I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
Everything improved a bit when browsers started limiting recursive popups and hidden executables on websites, but for much of the late 90s and early aughts, every click was risky. And oh my god the design of things. I was so happy when the <blink> tag finally fell out of fashion.
What that taught us was to be fucking careful about what you click on on the internet.
I agree about popups and executables (what an absolutely moronic decision to include that crap in browsers), but all the JavaScript BS and “please let us track you” cookie banners in modern websites is a thousand times worse than any use of <blink> or <marquee> could ever be.
If you had a seizure condition, though…
I don’t remember it that way. To me, it was a minefield of viruses, popup ads, chain mail, and unexpected extreme NFSW content.
What, you don’t want to punch the monkey and also have 50,000 pop-up and pop-under windows spawn because you picked the wrong link?
Also, accidentally discovering that python[.]com was NOT where one went to download the scripting language back around 2006, while trying to help a student get her laptop setup. It’s still not, but that’s not how I wanted to learn that fact.It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn’t fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.
I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It’s like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.
I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn’t conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or “like native”, ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.
You didn’t have to be looking for porn – it was super common to run across CP or beheading videos in random niche interest forums posted by trolls. So many times I saw something I did not want to see when clicking for a knitting pattern.
e: I have psychological scars from that Dan Pearl video – for a while in the mid-aughts, it was literally unavoidable unless you stopped using the internet entirely.
On the forums I visited there was an area where new users were allowed, intended for describing who they are and why they should be allowed further.
But generally - I think I might have seen something like that, but without registering it in my memory.
Yeah I think this is definitely a case of rose colored glasses. I absolutely miss the way the internet was 25 years ago but I also do not miss randomly browsing and running across child pornography, I don’t miss every kilobyte being measured to make sure I don’t over use the network, I don’t miss having to have multiple browsers just because a website was written for Netscape and not Explorer, or pop-up adds, viruses, and everything else you mentioned.
Oh, yeah, the browser wars. As a designer during that time, having to learn 5 or more versions of css and JavaScript (which were sometimes competing and broke one another) before code pages were a thing was a nightmare.
And getting kicked off dial-up because someone decided to make a phone call when a large game download was at 97% complete after 5 hours before file caching was really a thing was infuriating.
you sound like you can help me identify that weird square icon that saves my shit
Do you mean these?
They were part of a continuity ritual we performed before they installed cupholders in computers. You’d have to feed them to your pc one at a time when requested, often whilst entering an incantation in the command prompt. The meaning may have been lost to time, we still use their icon to honour that ritual.
(I can’t believe I found these so quickly.)
Came across a bunch that have old backups of someone’s data. Also some 5 1/4". Not sure if magnets or a hammer/scissors is the best security destruction 😆
If you’re concerned about privacy, fire nearly always works.
I’ll just leave these here…
…raspberry pi 4B for scale 'cos i can’t put by banana next to them, this ain’t the 90s ya know?
Boo.
Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it’s on a “big evil” service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it’s easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there’s other ways to find things than search engines, and there’s other search engines than the big ones anyways.
There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people’s writings, link them, sign their guestbook.
Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don’t sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You’ll find some if you poke around the small web enough.
A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren’t the default Internet experience, they’re hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it’s very inspiring and comforting.
Its not that there is a shortage of these spaces, its that they are not popular. I’m not sure they ever were popular amongst the general public though, to be fair. Personally I think its okay to have a somewhat small community.
Yes, I like it smaller! Ideally you have a sort of fractal structure of a bunch of smaller, tighter communities, which are also bound up in larger but looser communities. Then you can get the benefits of broad exposure and resource sharing from large communities, as well as the benefits of meaningful individual engagement and respectful kinship from smaller communities. I think that personal sites along with forums and the rest of the Internet really can do a great job of bringing this about.
