Imagine it’s 1995. You look for your rose-colored readers while waiting for the dialup handshake… bee-dee-bee-dee-boop…de-doop-de-doop…psssst-bweeee-oooop-psssst. You give Netscape half a minute to start, look for something interesting on Yahoo, and try again on Altavista. Failing to find it in either place, you get distracted by a rectangular webring banner. You spend the rest of the day jumping between GeoCities neigborhoods, waiting a few minutes for each gaudy page and thirty GIFs to load. In that time you read a retired professor’s blog on medieval Italian armors, some amateur poetry, recipes written by stay-at-home spouses, and countless commentaries on the important and inane. Everything is written in complete sentences, and you don’t even pause to question the author’s humanity. There’s an ad for some sort of online bookstore, and you wonder why anyone would do that…
Fast forward a few decades.
bro, texts are like 10x shorter now . memes are massive tho. cat videos literally have their own metaverses. oh wait, boom, 1k more just dropped. check ur phone. everything is there all the time super quick. you got lost? that’s not a thing bro. parking still sucks tho . lmao wat do u mean u have a blog?? what is this, 2015? wats ur tiktok? oh yeah, that new AI img gen is
Ye olde web is gone. The wild west gave way to a few hyper-monetized corporate walled gardens. With them, we now have unprecedented convenience and access, usually for free. Everything is more polished (sometimes), faster (sometimes), shinier (almost always), cheaper (relative to inflation), easier (as long as you don’t question it), and… better? Right? Isn’t it?
idk bro… vibes are off. lowkey sus, not gonna lie.
It’s a mixed bag. I remember downloading computer games, and one time came across one that was – gasp – one megabyte in size. The size of entire floppy disk! It was basically an overnight download over dialup.
Today’s internet is intensively commercialized and plagued with malware but also very, very fast. As long as you protect yourself against the evil, it’s basically a net positive. It would have been inconceivable in 1995 to conduct your whole financial life by computer, without ever leaving the house. It fits well with my Old Fart lifestyle where I prefer to not leave the house, ever. And fast internet has opened up a whole new world of cinematic entertainment.
I worked for Sun Microsystems back in the 80s. If you were on the Internet it was because it was built by you and for you. And it had nearly zero commercial content.
If you weren’t on the Internet then, it probably wouldn’t have been useful or interesting for you.
So, my answer to the OP is “it was better for the people on it.”
I wouldn’t want to do it now but I’m very grateful I got to be a part of it then.
Stuff was more fun, exploratory and had a much greater sense of community. “Netiquette” was actually a thing many people gave a shit about rather than trying to be the biggest troll asshole you could be for clicks and attention. Webpages were being made (and could be found) because people were hobbyists and enthusiasts. Just a way different and more fun vibe before the rampant commercialization, not only by Big Business but every individual trying to blow up into a millionaire influencer.
But, yes, the things we can do now and the speed at which we can do them is so much greater than before. It’s a net positive for a larger number of people than the handful of nerds on the internet in 1995. Still a shame though to have lost that early feeling so completely. I’ve said before that I think the single worst contributor to the modern internet though is the smartphone. Once the internet stopped being something you had to carve out time to plant yourself in front of a keyboard for and became something you could (and were encouraged to) interact with 24/7 everywhere in your life is when it all really went to shit.
I recall trying to read one of the first online newspapers, maybe the New York Times? First problem was they tried to mimic the layout of the print version with columns and headlines everywhere.. The biggest problem was waiting for the photos to load one line at a time. And that was at work on a T whatever connection. I remember thinking who the fuck would ever want to read a paper on the Internet?
That was all there, including months long flame wars about what was proper netiquette. It was just so much smaller, and of so much less consequence. All of that bad stuff existed on Usenet, including spam and scams. Thing was, you close your newsreader, and it’s gone. Some troll in rec.fitness (or whatever) doesn’t have the clout to influence millions of boys, and doesn’t get invited to the Whitehouse.
The thing I really miss from 30 years ago was that email so much more personal. I got messages from work/school and messages from friends (plus spam, of course), but that was it.
Now probably 10-20% of my email is hand written work related messages sent to just me or a few other people, and almost none% are just correspondence from friends. The other 80-90% are various autogenerated messages from companies, governments, or work. Sure, some are useful—I much prefer an email saying my water bill is payed than a physical letter with the same information, but it is all just so boring.
The whole “You’ve got mail” ad/meme is based on the experience that it would be a fun email, not a note that you’re mortgage payment is due.
