My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.
I always thought the relative lack of people sucked back then.
Now I kinda wish it didn’t have as many.
The vitriol was more or less the same as it is now, though. It really was dependent on the spaces you hung out, and if they were actively moderated and had rules against such crap. All but one of the spaces I would spend online would have dropped the ban hammer on someone telling someone else to kill themselves or for using a slur/spouting hate speech.
But it was also easier to find spaces where that kind of talk was encouraged, too.
Hand-curated categories -> lists etc.
Think back to what Yahoo originally was. Drill down through categories, subcats, etc. to find what you’re looking for.
Worked for the time, but for a technical query today would be an absolute non-starter
Pop up ads. You’d be on a webpage and suddenly you’d be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.
“Pop-up blocking” was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn’t want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.
Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.
Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.
Pop-ups but not ads. They have moved to restrict what adblockers can block with newer versions of chromium.
Google has probably done more than any other major web company to ensure that ads aren’t allowed to harm users — whether through unsolicited pop-ups, malware, or other attacks.
Malware ads used to be commonplace on ad networks; with “legitimate” websites like CNN.com showing ads (served via a third-party ad network) that attacked security holes in Windows users’ browsers.
Ask anyone who worked in IT in the early 2000s. Web ads used to be a shitpit. Now they’re annoying at most.
Sure but now everyone is at parity with regards to blocking ads and malware, but Google is intentionally rolling some of that back. I won’t say they’re ‘evil’ or anything (at least in this instance) but they’re definitely greedy and there are much better options out there (though chromium makes up a huge majority of the market)
No mention of Mosaic (first web browser)? What sucked was you generally had to compile it yourself. That meant installing all the build tooling, building it, and turning it loose. Oh. Windows? Lol. No go. Gotta get an early version of Linux up and running first. That usually meant 20+ diskettes of Slackware installation.
But then you could surf in all the basic HTTP glory. It was a new world and it was awesome.
I was there way before “wild west”. Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.
But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.
Our “search engine” was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.
Removed by mod
Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you’d have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.
When I used to pirate music back in the late '90s/early '00s with dial-up, I’d setup like 3-4 songs to download and then leave them running overnight with our 28.8Kbps dial-up internet. If anyone called in on the phone during that time, it’d kick the computer off the internet and I’d have to start the downloads over again. Browsing porn (or just images in general) was interesting too as you would literally see images load top down, line by line. Video was essentially out of the question back then and the best we got was like 2 second looping gifs.
Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.
Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.
Damn I’m getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn’t online. The internet had it’s trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.
Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It’s crazy to know they’re still in existence and still pretty active.
lol… “old internet” “2008” … wut?
The wild west part was the best part. It felt real. Now it’s all watered down.
