It used to be exciting. They weren’t trying to earn money with every click and game the system. You got to explore the world and meet interesting people. I miss that, it’s all a lot of anger and social bubbles now.
Having been online when the web was invented, I remember an internet where people simply trust each other. Mail servers acceped mail for anyone without authentication, you could upload files to public servers without problems, and if you needed a machine to host something, you asked around for someone letting you do this. Imagine that today!
SPAM still was processed meat and not the bane of your inbox. It actually had not been invented then! No ads, no cookies, no subscriptions, no paywalls. OK, ordering pizza online was not a thing yet, too.
When you did something stupid because you were new, someone took you by the hand and educated you (eiter not to do it all, or do it the right way), and you learned to be a good netizen.
It was separate from real life. Like, you had to make a conscious decision to “go online”, because otherwise you were always offline. Now it’s harder to be offline. I guess I’m saying I miss the days where we weren’t expected to always be reachable. The phone and the internet were at home.
Forums felt like a real community. Even crummy little forums like my home forum Supercars.net were teeming with life.
Discovering websites that had highly specific purposes.
Going down the rabbit hole of knowledge of a niche topic on websites alone. Now Wikipedia has most of the information about something in one page. Because information could be so fragmented then, you could spend hours just learning about a topic through people’s personal websites and forum posts.
The old internet still felt very hobbled together by people and their simple efforts. The new internet feels very big corporate. Lemmy kinda feels like a slice of the old internet sometimes.
The rabbit holes was big for me. I think it started changing after Google Reader and other aggregators came along, but before then you’d go from one site, which would link to another, then to another site, until after an hour you’d gone across a dozen or more different sites and you were on a completely different topic than what you started.
It still can happen in the current web, but it all feels alot less connected now, every website is like an island almost, no external Links and completely separated from any other sites. Before, finding new sites and content from a site’s ‘Links’ page was a big thing, I feel like that’s how I found alot of stuff. You would just bounce from one site to the next, read what they had, check the Links, see something else, bounce to that and repeat.
I really miss webrings. You’d discover the most absurd niche shit people were into. Especially since everyone seemed to have their own Geocities page or something similar. Nobody has one these days, as we all just use social media and big sites.
It really sucks. You just don’t get that these days now everyone is inside their own little bubble on the net.
There wasn’t anything resembling influencers, and mostly you were talking to other nerds.
People were much more technically savvy, and creating their own homepages with guestbooks and construction gifs.
Downloading music… I was discovering so many cool bands by downloading shitty quality mp3s!
Even before filesharing, you could just type the name of a song with .wav or later .mp3 and there was a good chance someone had it saved on their personal site
Geocities. That’s how I lerned HTML. Used their WYSIWYG editor and then tinkered with the code. Built several pages close to my interest, and even scored some free stuff from marketing early online retailers like CDNow.
Also spent a lot of time browsing other Geocities pages and contacting people with shared interest.
I was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly magazine because of my Geocities account haha.
A huge portion of websites were labors of love, just someone putting something up as a joke or doing a deep dive into a hobby. Nobody was shopping online in large numbers so there were basically no ads, no SEO, no listicles, no influencers.
Not every single last gonk was online. It was mostly nerds who had something interesting to share. So many different places to go to…
A lot of this thread is hugely familiar and a nice memory.
I’ll just add one little thing I remember from 96/97ish, the “… ate my balls” phenomenon. I guess nowadays you’d call it a meme format.
The gist of it was that you would take some cultural icon/celebrity/whatever and add their name to the phrase “…ate my balls”.
For some reason I remember this as being hilarious at the time. Not so much when recounted in the here and now though :-)
Yet another thing I remember from the 90s Internet was Church of the Subgenius. It was one of the first viral memes and when you read about it, you might just discover a thing or two about a thing or two.
Well not late 90s but pre 94 was the best times on the net. As for late 90s internet was not a commercialised mess of brands and much more fun.
Totally. I spent a lot of time on Prodigy bulletin boards.
This. https://youtu.be/3KXF423TEwY?si=n8ExMrJJRQQHLjIP
This is the early internet - a self hosted, bunch of regular people just doing stuff for stuff’s sake.
Also https://www.cockeyed.com - decentralized, zero budget fun.
In some ways, the low-medium technical barrier was perfect. If you could do some basic html or PHP, you were a creator.
I remember the first time I connected to the Internet and browsed Usenet back in the early 90s. I’m a soccer fan and it amazed me that I could read about soccer match results and news and opinions from all around the world.
Back then it was pretty uncommon for people to be assholes to each other online. We were all just amazed at how much information we could share and consume.
It’s important to understand that prior to the Internet the only comparable experience that even came close was going to a library and browsing the magazine rack. And that was neither interactive, nor timely in the way we have grown to expect in the Internet age.
Social media was so good back then. Livejournal was a total joy and I have my friends from there to this day. It was basically free therapy even if it was way cringe to read years later.
