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

I miss how silly and unrestrained the old Internet felt. Alot like the Wild West but for tech.
I also miss Flash. I feel like it died an artificial death, "End of Life" feels like an excuse to phase it out. What I miss about Flash in particular is that many novices of the craft made earnest, weird works on a large scale. On Newgrounds, there were many sprite animation series, and they really played around with the source material to create something new out of the old. I miss that atmosphere....it really hasn't been replicated since.
 
I lightly dabbled with "internet" even before internet came around. In the early 90s, I would connect to a BBS that was hosted by an average individual on their PC at home. I was able to download old dos games (took forever to get) and these, I guess you would call them "sites", were made up of local nerds around my age. We would meet up on occasion at a local mall to watch a movie and/or play in the arcade. It was so basic that only one person could connect at a time as well and the monitor I was using wasn't even colour, had a green tinge to it like an old gameboy. At this point I am 12/13ish.

When actual internet came out I made use of that in the form of chat forums where you can use text to have a group chat live. Spoke to tons of people around NA and it was enjoyable. This would connect to University/College servers. Lots of file sharing happening too. It was also littered with illegal material that was far too easy to get. At about age 14ish, I could, if desired, easily find porn of girls that were likely around my age at the time, not exactly a healthy environment to be around to say the least. Lots of fun but the amount of open illegal activity was insane.

In the same time I was also talking to plenty of girls around my age that lived close enough that I was able to see them irl. Fun was had......

Wasn't long before things evolved enough that online gaming became a thing like Diablo 2. Napster/Limewire and other early swashbuckling adventures were easy to find and I made use of these as well.

By age 17 my internet usage dropped drastically. Going into adulthood I was kept plenty busy with irl friends/GF/life and was simply too busy to bother with it. Next time I would make regular use of internet would be around my mid 20s when dial up was gone and things like Google/FB/YT were new and exciting.

I think connecting to random people and talking and even meeting irl were the best aspects of my early internet experience. Which is ironic as it's basically saying that the best part of early internet was getting off of it to experience irl adventures with people I meet on it. I do wonder if there were time when I flirted with danger without knowing it.
 
Actually i wasn't an internet person until a few years ago... language barrier and fear of virus was among reasons that caused us to use internet only bare minimal.

Nevertheless, the only thing which i truly miss about old internet is that sites were light-weight! 😇
A website downloading 1MB upon opening it was like a taboo!

And what about now? we all should hope that the site we are going to open wouldn't download 100MB just because of some uncompressed ultra-hd images which we have no interest in them! 😡
 
JustLooking123 said:
Actually i wasn't an internet person until a few years ago... language barrier and fear of virus was among reasons that caused us to use internet only bare minimal.

Nevertheless, the only thing which i truly miss about old internet is that sites were light-weight! 😇
A website downloading 1MB upon opening it was like a taboo!

And what about now? we all should hope that the site we are going to open wouldn't download 100MB just because of some uncompressed ultra-hd images which we have no interest in them! 😡
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Ah, to be a young boy and discover a site with pictures of naked ladies. You clicked on it, waited for ages for the page to load and then you would be greeted with this icon before you'd see anything below her neck.
Broken-Image-Icon.png

Good times. Unless the site infected your computer and you had to awkwardly tell your dad you have no idea what went wrong but now the entire OS has to be reinstalled.
 
Hm... how should I put it. Everything was slower (both in an actual and metaphorical sense), nore personal, untamed. The internet was really a space for people, not a corporate data mine of Orwellian proportions.

Sure, there was less content to be found, but you could actually find it, instead of getting bombarded by inane suggestions that amount to little more than product placement.

Also, I miss Netscape. I was an opinionated, hard headed guy from the start and refused to use Internet Explorer. Edge and Chrome can disappear for all I care, by the way.
 
RageBurner said:
Also, I miss Netscape. I was an opinionated, hard headed guy from the start and refused to use Internet Explorer. Edge and Chrome can disappear for all I care, by the way.
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Ah... you ignited an old burning rage in me... ::redhot
It's not just about missing old internet, but old era of pc at whole!
I remember how everything was much easier back then, user interface of programs were all native and standard, so simple and efficient! 😇

As a dev, i can't tell you how much suffering i have gone into due to radical changes in UI systems and expectations too! and supporting multiple os on top of it! all with their untamable quirks!
And then using lib over lib, to solve it, only to find untamable bugs in libs!
and not to mention adding a lot of bloat to end result!
And also add to the list, incompatibilities between different versions of each os, where each of them can draw your toy app totally unusable!
And how can i forget people with older pc or os versions? while i have felt their sufferings myself thoroughly and for long time... I would NEVER!!! i can't even think about not supporting them!

And then we have modern browsers! revolved to almost os level!
Yet, i found them most stable structure so far! working equally in every os and device type!
They can almost do everything! and being so stable and backward/forward compatible makes them almost ideal for any dev!
Apps written for them are technically safer than native apps, and users can use them without fear of virus or their device being tampered with and they not knowing it.

