Does anyone else miss the old internet?

oldguyjoe said:

I miss the internet that had less slop,
google search where top 10 results were actually relevant,
social media network where first interaction with someone didn't lead to immediate wall going up in anticipation of a scam,
I miss the small communities before the great centralization, where everyone knew each other and was always ready to chat without an agenda.

I also miss the old BHW, where good sales threads stayed on top, not being gamified or spammed to death.

Click to expand...

I made a request some time ago, but it never went anywhere.
For sales threads, all reviews that the thread starter reposts in their threads should include the dates in them.
I still believe that if that were to be implemented, it would reduce a lot of the spam threads that the thread starters repeatedly bump with reviews from like 2018 that have their dates concealed.
This would help all the customers to be able to make better and more informed decisions.

Since we're talking about the old days...
I miss the old AOL chatrooms, the 2d online games where many of the playerbase felt like close friends and some like family, and the BHW stars.

I will give you a pro tip for happiness...don't live in the past and neither in the future, always live only in the present and try to enjoy the most of it. No matter where and how you live, there are good things in the present to focus on, ignore the rest.

Definitely. The Internet is exhausting, fake, scam, non-human. Maybe it's time for The Human Internet

Take me back to Quake 2

There are aspects I miss, for sure. The quirkiness of GeoCities and the dancing hamsters. Simple websites, no flash, basic HTML, 14 year old writing websites for Coca-Cola (true story). Search results that were relevant, content written by people with actual expertise and wiling to help. I miss some of the old BBS games too, if you want to go even further back.

I do like the speed of the modern interwebs. I like the ability it has now to more easily share news and ideas in newer and faster formats (videos, socials, etc.), but that comes with risks and a larger attack surface too. Definitely tradeoffs. I still play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft (on private servers though), and that painful on the older dial-up modems.

Of course, maybe we are just old now. But Internet before was user-driven alternative of big media, now it's run my big media.