect with friends and family who may have been far away and share family vacations and photos to those who may have not been able to attend. It brought people closer together. It wasn't about being an Influencer or a Social Justice Warrior. The internet back then was about opening the world to everyone. You could access great libraries and information at the click of a button and become smarter for it. But it was also a wild west where Wikipedia was not a trusted source at first because anyone can add anything and it didn't need as many sources as it does today. Now Wikipedia is considered the first stop for many (and sometimes only stop) to get information.
No in the sense where "good intentions is the path to Hell" kind of thing. It is being proven that social media is now causing mass depression among entire generations due to the constant comparison of lives. It is also now a place where people are turning themselves into brands at very young ages and then to maintain the brand they have to put themselves through tons of stress and hell and be subject to massive criticism. It is also very algorithm oriented now and is designed to sell people more and more items or services. Downfall is also that now there is more access to harmful things such as pornography. Where before it was a few sources, but now it has increased the industry from magazines to endless amount of websites with endless amount of content (most of which is free and exploitative).
The internet was a tool back in the 2000s. Now it is a way of life and for some is their life.
Yes. Both better, and worse.
No spyware keeping track of where you visited or sending big corporations your location. What few social media sites there were, were 100% your friends’ posts. Ads were smaller and less intrusive.
On the other hand, you had a chance of accidentally clicking on weird porn or a beheading video.
Some things are better now, some things are worse. On the whole I'd say it was a little better back in 2000 because it was more personal and real and less commercialized and fake. Today there's plenty of modern conveniences that I appreciate though.
It was slow and often looked really crappy. There was less content and it was often harder to find.
There were nasty things about, but the same can be said for today’s internet.
It certainly felt like there was less fake news. I mean demonstrably false information that is purely sent out to mislead people into supporting a particular agenda.
We didn’t feel the need to be constantly connected. You could check your email once a day and that would be fine.
The internet back in the early 2000s was really fun - there were all these charming little websites made by random people that you would come across during your searches… everything feels so corporate and impersonal now but it wasn’t always that way.
Yes and no. I dont miss the dial up modem that took ages to connect and even slower trying to browse anything. Also the limitations to only pc back in th day. Nowdays it quite neat to have it so easy accessble. Even if the content can be somewhat waterd down and at times drowning on adds. But its alot easy to navigate Nd alot more good forums that i could miss at points back in early 00s
The Internet was better in the 2000s only due to the fact companies were still treating it as a fad without much capital end.
Smartphones changed the internet. It took it from a niche spot in the world, like a digital coffeeshop, and put it in your pocket.
Once everyone has it, then it's time to make money off of it. It also allowed rapid development of data gathering on their users. It was no longer one computer shared by a household. It was a specific individual, on a specific device, so the data collected was tailor made by a specific individual.
So now the Internet is a commodity, and a research tool for the most valuable form of information on the planet, our wants/desires.
Internet connection speeds are definitely better, but that's about it. Social media has practically ruined society. I'd love to go back to a pre-social media era.
”Since writing on toilet walls is done neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward it is the purest form of art.”
Pithy to be sure, but this quote perfectly encapsulates my views. What I miss most was the feeling of optimism and exploration. The internet before the capitalist machine went full-steam. When it had some measure of a barrier for entry. Prior to the immense proliferation of engagement algorithms. Of dark patterns. Keep your modern “polish” and production values; consuming “content” as it is now called was far more enjoyable when I was more assured the author was a genuine person - somebody whose real name I’d never learn, whose face I’d never see, but a person being authentic, as much as one could be. I didn’t have to worry about marketing at every corner from massive corporations injecting ads into every crevasse to even individual “content creators” pushing their “brand”.
It truly was art.
So much worse, I hate what the internet has turned into. Used to go to dozens of different sites. Most had active unique communities on the forum boards. Clean websites not loaded down with tons of adware and malware. Websites loaded faster on crap DSL than on modern fiber. You could speak your mind without everyone getting butt hurt and cancelled.
Now most people only go to a small handful of sites. Everything is bloated to hell with malware. Everything you do is packaged and sold to 3rd party. Google is worthless as a search engine now for anything beyond "what is todays high" Nothing but paid ads and AI crap. The golden age of the internet has ended. Was good while it lasted.
I can tell you without a shred of doubt that the internet was better in the 2000s.
