One of the things I perhaps miss (but not really) about the old internet, as in the early 90s or before, is that it felt kind of special, since it wasn’t ubiquitous yet, and the interface to it was a bit arcane. So having access to the internet and the ability to navigate it was a bit of a special skill.
But there just wasn’t as much information out there, finding that information in itself was a challenge (especially pre search engines), and the ability to verify that information was even more difficult (in my opinion.) Stupid ULs and hoaxes were spread about just as they are today, and there wasn’t a reliable way like Snopes or UrbanLegends.com or even a quick Google search to help you navigate fact from fiction.
As much as I feel that some of the multimedia is overdone (really, sometimes I just want to click on a news story and read it, not slog through some video waiting for the pertinent information), on the other hand, the multimedia has been great, especially on Youtube. I have learned so much, been able to fix so many things, and been able to share videos with friends and family half a world away because of it.
Click-bait and slideshows do annoy the crap out of me, though. But, once again, small price to pay and I’ll take today’s Internet over the one even ten years ago. There’s so much more out there, and I find it so much more useful, especially in my interpersonal and business relationships.
The trouble is 99% of those slide shows and lists are garbage. They don’t deserve to be paragraphs. 10 Things You’re Doing Wrong with Money Right Now doesn’t need 2-3 paragraphs per item because you can be all but certain the list is 10 obnoxiously obvious points.
yeah, but i don’t meet “new” people online like i used too(in reference to you saying it has improved relationships for you). but perhaps that is is my fault.
When I was cleaning out my office for the move a few years ago, I found a mid-level “Internet User’s Guide” from Sybex or one of those tech publishers, from maybe 1988 or so. Beside being entirely about gopher, telnet and the like, it was endlessly cautioning “civilian” users to stay off the wires during the busy times that real university folk would be using them. Clogging up a U’s gopher server in the middle of their work day was Very Bad Form.
It was one of the few books I simply put in recycle.
I meant the article itself being 2-3 paragraphs rather than broken out into list form but then the sort of thing you describe is more click-bait anyway.
Agreed with others here that the “old” internet just seemed to be weirder. Not always in a “good” way or superior way but usually in a more interesting way.
Despite that not being my quote, you can still manage to find new people online. Back then I got on IRC and typed up a storm to people who started as complete strangers - and you still can. Undernet is still around and kicking.
It was ISCABBS. Apparently, it’s still around. Just telnet://bbs.iscabbs.com. Still looks the same, pretty much, but I can’t remember how to get around.
I have mixed feelings about this; on one hand, I liked the Wild-West feeling of about 1995-2003, where there were scads of start-ups, people had personal web pages, and you could often find all sorts of really interesting stuff on said personal web pages.
On the other hand, the commercial internet is very mature these days; I particularly like the things like banking and online shopping being as mature as they are. Back in say… 1998, there wasn’t that much online shopping- the only things I can think of that I actually bought online were things like books and DVDs from Amazon, because I could find them there without having to make an afternoon of visiting a half-dozen physical stores looking for a particular book or movie.
I think that to some extent, the older internet was a little more intellectual and cerebral; Usenet from about 1992 forward, while still rife with spam, had some really interesting groups about some really interesting topics, where the level of discourse was high, with only incoming freshmen stinking it up in September of each year, but they either moved on or got a clue pretty fast.
Nowadays, your average message board (not here) is filled with semi-literate morons, and topics devolve into politics and religion all the time, or are just flat-out wrong about many topics that should be factual.
I liked it when it was just us dweebs, geeks and weirdos on the Web and on BBSes, and as a girl amongst all these dudes I could get a lot of dates.
Now that the “normals” are all online, dudes don’t have to settle for weirdos like me and they hook up with normal girls. Or pass me over to wait for them.
(This may or may not be true but it’s totally what I like to tell myself.)
But it’s ok, I love the availability of information now and the ease of keeping up with IRL friends. There are LOTS of things I remember having to painstakingly search for back in the day and it amuses me to no end that it’s all RIGHT HERE now. It’s great!
Getting tired of the Internet?? “No, Sir, when a man is tired of the Internet, he is tired of life; for there is on the Internet all that life can afford.” -Samuel Johnson
As someone who struggled (and still kinda do, although not nearly as badly) with lonliness, I miss the old internet chatrooms.
