Ebaumsworld days
Before the questionable fake content and the pollution of websites by intrusive ads.
I like the internet a lot now but I miss the Flash era. So many game devs creating so many unique bitesize concepts. I still play many of them on flashpoint but every now and then you get hit with the depressing realization that its over. Like watching old taped cable and realizing you can’t actually change the channel.
The days before everything became enshittiffied, before 6 or 7 giant corps took over, the days before social media became a cesspit of slanging matches & false lifestyles, the days when search engines worked & displayed what you searched for not what they think you want to see, the days before shitty algorithms clogged your feeds up endlessly with shit that you searched for once during a conversation you had with someone at work, the days where news sites showed news headlines not bullshit clickbait lies, the days before evil corps tracked every move you make, the days before you were forced to have a shitty app for everything.
The days when going online was fun & interesting. I hope Lemmy continues to bring back some of that fun!
Well, have a nap, then FIRE ZE MISSILES!
Hokay
The best era is the first 5 years you experience it. That’s when all the magic happens. Recapturing that level of awe wonder and pure joy is hard after you become a veteran.
closely followed by the period right before it you didn’t experience, but everyone around you is nostalgiajacking to…
The 2000s for sure - from early online games and MMORPGs to a lot of forums, when Slashdot and Reddit were good, the start of Wikipedia, etc.
There was more optimism around everyone communicating with eachother internationally, and fostering communities. Nowadays it feels everything is dominated by a few big monopolies, and there’s a lot more censorship.
For me, it was the 90s, before the entire landscape got consumed by giant corporations. I know it wasn’t all roses back then, but it felt like you could find anything online, and it opened up a whole new world.
Remember when almost every new web site had a guestbook and would sometimes let you sign up for an email address using their domain? I had a [username]@britneyspears.com email address for a while.
Go play HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW right now, if you haven’t. Trust me.
I keep wanting to go back to usenet, but I hate that it’s not included by my ISP anymore
http://www.eternal-september.org/
free access to text froups
WHOA! Thank you so much!
Gah, I miss those days. I had a personal video on YouTube from the early days. Something or another flagged it — probably the audio I used for the cheap “credits” I put in — and the video went away.
More recently, grandmas birthday video. It got taken down a year later, likely because I had short, edited clips of Peanuts included. 🙄
Oh, and you mean Justin.tv.
Best era of the Internet was before the DMCA. At the time it passed I knew it would kill a lot of my favorite things about the Internet and I sadly wasn’t wrong
What’s DMCA?
Digital millennium copyright act. It effectively moved the burden of proof for copyright infringement from the copyright owner to the accused, short-circuiting the existing IP laws, among other things.
It is where much of the drama around copyright online stems from. It’s used as a way to quickly stifle anything someone posts that’s something you don’t like.
It made circumventing DRM itself illegal, even if you’re not breaking copyright by doing so (even if it’s for your own research or backups).
Early YouTube and twitch, early reddit, pre-instagram. That was a good time.
The early 2000’s. When I clicked the chat button on ICQ that connected me with a stranger anywhere in the world, that blew my mind as a kid.
I really got into the Internet in the mid-00’s and I would say the early days of YouTube, Digg, and most things still being pre-social media with forums being widespread was my favorite era. However, my second favorite era is going on right now. I always wished open source services would be more popular and even back then there were issues with corporate controlled services screwing over their users (see the Digg Migration). I’m so glad to see the Fediverse finally taking off, with self hosting options and no centralized entity who can shut the whole thing down at the flick of a switch. Leaving Twitter and Reddit behind has been very refreshing.
2001 - 2012.
No one knew shit. Privacy barely mattered. Everything was out there. The big guys were only big, not fucking obnoxious.
The pirate bay.
I mean…
No contest.
The few years when Google was fully usable.
When AltaVista was actually good was another highlight. Babel Fish was great for its time.
Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.
I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.
Search engines no longer exist. There are only content recommendation engines now.