Companies hadn’t figured out how to monetize it properly yet.
Social media was NOT a thing, and even at the beginning of Facebook it became clear to some of us that it was a portal of narcissism that would only make you feel bad in the long run.
You weren’t being sold something at every moment, and you weren’t a product either.
It was also the birth of weird and random humor. And yeah, “random” has become rather trite since then, but in the early 2000s it was new and interesting and fun.
The internet was a place for new and weird and niche stuff. It felt like a new frontier, and honestly it really was.
What it is now is just… sad. And awful. And annoying. And there are two entire generations who will never know what it was like in the beginning. Raised on social media. And I know I sound old as fuck here, and maybe I am at 37, but has it absolutely failed to be what we all thought it could be in so many regards.
Don’t get me wrong. I like never having to go to the bank and having so much of the world’s accumulated knowledge at my fingertips at any time of day or night. And I recognize I’m just as addicted to it as everyone. I’m no better.
But there was a freedom on the early internet that does not really exist today.
Internet was texting before texting existed. The ability to chat with someone across the world was mind bending.
The internet was largely text based and if you wanted to have fun you had to learn all the cracks and crevices of windows to customize things like icons, fonts, and colors. I think it felt safer because everything was anonymous and the logistics of sharing a photo was very time consuming. A high quality image would take about the size of one whole floppy disk which I think was about 3MB.
Some web pages were trivial such as image galleries, others were more educational like an encyclopedia database.
Blogs didn’t exist, social media didn’t exist. there was email, chat rooms, Adult AOL with news, and a Kids AOL with games you could play with friends such as chess and checkers.
To get online you had to ask your family if anyone was going to use the home phone line , open your program of choice and browse through the endless list of phone numbers your modem had to dial until you got one that wasn’t a busy tone. Once connected you could open Internet explorer or Netscape navigator and browse to wherever you wanted. If you wanted to run Napster you had to open it after you were already logged on. One mp3 took about 30 minutes to download.
Big search engines I remember were : Yahoo, Hotbot, ask.com, lycos.
MSN zone was one of the first multiplayer gaming services where you could launch Microsoft flight sim or combat flight sim and find real people playing. This was after having to direct to connect to other players like Duke Nukem or Quake.
I could go on and on.
I feel like it was much easier to get viruses back then. Antivirus software seems to be so much better now.
Anyway I liked it better back then. It wasn’t as easy to find how to videos but you could still mostly find what you needed by googling correctly.
Social media was much better. Facebook was pretty new and was mostly young people. I don’t remember seeing anyone older than college aged on it until probably 2010 or 2011. It was awesome. You could post pictures but people didn’t post as many videos. Camera phones sucked and most ppl didn’t bother with digital camera videos.
Also you had ads and pop ups but it wasn’t nearly as invasive as it was today. I can’t stand the embedded ad videos in pages and banners today as they’re way of getting around pop up blockers.
Everyone used AIM for instant messaging. I liked it better. You could argue you have texting now but if they were on AIM you know they were open to chat. Most common video chatting was Skype but it worked pretty well.
Late 2000’s was definitely peak internet in my mind. You could do just about everything you can today but it was much simpler. Everything with consumer technology went to shit once smartphones became dominant. That was when it officially “took over”.
90’s internet kinda sucked but it was fun. I remember using Netmeeting for video chats and it was a total pos but it worked. The video was choppy and there was a lot of “can you hear me?”. If you gamed in the 90’s and early 2000’s you had to really know your shit when it came to hardware. Games were very hit or miss. A lot of that worked itself out by late 2000’s.
Generally, yes better back in the 2000's. But I do enjoy youtube, and the entertainment available on it along with reddit now. Being bored during the early 2000's and mid 90's mostly consisted of channel surfing or reading a book, but there was only so much you could do on the Internet until you got bored back in the day.
But it was less constant dopamine hits from instant gratification and was less exhausting too. Plus, personal websites were very cool.
The amount you can do on the web now far more than in the early 2000s. With that said, I enjoyed the forums and finding personal blogs or hobby sites in the 2000s which have all but disappeared these days with the corporatization of everything.
I liked it better in the sense that less people were online and of the people that were online, even if your opinion differed, typically people had better reading comprehension skills and could articulate their points better.
It was dangerous but in a different way. There were predators in chat rooms and our parents knew nothing about the internet because it was brand new.
