It was fun. It was creative. it was free. It was optimistic and people were pretty chill.

Now the internet is all abotu the bottom line. 90% of the traffic/people on it are bots and scams from malicious people trying to make a easy buck by fucking over people.

I remember just the sheer wonder and awe. The raw thrill of exploration.. It hadnt been corprotized yet, So there wasnt any real ads or anything. Just a vast existence that felt like raw, unexplored territory, every keystroke unveiling a new and wonderous world hidden just behind the next hill.

Websites had visitor counters, which further enforced the thrill of exploration when you stumbled upon a website that had a visitor counter in the single or double digits. Discovering the bleeding edges of human civilization, where a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent had dared to tread.

The raw exhilaration of it all causing time to seemingly stop for you, until you realize 36 hours has past in the blink of an eye, and suddenly crash for 12+ hours of sleep.

There is no magic to the web anymore. Its just..a utility. Boring, and sterile. Dangers more from the corporatization and ads thananything else. Changing constantly only in the pursuit of shifting trends expressly and only for the purpose of improving metrics.. because getting 30,000 hits that'll never come back looks better than 5,000 people that regularly engage.

God fucking hell I'm depressed as fuck now.

Imagine a bookworm that suddenly has access to an effectively infinite library that they can access almost any time that they want. And it felt like there was a lot to explore and didnt feel as centralized. I.e today it feels like youve got 5 maybe 6 really big sites rather than hundreds, thousands, millions of distinct and potentially interesting places to explore.

Do I want that back? Yes and no. I miss the feeling of wonder and of exploring the unknown but I do not miss dial up. If your internet connection were 100x that today youd think something was wrong with the connection. i.e horribly slow. Images would take minutes to load, songs hours, video was unthinkable.

I miss flash games.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next "rank". Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you'd have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

I certainly don't miss all the exploits, viruses, and general lack of security. Security and privacy online are very recent. Back in the day, everything was transmitted in plain text and browsers and extensions were full of holes that were easily exploited. Your computer could get a virus just by opening a webpage.

Audiogalaxy Satellite. This was THE BEST mp3 service available. It was an index of privately run FTP servers. It was 97, I had just gotten cable internet. I went to spring break for a week, left my server up with a 1.5 ratio. Came back to a hard drive full of shitty late 90's pop. Literally full. Which wasn't saying much since my HD at the time was maybe 2 gigs.

I miss msn messenger so much.

@Provider Search. Can't find anything these days. I get so frustrated with the results being completely irrelevant and or obvious ads. I used to get 100 pages of results and have to narrow my search with operants like AND or "specific phrases". I used to feel like I had all this knowledge at my fingertips if I could just word it right. Much of it is still out there, I'll just never find it

This Tumblr post has some helpful links

https://www.tumblr.com/myalgias/721490730516922368/cea-tide-ladyshinga-im-sorry-friends-but

I miss text centric internet. I was interested in Linux from like age 12. But I only had one computer and was scared to install it. Well I got tricked on irc to fuck up my windows install. Left with some Linux install CDs and little other options, I went for it. My modem wasn't supported, but luckily I had a little bit of money stashed and went to office Depot to grab an external modem I knew worked.

And after struggling to get windows to work well on that old hand me down computer I was blown away. Especially when I found lynx. It opened webpages so fast. Got AIM working, got irc going, and had everything I needed. Started to learn more about the system and the internet was a wonderful place. Loads of information, but you had to seek out the things that interested you.

I made some really good friends that I would chat with for hours on end. Really helped me through an otherwise pretty not good childhood. Helped me learn a lot of stuff. And it wasn't ad filled, hyper tracking oriented, walled garden garbage.

Also, goatse.

I miss Usenet.

I spent 95% of my time shitposting on one forum in the early 2000's. It was a similar experience to spending 95% of my time on reddit or one of the other major social media sites, except that crazy new ideas for social media didn't really exist back then. They were all traditional forums where everything is posted in chronological order. I remember occasionally sumbling across a threaded forum back then, where you could reply directly to a comment and start a new thread chain like lemmy and reddit can. That was about it as far as innovation went, or at least from what I remember.

The other 5% where I was browsing those old web 1.0 sites with basic html and flash and all that stuff, I don't miss that stuff too much. It would be nice to browse through an archive of stuff like that once or twice for nostalgia's sake, but the modern internet is good too. I have no qualms with the modern internet.