And at same time, i hate modern browsers for being so invasive and uncontrollable!
Apps as web-service are always changing and might disappear completely at any moment!

I have seen it both as a user and a dev, and thus suffered as both!
It's like a wrong solution that we are all doomed to use!

That being said, i as a dev am still fighting overusing them as far as i can... even if it makes life for me like hell! 🔥
I will at least give other options for users if they want.

Whew... I'm sorry for long rant! I feel much better now! 😄
The world might have turned dark, but i will try to hold at least a torch, making it brighter even if for a bit, to my limited abilities. (🕯️)
 
I really miss the wild frontier feel of the old internet. Now you have a general sense of where to find everything online since the usual monoliths absorbed all the smaller players. So now instead of clicking through an archipelago of webrings and being surprised at the wonderful little creations that people made, now it's all in the same sprawling megalopolis sites bombarding you with slop and advertisements and trackers at every opportunity. The web used to be created by and for people, now it's by and for algorithms.
 
Waffles said:
I personally miss people's untamed creativity when it came to creating, customizing and presenting their profiles.

Visiting sites like MindViz and VampireFreaks showed me an almost endless display of HTML mastery, and I miss the fact that some sites would let you run wild with profile customization. It made each and every one of us feel unique in a way that avatars and signatures couldn't quite convey.

I'm sure there are security reasons not to let people do that anymore, but it feels like a step backwards.

What do you think, though?
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God, what DON'T I miss. I first got my own internet line in the fall of 1996, though I used my buddy's AOL for a year prior. There were a lot of great things you don't see nowadays. Being on IRC and meeting local women through it that were actually cool and not psychotic, chatting on anime and gaming channels...heck, I remember in late 96 when the Tomb Raider demo hit and the anime channel I was in, #Crystal_Tokyo, all went nuts downloading it and we were floored at how good it looked.

I miss the old forums the most though. Forums like how this is. I used to chat on so many amazing gaming forums in the 90s/early 2000s. They were always so active, had very tight knit communities, and you often met folks at meet-ups or if they were close enough just drove to them and hung out. The internet was just *nerds* and they were your people. The kind of people you just didn't find hanging around the mall or the gym or even your job.

I just miss the innocence and purity of it all. It seems like every community I find now, whether it's on Steam, Discord, Twitter, etc, it's all so brutal and unforgiving and mean spirited. I'm not soft, but it seems like now it's just people being rude just to get a rise out of others or act cool. There's no togetherness, no "nerd brotherhood" anymore. That unspoken rule of "respect your other nerds" doesn't exist anymore. Not as much, anyway. Maybe I'm just old.
 
I miss when Roblox was a cool, niche game that only a select few grade schoolers knew about and wasn't a billion-dollar platform backed by venture capitalists.

I miss how you could perform a psychological profile of a person based entirely on which Flash game website they preferred.

I miss the "shotgun" approach to content delivery where instead of personalized algorithms, you'd be inundated with everything a site had to offer.

I miss MegaUpload and RapidShare; more specifically, I miss when you only had to rely on either of those two places for free downloads.

I don't miss sprite comics per se, but I definitely miss the genuinely absurd ideas they had and how often they flew off the rails.

I miss when memes were called "fads" and didn't have a shelf life of exactly one week before being ruined.

I miss YoYoGames.
 
burnout2 said:
I miss how you could perform a psychological profile of a person based entirely on which Flash game website they preferred.
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Judge me, doc — mine was Andkon Arcade. (If that’s too obscure for you, Armor Games and Nitrome are back-ups.)
 
I miss the decentralization factor. Now it's all about social media. So people find themselves locked into a handful of corporate social networks consuming the same viral content and reposting the same stuff to each other in an endless loop.

I prefer the small intimate communities. I miss how everyone had a website full of their favorite things and you could get lost in webrings and AniPike for hours.

I love you Trixie Turnpike! ❤️
Original_Trixie_Turnpike.gif
 
I don't know how i stumbled upon this site as a kid, but it is where I downloaded GBA emulators and Pokemon ROMS to put on my friends computers
The site hasnt changed other than the ROMS got removed.

It also has a bunch of Pokemon ROM hacking tools that got me into making ROM hacks when I was like 10 or something.

Anyway what I miss most about the old internet is Adobe Flash.
 
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From a technical point of view, I really hated the old internet, because it was slower than a NEOGEO CD at 1X speed and I’m not joking, when I say that in terms of timing, it was more convenient to leave the house (on foot or by bike) and go to a newsstand to buy a magazine dedicated to the requested topic, rather than waiting for the website to fully load and display what you wanted to see at maximum resolution.

