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I miss the old internet

7K views 92 replies 53 participants last post by  Main Street 
#1 ·
My family first got the internet in 2003. We had AOL dial up and the internet would disconnect when the phone rang. It was pretty bad.



But back then the internet was novel and accessible. I didn't have to venture far to speak to people, as there was AOL chat and MSN messenger.


A year or two later I started posting on forums, mainly music forums but also social phobia world and social anxiety support.


Back then it seemed like people were easier to talk to. That's what I meant when I said the internet was accessible. I made online friends and met some of them in person. We had a social anxiety meetup one time. Another time I went to a gig.



Unfortunately, they all one by one went their separate ways due to finding partners, starting jobs or simply getting bored of internet forums. Then the forums seemed to start dying. In 2012 I saw my one remaining friend for the last time before she drifted away after getting a partner.



I haven't had any friends since 2012. I've had acquaintances, but no one I could to relate to like my old online friends.



I've tried to make online friends since then but either no one wants to talk or I can't relate to them. Of course I still try to socialise in real life but there are cliques everywhere and I never see anyone on their own like I am.


Can anyone relate to these ramblings? Maybe I need to search harder but I feel alienated everywhere. This forum isn't too bad but it's not as good as it used to be. I like to read old posts.
 
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#2 ·
the internet was even better in the 90s. Websites were informative text and photos, where anyone could make them. It wasn't all corporate and ad-based. AOL had celebrities chat in their online board, and they would publish the schedule in the newspaper when they'd appear. There used to be an unlimited number of chatrooms about any subject, and you'd spend hours just texting about anything, and it wasn't full of hate or divisive politics or anything.

and everything about the internet felt brand new.

I imagine mobile technology (apps) is kind of like that. It's probably really fresh to teenagers, like how the "internet" was with me, but it's way too visual and omnipresent now compared to the "internet" of the 90s and very early 2000s...before facebook ever existed.
 
#73 ·
the internet was even better in the 90s. Websites were informative text and photos, where anyone could make them. It wasn't all corporate and ad-based. AOL had celebrities chat in their online board, and they would publish the schedule in the newspaper when they'd appear. There used to be an unlimited number of chatrooms about any subject, and you'd spend hours just texting about anything, and it wasn't full of hate or divisive politics or anything.

and everything about the internet felt brand new.

I imagine mobile technology (apps) is kind of like that. It's probably really fresh to teenagers, like how the "internet" was with me, but it's way too visual and omnipresent now compared to the "internet" of the 90s and very early 2000s...before facebook ever existed.
Before facebook ever existed, made me laugh for some reason, "back in the old old days".
 
#5 ·
Me too, it used to make funny noises.
 
#6 ·
The internet as a whole was terrible back then. It was full of popups, nauseating animated GIFs, RealPlayer, haphazard plugins like Shockwave, and the like. Websites were designed for particular browsers and operating systems and even particular screen resolutions.

But I do miss when forums and instant messengers were more popular. Around 2010 was the best, just before mobile-first design started ruining desktop websites.

And really the fundamental problem is that the web these days is phone-oriented. All the instant messengers today are designed for phones and don't even bother with desktop options, the websites are designed for phones, forums are unpopular because that sort of long-winded writing isn't easy on a phone, etc. Companies are just too lazy to do things twice to provide a good experience for PCs as well as phones, so they spend all their time on the more popular of the two.
 
#22 ·
Yeah, all those pop-ups were really annoying. OMG. When my ex's family (mom, stepdad, and their young kids) first got internet at home (before we did), my ex (pervert that he was) used to go over there and watch porn. So when I went to use that computer, I'd get random pornographic pop-ups from all the viruses. :O Meanwhile a few 4-8 year old children would be walking around behind the computer desk.

And I hate how some functions on websites can only done while on mobile. So many websites are super pushy about downloading their stupid app. It blows my mind how several of my coworkers say they almost never use a computer while at home unless they are working remotely. They just use their phone.
 