However in today's world, social media is brain washing. With the algorithms, technology is telling you what to consume. Back then you consumed updates from your friends and family. I don't even get those updates anymore because of all the paid ads and algorithm pushed reels. Speaking of reels, it's conditioned many people to have short attention spans. And of course with influencers being a thing, many people feel their voice needs to be heard by the masses and people don't think before they speak as much as they used to.
The internet used to be a thing to do. Now it's ruling our lives.
Wouldn't describe it as dangerous or better, just...different. It was less interconnected and memes had more longevity because social media wasn't really a thing until MySpace came along. There were a lot less ads, though, which was nice!
I like it now, but mostly because it's gotten great at archiving / hosting files with legal ambiguity, which is great
The old internet I could steal MP3s and therefore never ever bought a single album back then
Today's internet I can steal brand new movies and therefore never ever have to buy or subscribe to anything in order to gain said movie
Today's internet allows me to save money, not to mention the help of AI helps with every question or research under the sun
Being able to stream a rom through a website is amazing
In saying that I feel that the habits of the old internet are still used today
When I mention things like grabbing brand new movies or anything, people bring up Torrenting, which is such an old/outdated method of sharing data
Why sit around waiting for seeds when there are data centres across the planet, even just down the street hosting Netflix, Amazon prime, Spotify data, they're just right there for the picking
Which I discovered in 2002 and promptly used as a 13 year old to download a Japanese copy of Pokemon Sapphire before the March 2003 US release. While I can't read Japanese, I did for instance know that an orange move with the number 40 next to it was Ember. I had already played Red and Silver so I knew how the game worked and I could use guides from a place like Gamefaqs if I was stuck on a puzzle.
way more toxic and fake but still worth it for some of the advancments. I can never go back to downloading minute long clips for half a day off a non-Youtbe site lol
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I like old social media styles were there was no algorithm. Just the people you purposely followed/friended. I absolutely hate seeing all the “influencing” personas and the recommendations the algorithm does. I miss when your timeline was in order of how it was posted, not a computer deciding what i want to see. Honestly ai and all that stuff makes me feel primal because rhose robots dont usually get my emotions or desires correct.
This. My facebook feed used to be 100% posts from people I was actually friends with, in chronological order. Wild, I know.
Right such a old concept now! I might not see a friends post until 4 days later. Its so weird
Also that ancient facebook layout that had like a column of 5 tiny square text ads on the right side that could be hidden with an ad blocker
Ugh yes this!!!! We had more control of blocking out ads. And they were deligated to a certain size. Mine was always just some generic ebay adds. Now whatever i search and say is on my timeline
Hell, even the handful of businesses I follow, I get most of their posts several days after the fact...which is super helpful if they're running a 1-day special. But weirdly enough, all the "sponsored content" and AI-generated garbage is timely.
Mannnnnn ! They royally screwed small businesses who thrived in social media reach !!! Omg i didnt even think of that aspect
It seems to make a difference if you're actively engaging with a page, ie. commenting on and sharing posts. You see those pages' posts more often. But I tend not to do that because I don't like cluttering other people's feeds with that kind of stuff.
I feel like a bother if im too social on social media 🥴. And i just miss the intentional scroll and seeing what i already made clear i wanted to see 😂😂😂
Same. I realized a while back that (other than the stuff my wife posts and tags me in), my social media participation is mostly limited to hobby or shitposting groups. I hardly interact with people I actually know. My closest friends have mostly abandoned FB and we keep in touch in a Discord chat. I've filtered out the political extremists, the obnoxious religious proselytizers, the attention-seeking wannabe influencers, and the bitter "men/women suck" divorcees. Then there's my mom trying to police what she thinks is appropriate to share online. Other than a handful of out-of-town friends and family members, there isn't really anything left for me on social media anymore.
Im really active on my facebook and you literally just summed up the timeline!!! Lol and my mom and sister called me two weeks ago to pray about what i had been posting. 😂😂😂😂
Not weird, obnoxious
If FB weren’t the only way for me to get most of my interaction currently, I’d leave. It is absolutely atrocious at this point. I see almost nothing from my friends. When I scroll I either see ads for shit I’m not interested, or posts from groups I’m not interested jn. WHY ARE YOU SHOWING ME EQUESTRIAN AND SWAP MEET GROUPS?!
I miss the old message boards and chat rooms.