As with many things, the responsibility ultimately lies on the individual to protect themselves and resist falling into bad patterns. Most primarily, maintaining your small community takes effort, and it’s much easier to just be a passive part of a very large community that subsists on infrequent uninvested involvement from many people. It’s even easier to be part of a “community as a service” like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. where all the incentives behind community building responsibilities have been supplemented with real income or fame. But of course then the people making posts, suggesting ideas, steering trends, managing communities, etc. are all in it for reasons that are not necessarily aligned with the well-being of community members. Hence the platform becomes a facade of a healthy community. Really good community upkeep seems to need to be done out of a love for the community, and any income you collect is to support that, rather than the other way around. But love for a community is often not sufficient fuel to power someone to serve huge groups out of the goodness of their heart, when they don’t even know 99% of the members. Not to mention that even if someone really is that altruistic and empathetic, the time and resources become unfeasible. So ultimately, a fractal model or an interleaved model seems to be the only one that could work.
Don’t get me wrong. Large communities are awesome in their own ways and have their own benefits. They have more challenges, though. Ultimately the best way to build a good large community is by building a good small community.
Would you say all of that is true for communities outside in the real world? Ive a theory that groups can become so large the negatives nearly always outweigh the positives but I haven’t really had time to think it through entirely.
Thank you for mentioning neocities. I did not stumble over this project until now and I love it!
I always look back to the 1960s visionaries and their charmingly naive ideas about the future use of computers.
I suspect that if they could have seen the actual future they would have become plumbers.
We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.
Ads are fine relatively speaking. Its the data brokers that are the real problem
There were also “no girls on the Internet”. Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop’s petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.
It wasn’t uniformly better.
We can’t, and shouldn’t go back. Ever forward.
Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube’s reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I’m not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn’t profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).
Rose colored glasses.
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
Listen, I hate capitalism as much as the next guy, but that’s not the case. Normies ruined the internet, then capitalists latched onto the normies.
Normies ruined the internet
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Cyptocurrency freaks, the click bait video game ads, and the endless AI generated slop.
What was this about my dear sweet mother, who can barely check her email anymore because of all this crap, ruining the Internet?
Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse
The normies are fine, the problem is that capitalists consolidated everything into 4 websites and then started pushing the unprofitable weirdos like us off those sites.
It’s not a big deal, we’ve made niches for ourselves and will continue to do so because we can’t rely on corporate services not to enshittify.
Both are rights, but the normies definitely destroyed the internet culture. They invaded forums without any regard for the rules set before (remember “RTFM”?), and when capitalism arrived, they all moved to commercial sites.
It’s not a big deal
It’s absolutely a big deal. Normies getting propagandized by capitalists are how we got fascism, and no amount of “making niches for ourselves” will save us from that.
True
Plus the corporate web constantly kills off our niche spaces in the effort to make them palatable for advertisers by sanitizing minorities out of their own spaces.
I used to be super active in r/traaaa before the 3rd party plugin exodus and subsequent shutdown of the forum. Now? Those people either made a new Reddit or scattered to the 4 winds, and a similar space has struggled to take off here on Lemmy. And that’s just one of many instances of this sort of thing happening.
They would sell you the rope to hang yourself … and market you the idea that it would be a good and popular thing to hang yourself with their Deluxe Hangman 3000 Super rope made from naturally sourced hemp.
I think the expression is the capitalists will sell you the rope with which you’ll hang them.
So long as you’re planning to hang them next quarter – they can’t see that far.
How much?
Stop blaming capitalism - people are the problem, not the systems they create.
The average person is a fucking retard and that’s not changing - when they reach a space, it goes to shit.
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Lmao speak for yourself with the “self loathing” label - I hate the rest of y’all because you’re dumb as fuck.
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As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.
I think a problem is that different people have different meanings attached to the word capitalism
when some people hear it they think of trillionares exploiting homeless people, but when I hear it I think of private property and markets and competition
Im chill with the 2ed meaning, as long as it doesnt get out of control (like nowadays)
they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
They would sell you a subscription for the rope nowadays.
