Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
Blocking dumb trolls. Get a life.
I remember the tail end of the old internet. And no, it was not my MySpace or Reddit. It was forums and it was personal websites. I wouldn’t say it’s better per se but it was definitely more fun. There was no money in the internet and so there was no incentive to market anything. People just did what they wanted. Even companies mainly just had fun stuff on their websites.
On the other hand, damn was it hard to find literally anything. The only way to find new things was through word of mouth.
I miss forums. Vbulletin was brilliant.
Yes we had some trolls, but because those forums were independent sites you didnt get so many people stumbling onto them with ragebait because reddit or facebook thought they could generate friction and call it engagement.
Now the internet literally is just a few websites all showing the same things, forcing conflicting groups together, entrenching opinions, sowing division and delivering confirmation bias by the truckload to everyone. All in the name of profit, milking ‘engagement’ to the preferred ends of whoever has the deepest pockets.