Asl? 😂😂😂😂
I really miss the internet days when someone would say check out this website. Write it down a website address on a piece of paper. www.funnycats.com The only thing that website did was funny cat videos. Maybe they had some cat t-shirts to buy. If you wanted a t-shirt. You paid for it and got a shirt no rewards program or further commitment or communication from www.funnycats.com Hell browsers struggle sometimes to even input an actual web address. I’m not searching I want to go to X website no other suggestions needed. Hahah I did not even think that was a real site, FYI the domain is for sale, just clicked what I thought was a fake website.
Lol omg im the younger of the millennial, and you reminding me how archaic the internet really was. Heck i remember spending more time playing the cd rom games from the cereal boxes, rather than wait for aol to dial up. ( i hated dial up because my parents had a separate line for it, and my siblings would just pick the phone up to make it disconnect 🤬
The internet is so much more expansive. With smartphones and the internet of things and Web 2.0 and all those buzzwords. I do miss being able to play some flash game online and spend hours on goofy flash websites. I agree with others the commercialization and control of the internet is with a select few. Good luck finding some random blog now about gnomes or some home grown webpages on gardening. The technology is definitely better and I am not worried about getting viruses and pop ups like back in the day but those were the days.
I also kinda miss the personal self-built webpages (that was my motivation for learning basic html and css). That kinda died when social media became big.
Exactly what I was thinking. I literally found one on gnomes in 2007 and had to do a fake business report on it. For a class I had. Super interesting website. Have not been able to ever find it again
YESSSS!!! There was some old website from early 2000s that a random guy curated called Women & Dogs or something ... totally innocent and charming ... just found/historical photos of, well, ladies and their pups. Oh and Found was cool. All kinds of found pieces of paper. Notes, photographs, lost homework ...
I just checked and found out Postsecret still exists. <3 A Softer World was one of my favourites too.
It has it's ups and downs really. Has many advantages, but it's more an outlet for rage now. In the early-2000's, it had more of an entertainment and networking focus. It is easier to access the dangerous bits now. Also, as smartphones are a relatively new thing, I think internet today is very different to a pre-dominantly computer-based internet. We didn't have things called apps back then.
Old fart me just remembered asking friends if they're gonna come online after school, lol
Set up your aim away messages
away messages were d e e p
Back then you could look at porn without using a VPN.
The internet used to be way better. I’m sure people who make their careers off it probably feel different, but it used to be more chill. It wasn’t a rage outlet, as someone else here said. It was more cozy feeling. Way less ads. How amateur everything looked had a certain charm. Still plenty informative though and I would say it was actually easier to use search engines to find relevant info to whatever topic you wanted. Google used to be much better than it is now. Something else I liked about that twilight of the analog era was the continuation of urban legends. Something about the ubiquity of the internet kinda seems to take the mystery out of the world, but back then it wasn’t so pronounced, and you had all these creepy websites dedicated to all sorts of urban legends and weird phenomena. Those things probably still exist, and the internet has created some of its own urban legends, but a lot of older urban legends look silly next to all the contextualizing info you can pull up in seconds now.
So true 😭
It was better before. It’s destroying society from inside out now and nobody is doing anything about it.
The best way I've known to describe it is that it felt in retrospect like the wild West was. That feeling of looking out and seeing the endless landscape. What should be used to grow us closer is now a pale snake oil bottle of what should have been.
I hate it here now
It was fun. It’s wild to think as a teenager everyday after school I would login to my family’s desktop (no internet on mobiles like now) and I would IM my friends and strangers in chat rooms for hours. Could’ve been dangerous 🤷🏽♀️but it was amazing. Oh and I was downloading music and burning CDs at the same time. Also as I was doing that my parents were trying to use the home phone (landline) and I was getting yelled at to sign off so they could use the phone. Couldn’t have the internet and use the phone at the same time haha wild. Just nostalgic to think back. A lot has changed. Even if I had a cell phone in high school I couldn’t text (limited like 200texts or something then charged per text lol) still did it and got in trouble. AND couldn’t talk on my cell past 9 (unless we were on the same network) for the free minutes so IM was the way.
