My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
I was there way before “wild west”. Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.
But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.
Our “search engine” was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.
Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. “Don’t give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!” Shit I don’t want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it’s bringing people together. It’s not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.
Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.
The looks I got trying out online dating back in the day! The dates I got back then were… interesting. Dating sites were one aspect of the internet that needed a mainstream following.
I miss when google still proclaimed to not be evil, and I didn’t need every damn ad and tracker blocker imaginable on Firefox just to kick around.
Online dating? What a weirdo! You should have put some personal ad talking about how you enjoy long walks on the beach in your local newspaper or called one of those party lines where you chat with random people to meet a partner like the normies! /s
Kinda funny to look back on it now and see how opinions have changed so drastically.
But are “most people” on Fedi?
As an autistic person, all of the normal people are weird (to me).
I wonder if Fedi still has that perceived barrier to entry (even thought it’s not that hard) so the normies aren’t here here, and that it’s not “the popular thing that everyone does by default” yet so the people are here because they want to be.
I think Fedi feels kind of like the wild west early days, in a nice way.
That wasn’t the question. The question was about how the internet is different, not the fediverse.
Boo. Sorry for upsetting you lol. Sometimes discussions branch out. Have a nice day
needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.
This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it’s “GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!”
2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading Limp_Bizkit_-_nookie_4kbps_mp3.exe like you originally intended.
Which you try to play on your mpeg5 player
WinAmp, really kicks the llamas ass
Oh jesus tap dancing christ that takes me back…
I always thought the relative lack of people sucked back then.
Now I kinda wish it didn’t have as many.
The vitriol was more or less the same as it is now, though. It really was dependent on the spaces you hung out, and if they were actively moderated and had rules against such crap. All but one of the spaces I would spend online would have dropped the ban hammer on someone telling someone else to kill themselves or for using a slur/spouting hate speech.
But it was also easier to find spaces where that kind of talk was encouraged, too.
Pop up ads. You’d be on a webpage and suddenly you’d be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.
“Pop-up blocking” was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn’t want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.
Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.
Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.
Pop-ups but not ads. They have moved to restrict what adblockers can block with newer versions of chromium.
Google has probably done more than any other major web company to ensure that ads aren’t allowed to harm users — whether through unsolicited pop-ups, malware, or other attacks.
Malware ads used to be commonplace on ad networks; with “legitimate” websites like CNN.com showing ads (served via a third-party ad network) that attacked security holes in Windows users’ browsers.
Ask anyone who worked in IT in the early 2000s. Web ads used to be a shitpit. Now they’re annoying at most.
Sure but now everyone is at parity with regards to blocking ads and malware, but Google is intentionally rolling some of that back. I won’t say they’re ‘evil’ or anything (at least in this instance) but they’re definitely greedy and there are much better options out there (though chromium makes up a huge majority of the market)
When we’re talking about a for-profit corporation’s actions, “they did it for profit!” is not typically a very useful thing to say.
This is because no matter what they do, they’re doing it because they expect to profit from it.
When a for-profit corporation does something that’s good for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that good thing will cause them to profit.
When a for-profit corporation does something that’s bad for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that bad thing will cause them to profit.
So really, we can just note that we’re referring to a for-profit corporation’s actions, and just say whether they’re doing something that’s good or bad.
And we can try to ensure that good behaviors are profitable and bad behaviors aren’t profitable.
But saying “it’s for profit!!” doesn’t by itself mean that it’s good or bad; just that a for-profit organization did it.
you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
Looks at Twitter and Facebook…
Uhhhh… Who’s going to tell them that’s still a really big issue? lol
Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin’ BonziBuddy…
Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?
Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?
Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.
First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.
When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.
Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.
Those were good days.
Today, Flash can be played using a browser extension, written in Rust, that translates the Flash code into WebAssembly (Wasm). This can also be embedded in a web site; this is used by e.g. https://homestarrunner.com to play old toons & games.
The system is down.
Checkin’ my email with the lightswitch rave,
Checkin’ my email, make your moms behave.
I don’t miss Java. Fuck Java.
You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.
So many good Java things in that old web…
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Realplayer and qt where always a pain to get installed correctly
You’re making me remember codecs.
Remember when DivX finally unified us upon MPEG2 and that codec just worked? Forget Youtube videos, I’m talking just making videos in general usable on the internet.
Kids these days don’t even know what they’ve missed. Non-standard video formats. Ugggh. With everyone smoothly using mp4 or AV1 these days, life is so much better.
I remembered for audio projects, the .WMA format was the bane of everyone’s existence.
Removed by mod
Hand-curated categories -> lists etc.
Think back to what Yahoo originally was. Drill down through categories, subcats, etc. to find what you’re looking for.
Worked for the time, but for a technical query today would be an absolute non-starter
No mention of Mosaic (first web browser)? What sucked was you generally had to compile it yourself. That meant installing all the build tooling, building it, and turning it loose. Oh. Windows? Lol. No go. Gotta get an early version of Linux up and running first. That usually meant 20+ diskettes of Slackware installation.
But then you could surf in all the basic HTTP glory. It was a new world and it was awesome.
The wild west part was the best part. It felt real. Now it’s all watered down.
It was also a barrier to entry. Especially to advertisers but alas that did not last.
Also a big pro
File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn’t have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you’d be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.
Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.
Many different search engines with many different results. Searching for stuff was not very intuitive.
The wild west atmosphere was rather cool being a teenager, I must say.
Nowadays, Google just gives you results. Relevance may vary.
DuckDuckGo can give you more accurate results, but feels thin.
And search engines like Bing and Google, try too hard on being swiss army knives that do everything. From calculating to weather to showing movies from local theaters. Anything they do to keep you glued to them.
“Search engines” were often just human-curated indexes.
Well, search engines e.g. AltaVista or Lycos always used “spiders” to crawl the web and index pages. But web directories like the original Yahoo! or Dmoz focused on human-curated classifications.
Those Yahoo links were great. Old Yahoo was fucking awesome. Especially pool… I remember everyone played. Using icq. It was great.
Content.
There is MUCH more stuff of almost any kind on the web now.
Other than jokes, the internet used to be way better for jokes. Or at least, I assume it is. I don’t spend as much time these days looking up jokes like I did back then.
Christian and Scott’s interactive top ten list was a great one, anyone remember that? I might have even had a few submissions that made it in to the top ten over the years.
And rinkworks, loved the computer stupidities.
mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.
edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.
Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.
