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?
Start using gopher today
More of a Gemini person, myself. On Offpunk or Geopard, depending on the mood.
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.
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.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.)
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?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.
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.
Boo.
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…
What that taught us was to be fucking careful about what you click on on the internet.
Google did not work great. Finding what you’re looking for resulted in going through a ton of pages of results. It was chaotic.
It was capitalism. Proves that they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nah, the internet has always sucked it just has gotten worse
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?
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.
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)
As long as we’re blaming something instead of coming up with a new system of distributing goods and services.
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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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they would sell to you the rope to hang them.
They would sell you a subscription for the rope nowadays.
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.
Not sure. I still remember the Great-NetNews-AOL-Hate (aka ‘me-too’) of 1995 :)
/s, I think
I first used the internet in 1992. It was nice and quiet back then. You could send emails and poke around with a text browser and gopher. Then you could think “Welp, not much to see here” and go outside or read a book.
I’m part of the eternal September. It was glorious for us, but the old timers hated our ass.
Exactly this. Shit I remember when the alt.* tree was added to USENET. The amount of the cabal talk and how the argument actually was: “No, nobody wants to pay to host your racist rants”. And some of the worst stuff I see on Reddit today is light-years better than what the Internet was in plain sight back in the day before cracking down on things actually came around.
I’m glad person in the imaged post was happy with the Internet back then, but it was far from “human and genuine”. This is absolutely some rose tinted nostalgia. What they miss is small niche communities and this kind of talk is exactly how “get off my lawn” elderly people get started.
it was far from “human and genuine”.
Are racist rants and worse not “human and genuine?”
A lot of it wasn’t genuine.
Most of it was written by three kids in a trench coat pretending to be Chuck Norris.
I mean… how old is 4chan? …/b/?
I was on it mid/late 2000s. I dont know when it was formed, but i was definitelt on it around 06
Edit: The internet says it was launched in 03
Domino image with “Lowtax bans anime from General Bullshit” on one end and “American fascism” at the other.
It’s a pretty worthless site now … I think the same 20 people post there round the clock every day for the past 20 years.
Well my point was more that there’s a bit of a rose-tint in this person’s description of the “early internet”… unless they mean really early, like ARPANET early.
Plenty of rage-bait attention seeking in the mid-2000s.
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).
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Yeah, I remember when I first got access to the internet in the 90s and it was mostly forums and whatnot run by hobbyists. Finding stuff was a bit tricky, but Yahoo was largely usable to find stuff. Wikipedia didn’t exist, but encyclopedia brittanica or whatever was a thing and worked somewhat okay online. Pictures bigger than a thumbnail loaded like a slideshow on dialup, but text was responsive, and text-based online games were becoming more and more common.
Yahoo search? Alta Vista ftw
Lycos was also pretty rad.
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!
Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.
90’s internet was awesomer. It was simple and chill and small. We hand-wrote our silly little HTML pages and freely published our email addresses. I once mailed some random person a check to pay for a piece of shareware. They were the true halcyon days of the internet.
<blink>!!!I miss
<marquee>myself.
As quiVadisHomines says, too, the
90’s'90s net was a simpler time; but I think that was because it was well-backed by schools and even then mostly unknown – September Effect notwithstanding.Is it capitalism or just the tribe-too-large problem? Both, where we’re not united enough to socially correct the behaviour that would be knocked down sooner with a smaller group?
Anyway, I miss the enforced simplicity of no-images/rare-images Usenet, and how it highlighted the writing and the ideas.
It’s beyond me to dream up a suitable Usenet replacement, but I know for sure that FB, IG, Lemmy, they’re solving a different problem.
I’m not that “way back when everything was better” person, but I agree.
Nothing was monetized mid-2000s? That sentence, while still an exaggeration, would have made sense 10 years earlier. Also “ragebait and attention seeking” were rampant on these “forums focused on discussion”.
I was playing with some old UNIX software, and in the help text the dev said they were collecting foreign currency and asked people to send postcards with foreign currency, listing their full name and personal address. It was last updated in 1995.
What software?
A collection of games called “flying” which despite the name is a pool/billiards/curling/air hockey sim.
I had it mentioned on a Cathode Ray Dude YouTube video and wanted to try it, which led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. As far as I could find it never got ported to Linux? But it’s still in the FreeBSD repositories. So I spun up FreeBSD on a VM but couldn’t get it working because it refuses to launch on X if you have more than 8-bit color, and I was having a hell of a time launching X in that mode. So I downloaded a copy of FreeBSD 4 from around 2000 and got it to run.
IMO there’s “the Internet before Canter and Siegel” and “the Internet after Canter and Siegel”.
On the pre C&S Internet, not only was nothing monetized, there was a sense that even having an ad for something commercial was against the culture. The downside was that the pre C&S Internet was small, slow and limited.
Overall, I think the 2025 Internet is much better than 1994. But, there were certainly things to appreciate about an Internet without ads, without algorithms trying to win the attention economy, etc.
Dead Internet Theory is becoming mainstream now. How long will it be until we get AI slop rants about how worthless human content is?
We won’t know because it will be AI bots who will be arguing that human content is better than AI
Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.
Most humans are too slow, ignorant, passive and apathetic to join in important discussions.
Hey, that’s not…ehh, whatever.