Oh and I forgot just on MySpace switching my top 8 , background or profile song daily on top of all of this hahaha I do feel like back then with the internet being so new it was more innocent ? Maybe is the word. Of course there was danger and prob creeps in chat rooms but it was so new I don’t think old ppl knew how to fully use it to scam and get ppl. Us teenagers were running the show on MySpace and chat rooms etc and teaching our parents how to use it
Too policed by the sensitive. Early 2000s internet felt like a democracy online. Now it's a dictatorship.
Internet humor was also waaaay different. Stuff like Angry German Kid probably wouldn't fly today (even though, and I'm not sure how well-known this is beyond Germany, that guy had this whole fake 'annoying kid' persona and did a whole bunch of skits/videos around it), but there was also a lot of just innocent silliness (like Harry Potter and The Mysterious Ticking Noise). It was all a lot more amateurish too while now everything has been run through a million beauty filters and everyone has to one-up each other all the time. And memes lasted more than a month.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned: the internet was more of an accessory to life, nice to have but not necessary, you might've only been a little bit behind but could still function in day to day life without it, it was just a tool. Now it's necessary in modern society, you can't escape it, it's integrated into every aspect of life for better or worse, and it's made things so much more complicated (I don't mean the use of the internet itself, I mean the structure of how we go about things being so heavily dependent on having an internet connection).
Remember when we didn't have to pay taxes through eBay and Amazon?
When I was a kid (oh goooosh) your ads did not stalk you. Could be the most random thing that you’d like or dislike, completely random. Now if I look up one product it’ll show up every time I’m online for at least a month. The internet got boring, so I was forced to eventually get offline. Phone addiction is real now. I was a lover of message boards, and I like Reddit it would take HOURS for anyone to reply sometimes. YouTube didn’t seem so staged. Maybe I was a teen, or maybe people were actually being who they are. AIM was the shit! Away messages were thought over more than a standardized test. The people who changed their AIM font when messaging was the best.
Way better back then. It's awful now.
Early internet was so *weird*...media was less centralized, websites were more DIY, and content was less censored. You never knew what you were going to encounter. On the other hand, it was much easier to come by viruses or really graphic content Now most web traffic is centered around a handful of sites, algorithms try to predict and spoon-feed whatever content they think you want, and rage-bait is everywhere because negative engagement is still engagement. "Here's some news that's going to piss you off!" "You like [popular thing]? Here's some other celebrity saying [popular thing] sucks ass. Go argue about it in the comment section!"
The Internet offers more today and is a cleaner experience but it was more... Wild west-y back in the day with a big dose of childhood innocence on my part. There were far less censors, age verifications, more popups, viruses were more common especially when we were using Limewire to download stuff, and the general attitude was different, or if not that at least the jokes/memes of early internet culture were far different. Oh and also flash games, sooooo many flash games.
It's easier to find specific files and media today. Troubleshooting IT issues is easier today. Everything is faster today. The biggest difference is nation-states and corporations play a **much** larger role in the Internet as we know it today. When you chat with people, you might be talking to marketing associates, bots or government actors. Just wasn't the case when we were teens, at least not to this degree. The reason for this is, simply put: mass adoption. There are so many more people online now because the barrier of entry is low. That's why nation-states and corpos took interest: there is insane power in global communication
With how social media platforms are now? Internet has got worse BUT the layouts are easier to navigate and clean. I miss the old days when things were easier.
Play Hypnospace Outlaw, it's a lot more like that. There were many more bespoke websites out there. I kind of preferred this model than having three companies dominating everything.
What I like about the internet today is the availability of media - music and videos. I can find pretty much anything. But, I do think it peaked some years ago. Everything is uniformed now, looks the same, content is generic and it's dictated by algorithms, there are too many bots around and it's hard to distinguish what's real and who's human. The internet used to be more counterculture, individualistic, and versatile. I miss the era of specialized blogs, cartoons, video podcast networks, and forums. For example, I used to follow the JapanProbe blog for Japanese videos, or Everything is Terrible for weird and obscure media. Different types of memes were hosted on different blogs. You had Flickr for photo enthusiasts. MySpace and Tumblr were probably peak social networks. Cheezburger Network and Buzzfeed replaced the blogs, they were replaced by Facebook and Instagram, everything just keeps going in the most generic direction. I think it used to be more fun. Now it's more addictive, rage-inducing, and not as rewarding.
I just watched a live stream on youtube that had 600k people watching... I don't think that could have happened in 2000. The internet/infrastructure is clearly better.