Yeah, but it was all (as you said) on much smaller scales and diminished. Comparing it to today is like someone showing you a nuclear weapon and saying “Well, you know, they DID have bronze cannons in the olden days…”
Lots more info. available on the internet now-- junk and worthwhile, and easier to access. Perhaps OP should clear their cache and avoid the known junk? But maybe there’s gold among the junk, I don’t know. 1995 internet was pretty sparse, mostly newsgroups and barebones web pages, in my experience. I never used it much until about 1998. In about 1999-2000 I started a website trying to organize messages in a MGB (car) related newsgroup, but never got full permission to use the posts, so I abandoned it.
Bad actors, such as they existed, were also much less sophisticated. There was not ‘algorithm’ optimizing for attention and you pretty much had to ‘opt in’ for conspiranoia even though it was prolific. There were self-proclaimed ‘experts’ in nearly everything on Usenet or various LISTSERVs but because there wasn’t a proliferation of readily accessible information sources it was pretty easy to suss out when someone was bullshitting. Today, someone who has watched a few Isaac Arthur videos can proclaim to be a science futurist without knowing a bit of physics, and there is no end of people trying to impress by pasting a response from an LLM as their own intellectual work without even applying a bit of common sense. And this doesn’t even touch on ‘social’ media and what an absolutely clusterfuck it has become in every conceivable way with apologists constantly mouthing “CAN’T REGULATE IT—FREE SPEECH!”, as if disseminating fraud and nonsense are Constitutionally-protected rights and any ‘incidental’ harms are just an inevitable consequence of personal liberty.
What the internet has become has made us collectively dumber and more credulous, even those who should know better. I can’t wait for a future when next word prediction machines tell us to jump off a cliff and people just follow direction because it is easier than thinking for themselves.
You’re missing a very important final step. “CAN’T REGULATE IT—FREE SPEECH!–BAN THE SPEECH I HATE!” The truth is it’s impossible to regulate it the way people want: ban the bad stuff. It is too vast to identify all of the bad stuff, and false positives will also ban good stuff. That is assuming people can even agree on what is good and bad (they can’t).
Any regulation is going to have to be far more nuanced, and involve things like privacy and allowing individuals to have control over what they see. Some of the new wave of social media sites are trying this. Discord is popular because it has brought back the idea of group chats for friends.
My complaint about email applies very similarly to social media. I really liked Facebook back when it was me and a bunch of friends posting things and chatting about whatever. It was great, and I miss it. Now it’s been algorithmed, monitized, adverted, and enshittified to being to painful to use. It doesn’t show me my (remaining) friends (most have left), but just suggestions of things that definitely do not interest me.
There are two separate factors at work: the quality of the product and the novelty/excitement from first use of a type of product. Compare your first car (an old beater) with your latest car (with all its modern high tech features). Which one resulted in the most excitement/joy? Probably your first car.
I worked for DEC back in the 80s and 90s, and I even had an admin account on an Arpanet backbone (decvax). Each backbone site had a bank of modems and we handled all the phone traffic. I remember discovering that Sun was using decvax to transfer nightly bulk data from their East coast offices to their West coast offices rather than use their own dedicated lines. It was expensive for us, but it was all part of building the Internet of the future.
I made my first “real” website in 1997 for the organization I worked for at the time. It had JavaScript image loading, rollovers, and a Perl module for submitting comments. It was a fantastic time and the Internet seemed like a new world that anyone could conquer with a little training. Creating a website then really only required some basic knowledge, notepad, and an account. I learned HTML in about 24 hours (I had programmed before, so a markup language was incredibly easy to pick up), early JavaScript in about a week.
You could join the web with very little. It was thrilling. Then sites just started appearing. Searches became more and more interesting on an almost daily basis. It did feel like an emerging utopia. Yet, as it grew, I felt more cynical toward the growing “cyber-utopia” attitude that began to dominate. People claimed the web would become a new political entity where everyone was “free.” No laws, no government, etc. But, just like early television, which had a similar “free spirit” ethos, people would eventually find a way to make money from the web and it would gradually evolve into a large shopping mall. I started sharing this thought and I was sometimes attacked for my “shortsightedness.” I just kept saying “enjoy it while you can!” I did.
I really miss it. The early web had an excitement about it that no longer exists on the modern web, except maybe in some obscure corners. I don’t see the “good old days” ever returning. This feels about as possible as unfrying an egg.
That brought back another fond memory. Those lucky enough to have free local numbers to call were jamming up the phone circuits which were designed for a much smaller percentage of usage.
. memes are massive tho. cat videos literally have their own metaverses. oh wait, boom, 1k more just dropped. check ur phone. everything is there all the time super quick. you got lost? that’s not a thing bro. parking still sucks tho 
. lmao wat do u mean u have a blog?? what is this, 2015? wats ur tiktok? oh yeah, that new AI img gen is 