When you jumped on to chat (IRC) you didn't get pressured into upgrading to nitro (Discord).. IRC is still around but all the nice free networks have been decimated in acquisitions and other things.. there are still a lot of great Niche communities if you look hard however.

@Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

Off the top of my head, I miss that games used to have LAN play built in, and you could use apps like Kali to play ipx games over the Internet with a built in community

90s, slow (56kb/s) and expansive (4$/h) connection, PC was an instrument to do a single specific search at day without distractions. That's all. Game change was the subscription to monthly plans and speed up to 2mb/s.

I think what I miss is the novelty of the internet. The fact that it was fairly new was what made it exciting, whereas now the internet is old hat. That being said, a lot of the issues people complain about today's internet existed back then too. There were pop up ads that were annoying as hell, but fewer ad blockers. There was spyware and adware, which if you click the wrong thing would track your every move to add even more pop up ads. There was less security and awareness about that stuff back then, so it was easy to become a victim of spyware and adware. Hell, I remember when I first accessed the internet, it was through AOL, which was a major corporation back then with it's own browser and ecosystem that was designed to keep you on their webpages and seemed disinterested in letting you explore the web beyond that.

The internet peaked with gopher, tbh. Mosaic was the beginning of the end.

Static websites, they may have looked terrible, but all that dynamic loading nowadays is infuriating.

Also I feel like I can't find things on websites anymore. 9/10 times it seems easier to just use a search engine to find the specific part of a website, instead of using the sites navigation. I remember that being different around the 2000s.

I miss there being lots of pages people would go to, lots or things and communities to explore. I understand there's probably more pages in total now, but I still feel like users mostly gravitate the same ones.

I miss the days before it became all corporatized. The days of the early world wide web and gopher made the internet a whole lot of fun. I had a blast with usenet and internet relay chat as well. Even email was freaking awesome. I remember getting excited when I'd receive messages. Thankfully that excitement is getting rekindled due in a large part to corporate's own hubris. The growth of the fediverse is making the internet fun again.

it used to be more difficult for a smooth brain to tell everyone their opinion.

IRC when it was truly big and building your own homepage at Geocities

E-mail pen pals. I made friends from all over the world, it was a great way to get to know other people and their culture. Writing huge e-mails about where you're from and what life is like where you live. Because you usually only write one every couple of days, it was something to look forward to.
I guess social media kind of ruined that part, why write to someone when you can just post it for the whole world to see.

@Provider Web rings, IRC, and forums. Actual personal home pages dedicated to niche interests.

@Provider
I miss Listerv culture. I grew up with mimeographed APA fanzines, and mailing lists were the most pure implementation of that kind of community on the Internet.

Seemed like any interest, no matter how obscure, had a welcoming Listerv community online. If you knew how to find it.

I don't miss anything about it. And certainly not the modem dial sounds I knew from memory/intuitively.

Imagine having to dial into the internet and having to wait 30s with beeping and whooshing sounds.

/e: It seems OP question was stated more broadly than the linked article addresses and people seem to reply to.

I remember going over to my buddy's place. He had this hovercraft game and it was the most unplayable garbage ever, but it was fun because you were racing against other people on the internet. You were lagging so hard and getting maybe 10 or less frames. Garbage experience, but an experience nonetheless lol.

Before the internet, there was this thing called Fidonet which is a BBS that also allowed transferring files. It was such amazing technology at the time. You had your computer connect to the network using an acoustic modem and then at 300 baud you were on a very early version of a peer-to-peer network.

Traversing web and ftp sites by simple, progressive, suffix removal from the address. Sometimes very interesting what showed up that way. Security was spotty, an afterthought often.

I remember my Technology teacher in high school (1998-ish) showing me what websites I could go to for downloading full albums for free. He initially showed me a directory just filled with Pink Floyd tracks.

You can still find things in open directories, but it doesn't have that same feel of being wild woolly and free.

I miss early social media like LiveJournal weirdly. 1999-2005-ish was wild times.

I also remember hosting DJ Dangermouse's "Grey Album" which was a mix of The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album on my website as protest. The album was released for free, no money was made from it, yet Dangermouse was sued and banned from distributing it.

@Provider Written recipes where you didn't have any images or photos and didn't have to scroll down 14 pages of life story.

Just require a list of ingredients (using metric weights as only about 2 countries in the world use spoons and cups as a measure and every cook has scales), followed by a list of actions with time and temperatures where required.