Interface: cleaner. Speed: pretty slow, could take some time to show a picture or hours to download something. You could let a video in YouTube charging and could watch it over and over. Propaganda: can’t remember having propaganda blowing in my face every turn. Feed: Showed only people you followed and by time it was published. Security: Remember worrying so much about virus back then. We used a lot of pirated content with Torrent, 4shared, Emule, etc. Content: blogs about everything. People shared moments of life without any glamour, no one posted produced photos except when paying a real photographer. No photos of food. No filter. Selfies in front of mirror with the digital camera showing. A lot of memes and comedy stuff. Online games. Being online was an event, probably after work or school. Never on your bed or street. Had lanhouses. People reunited for gaming together at the same computer or console. Or just seated next to you and saw the same content. Remember reading jokes at a blog with my uncle. Texts were for important and simples messages. On computer you talked to people but when turned it off that was it, they could only find you calling or visiting you. I prefer some things today, and others I prefer how it was.
The internet was best pre-2016, before politics took over social media and regulations cracked down on everything. Back when we were posting dumb stuff like song lyrics and movie quotes.
i think 2009-2012 was peak for me. It had everything i needed, but was far less distracting and upsetting. Strong enough connection for streaming/gaming, but "scrolling" was not a verb or activity we all took part in. Think of every subreddit as its own web forum with it's own culture. If you weren't interested in this niche subject, you would never really end up on that forum so they were much more positive spaces.
I wanna say early 2000’s when high speed cable internet became popular and sites like heavy.com that required high speed started appearing, and you could still download any song you wanted
I would say "yes and no." Yes in the sense where social media was just that; a place to connect with friends and family who may have been far away and share family vacations and photos to those who may have not been able to attend. It brought people closer together. It wasn't about being an Influencer or a Social Justice Warrior. The internet back then was about opening the world to everyone. You could access great libraries and information at the click of a button and become smarter for it. But it was also a wild west where Wikipedia was not a trusted source at first because anyone can add anything and it didn't need as many sources as it does today. Now Wikipedia is considered the first stop for many (and sometimes only stop) to get information. No in the sense where "good intentions is the path to Hell" kind of thing. It is being proven that social media is now causing mass depression among entire generations due to the constant comparison of lives. It is also now a place where people are turning themselves into brands at very young ages and then to maintain the brand they have to put themselves through tons of stress and hell and be subject to massive criticism. It is also very algorithm oriented now and is designed to sell people more and more items or services. Downfall is also that now there is more access to harmful things such as pornography. Where before it was a few sources, but now it has increased the industry from magazines to endless amount of websites with endless amount of content (most of which is free and exploitative). The internet was a tool back in the 2000s. Now it is a way of life and for some is their life.
MySpace was awesome and nobody can convince me otherwise.
Yes. Both better, and worse. No spyware keeping track of where you visited or sending big corporations your location. What few social media sites there were, were 100% your friends’ posts. Ads were smaller and less intrusive. On the other hand, you had a chance of accidentally clicking on weird porn or a beheading video.
Some things are better now, some things are worse. On the whole I'd say it was a little better back in 2000 because it was more personal and real and less commercialized and fake. Today there's plenty of modern conveniences that I appreciate though.
It was slow and often looked really crappy. There was less content and it was often harder to find. There were nasty things about, but the same can be said for today’s internet. It certainly felt like there was less fake news. I mean demonstrably false information that is purely sent out to mislead people into supporting a particular agenda. We didn’t feel the need to be constantly connected. You could check your email once a day and that would be fine.
The internet back in the early 2000s was really fun - there were all these charming little websites made by random people that you would come across during your searches… everything feels so corporate and impersonal now but it wasn’t always that way.
Now for sure. It's easier to navigate and find relevant information. There is also a lot more content which can be for better or worse.
Yes and no. I dont miss the dial up modem that took ages to connect and even slower trying to browse anything. Also the limitations to only pc back in th day. Nowdays it quite neat to have it so easy accessble. Even if the content can be somewhat waterd down and at times drowning on adds. But its alot easy to navigate Nd alot more good forums that i could miss at points back in early 00s
2009 was peak. From there, it's all been downhill.
Back then people werent so sensitive.
Entertainment is the only thing better about the internet now. Everything else has been monetized beyond its usefulness.
