this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I've been saying for quite a while now that the Internet was best in the '90s and early 2000s back before it was commercialized, even despite all the "under construction" gifs and whatnot. The signal/noise ratio has only continued to drop since then.
Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it's become.
You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there's so much more garbage. I'd say they have grown in absolute numbers.
I get what you're saying that '90s-style content is largely still there if you look for it, but this...
...has nevertheless destroyed the "Internet as it existed back then," which was specifically an Internet where finding such content was easy.
You can find a lot of old school websites hosted on neocities, though a lot of them are more of an art project than an actual website.
But all our tripod, angelfire, geocities etc websites were little art projects.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/browse-the-web-like-its-the-90s-with-this-free-service/
Is it harder? It was very hard to find anything on the old internet.
No. 2000s Google, I could search for a specific string in quotes (like an obscure error message trying to boot xbmc on an old xbox, or a kernel patch for a hackintosh) Now it’s all some SEO bullshit about how I need to watch some asshole’s 10 minute YouTube video about something tangentially related.
i search for error messages all the time on ddg and it usually finds relevant results. it fails when errors are not sufficiently obscure, such as a common python error occurring in many code bases, permissions errors, vaguely-worded errors etc. But there is no way for the internet to guess context in such a situation. spam is not a problem.
if google is so bad stop using it.
Just had to find the right webring /s
and there are websites like https://wiby.me/ that exist to assist people in finding the old-type content.
I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.
Being not an English speaker, you'd basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.
Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you'd get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.
It's people and IT companies which were better.
Since I am an English speaker, my '90s Internet experience was very different than that. There were "link farms" (pages designed to exploit early search engine algorithms that scored pages higher when they got linked to a lot) and e-mail spam, of course, but being unsophisticated, it was generally a lot easier not to get suckered in by than the firehose of AI-written advertorials and shit we have today.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term "advertorial" is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words "advertisement" and "editorial. " Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. In printed publications, the advertisement is usually written to resemble an objective article and designed to ostensibly look like a legitimate and independent news story. In television, the advertisement is similar to a short infomercial presentation of products or services.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Right, but what we have today has been predicted by people seeing what was then (and even earlier).
You forgot the pop-ups, forced midi music, easily injected malware, difficulty in verifying sources, html frames that frequently broke, the entire concept of needing a site map, fucking keywords, true banner ads that could force clicks with Javascript, and RealPlayer to name a few. I don't miss it at all.
No, I didn't forget anything. It was still better even despite all that.
Besides, getting RealPlayer videos to play on Redhat 6 was half the fun.
It was always bad, it’s just now bad in a slightly different way. I’ve been online since 1994 and, yeah. If anything, it’s a bit easier to avoid malware and scams these days. Even websites from reputable sources were sketch as fuck back then, with seizure-inducing popups and a minefield of JavaScript malware with no real options for VPN or blocking ads.
It’s been getting steadily better over the past 10 years or so, and the AI nonsense is threatening to send us back to the early internet Wild West.
All we need now is for Microsoft to start including 30 very sketchy ‘demos’ and mandatory adware with Windows again and the nostalgia will be complete.
The internet is light years ahead today. What we need is anti-ai filters in our browser to keep our browsing clean of shitty AI nonsense, kinda like ad blocking plugins.
e: I’d do UX, usability, and some dev on such a plugin if anyone wants to do some dev, too.