Many yearn for the "good old days" of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@molly0xfff 1995-2005. There was a quirky Internet before that, but the #web everybody knows really blossomed in that era. Decentralized. Quirky. I was safe to say what you wanted (without worrying about people doxxing you). It was easy to create something with a minimum of HTML. Geocities was pretty bare bones and easy for people to figure out and make things. Early blogs. No walled digital gardens.
@molly0xfff
I started scrolling through the comments and was struck by how many conflate #web with #Internet. I suppose what I miss is that many who only know the Internet via the Web fail to understand they are NOT the same thing.
@molly0xfff Vast choice of millions of quirky small tiny websites, including, but not limited to, blogs, "check out my hobby", movie websites. All that personal expression that was not funneled into the same three websites' allowed formats.
@molly0xfff I miss telnet BBSes, mostly. But for #web things, I miss ephemeral sites like the Trojan Room Coffee Pot or FogCam. Nando.net was good, and Yahoo was fun when it felt like you were just clicking through digitized Yellow Pages.
> "If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss?"
@molly0xfff I like how simple and home-made everything was, but also how new and exciting it all was. Everyone felt like the web was something truly revolutionary and world changing, and we were participating in it all together.
So many people tried making their own homepages, and these were all like scrapbooks. People would post about what they liked, or what they knew about, or their hobbies, or they would make up memes, and they would share other peoples work just by linking to them, or sometimes just copying and pasting to their own website. People learned how to write basic markup in HTML from online tutorials and by looking at other websites. Some people would use web page editors by Netscape or Adobe.
And there were so many small companies out there trying to make money on new web based technology, but this was before JavaScript was the all-powerful language of the web. Sometimes they used Java, sometimes Adobe Flash, sometimes Macromedia Shockwave. No one knew what, if any, of these technologies would become the one that would become dominant, it was all up for grabs.
Before folks worried about cyberstalking (stalking but with bits). Hackers stealing your money. Identity thieves. Surveillance. Naughty bits. Being caught seeing naughty bits. Privacy to chat with friends without conversations being public. Disinformation. Advertising. Internet/social addiction. Cyberwarfare. Election interference. Ransomware. I experience today's #web through insecurity and anxiety and ad overload. I miss the awkward relatively quiet net of olde.
I'm in the process of migrating from Google Workspace to Proton Mail, but I've hit a snag that might make me stick to Google. I have several email addresses for business, and yet Proton puts all emails in one inbox, which doesn't make any sense. So I'll get emails related to my writing in the same inbox as those for film, as personal emails, and as those for other work? I expected separate logins for each email.
This guy is taking no prisoners. Even though we all have a good intuitive sense as to why Google has gone to shit, there has been something slippery about it. This article makes it all more concrete.