Capitalism ruins everything, just look at America
Britain ruined North America (ask the many natives of colonial times) before America could ruin the rest of the continent, then itself
I’m not sure I’d pin the ruining of north America on the Brits. They got that ball rolling.
While the big three empirical powers that colonized the Americas are all at fault, they are late comers compared to the Spanish. By the time the British started their first colony Desoto had ripped through appalachia, on a quest for gold, and had murdered, raped, and enslaved many natives. More importantly though, he introduced most of the tribes to old world diseases, which was apocalyptic to them.
True, that ball was already rolling when the Brits kicked it, but my point is that it didn’t stop being kicked afterwards either. Or to this day, really.
Oh yeah, the Native American genocide is still happening. These days it is mostly ignoring treaties to take their land for things like oil pipelines, but still going on.
completely ahistorical, the Internet has had the same problems for basic its entire existence
Online tolling and raging have been around far longer than the mid 2000s.
If anything I’d say the Internet has gotten nicer overall.
There was always a tacit understanding you were coming into someone’s house. Sometimes quite literally. The server for a forum I used for 20+ years was in various apartment closets most of that time. House rules, so to speak, weren’t controversial.
Now everyone’s used to using centralized commercial servers for rent, with things like ads and liability insurance. Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn’t.
Social media is considered a public space, even when it isn’t.
Like when people claim their right to free speech was denied because a privately-owned website banned them. They seem to think that if a platform allows them to speak publically, it’s the same as saying something out in a public street.
In reality, it’s more like being in a venue with an open mic - it’s a private (and likely commercial) space by default. If you go up on stage and say something the owners or managers don’t like, you absolutely can be kicked out for it. Private websites, including social media, are the same way.
I’m reminded of some business-person(?) saying that people often forget that “store this on the cloud” is basically saying “store this on someone else’s computer”. I have used this reframing a few times to help ground discussions around data infrastructure.
Yup. Mainstream social media is chaos, not community. I would even extend this to fedi if we aren’t careful.
It was for sure toxic af, but a lot less commercial. Actually the early internet was incredibly hostile to corps, but then the banner ads came, and the eyeballs, and the ads started actually making more money than just server costs, and it was all over.
Yeah, i remember the fucking aim chat bots fucking ruining everything
I miss old YouTube so much it hurts omg. i miss how it wasn’t about engagement, branding, money or camera quality, it was about broadcasting yourself and having fun. now it’s become a bland corporate shell of what it used to be and half of my recommendations are AI slop lol
source: I’m so old I remember when YouTube vids were rated with stars and everyone had neon channels with funky text
I miss playing amv’s in the background while drawing final fantasy fan art.
Freetube my friend
Do people generally just watch YouTube recommendations? Literally my entire usage of YouTube has been looking for something in particular (how tos or whatever) or I have a large amount of channels I’m subscribed to that I go look at their channel specifically for any new content I want to watch.
For that usage pattern, I recommend the Freetube app to block Google from spying.
I mean, yeah man that’s literally how 95% of people under 30 watch YouTube.
I only ever go straight to the Subscriptions page. I’ve got enough good quality channels to keep me entertained for long enough. I’ll occasionally check out a new channel form the suggestions on the sidebar, and I’ve found enough good new ones that way to keep me doing it, but it’s not a frequent occurrence. The thing I like about these services is that you can curate whatever experience you like by being sufficiently selective with what you click on, and the more you click on good quality stuff, the more stuff like that it’ll show you.
I have a roommate that watches YouTube like that. He was out of work for a long time and basically watched YouTube all day. I saw him finish videos and click on a recommended one.
Naturally he’ll say the craziest shit sometimes but most people around us are the same. It really sucks and I can’t wait to move out of this living situation.
I listen to lots of music on youtube, just random playlists in the background. Unfortunately, there is a TON of AI music on there now, and it’s really hard to tell the difference these days.
They took our jobs and our art.
I use YouTube music and the community playlists on there aren’t bad.
