Anyone Else Miss Web 1.0?

[Oneironaut]

(Web 1.0 being the era of AOL, MSN, Yahoo, no two-day shipping, no Facebook, no Amazon, no Twitter, no YouTube)

I’m so nostalgic, despite beginning at the tail-end of Web 1.0. Those were magical times.

My first graphics card had 16MB of RAM. I first started experimenting on my computer at 11, messing around with Visual Basic programming and game mods. I loved visiting odd Geocities sites, chat rooms, gaming communities, etc.

The message boards were amazing! Were people nice? About as nice as they are now. However. Moderators usually clamped down on toxicity when it occurred. Message boards were watched for bad behavior; the same that seems to flourish on Facebook now.

I feel like DU is leftover from when webpages weren’t absolute shit: flooded with advertising, misinformation, and low-effort content (if you ignore the pop-ups we used to deal with). I miss the days of viral videos that were actually interesting. I miss when morons didn’t try to record everything for fake internet points (like likes or upvotes). I miss communities like DU.

The current internet is toxic. Morons can live in their own information bubble and never leave it. As a result, you get cult-like followings of people like Trump. Insane message board types like those found on Free Republic (which I used to laugh) are now mainstream.

Everything is a scam now. It’s fine-tuned rob you blind at every moment. There can’t just be a Facebook that exists on advertising. No - it has to cater to everyone to get the most money possible, including tailoring the experience towards mountebanks and bullshit artists who use an entire Corporate Social Media team and Psychologists to fine-tune the art of grifting.

I’m tired. I will gladly celebrate the day, should it come, that Facebook closes it’s doors forever. I can’t wait until Instagram is gone, followed by TikTok, Twitter (or, X, or, whatever fever-induced pseudonym Elon Musk dreams up in the moment), and, finally, Reddit. I wish we could come full circle.

It’s a pipe-dream, sadly. The genie is out of the bottle, and, we will never go back to the way it was. However, I have to admit that I miss it. I want just one more uninvited AOL CD in the mail, please?

[gay texan]

1. yes

I miss AOL's LGBTQ chat groups. Those were really awesome back in the day

[Basic LA]

2. I still hang on, in a way.

With my AOL (Compuserve) email, & elegant old Kodak EasyShare photo editor. Plus my Windows 7, which is good enough for me.

[Mr.Bill]

3. In 1981 I ran a small franchise print shop.

We used a Radio Shack TRS-80 for estimating prices on printing jobs. I had to do data entry when the paper prices went up. The hard drive was small a cassette recorder/player. It actually worked very well. It also played checkers and backgammon. Of course, this was pre-internet. I hired a 14 year-old kid to help me set it up. I wonder where that kid is now.

After a few years of that, I didn't touch a computer until about the mid-90s. Where I live we didn't have a local ISP until '98, so logging on to the internet was a long-distance phone call, so we didn't use it much. I wasn't using a computer daily for my own entertainment until '05.

[Shermann]

4. The Internet peaked in the 2000's in my opinion

The viral videos were the funniest, the comedy sites were novel, the music and guitar forums were in their prime, and online shopping and auction sites were very compelling. Most everybody seemed to be working to make things better in good faith with some hoping to turn a profit someday.

Now it is overrun by bad actors all working to make it a shitshow and cash in on the chaos.