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.
Relatedly, things that didn’t expect an always-on connection. Email could be queued, web pages could be downloaded and cached (and they didn’t have a thousand dependencies dynamically loaded — you could reasonably expect that a cached page would render the same as a live page)
@molly0xfff I miss the era of personal web sites started out of genuine admiration for something, rather than out of a desire to farm a few advertising pennies
@JasonW@molly0xfff This. You wanted to identify a song? Type some of the lyrics into a search engine and hope that somebody transcribed the same lyrics onto their fansite. You needed to know a fact? Better hope some guru had taken the time to share it, or it'd be time for a trip to the library
Not having information instantly easy to find meant that you really treasured your online discoveries. You'd bookmark the best sites on whatever topics you cared about and feel no awkwardness about emailing a fellow netizen (or signing their guestbook to tell them) about a resource they might like. And then you'd check back, manually, from time to time to see what was new.
The young Web was still magical and powerful, but the effort to payoff ratio was harder, and that made you appreciate your own and other people's efforts more.
@molly0xfff I like the web now, but "the good old days" are basically everything before Facebook. Especially the 90s where it felt like a playground with unlimited possibilities and everybody was having fun.
(I know not everyone was having fun, it just felt like that).
@molly0xfff I used to have a list of websites I'd visit every day, various blogs, webcomics, and other similar sites. Those all died, and were replaced by the big social networks. This makes it a lot harder to see the stuff I want to see. It's also depressing because in order to see the same type of content I have to see a bunch of ads, and none of that ad money is going to the artists / creators that I care about.
@fancysandwiches@molly0xfff i'll have to fight you one the webcomic thing haha we're still here with our own websites! It's just that very few people are comfortable enough to visit :c
@batichi@molly0xfff Yes, some webcomics are around and using their own websites and I love that! But there are a bunch I used to follow religiously that are either entirely gone, or no longer have their own dedicated website. I'm just really miffed to see some creators sharing their content on various platforms where they have thousands of followers, but get no money from doing that. You can at least put ads on your own site and get some money out of the deal.
@fancysandwiches@molly0xfff unfortunately for creators those platforms pay more (even though the payment is ridiculously low and you have to be really lucky) than running google ads. Many of us have some sort of tipping feature to jump the middle man all together but it's hard to get people to donate.
I've been doing webcomics myself for years and only broke close to even on events like Kickstarters when i could finally print a book.
@batichi@molly0xfff I'm not really talking about platforms that actually pay creators (though, as you stated those aren't perfect). I'm complaining about some folks posting exclusively to places like Instagram or Twitter. I can't really view any content on Instagram because I don't have an account and they make it very difficult to see much of anything without one. Even if I did have an account I'd have to see a ton of ads, but the creators aren't getting paid by Instagram.
@molly0xfff Information density. Not just less padding on content, but the simplicity of the content. Pages that were mostly lightly-styled html with some images.
@irenes@molly0xfff
I miss the early 1980s Usenet. I learned massive amounts by asking questions and getting back ideas on where to do further research.
@molly0xfff For me, it's before Enshittification started. When I could still trust that a website would not eventually always try to abuse me or my data.
@molly0xfff I feel like people used to do more stuff just for the heck of it and not for clicks or monetary gain. Just making stupid flash movies voor shits and giggles for instance. As per usual shit went downhill when money became important.
@molly0xfff A smaller web. It was fine if your post or website wasn't visible or even findable by masses of individuals - that wasn't the point. It was discovery and community once you found your spot. Enjoying the discussions in front of you. Today, we must consume everything all the time all at once and be infuriated if we can't.
@molly0xfff I miss when it was more person to person. People had "home pages" and websites, often part of a ring of like minded or thematically relevant places to visit.
I miss when the content was made by humans for other humans to look at, instead of being directed at some algorithm that must be gamed to gain visibility, or to ensure it generates value for shareholders.
Forums and Mailing list culture in itself, while not devoid of its own problems, was preferable.
@molly0xfff the hope, the innocence before the grifters came. I still have so many good friendships from this days. The times when it was not obvious that twitter would survive. The fail whale, Jaiku, FriendFeed, tweetups.
@molly0xfff Visiting a website for news about video games and seeing news... not a bunch of SEO game "guides" or AI generated garbage.
Also the days when Google would experiment with fun, playful stuff for more than a year and leave it up and running even if it wasn't immediately successful.
@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.
For me, it was the high level of "human" that was the original web. Directory builds, web pages, heck even protocols like HTTP were all fairly human friendly.
You knew someone had to make all of it. Someone had to bodge it together with only a vague idea if it might work.
We lost a lot of that in the ideal of being "efficient" and "optimized".
@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 (self-hosted) blogs were great, because you'd get a link to something interesting, read the blog post, and the entire experience was tinged with quirks from the author. And then you'd find other interesting things on that same host, or linked to from the host.
Kind of like going down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, if every Wikipedia page had vastly different colors/themes/fonts/layouts, copious information about the page's author, and no standards at all.
@molly0xfff Very different experience from watching youtube video after youtube video, or reddit comments/posts, or even livejournal/facebook/etc posts where people write or create content with their own quirks, but everything surrounding it is extruded through the same platform theme/layout, and manicured by the same moderators/employees/megaconglomerate.
@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.
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