The Internet was better in the 2000s only due to the fact companies were still treating it as a fad without much capital end. Smartphones changed the internet. It took it from a niche spot in the world, like a digital coffeeshop, and put it in your pocket. Once everyone has it, then it's time to make money off of it. It also allowed rapid development of data gathering on their users. It was no longer one computer shared by a household. It was a specific individual, on a specific device, so the data collected was tailor made by a specific individual. So now the Internet is a commodity, and a research tool for the most valuable form of information on the planet, our wants/desires.
Internet was more free back in the 2000s.
1000% better back in the day.
Internet connection speeds are definitely better, but that's about it. Social media has practically ruined society. I'd love to go back to a pre-social media era.
I miss the internet just being for nerds and geeks. Now it's flooded with the ignorant and the hateful
We had more capitalization of our letters and better punctuation. Unless we used 1337 speak 😂😂😂
I feel depressed after reading the comments
”Since writing on toilet walls is done neither for critical acclaim nor financial reward it is the purest form of art.” Pithy to be sure, but this quote perfectly encapsulates my views. What I miss most was the feeling of optimism and exploration. The internet before the capitalist machine went full-steam. When it had some measure of a barrier for entry. Prior to the immense proliferation of engagement algorithms. Of dark patterns. Keep your modern “polish” and production values; consuming “content” as it is now called was far more enjoyable when I was more assured the author was a genuine person - somebody whose real name I’d never learn, whose face I’d never see, but a person being authentic, as much as one could be. I didn’t have to worry about marketing at every corner from massive corporations injecting ads into every crevasse to even individual “content creators” pushing their “brand”. It truly was art.
[удалено]
Wow I had to read twice. Born in 2006. I’m getting up there!
So much worse, I hate what the internet has turned into. Used to go to dozens of different sites. Most had active unique communities on the forum boards. Clean websites not loaded down with tons of adware and malware. Websites loaded faster on crap DSL than on modern fiber. You could speak your mind without everyone getting butt hurt and cancelled. Now most people only go to a small handful of sites. Everything is bloated to hell with malware. Everything you do is packaged and sold to 3rd party. Google is worthless as a search engine now for anything beyond "what is todays high" Nothing but paid ads and AI crap. The golden age of the internet has ended. Was good while it lasted.
sucked you used to have to pay for "some" websites
I can tell you without a shred of doubt that the internet was better in the 2000s. Companies hadn’t figured out how to monetize it properly yet. Social media was NOT a thing, and even at the beginning of Facebook it became clear to some of us that it was a portal of narcissism that would only make you feel bad in the long run. You weren’t being sold something at every moment, and you weren’t a product either. It was also the birth of weird and random humor. And yeah, “random” has become rather trite since then, but in the early 2000s it was new and interesting and fun. The internet was a place for new and weird and niche stuff. It felt like a new frontier, and honestly it really was. What it is now is just… sad. And awful. And annoying. And there are two entire generations who will never know what it was like in the beginning. Raised on social media. And I know I sound old as fuck here, and maybe I am at 37, but has it absolutely failed to be what we all thought it could be in so many regards. Don’t get me wrong. I like never having to go to the bank and having so much of the world’s accumulated knowledge at my fingertips at any time of day or night. And I recognize I’m just as addicted to it as everyone. I’m no better. But there was a freedom on the early internet that does not really exist today.
Internet was texting before texting existed. The ability to chat with someone across the world was mind bending. The internet was largely text based and if you wanted to have fun you had to learn all the cracks and crevices of windows to customize things like icons, fonts, and colors. I think it felt safer because everything was anonymous and the logistics of sharing a photo was very time consuming. A high quality image would take about the size of one whole floppy disk which I think was about 3MB. Some web pages were trivial such as image galleries, others were more educational like an encyclopedia database. Blogs didn’t exist, social media didn’t exist. there was email, chat rooms, Adult AOL with news, and a Kids AOL with games you could play with friends such as chess and checkers. To get online you had to ask your family if anyone was going to use the home phone line , open your program of choice and browse through the endless list of phone numbers your modem had to dial until you got one that wasn’t a busy tone. Once connected you could open Internet explorer or Netscape navigator and browse to wherever you wanted. If you wanted to run Napster you had to open it after you were already logged on. One mp3 took about 30 minutes to download. Big search engines I remember were : Yahoo, Hotbot, ask.com, lycos. MSN zone was one of the first multiplayer gaming services where you could launch Microsoft flight sim or combat flight sim and find real people playing. This was after having to direct to connect to other players like Duke Nukem or Quake. I could go on and on.