These days all I have are Omegle, and that’s just 12 year olds looking for sex. All I wanted to do was just talk with someone, make a friend, and it was so hard.
In the old days there were chatrooms for sex yes (I mean…I was pretending to be a lesbian, but the other person totally was) but there was also chats for TV, movies, I had a back and forth with a girl who liked to write like me and it was just good fun to talk with someone.
Nowadays no one chats because it’s all sex and pedophiles it seems, and the best I get are message boards, which are great, but heavily restricted by time.
While there are aspects of the “new Internet” that are annoying, I can’t possibly see myself missing the old Internet. Progress is progress. There are things you can do nowadays that were impossible once upon a time.
If there’s anything I miss, it’s that the old Internet had a lot of barriers to entry. AOL kept the amateurs pretty well contained; if you knew IRC or something like that, you were among a pretty select group. I think that did a lot to shape the kinds of people you met. However, I the new Internet has plenty of scenic byways - if you’re looking for a particular group, you’ll probably find them somewhere.
Ah, the early days of the web, and it’s explosive rise to popularity. A time when the URLs were long and nonsensical and the particle effects were shiny and also nonsensical. Imageboards were full of ASCII porn and (after a while) you never had to buy any nonfloppy disks, because AOL would send you three in the mail every week. No spyware designed to steal your bandwidth… No ‘leet’-speak nonsense… No Facebook…
Do I miss the days when you had multiple big-name search engines and didn’t see 95% of everyone getting their results from a single monolithic entity that can’t even spell its own name correctly yet operates with a consumptive efficiency that Joseph Stalin would envy? When you could hop into a game of DOOM and actually reasonably expect a modicum of civility to be the norm (not much more than a modicum, mind)? When the apex of biting social commentary was “Spice Girls Ate My Balls”? When Telnet was still roaring strong, a refuge to the people complaining about how the internet had gone to hell, like we’re doing now (Hi, Tuttle47286!)? When, in short, the unspoken motto of the internet wasn’t “Buy stuff, waste time while unknowingly conducting sinister market research, and see naked pictures!” but “Come hang out with the nerds! They have naked pictures!”?
Of course. The first time I saw the “phrase” ‘tl;dr’ (and learned what it meant), I was torn. I thought “He wrote three paragraphs. Twelve sentences, less than a hundred words. This is a forum, not a chatroom. Why would anyone interested in what he has to say not be willing to read that much, but still care enough to stick around?” But on the other hand, “He actually knows what a semicolon is!” I don’t want to sound like an old fuddyduddy here, but in many ways, the 'net was a lot better in those days.
But then, I don’t miss taking eight days to download the Wing Commander: Prophecy expansion. I don’t miss complex boolean search strings becoming so commonplace that (had they had this feature back then) the word ‘boolean’ wouldn’t make a wavy red line appear beneath it when typed into my browser. I don’t miss the web browser wars, or the day AOL switched to sending out CDs, which were useless unless you were short of clay pigeons. And I really don’t miss smug 40-year olds laughing when the tech bubble burst, at those dastardly fools who dared to try bettering their situation and not be simultaneously young and miserable. All in all, it is a remarkably well-mixed bag.
When I started buying and selling on ebay, auction numbers were six digits long and started with a 1. Several weeks later they passed the 200,000 mark and the auction numbers began with a 2 but there were still just six digits long. They were selling a couple thousand items a day. If you ever saw an item which was miscategorized (or prohibited) you could report it and an actual person would review your report and take appropriate action.
Now ebay item numbers are 12 digits long. They do a billion transactions a day. When you see a miscategorized or prohibited item, you just cringe inwardly and know that it’s pointless to report it. They don’t have the staff to read all the reports and they go to great lengths to hide the links you need to click just to get to the “report this item” page. I hate it.
A similar thing has happened with craigslist. There are rules, but people break the rules all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can click the “report this page” link but 99 times out of 100 it does absolutely nothing.
This would be fantastic if it works like it’s supposed to and doesn’t devolve into nonesense
Edit: Upon reading the article it’s an app, which is fine and all, but I can type a trillion times more accurately and quicker than I can on my phone. This is another reason I miss internet chats
