Ironically, despite this board being stacked full of liberals, it couldn’t be more conservative.
I routinely get pissed at news sites who just link videos in the midst of their news stories (I’m looking at you, CNN!).
If I wanted to watch CNN, I’d watch CNN. I’m reading your stories on the web because I can read faster than I can sit and watch a news story.
Also, I’m getting damned tired of how-to and instructional videos when a simple list of tasks would suffice. I mean, in general, I’d rather read a recipe or list of setup/assembly instructions than watch someone do it, unless there’s some trick involved that needs to be seen.
Webrings, blue ribbon campaign, web counters, and under construction gifs are what stand out about “old” internet to me.
I miss the community-focused functionality of message boards, vs the individual-focused functionality of social media sites. Even comparing Livejournal to Tumblr I see a difference. It’s so much harder to get to know someone on the latter if you don’t blog a lot.
OTOH, I think it is far easier to find good-quality information these days.
Edit: thinking about it, I even get nostalgic about old Facebook. I was a student in 2005 when it was just becoming big. People used to join all sorts of dodgy/hilarious groups, and I remember randomly chatting to some guy I didn’t know because we went to the same university and had some common interests. I’d never do that now & we’re all conscious of our employers potentially checking up on us.
It all started going downhill when those damn “web browsers” and their newfangled “world wide web” caught on.
I miss getting the Info-Mac Digest in my mailbox and opening Fetch and FTP’ing down the shareware I was interested in. And posting to usenet.
Yeah, Internet to a lot of people here seems to mean web. The real difference is spam. Before domain addressing almost all spammers were too stupid to cause problems, and most participants on Usenet had a clue. John Mashey used to post on comp.arch. And there was one alt.sex site, low volume. That’s the old internet, not even gopher, Archie and Veronica.
By the standards of back then, almost the entire web is spam, though the spamming is done by respectable companies too.
Mostly I miss the old eBay. It used to be such a great hunting ground… a huge internet flea market or garage sale. A great place for collectors to buy and sell. But because of all the idiotic changes eBay has made dealers and collectors have abandoned eBay by the thousands.
There used to be chat boards on eBay for members to discuss and sometimes complain. Well… they took those out probably because the complaints are legitimate and eBay just doesn’t want to hear them, or do anything about them.
That’s what I mean. I remember rotary dial phones, and I mean ones that you couldn’t unplug from the wall. And I remember very well when there was no Internet. The Internet didn’t come along until I was just about entering middle age. So now to hear about the old Internet … well, I feel ancient now if I didn’t before. 
See what they like best, and which direction they come from. Plant more of that on the edge of the garden and let them have it.
As a programmer, I think you’ve brought up a good point. It’s so much easier now to get useful answers to programming questions. Back in the late 90s, if you ran into a problem with a library or other gremlin, it could be difficult or impossible to get solid answers.
“New” internet makes my professional life a lot easier!
I know this post is old, but due to my age, I think I can offer a unique take on this.
( I apologize for my somewhat messy thoughts here. )
I got to experience this “old” Internet at a very young age, from the ages about 3-8.
I can objectively say that the modern Internet is kind of whack in terms of creativity and there
are TOO many monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google… among others.
There is no variety in terms of sites or any kind of personal touch (even on corporate sites)
and everything feels too standardized and sterile.
I’ve heard some people say in this forum that the modern internet is much more suited for business and is better for finding information, and with that I say absolutely yes. I’ve also heard that some people prefer the old internet due to it’s variety and creativity.
However instead of forgetting everything about the “old” internet or being split on this
and passing it off as “obsolete”, why not combine elements of the old, take what’s good about the new and make something great?
This doesn’t just apply to just the Internet, but it’s one of the many things hit by the current paradigm (which sucks btw).
The same could be said about virtually the entire entertainment industry and the consumer technology industry.
I think it’s about time for a paradigm shift. Combining what worked before with what’s being made now instead of just forgetting about it or where things came from, why they were so successful.
There’s a reason why 90s-80s kids and even people my age from my generation are into the hole nostalgia thing, even when they don’t have any nostalgia for some of these things, but the reason why they like them is because they were objectively better.
Interesting revival of a zombie. In general, I like the internet of 2019 more than 2014 and certainly more than the internet of the early 2000s.
I do wish the SDMB was more like the SDMB of the early 2000s. But I realize that message boards are a dying breed. The SDMB is unique with our demographics as well as our excellent moderation. I’ve left so many other message boards because every thread ended up loaded with spam, trolls, or being hijacked with some idiot wanting to turn everything into a political debate. You start off a thread about who should be the starting quarterback and some idiot hijacks it to tell how they think Obama is the antichrist.
A lot of people misunderstand me when I mention things like this, I don’t want to create an exact replica of how the internet was then or put the “old” Internet on life support as there wouldn’t be anything new and/or bring back legitimate negatives or “holdbacks” of the era.
I’m saying we should take what was good about the old Internet and take what’s good about the modern Internet (in a scientific or objective sense) and make something new and better.
The cultural difference compared to the 1970s is that not everyone online now is a hacker or computer scientist; not much you can do about that. But why would you want to?
Apart from that, the bar for creating something new and better is lower than ever in this era of free software (and educational+reference materials), cheap hardware, and global broadband. So go for it 
I miss weird and wonderful website designs of the early days. You could be as creative as you wanted to in colours and font schemes but now everything has to appear professional and templates are designed for mobile so they all look identikit. Some sites retain that free spirited appearance but they’re becoming rarer.
Have a look at the first presidential websites from the 96 election to get a feel of what I mean:
You should visit Ling’s Cars. It’s a proper legit business and, well, Ling who owns it likes her website this way. 
I agree–holes were so much better when I was younger.
I know I already posted in this thread five years ago, but I think the reason for the shift is because it was commercialized, and as a result, lowest common denominator (which is pretty low!).
The “old” internet was primarily a mixture of university users and other educated types, followed by a short period where it was those same university users and a set of commercial ISP users who were generally also educated. But then, starting in about 1997-ish, the Internet became something everyone used, and it only accelerated with MySpace/Facebook/social media and smartphones. Now, any half-literate boob who didn’t graduate high school can get on there and get stupid on Facebook, or do a whole lot of stuff on their iPhone.
In some ways I do still miss the old internet, but in others I don’t. I mean, I miss the old Usenet newsgroups a lot, but I don’t miss having to fiddle with Trumpet Winsock and a modem dialer, as well as continually download new browser versions, that’s for sure.
I’ve been thinking about this as well lately. It seems to me that, outside of walled gardens like AOL and Yahoo, “the internet” was still mostly a place for nerds and geeks throughout the first half of the 2000s. “Social media” were starting to pop up (LiveJournal being a precursor if not an early example), but the share of nerdy/geeky stuff as compared to real life was excellent. You’d check your dozen or so favorite URLs every day and were sure some of them would have what you were craving.
Now, virtually all the traffic is through Facebook etc., and it’s almost as hard to find good stuff as it was before the internet.
You are saying the signal-to-noise ratio is down, as it were. That may be the case, but the search-engine technology is up. Most of the “nerds and geeks” from 20-30-40 years ago are still with us, and the current generation is not entirely to be dismissed. Nobody is forcing anybody to sign up for Facebook.