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I miss the old internet because it was a time you could meet up with old friends and connect and stay in touch with each other.

A few things changed, though. First, enshittification of services. You used to go on Facebook and just SWIM in the lives of other people. Now it's just promoted content. Second--related to the post--is rage was recruited to encourage engagement. Third, people's behavior online shifted towards tribal identification, towards rage baiting the other side, towards performativity; and I honestly don't know how much of that I can lay at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg.

I also miss the old internet because truly random things had a chance to make the rounds. Cracked.com had some of the finest writing I've ever read. Nowadays with SEO and official tie-ins (Forbes.com has a deal with Google), the only way to be seen is to spend money, and the only reason to spend money is to make money, so most everything online is now directly or indirectly an advertisement. AI only accelerated this process.

I think this is why Reddit became as huge as it did, because the weirdness still had a chance, and because people want to talk to each other. And now we have Lemmy.

We keep making and finding new islands as the waters continue to rise, but we used to roam the plains.

Bullshit. The technology WAS better.

Text communication took like, 28 Mb of RAM and was blazing fast, and a single chat application like Pidgin could interoperate with ALL of them.

That's not it at all. The internet used to be a multitude of small sites. A true bazaar made by individuals, visited by individuals in their web browsers.

Now it is all the 5 biggest platforms trapping users in their apps and doing their best to wall everything off.

back when using your real name on social media was idiotic

The thing about AIM, was "OMG this person is available to chat instantly, right here, right now!" A lot of people didn't have text messaging, or they did but it was expensive, so being able to chat remotely meant calling them on the phone, or you and the other person happened to be online at the same time.

We've effectively eliminated boredom from our lives, and that sucks. Boredom is super important not just for our mental health, but in my view also for qualifying as sentient creatures.

Also it was made to be fun and chill. You logged on talked to a few people end of transaction. You weren’t mined for data. They weren’t pushing ads and content based on your history. Myspace and aim just did a thing and you did that thing. Now the thing does you.

Nah, I'm nostalgic for the time when a chat was just a chat, not a signal to be analyzed, monetized, advertised, and propagandized.

This and the old internet was largely non-commercial compared to today. It was the "small" internet of passionate nerds, academics, and techies who needed an outlet for their passion. I remember being confused when I learned the ".com" was intended for commercial web sites only, because most personal websites people had were ".com"

Can confirm, 39 year old here. The internet was fun from the mid 90s to mid 00s. People made content for fun, educational purposes, or to provide a service someone needs or would find useful. You "went on the internet" to chat with weird strangers and download media. It was fun. Now almost my entire life is the internet - my job, errands (banking, shopping, appointments) relaxation time (tv shows on streaming service, music and podcasts in one app). And in each of those things, bombarded with ads, privacy invaded, personal data stolen... we are way too reliant on the internet

Smartphones ruined the internet.

When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.

Plus, there's just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.

Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that's really when the internet went to shit.

The internet was much better before people figured out how to make money off of it.

No, it's because it wasn't full of bots and shitty content created solely for the purpose of generating clicks. People created content to have fun and share their passion, not because they wanted to be a professional influencer.

One of the core features of AIM was an away message. I'm not here, fuck off.

Even better was if someone sent a message and then you set yourself as away.

I miss flash games like pogo.com and stuff

Well, then the Internet wasn't a capitalist shithole. It was only a shithole.

... eventually, you logged off.

Maybe you logged off. Quitters.

Sometimes I get done of posting on Lemmy and I go out and take pictures.

Also the Internet wasn't crapped up with every moron imaginable that could pick up a phone. There was a minimum barrier to entry; you needed a computer and to have at least average intelligence to figure out how to use it.

Remember:

Products from Amazon will cost MUCH MUCH LESS because there's no "big box" overhead.

And shipping will be FREE!

some things about AIM are better. on discord, you express yourself with a monthly fee and now the member list is full of distracting animations. on AIM (and myspace), you had to learn some HTML to format the song lyrics in your bio just right.

Everything you did on the Internet didn't exist just to sell you something; you weren't a commodity to be manipulated and packaged with everything you looked at.

Not long ago, I stumbled upon a legal YouTuber who covered an astonishing revelation: it turns out that casual users on Facebook or Instagram can get copyright strikes for the music Meta suggests they can embed in their shorts and atory reels...!??

I was there on MySpace 20 yeara ago - it was so much easier to approach musicians, and embedding their songs on your profile page was just one of the cool features. I still keep in touch with a few artists and bands from that era and still revisit them from time to time, even though I usually tend to always seek out music that is still to new...

P.S. Maybe it's because I'm autistic, but I really feel the take in the OP just screams normie. Also, having an intense interest these days in decentralized social media and the smolweb and the rest of the indie web revival out there, I think things are not so bad, in a way. It feels better now that we know we're going against the grain with things that might have been taken for granted 20+ years ago.

"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.

In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.

I have a 20 year old coworker I constantly ask probing questions about what it's like never having not had the internet. It's so weird.

I mean crushing boredom isn't a thing anymore because of it, which is cool and I can acknowledge that. But there's also something very dystopian about it and clearly it's having pretty serious negative effects on society, politics in particular. So yeah....not really sure how to feel about it.

I just went camping and put the goddamn thing in a bag for 4 days and forgot about it. Friends and I only brought the internet up once during the trip to joke that we hoped when we got back into reception we'd find out he had died. It's funny cuz I don't even need to say who.

Tbh the indieweb and fediverse have me feeling this way these days. I look forward to getting home and checking my forums and messages, just like I used to after school.

GenX version of the internet:

https://youtu.be/ckc6XSSh52w

Then log into a BBS.

ASCII Pr0n and 8 bit music...

Fuck that, I'm nostalgic because there was an actual aesthetic with character. "Modern" flat UIs are boring and flat.

lol I’ve been perpetually online from the beginningish.

MSN chatrooms are where I met the first person I had a relationship with, AIM is mainly where we got to know each other.

And MySpace was what got me interested in web design, back when crafting webpages by hand was still seen as a form of art.

Really, because I'm more nostalgic for having hope for the future.