# Was the internet better 30 years ago? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 11, 2025, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260 "2025-05-11T18:22:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![dorvann](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/df705f/32.png) [@dorvann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dorvann)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/21 "2025-05-12T00:20:32Z")
> [@echoreply](#): > > 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. I think 90s equivalent would be if **MI5Victim** got invited to The White House. (For those of you not in the know— **MI5Victim** was a individual who posted in Usenet newsgroups who claimed that British intelligence had bugged his home and was sending people to follow him around and harass him.) ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/22 "2025-05-12T00:34:47Z")
And if they didn’t, they had Johnny Castaway. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/23 "2025-05-12T00:39:30Z")
Here is an article from _Mental Floss_ I like to read to people that have fond memories…but not totally accurate memories. [What the Internet Looked Like in 1995](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/49676/what-internet-looked-1995) ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/24 "2025-05-12T01:38:30Z")
I will confess. In 1995 I was one of the people trying to carve out at least a commercial niche for the Internet. It was a time of experimentation - almost all of it disastrously inept. People took business ideas that had failed in every other context - brick and mortar; mail order; door-to-door; you name it - and decided that they would succeed on the Internet. For awhile, the only business ventures that showed any kind of success were online porn sites, and even they had trouble figuring out how to monetize the product. Meanwhile, giants like Sears ignored the Internet entirely and wound up footnotes in history. I have some amusing stories from that time, but not what I’d call fond memories. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/25 "2025-05-12T01:48:52Z")
Anyone remember when we were told that NetZero was going to give us the internet for free…forever! ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/26 "2025-05-12T02:10:31Z")
30? Absolutely not. I’d agree on 5-10 though. Twitter not yet the Nazi bar and AI slop wasn’t everywhere. Probably go a bit further back to get before SEO enshitification. ---
**Author:** ![Dag\_Otto](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/439d5e/32.png) [@Dag\_Otto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dag_Otto)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/27 "2025-05-12T02:10:52Z")
Amazingly, both Foam Bath Fish Time and [Zombo.com](http://Zombo.com) are still up. Sometime, perhaps 30 years ago or maybe a bit less, General Mills had a website that allowed you to custom design breakfast cereal and they would make it and then ship it to you. They had a dozen or so ingredients that you could choose from. It shut down after a short time, but I think it was ahead of it’s time. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/28 "2025-05-12T04:18:54Z")
blinking text garish colors pages that played music, pegging the volume for your convenience scripts and effects that only showed if you used the right browser and, of course, Macromedia Flash ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/29 "2025-05-12T04:34:15Z")
> [@Snarky\_Kong](#): > > Twitter not yet the Nazi bar… Twitter was always a dumpster fire by the very nature of its design, intended to facilitate knee-jerk reactions to and ‘re-tweets’ of soundbites and memes. Stranger ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/30 "2025-05-12T05:28:18Z")
30 years ago? No. I think 15 years ago is when it started to go bad, where the technology finally caught up with the imagination, but then was instantly subsumed by corporate homogeneity. ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/31 "2025-05-12T07:04:47Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Remember when screensavers were big? I still use them, mine is from [Electric Sheep](https://electricsheep.org/) - psychedelic generative mandala-esque art. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/32 "2025-05-12T07:34:56Z")
The internet was definitely more _innocent_ - it seems to have taken a couple of decades for commerce and organised crime (and I suppose other factors such as toxic groups) to really reach critical mass and fully exploit the internet, to the point of changing its fundamental nature. Perhaps it was _too_ innocent for its own good; it’s pretty unthinkable now that a person would publish a personal page with their full contact and address details on it, but that happened a lot - the internet was in that sense like a sort of enhanced phone book; trust was almost the default state. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/33 "2025-05-12T07:40:09Z")
Well, it was a lot simpler, that’s for sure. When I first got Internet access in 1995, the WWW and the web browser were what most people thought of it as. There was Usenet, and things called Archie and Veronica, and Eudora for e-mail, but it was pretty much dial-up 14,400 kbps (blazing speed!) paid for by the minute, so people took care as to what they said or did online. Hey, does anybody remember the days of “30 hours a month for only $4.95,” with every minute, or less, over that 30 hours for $0.10? So maybe it was better. Not saying that it was cheaper, but given those parameters, it made people think twice before posting whatever random thought popped into their head. As a result, I recall that there was there was more reasoned discourse, more “to-the-point” arguments, and a lot fewer spur-of-the-moment Tweets and the like. Not that Twitter had been invented, but after turning on your computer, firing up your modem, dialing your provider, getting connected, and getting to a website, you thought twice about correcting “something being wrong on the Internet.” ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/34 "2025-05-12T08:01:33Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > Twitter was always a dumpster fire by the very nature of its design, intended to facilitate knee-jerk reactions to and ‘re-tweets’ of soundbites and memes. Absolutely right. The first description I heard of Twitter was something like “post thoughts as they occur to you (140 characters or less)”. I reaction was “gawd, we already have enough garbage on Usenet. Why should I be interested in some random person’s unfiltered thoughts?” ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/35 "2025-05-12T08:26:37Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > The internet was definitely more _innocent_ Uhm… may I remind you of rotten dot com? (Beyond NSFW, that site is not safe for anyone. And I think it is no longer working at all.) The internet was a wild ride back then. Now it is more expansive but also more boring. Also I would not have a small collection of gay man on dinosaur porn, if it was not for the mid-nineties. The 90s were wild, if you were looking in the wrong places. Apparenty tyranosaurus cloaca was one of those places. I mean, somewhere on a harddrive I have video of the least erotic porn I have ever seen, two ladies fellating three gentlemen who are _dressed in pterodactyl costume_. You just don’t get that variety these days. ---
**Author:** ![Jegpeg](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jegpeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jegpeg)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 9:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/36 "2025-05-12T09:14:27Z")
30 years ago was 1995 not the 80s. I think I got internet access at home in about 1997 and it was pretty much as the OP described and I was far from the first to do so. I think by 1995 the internet had moved on from being only for the specialised few and was of interest to the general public. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 9:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/37 "2025-05-12T09:31:18Z")
That’s not the kind of innocence I was talking about. ---
**Author:** ![scudsucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scudsucker/32/14101_2.png) [@scudsucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scudsucker)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 10:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/38 "2025-05-12T10:34:04Z")
Haha, no, not at all innocent. But I get what you intended. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 11:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/39 "2025-05-12T11:54:26Z")
30 years ago, internet-enabled smartphones were not yet transforming the developing world in myriad ways by providing access to education, healthcare, and financial services. People griping about the enshittification of social media have no eye on the bigger picture. The internet has changed lives and enriched economies that badly need help, and stepping back to 30 years ago and pampered elites arguing on _alt.startrek.vs.starwars_ then rather than r/warsvstrek now is not by any measure “better” ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 11:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260/40 "2025-05-12T11:58:00Z")
Even if you accept your premise, which is wrong, Twitter has gotten significantly, unrecognizably worse in the past year. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-internet-better-30-years-ago/1018260.md?page=3)