However, the emotional side of me feels nostalgic, because the boundary between the main web and the hidden one was really blurred and sometimes completely unexpected things would happen, which became the subject of conversation; people were truly free to say whatever they thought without filters and some had a genuine passion for the same interests you had, something that today you simply don't find anymore in a satisfactory way.

In fact, nowadays most internet users are lurkers or lobotomized, not really interested in to discussing in a genuine and playful manner, but just following trends to get reactions or manipulate you using politically correct language in a fascist and hygienized way (the so-called 'awareness companies' working in gaming today are a joke that’s not funny).
 
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i miss the ability to walk away and be AWAY. i hate that everything now is pushed to you constantly, so you can never be "away" even when you walk away. everything is an app, everything is a constant data flow.

i love the internet, my computer is part of my career, but i want the ability to say "okay, i'm done for today" without completely disabling my internet. you can't do that easily anymore. even if you disable things, people will freak out when you don't respond. "where are you?" "are you okay?" "you didn't answer when i messaged, i got worried". they say things like this. it's true for cellphones too, of course. basically, i like that things are connected, but i miss disconnecting.
 
I miss the specificity and lightheartedness of it all. You were always able to find a community for any topic be it broad or specific. Want to be on an anime forum? Find an anime forum. Want to find a forum for a specific show? You can find that a lot of times too. Profiles for forums tend to feel far more personalized than social media profiles aside from maybe tumblr.

And in general there was far less bullying, with the bullying that did exist being far better policed and far less intense. You'd get some really rowdy, shitty people but mods either dealt with it when it got out of hand or they let it slide in which case you'd just move to another forum/irc/whatever to find a community you felt more accepted in. So you'd find communities based around things you liked and those communities were self-insulated by the fact that it was a website built specifically for that community, instead of social media where everyone is sharing the same space constantly and harassment is far more aggressive and far harder to avoid.

It also took way less street smarts to navigate. Nowadays if you're a remotely relevant figure you have to jump through dozens of hoops to lock your online ecosystem down and the slightest misstep spells absolute doom, with the techniques for swindling even the most discerning users becoming far harder to detect. Back in the day it was far easier for people with minimal internet safety knowledge to navigate, with most malicious content that sought to bring down your system or steal your identity being far easier to navigate. It also just wasn't as prevalent, and the tools people had to cause a ruckus were far less accessible and generally less disastrous.

I also just miss how innocent so much of it was. The internet is so driven by algorithms and private interests that things as simple as Google or Youtube's search engines are far more difficult to use when searching for older content or content the algorithms deem less monetizable in the current day. This trickles down to creators themselves, many of which feel the need to mold their content and persona around the algorithm and sponsorship ecosystem. It all just feels less personal and the endless barrage of ads and barely-relevant "recommended" content in discover tabs on social media or youtube is just exhausting.

It's difficult to find damn near anything that the internet of the last 6-7 years does better than the internet of 10+ years ago.
 
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The days before algorithmic curation and devices recording and selling data where I wasn't sold things I thought about in recent days.

I personally feel like all of the trolling campaigns of old were all pretty funny and back then no one suddenly became remorseful about it.

The wonder and boom of MMORPGs and authentic online communities that weren't just full of grifters and the like.

Bulletin board forums like this I used to be a member of many and now I can count on one hand whats left worth visiting. I hope its not too late to shift the Internet back into a little bit of what it used to be.

Flash games and flash game sites.

The Internet as it is now to me is like 99% like this scene from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and the 1% is this small graveyard we still haunt.hqdefault (1).jpg
 
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I miss when rage baiting and bad behavior wasn't rewarded with fame and money. Lowkey modern internet culture has made some of the worst people famous, and not even for reasons you could consider "earned". Actually talented and skilled people get ignored for loud, dumb, and lazy content.
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Yousef said:
Funnily enough this is how I feel when YouTubers casually reveal their faces, real names and where they live for no real reason.
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I remember when Youtubers would create avatars or come up with elaborate usernames to hide their identity and to keep their real world life and online life separate. Nowadays most people's usernames are just their actual, full name. Being a micro celebrity online really shifted people's opinion on privacy.
 
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During the pandemic, I joined a manga reading club on Discord - literally downloaded the app for this reason alone - with a bunch of Gen Z kids and I was floored by how casual they were about revealing their identities, places of residence, etc. Back in the olden days, you'd hang out with people on message boards for years/decades and not know their names. It dawned on me how the internet really is real life for the young'uns.

Fan sites and forums were where I spent most of my time. Particularly for those of us into anime, the fact that video sharing online was a bit hard - even when torrents came round, most of us had broadband too shitty to fully enjoy it - and that you had to basically pay some dude in Hong Kong to mail you a VHS tape to watch, say, the End of Evangelion, guaranteed that whatever discussion could be had about the topic was bound to be interesting. Only the committed made it through.

YouTube (2006) & Facebook (2007) is when the old internet died.
 

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