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What exactly made the old internet better than the modern internet? (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 15 hours ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they've missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I'm one of the few out there who've been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.

For one thing, the internet wasn't reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren't prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it's been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.

And it was fine.

Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it's all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.

Blocking dumb trolls. Get a life.

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[–] 5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

reddit/Facebook/MySpace

MyFace! There was also the fact that those of us old enough to have been online saw the first shot at these platforms and they were very different than today. I got into gmail when you had to have an invite. I registered for The Facebook when doing so required a .edu email address.

At a certain point there were still videos, but it was QuickTime and realplayer and “buffering” was an annoyance.

I remember when QuickTime.com posted the first "HD" movie trailer and it blew my mind.

Flash player came out and allowed for a renaissance of creative games and movies

And shockwave, complete with all the sites that built content for it.

We had all the building blocks for creative expression, with none of the garbage that started growing with digg/reddit.

We also got to see digg/reddit when they were still pre-prime. My reddit account is old enough to drive.

To answer OPs question, I suspect there are two things going on.

First, the web of lore was not monetized. Google was very young and actually meant it when they said not to be evil. Steam was just launching. Web 1.0 was performant, no one gave a shit about engagement, search ending optimization didn't exist, small personal websites had great information, and it was private, although privacy was more of an accident. There were bots, but they were very basic chatbots.

Second, people old enough to remember this era are going to be reminiscing. But I still think the old web was better.

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