What do you miss the most about "the internet of old"?

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I kinda miss bare-knuckled fights to the death over literally anything (not that they ever went away, but the quality has decreased dramatically).

 

[Agent Otaku]

Where do I begin?

I miss user created sites full of customization and personality.
I miss profiles being full of customization.
I miss people using custom ringtones.
I miss forums and blogs.
I miss shrines
I miss when people took the media they enjoyed seriously - sometimes even too much. A much better alternative than nobody taking anything seriously.
I miss that if you didn't like someone's forum or moderation, you could make your own.
I miss that YouTubers weren't all a bunch of CEOs shilling products.
I miss that arguments were both not that serious yet also full of slurs and insults. It's dumb, but it felt free.
I miss being able to discover new sites and webrings.
I miss when it was easier to avoid hatred for the things you liked. Sure hate always existed, but it was much lesser, and a lot easier to deal with. This is kind of the other side of my previous point of "taking things seriously". You can't take anything seriously, but your haters can and will try to ruin your life nowadays.
I miss not being restricted to a few websites.

I miss it all. Even a lot of the bad.

As you can tell, I love the old internet and I'm so sad we'll never get it back.​

 

[Ikagura]

Angular edges, no rounded square nor circular shaped profile pics.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

When sites would make deals with music companies so bands (both indie and professional) would have profiles in there to interact with fans and release new songs/albums online for anyone to buy and would also allow users to use their songs on their profiles through special music players provided by the sites themselves.

That was a huge thing that just seemed to have gone away for no reason, and we are all the poorer for it.

 

[FlowersSunRain]

I grew up right around the time where the big shift happened, where all those personal websites that littered google searches were disappearing and web design was changed to be sleek and "professional". I actually wrote a blogpost about this on my wordpress, because the old internet is something I kinda regret missing out on, especially because I had access to everything I needed to engage with it and I just didnt.
If I was to say something specific I miss, then I'd say I miss the decentralised nature of it. Forums like this aren't really that common as far as I know and a lot of the ones I've stumbled across, like Anifriends or things like that are dead. Everyone is grouped up onto corporate run social media, you're forced into a space with a bunch of people who you may hate or who may hate you, not that hatred wouldnt exist on smaller things like this but it's far more common for you to just flame or be flamed by a guy who you will never meet or talk to again.

 

[Ikagura]

Can we bring back skeuomorphism (or just have 3D relief so it feels anything but flat).

Or even like Classic Windows:

 

[KamakoKamako's icon]

Far fewer bots masquerading as real people. And those that did, were reaaaaaally bad at it, so it was more entertaining.

 

[ThirteeTooBeets]

Children oriented websites, especially for brands. If you liked a toy, series, even a food product chances are that their website had an add free (as the website was the add, let's be honest) space with free flash games, coloring pages to print, little promo videos or animations, etc.
The ones I miss the most were the Disney Jr, Barbie, and Paz the Penguin websites.
Children nowadays don't have safe and fun places to be on the internet, and those were formative for me. It's either social media (horrible for being social media), platforms like Roblox (bad moderation, very unsafe), or are being shoved the same adds we all suffer from in a very aggresive way.
I don't want to sound too much like a "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" nut, but there was a genuine sense of wonder and fun when I was a kid and on the Internet, and the spaces that made it that way are no more...

 

[FlowersSunRain]

Children oriented websites, especially for brands. If you liked a toy, series, even a food product chances are that their website had an add free (as the website was the add, let's be honest) space with free flash games, coloring pages to print, little promo videos or animations, etc.
The ones I miss the most were the Disney Jr, Barbie, and Paz the Penguin websites.
Children nowadays don't have safe and fun places to be on the internet, and those were formative for me. It's either social media (horrible for being social media), platforms like Roblox (bad moderation, very unsafe), or are being shoved the same adds we all suffer from in a very aggresive way.
I don't want to sound too much like a "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" nut, but there was a genuine sense of wonder and fun when I was a kid and on the Internet, and the spaces that made it that way are no more...

Oh yeah this is entirely true and I think its one of the main contributors to the internet being less safe for young people to be on now, children should be able to have their own spaces, teenagers as well.
Especially so I don't have to see their opinions on twitter lol

 

[Ikagura]

Children oriented websites, especially for brands. If you liked a toy, series, even a food product chances are that their website had an add free (as the website was the add, let's be honest) space with free flash games, coloring pages to print, little promo videos or animations, etc.

Sadly some are bringing back suspicious people.

I don't want to sound too much like a "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" nut, but there was a genuine sense of wonder and fun when I was a kid and on the Internet, and the spaces that made it that way are no more...

I agree, some people are using children to justify stuff when there should be other solutions.