Just wished the player didn’t break when content warnings popped up, can’t play RATM as a result.
I don’t have that problem
I miss being able to tell at a glance whether an instructional video was trash. I have the “return youtube dislikes” extension but it doesn’t work as well for a multitude of reasons.
Google did not work great. Finding what you’re looking for resulted in going through a ton of pages of results. It was chaotic.
Ah yes, the halceon days of non-stop pop-up ads and malware taskbars. /s
Not to mention that everything they mentioned was absolutely started to become what it is today. Nothing changed, they just progressed their plans over 20 years. Pretending it was all started with benevolent intentions is naive at best.
Are you telling me Bonzai Buddy was not really my Buddy?
It sucks because it’s beginning to feel like a life wasted. I got in early, my career pre-dates the 1st .com crash. My first browser was Mosaic, then shortly became Netscape with the big pulsating “N” animation.
I LOVED the early internet. I loved the personal sites, webrings, IRC and newsgroups. I remember the first time I spoke with someone on the other side of the world (hello to my Canberra friend, it’s me, your midwestern buddy). I felt part of something that was new and exciting and fun.
Then ads came and it’s just gone to shit ever since. To the point where I now hate being online, all my shit is selfhosted and I barely interact with anything besides lemmy and mastodon (they still feel like the actual internet).
I used to be slightly disappointed my kids didn’t turn out as nerdy as me. Now I am just thrilled that I was able to be a cautionary tale for them.
I’m not clear on what you mean by “a life wasted” — can you elaborate? I’m getting the sense that you’re quite jaded from the early internet dying, but I don’t understand why you consider this to be a waste (or what you mean by being a cautionary tale).
Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that I am probably similar levels of nerdy as you, but I am somewhat younger than you . This means my early experience of the internet is quite different, and I am endlessly fascinated by what came before — in an odd way, it feels like learning about my own “cultural heritage”, so to speak.
My career has been in building infrastructure for internet services. I got into this line of work because I felt like it was democratizing knowledge and bringing people together. The way it’s instead gone, I regret being part of it, and I wish I would have gone into another line of work.
Start using gopher today
More of a Gemini person, myself. On Offpunk or Geopard, depending on the mood.
It was, but… this morning I pulled out my pocket computer that also can make calls, started streaming the Disco Elysium soundtrack, and proceeded to drive across two cities. There were no pauses or hiccups in the stream.
The early 2000s mind cannot comprehend this.
But surely if you hit any bumps while driving, the disc skipped, right?
Sudden flashback to the first day of getting a rio mp3 player and using my tape deck converter… the lack of skips brought a tear to my eye.
What’s your favourite track on the Disco Elysium soundtrack (if you have one)?
That’s a tough one. It hits so many moods.
Detective Arriving On The Scene or Precinct 41 Major Crimes Unit are up there.
Whirling-in-Rags 8 AM gets a lot of replays along with 8 PM.
The Cryptozoologists sounds almost identical to a song I made in Ableton in 2008 and it trips me out.
But I have blasted Ecstatic Vibrations, Totally Transcendant the most I guess.
Man, I gotta finish the game. I think we left off around the point where we’ve figured out that a sniper shot the victim and we’ve figured out that it must have come from one of three locations or so. Last thing I remember is the church and those party-goers in the tent - not sure where we’re supposed to go next
I remember reading comments on Slashdot circa 2005 “explaining” why video streaming would never replace physical media. I totally bought it at the time.
This was a moment in time when Netflix existed, but it only sent DVDs through the mail. Only took a few years before their streaming service took off. Also, YouTube showed up around that time (and then Google bought it).
and netflix wasn’t even the first one to do streaming, years before them some startup bought one physical disk for each stream and if they ran out of copies you had to wait for someone else to finish watching the movie, it was like a digital library. they did it to avoid copyright issues but they got sued into the ground and died. then netflix happened and now we have another cable tv subscription instead of an internet
Fuck. I almost forgot Google didn’t always own YouTube…