#8 ·
We had AOL dialup till 2009 lol. I'm actually 28 so all my peers had broadband by the time we were about 11, but my family didn't, actually we only got dialup when I was about 11. I would have to wait forever for a YouTube video to fully load.

I like the personalisation in the early 2000s internet, even with forums being a thing many people had their own website which they customised in all kinds of ways. Lots of really ugly aesthetics lol but still. @zonebox posted a search engine in another thread recently that can take you to random old websites:

https://www.wiby.me/
 
#12 ·
Got internet in the summer of 1996. Bought my first PC computer myself. Had dialup. Almost had a heartattack when I got the phone bill. Didn't relieve the server number I was dialing into was long distance. Bill was like $100 when normally it was $14 per month. The phone company was a small company and they waived the fee and signed me up for a little more per month so it would be toll free calling into that server. It was $19 per month for the internet service. First computer had a 33.6 kbps modem then the second computer I bought a year later later had a 56 kbps modem.
 
#13 ·
Sometime in the late 90s I got a dedicated phone line for the internet and set up a Linux box that kept the connection alive 24/7. If the connection was dropped it would automatically redial. I think at the time it had a 28.8 modem but I soon upgraded to 56k. The Linux box also acted as a router for the home network. Any request for an internet address was routed to that box. It was all very primitive but it worked.
 
#15 ·
what do you miss exactly?

everything is the same as it was before. yeah there are corporations everywhere now and advertisement but you dont have to use these sites.
the only thing i miss from the old days is that everybody used to have a website. you had to make your own site, not use facebook or myspace or all the other things.

gaming clans had their own websites back then.
 
#17 ·
what do you miss exactly?

everything is the same as it was before.
That's not really true. Usenet is pretty much gone unless you pay for it. Sure you can still make a website but good luck getting anyone to come to it.
The whole culture of the internet has changed and the internet has also changed the overall culture we live in as well.
Corporations ruin everything. As soon as a corporation touches anything it ceases to be genuinely cool. A corporation is like the tacky rich uncle at the beer party. He ruins the good time with his boorish behavior but nobody kicks him out because he brought the beer.
 
#21 ·
Websites sure have changed. Now to read an article or list you are supposed to click through 5 plus pages, like one paragraph per page. Is that because websites are designed for phones or just an attempt to generate more page views? Seems like I used to be able to view websites with no problem when I had dial up but now if not for using an ad blocker most sites won't even load.
 
#23 ·
Now to read an article or list you are supposed to click through 5 plus pages, like one paragraph per page. Is that because websites are designed for phones or just an attempt to generate more page views?
That's purely for ad revenue, gives them 5 ad impressions instead of 1. The worst is listicles in gallery form where you have to click through 40 pages of unnecessary photos to read the sentence of text at the bottom of each. But at least we have effective ad blockers these days, unlike 2003.
 
#24 ·
bring back napster and shareazar


delay my connection by a minute and play the dial tone thing every time before i start to use the internet


back then this place was cutting edge tech. emoticons! amazing


porn was a slowly loading image


lets just smash our pcs and go back to books. destroy all cars and walk everywhere or ride a horse.
 
#25 ·
Yes I miss the novelty of it all. Got access to internet at univ before it was publicly known, so it was like discovering this big amazing secret.

I guess like all new (well, it wasn't totally new of course) things there was a pioneer spirit to it. Fairly bad web sites that took a long time to design, full of href links, like every second word. Then they were not updated.

Played/coded a lot on MUDs back then. Game service needed to be set up by someone who had access to a server, you didn't get it for "free" (or a small fee) like today with Minecraft or WoW. You could tweak the code and learn a lot of programming that way, not to mention the satisfaction of introducing something new to the player group. To do that now you need to start/take part of a company?

Never thought it would happen, but getting tired of the internet and prefer spending time IRL...
 
#26 ·
sometimes i wonder how i found anything on the internet in the times before google, yahoo etc. were a thing. i remember searching for lord of the rings websites but i dont know how i found any of them.

i also cant really remember how it was before youtube was a thing. what did i do all day on the internet back then? i want a time machine to check that.
 