Youtube Kids is anything but useful (and parents don't bother installing it instead of the regular youtube).

 

[FlowersSunRain]

I agree, some people are using children to justify stuff when there should be other solutions.

Yeah in general child safety is only used as ammunition for more surveillance, almost none of the ways people try to tackle child safety actually makes anything better either.

 

[DjQuick2008]

MSN and yahoo were insane.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Youtube Kids is anything but useful (and parents don't bother installing it instead of the regular youtube).

It actually came pre-installed on a tablet I had brought ages ago and it did give me a sense of ease when I had to let the kids have some unsupervised screentime.

It's not perfect (God no), but I thought it did the job.

 

[Zerohour2k12]

I dunno, I guess not getting hate for not agreeing with the majority takes and being a noob. In general I miss a time when people try to help instead of hating and judging first. Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of good internet peeps!

 

[Crashbandi]

I miss old school BBS pages like this. I was part of this BBS called RPGchat and I spent so many hours on there during my High-School years doing Role Plays and met a couple folks I still talk to today on there and thats like 25 years ago. Such a simpler time.

It was just a genuinely different atmosphere and feel in the old days. It was a bit Wild West, but there was more user generated pages. Now if your brand doesn't have a FB page then you're pretty much not being found so there is no more organic pages being found.

 

[Mopeybloke]

I miss the customisation of websites. Many more people had websites contrasting to now when a few "platforms" hold almost everything worth seeing online. I spend most of my online time on Youtube, and that's probably cause I can watch it on my telly.

I also miss colours. At some point, every website turned white, and then, a decade later, a few of them turned black. I'm always happy when I go to a modern website and the primary colour is blue. So daring.

The worst design movement was when websites made a compromised version for mobile and then eventually remade the desktop website in its unsightly image. Reddit is a great example as one can see the pleasant themes old reddit still sports in comparison to the samey design of new reddit. Or new, new reddit.

 

[Naltic]

This might sound a little weird, but I miss how the old internet and real life were two separate things. I liked checking social media on a computer and I liked how it was the norm.

DUDE, 100% nowadays, the internet is REAL life. It both brings about actual physical changes but also dictates what will be coming later. You can't separate your life, you can't live 2 identities like you used to and worst of all, you can't really escape the problems of real life because whether you like it or not, it will appear here on the internet.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

The utterly gigantic sites that one dude built himself by learning how to code, just because he could and had an idea they wanted to share.

 

[J.B’s rabbit den]

I used to always sit and wait as a little potato at the dinner table for my mom to be done playing FarmVille on our windows 7 laptop so I could get on Cartoon Network.com and every morning before school they’d let me hope on and play games like wizard 101 for a little while before heading to elementary

 

[Adachi_08]

Everybody would make funny sites about anything as well as the fact that internet access was way more troublesome, cuz you had to use dial-up and if somebody used the phone - bye bye intenet connection. Cuz of that you would have spent time only on sites that were like a second home to you.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I usually lament death sites full of irreplaceable content, but...

I don't know how many of you were familiar with a site called Taringa!, but it going away was a net positive.

It was toxic to the point of setting off Geiger counters and it was linked to quite a few RL incidents.

But why am I bringing it up? Because someone else did and then I remembered it fully.

So... I guess I miss the time when it wasn't a thing.

 

[VidiyaGaemer]

I miss sprite animations, and how big even crude sprite animations were....some which spawned epic series that got better, both creatively and technically, with each episode. I try in my own way to keep that scene going by becoming a sprite animator myself. I wish I started and created during its heyday.

 

[elbanano]

I miss sprite animations, and how big even crude sprite animations were....some which spawned epic series that got better, both creatively and technically, with each episode. I try in my own way to keep that scene going by becoming a sprite animator myself. I wish I started and created during its heyday.

those oddly enough still exist, but in a weird deviantart type of way that is hard for the algorithm to recommend, the other way i was watching a youtube stream about reactions and one of the commissioned reactions was something like "Sprite battle, Blaze the Cat vs Starfire", the animation was good, some dialogues were oddly in-character, but the concept itself is super weird

Still, I don't miss that so much, I'm happy that animation is so easy nowdays that people prefer to make original ideas with original sprites, one of my all time favorites being Jimmy & Baby, I wouldn't be surprised if most of those animators started doing that, the same way pinkshonen started doing stickmen fights and now does super high quality fights with amazing choreography... and porn at the end of each one lmao

 

[Boofy]

I checked out doodie.com for old times sake. They don't even have poop animations!

 

[PacGuy]

I used to play Gaia Online way back in the day. In the chat part where you can walk around I would hide behind houses and wait for people to wander in and start ERPing (Cybering was the term of the day) and then I would come out and harass them.