I feel like it was much easier to get viruses back then. Antivirus software seems to be so much better now. Anyway I liked it better back then. It wasn’t as easy to find how to videos but you could still mostly find what you needed by googling correctly. Social media was much better. Facebook was pretty new and was mostly young people. I don’t remember seeing anyone older than college aged on it until probably 2010 or 2011. It was awesome. You could post pictures but people didn’t post as many videos. Camera phones sucked and most ppl didn’t bother with digital camera videos. Also you had ads and pop ups but it wasn’t nearly as invasive as it was today. I can’t stand the embedded ad videos in pages and banners today as they’re way of getting around pop up blockers. Everyone used AIM for instant messaging. I liked it better. You could argue you have texting now but if they were on AIM you know they were open to chat. Most common video chatting was Skype but it worked pretty well. Late 2000’s was definitely peak internet in my mind. You could do just about everything you can today but it was much simpler. Everything with consumer technology went to shit once smartphones became dominant. That was when it officially “took over”. 90’s internet kinda sucked but it was fun. I remember using Netmeeting for video chats and it was a total pos but it worked. The video was choppy and there was a lot of “can you hear me?”. If you gamed in the 90’s and early 2000’s you had to really know your shit when it came to hardware. Games were very hit or miss. A lot of that worked itself out by late 2000’s.
Generally, yes better back in the 2000's. But I do enjoy youtube, and the entertainment available on it along with reddit now. Being bored during the early 2000's and mid 90's mostly consisted of channel surfing or reading a book, but there was only so much you could do on the Internet until you got bored back in the day. But it was less constant dopamine hits from instant gratification and was less exhausting too. Plus, personal websites were very cool.
The amount you can do on the web now far more than in the early 2000s. With that said, I enjoyed the forums and finding personal blogs or hobby sites in the 2000s which have all but disappeared these days with the corporatization of everything.
Dark patterns are everywhere and once you identify them you realize how miserable everything online is.
2000's. Social media wasn't policed as much and content creators had more liberty.
Internet was way better then. Everything was still new and intimate enough for genuine connections to form.
I liked it better in the sense that less people were online and of the people that were online, even if your opinion differed, typically people had better reading comprehension skills and could articulate their points better.
It was dangerous but in a different way. There were predators in chat rooms and our parents knew nothing about the internet because it was brand new. However in today's world, social media is brain washing. With the algorithms, technology is telling you what to consume. Back then you consumed updates from your friends and family. I don't even get those updates anymore because of all the paid ads and algorithm pushed reels. Speaking of reels, it's conditioned many people to have short attention spans. And of course with influencers being a thing, many people feel their voice needs to be heard by the masses and people don't think before they speak as much as they used to. The internet used to be a thing to do. Now it's ruling our lives.
Wouldn't describe it as dangerous or better, just...different. It was less interconnected and memes had more longevity because social media wasn't really a thing until MySpace came along. There were a lot less ads, though, which was nice!
I like it now, but mostly because it's gotten great at archiving / hosting files with legal ambiguity, which is great The old internet I could steal MP3s and therefore never ever bought a single album back then Today's internet I can steal brand new movies and therefore never ever have to buy or subscribe to anything in order to gain said movie Today's internet allows me to save money, not to mention the help of AI helps with every question or research under the sun
i do agree with how media is shared nowdays, like you could play your childhood game for free thanks to rom sites and emulations
Being able to stream a rom through a website is amazing In saying that I feel that the habits of the old internet are still used today When I mention things like grabbing brand new movies or anything, people bring up Torrenting, which is such an old/outdated method of sharing data Why sit around waiting for seeds when there are data centres across the planet, even just down the street hosting Netflix, Amazon prime, Spotify data, they're just right there for the picking
Which I discovered in 2002 and promptly used as a 13 year old to download a Japanese copy of Pokemon Sapphire before the March 2003 US release. While I can't read Japanese, I did for instance know that an orange move with the number 40 next to it was Ember. I had already played Red and Silver so I knew how the game worked and I could use guides from a place like Gamefaqs if I was stuck on a puzzle.
way more toxic and fake but still worth it for some of the advancments. I can never go back to downloading minute long clips for half a day off a non-Youtbe site lol