#58 ·
I remember what I did when I first found out about "internet". I spent most of the day wasting away in chat rooms. I would literally write stuff onto paper and then write that onto chat lol. People were really excited to be all grouped together talking about...whatever. It was kind of funny looking back on it because a lot of it was an attempt to talk to the opposite sex.
 
#27 ·
The internet stopped being fun for me since I was around 12 or 13. Up until then, it felt like an endless source of entertainment and way to make friends but then I slowly started getting more and more bored of it. These days I just mindlessly browse the same old sites but its not like when I was younger and always finding something new to install, game to play, files to mess with, etc.
 
#28 ·
I never really had dial up (used it once, but as I was a kid and wasn't paying the bills I didn't really use it).

I properly started using the internet when I got broadband in 2005, but even that was better than it is now. Made friends on forums then later twitter, but nowadays it seems tougher, no one hardly interacts with you any more, no one follows you back etc.
 
#29 ·
forums are dead now. even this one here. there are people here who make like 5 postings and then they leave again. you cant even connect properly to people because you dont know if they will be here tomorrow.

back in the good old days the people from different forums used to meet in real life and form real friendships.

todays social media is like being "alone together" you know that you are alone, most of the others know that they are alone, but we all pretend to be superbusy even if we hang out on facebook or other social media sites all the time.

also things like the invisible option did a lot of harm to the internet. in the old times you were online or offline or do not disturb. today most of the people are online but invisible so that nobody can say that they hang out on social media sites all the time etc.

this invisible feature also brings with it that you can freely chose who you talk to and who you ignore. in the old times it was a lot more like real life. anybody could message you and if you didnt answer they knew what was up. today there is all this invisible secret culture where you talk only to the people you want to talk to.

i really dont know why people do what they do today. i am either online or offline or dnd. i never go invisible.

anybody can talk to me and anybody can see when i am online.

as an example: a workfriend added me on battle.net 2 weeks ago and he is never online (officially). so i think hes invisible all the time. i see him posting on reddit every day so i know hes in front of his computer :D

but hes invisible all the time. i really dont understand that behavior. what is the point in adding friends on facebook/battlenet/whatever just to go invisible and appear offline all the time?

why do people do that kind of thing? wouldnt it be easier just to not add certain people then instead of adding them and going invisible all the time?

this culture is what really killed the internet. the internet now is a egoistic place where everyone only talks to the people he or she likes.
 
#30 ·
There is one forum I regularly post on which still get high traffic every day, but no one you really talk to or get to know, but I like posting there. But yeah, these forums are a little bit more quieter, so I tend not to come on here as much.

I remember getting close to people on Twitter when that platform very first started, even met up once. But now even that's not the same anymore.

Must admit, when gaming online I might sometimes appear offline when I'm not, for some reason getting an invite gives me anxiety.
 
#39 ·
I only started using an ad blocker because a lot of webpages wouldn't ever load for me because of the ads. I think at the time I was having real problems viewing SAS because of the ads and browser hijacking. But yeah I get a lot of sites asking for ad blocker disabling. My ad blocker is saying 31 elements blocked on this page now, I probably couldn't even view SAS without an ad blocker even if I tried.
 
#33 ·
On Myspace you could make friends. Then with Facebook the internet became more a place to reinforce already made/offline friendships than to create new ones. Another factor is how big internet dating became with sites like PlentyOfFish. The atmosphere changed from a chill hangout to a more serious environment as it it began to reflect and kind of become one with the "real world".

For me though, a lot of the change was personal. When I was young I was more like other people because if you went to school, played video games, and listened to music, you shared a lot in common with others. Then you get older and people segregate based on jobs, dating/marriage/having kids, and all these other things. Someone with good social skills can overcome a certain amount of hurdles but for me it felt like a losing game I'd rather not play.

Still, it would be nice if the internet could become a more fun, relaxed place again.
 
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