If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff
I've been though the whole period and look upon all of it with fondness and appreciation for my experiences.
I don't long for any good old days though, I've always been working to build new, better days, and I've never been so excited as I am right now with the upcoming launch of truly autonomous decentralised technology from Autonomi.
So not AI. Jury still out there, but I see massive change and hopefully benefits beginning later this year from a sea-change in peer-to-peer.
@molly0xfff Websurfing! The ability to jump from link to link as topics interest me!
That's the one thing which to me feels like it really has disappeared. Even on blogs, its rare for me to find them linking the concepts they discuss, & if they do its to previous articles of theirs.
Wikipedia seems to be the last bastion of it! Though that's also internal links.
I try to make up for this, give my readers a taste of what I miss. But that just informs me of how difficult linkifying is!
StackOverflow has a social rule to not just link, but quote or paraphrase the source to avoid links becoming 404.
I myself on my blog write the necessary information I want to share, and link/reference to other sites, hoping they will stay. Would be great if I also had a local archive with some of its content, but that would close down due to copyright issues.
@alcinnz@molly0xfff Basically, the Internet seems permanent, but it is still pretty volatile. Sure, Barbara Streisand's house will keep existing, but only because people care.
Web 3.0 wants to change this, but this is up to a certain point where it requires clients to share and pin. It is a mere facade of web pre-2.0 where sharing is the center of attention.
@molly0xfff websites maintained by experts on a topic, using space provided by their ISP or institution, without any monetization or tracking. Also, the prevalence of text, and a view that any serious website would not clutter the screen with animations and autoplay video (even though unserious ones always did).
@molly0xfff The web was great before marketer's and the monetization of everything ruined it. Also, for those of us with slow or spotty connections, the bloat of modern websites is a massive pain. Looking forward to your article!
@molly0xfff I miss the web from about 20 years ago. I miss forums, personal websites, small communities, and when Google actually gave good search results. I hate how forums disappeared and reddit took over. I hate most social media platforms. I would rather go to a small community and talk to people there. I miss the web when there were less algorithms and videos. I don't like going to news websites and a loud video starts playing. I prefer reading the articles.
@molly0xfff I miss search engines showing me only results that actually contained my search terms (and didn't try to guess what I "actually" meant, didn't show me barely related results, didn't force massive numbers of ads, videos, "similar searches" or other junk and actually did respect when I used searches that included quotes or negatives etc. In short Google (and a few other search engines) of the late 1990's early 2000's.
Then I could actually do a search and find no results and trust it
@molly0xfff where to start? The late 80's till about 2010 were the best. Especially when - no google, no algorithms, no ads, no social media (lots of communications through blogs), few agendas, little misinformation, no monetisation, few creepy people/scams/phishing/hacking etc etc. No influencers.
Without infinite scroll, MiBs of JavaScript to render a single-page information website, the slowness, the badly reimplemented in JS scroll, the accessibility issues of all that, and the general jankyness.
With links working immediately, instead of a weird half-second delay because every link is now overloaded with fifty different event handlers that are not actually needed for any of the functionality.
@molly0xfff I miss the feeling, misplaced or otherwise, that the Web had no ulterior motive behind it. It wasn’t there to collect information on you, to sell you something every 2 seconds, to control what you think or even to make you feel good or bad about yourself. It was just an information superhighway that you could race (or cruise) along however you wanted to.
@molly0xfff Personally I miss the anarchic days of 1990s net art. However, for people with shorter Internet memories, I'd point to RSS (1999) as a democratic protocol that let anyone be a publisher. While the shuttering of Google Reader (2013) marked the encroachment of publishing monopolies online, the benefits of Really Simple Syndication persist to this day—for example making it easy for anyone to distribute a podcast on multiple platforms.
@molly0xfff Disinformation was the distinct minority of Internet content rather than on par with truth, was typically poorly, rather than professionally, produced and was not easily globally distributed. No mass-induced multinational terror that clinking a single innocent looking link could forever ruin you financially at any time. Much less than the present 100% of internet service providers stored highly private information about you, analyzed it with AI and sold it to advertisers.
@molly0xfff I read someone say “I miss when there was a million websites about 3 things instead of 3 websites about a million things”. I think that’s what I miss in a way.
Curated lists of sites, Search results filled with websites made by real people.
Sites made with simple tools that you didn’t need to go to university to understand. A more human web.
The web needs more gardens and fewer shopping malls.
@molly0xfff Proper many-to-many threaded conversations on mailing lists that I could participate in, but also be caught up with at the end of every day.
RSS feed full of webcomics.
... I think that's what I miss, but I'm not sure I'd participate in them anymore. I never did figure out the best way to "sync" my reading "context" with my phone for either.
@molly0xfff I miss the feeling that the web is a big world where everybody had their own little islands I would visit, but now we all just get together at the same crappy hotel.
@molly0xfff I mostly miss two things: The pre-#EternalSeptember#Usenet where many people gave polite, well-considered long-form answers (Some of that still exists in some groups, but most are dead, which is at least better than riddled with shit, as they were until Google Groups defederated) and the trolls were easily plonked. The #Fediverse is as close to that as you can get nowadays, though it still feels very rushed. 1/3
@molly0xfff The other is websites that focused on content, not "page impressions" and "retention". Today even most special interest/hobby sites are keen to cram "metrics/tracking" down your throat and are designed to be slick as fuck and try to grab your attention/iritation by the throat, but with, comparatively, little substance. The closest analogue to that is #Gemini, but sooo many people abandon their capsules after a short stint. 2/3
@molly0xfff In short: I prefer a tech/science-content-oriented, slow-paced, low-hype/drama #smolweb, though definitelywith the societal changes in the importance of diversity, representation, etc. Usenet was, I think, relatively good for its time, but in retrospect one can't help but recognize it for the mostly-white, male, academic, elitist club that it obviously was by extension of being very much a university thing... 3/3
@molly0xfff I personally miss forums and individual websites. Both disappeared with the rise of social media. Forums have a huge advantage over (corporate) social media in that a) it is a vault of knowledge because it is easy to search and/or find threads in relevant categories, while I am lucky to find a post of mine again if I didn't bookmark it and b) you can just ban trolls and people who are being arseholes from the forum. No "dni" needed.
@molly0xfff And personal websites were often just passion projects. I learned how to create a website from scratch to make one about The Lion King. I remember countless fansites on Geocity. I used to do reenactment and there was a fountain of knowledge on the groups' personal websites about patterns and old domestic animal breeds and cooking and what have you!
Some of these sites still exist but most of them don't. And I feel the web is poorer for it.
@molly0xfff not being subjected to endless, utterly pervasive surveillance and instead thinking of the technology as potentially democratising access to knowledge for the betterment of all. Turns out the only knowledge some want is how to impose their will on others.
@molly0xfff personal blogs and RSS.
And by personal I mean the cool blogs that had an extensive article about C++ and then a picture of their dog.
Everything feels a little too professional these days.
@molly0xfff
I miss the time when forums and newsgroups were the main social medias and people actually read blogs. A time of low to no virality, which meant low to no toxicity. A time of diversity, of constant discovery, a time when you often told yourself "how did I get there?". Today, most people don't get out of their comfort zone because of algorithms pampering them. I still use the web like this today, but most people don't, and it makes the 20 years old positivist me of 1997 really sad.
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