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 miss the messiness. Every website was bespoke, and webcore looked like delightful garbage. It said something about the person who designed it. They put it there on purpose. It was human. Now everybody uses the same three templates.
I miss phpbb forums for niche topics. Tight knit communities full of unrepentant cringe. The joy of finding something truly bespoke and bizarre.
I miss the golden days of forums, before Facebook groups
the golden days of Craigslist, before Facebook Marketplace
When we had to host our game servers and we could build communities, before instant matchmaking
I miss the days we could trust online reviews, before affiliate link blogspam and SEO gaming
I miss the days before every website and every app’s sole purpose of being became capturing and selling data about me, or filling my screen with of ads
@molly0xfff Like so many other people: individual blogs with interesting things. When it felt like there was always more out there that was interesting and you just hadn’t learned about it yet. Google Reader, favoriting posts and sharing them with friends.
@molly0xfff I miss webrings and chunky graphics! Things these days feel too smoothed out and polished.
It's kind of like the Windows 98-era GUI aesthetic; it felt tangible but not to the point of skeuomorphism. I liked when my computer was making consistent visual metaphors.
@molly0xfff It felt easier to discover more authentic and unfamiliar writing from new people. Today it feels like the filter bubbles are very strong and the writing is a lot more commercial / professional.
@molly0xfff I miss when the Internet wasn't just another means of profiting off people but instead was a place to find people to talk about your hobbies and interests. All things seemingly now devolve into making money but I think that's just a product of countless years of income disparity between working class and the oligarchs.
@molly0xfff I liked the home-made sites. I remember being astonished and delighted to come across a site that was just pages of jokes about banjos! I liked the "webrings" - once I found a site that was about a topic I was interested in I could just click "random" and see more. I liked that the web was not overrun by spam and ads. The social media was specific-topic message boards and they felt like a small group.
@molly0xfff Top thing I miss is instant messaging. Specifically, I miss the culture of being "away" or "available": I miss seeing someone online I haven't talked with in a while, and striking up a conversation. Without that signal that someone is around and actually interested in talking, it's a lot harder to feel up to messaging someone.
Also modern text conversations tend to drawn-out asynchronous affairs, while IMs tended to be more present in the moment, IMHO.
I loved being able to click on "view source" and usually within and hour understand everything about how that page worked. Now its just .... Javascript Turtles all the way down.
@molly0xfff are there really any “good old days”? Everything that is wrong now was wrong then (more or less), just on a much less massive, life disrupting scale. (I’ve been online since most online wasn’t http based - early 90’s - and BBS before that).
@molly0xfff@matthiasott Unexpected communities of people connected without large companies involved. Goofy esoteric experiments. Creating ephemeral things without worrying about how they might be used by some nefarious third party.
The feeling that just by putting something up on the web, it was now a part of a larger conscious collective instead of just another junk mail flyer drifting down an already overstuffed gutter.
Usenet in the 90ies (esp. comp.lang.java). People with the same interests and helping each other
Altavista and then early Google
Websites with reams of content written/curated by a single person (some still exist and still new ones get created e.g. https://otokano.com/colors-by-pigment/)
@molly0xfff I have been too online since I was a teenager in the 90s. Made Geocities pages, lived on IRC and ICQ, used newsgroups, etc.
I don’t really miss it. It’s always been balkanized (various chats, various phpbbs, slashdot, digg, something awful). The same arguments around moderation.
The tech was just awful. Browsers had splash screens they loaded so slowly. JPEGs were progressively loaded. Flash and Java abounded. Security was nonexistent.
It was more like a forest. Wild. Chaotic. And surprising. Requiring exploration and delighting when you found a new village.
Now it’s more like a city. Busy, noisy, full of adds and well trodden streets.
As a result, a muscle I’ve lost is how to find villages of people that care about a specific thing. I don’t know how to join a new forum and start talking. It’s like I’m on a street with everyone passing each other by.
@molly0xfff to me, there seemed to be the possibility in the early 90s of a more egalitarian society, a leveling of the playing field where everyone could have the same level of access to whatever information was available.
Very soon thereafter, Microsoft got busy crushing Netscape, so the writing should have been on the wall that rich tech companies would not be playing nicely.
I didn’t foresee all of the tracking, the sale of personal information, the surveillance. Or those Boston Dynamics robots which scare the bejeebus out of me.
@molly0xfff I miss a web where the only ads you saw were on the pages of businesses. I miss innovations done in the web space largely by people who had an idea and who made a small company because they loved the web, not because they just loved money or wanted to make something built-to-flip. I miss before people were millionaires. I miss when there was a pretty good web-based search for Usenet. I miss search engines which all did something a little different. I miss a small SXSW. I miss Brad.
@fraying Your remembrances @jessamyn brought back a vivid memory of Mols (Molly Holzschlag) debating web standards with folks at a W3C face-to-face meeting. :( I miss Mols.
@molly0xfff I'm simple. What I miss is the days (2003-2013) when I and the people I share interests/values with could gather together in single shared spaces and have conversations about things we cared about.
After this was a period where people like me couldn't use public spaces cuz everyone was being chased out of public by organized right-wing harassment which the platforms coddled; and now, everything's balkanized into walled-off, corporate-controlled private spaces (Facebook, X, Discord).
@molly0xfff I was also online (BBSes/early Internet) from 1993-2003 but I'm not going to categorize that in my "good old days" because back then we were just using IRC and IRC just isn't that good. Yeah, I said it.
I guess I could do it still, but going to geocities to find final fantasy art on a dedicated fan page was nice.
It seemed more hand-made, more for us.
Or finding a website that someone hosted on their own, not affiliated with any platform, and then sharing that with friends. Seemed like whoever made the website had their piece of internet real estate and owned it.
On that note, I think he still exists, but wasn’t there a guy who did flash art, and it was great?
@molly0xfff search results containing actual useful knowledge from individuals who love their subject rather than pages of unrelated garbage that people want to sell me.
@molly0xfff 🤔 I think I'd say the “good old days" of the internet were before the rise of the big social media and ecommerce giants, when everything was scattered.
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