j7n wrote:

There are several good points made in this thread already.
Forums haven't disappeared yet, but they sure seem to be in the process of.

Many forums have died and many more have so little activity that the owners may as well take them down. Obviously VOGONS is still very much alive. But then the denizens here have a very high appreciation of the old.

luckybob wrote:

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

As for ads, I block most at my router. its one of the perks of using an old p3 xeon rig as a router. the ones that do get by are caught by adblock. youtube was lousy with crappy ads for a while until i installed magic actions for youtube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mag … ecdgepllmpfceif It makes a WORLD of difference.

Anyone putting up with ads they do not want must be uninformed or lazy. there are very easy ways to block most ads and other web annoyances.

Unknown_K wrote:

I miss the old websites and their information that was lost when places like Geocities shut down.

Yup. That's what I miss most. The primitive looking sites people used to make on Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire. AOL Hometown and Homestead sites also had that retro vibe, but they weren't as popular as the big 3 free hosting sites.

Forevermore wrote:

The internet was a nicer place to be before the advent of social media.

The only thing I don't miss was Dialup connection speeds.

Dial up wasn't bad in the old days before web pages became bloated with streaming content and other bandwith hogging technologies. If all you needed the internet for was to keep in touch with others by email, it was more than enough.

collector wrote:

luckybob wrote:

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

As for ads, I block most at my router. its one of the perks of using an old p3 xeon rig as a router. the ones that do get by are caught by adblock. youtube was lousy with crappy ads for a while until i installed magic actions for youtube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mag … ecdgepllmpfceif It makes a WORLD of difference.

I said what, now?

I miss when mundane things were still mundane and websites didn't ask you to "like" or "tweet" about them.
I miss being able to just browse a site without needing to register first.
I miss being able to look up information about a game without needing to disclose my date of birth.
I miss when "internet connection" in the system requirements of a game only applied to multi-player and wasn't needed just to install it.
I miss programs that didn't try to access the internet unless you specifically told them to.

If I had to boil it down to a single denominating factor, I'd say it was the somewhat innocent "pioneer spirit" of like-minded, tech-savvy people finding a whole new frontier for their online antics. Certainly a far cry from the monetized, well-oiled antisocial networking machine it has become for most folks.

Also: I can't help but cringe at all this praise for the modern-day search engine. If anything, finding relevant results is increasingly becoming more difficult, with all those huge content-farming sites and SEO witchdoctors who have figured out how to game the system.

That said - do you remember the early web as being "ad free"? think again! (if nothing shows up for you, disable your ad blocker - yes, ABP still targets those pesky 20th century banners!)

I miss the old internet days when there were no old people lamenting on the good old internet days... 😉

Bonzi Buddy

VileRancour wrote:

Also: I can't help but cringe at all this praise for the modern-day search engine. If anything, finding relevant results is increasingly becoming more difficult, with all those huge content-farming sites and SEO witchdoctors who have figured out how to game the system.

I completely get nostalgia, or I wouldn't be here posting on this forum, but come on. Seriously. I think your rose-tinted glasses might be out of focus dude.

Search engines aren't perfect, people will always find out how to dog the system, but they're a million miles from the primitive junk we once depended upon.

CompuServe

collector wrote:

Anyone putting up with ads they do not want must be uninformed or lazy. there are very easy ways to block most ads and other web annoyances.

Indeed. I sort of miss the time when loading of all ads could be easily postponed by not loading pictures. I could load all UI elements like arrows once, then set loading to Cached, and any new ads will not load. Opera made a huge difference in browsing speed.

That is correct, I do not miss installing Real Player for people who would like to browse crap sites. Droping a single NPSWF32.dll is much less intrusive to the system configuration. But those plugins were mostly needed for 'bigger' streaming websites like radio stations.

Dominus wrote:

I miss the old internet days when there were no old people lamenting on the good old internet days... 😉

Back then we were lamenting the good old days on Compuserve, Delphi, and Usenet. 🤣

SquallStrife wrote:

I completely get nostalgia, or I wouldn't be here posting on this forum, but come on. Seriously. I think your rose-tinted glasses might be out of focus dude.

Search engines aren't perfect, people will always find out how to dog the system, but they're a million miles from the primitive junk we once depended upon.

It's a genuine problem I've been noticing, though only for the last couple of years or so (to be fair), so it's not really an indictment of the modern search engine as a whole.
There sure are enough things I don't miss about the early web, and lots of modern amenities I take for granted - of course, back then we just didn't know any better...

I miss the internet before AOL, Flash, Popups, Spam, Instant Messengers, Social Media, Rootkits, Trojans, the NSA, Napster, Kazaa and the rest of the general abuse and misuse.

I miss cdrom.com, ftp sites from every manufacturer and game publisher, freedom of information exchange, etc etc...

at least we still have IRC.

IRC use has really become an idlers ghost town though. I'll probably be the last regular user on Undernet...

IRC is awesome. As an anti-social person, I discovered it only last year. I'll talk to the last few users before I'll seek company in "social" media.

However, as with forums, I'm observing channel owners being absent for weeks at a time from their rooms: in online games and sharing photos at a snail's pace on fatbook.

Freedom of information exchange. Right on. But very few people believe in it anymore.

What do I miss about the old web?
- no excess JavaScript
- no Flash
- no Java
- no AJAX popup ads (at least browser popup is easier to close)

Seriously, we are reaching the point where browser has become the biggest resource hog. I still remember 1997; the time where the biggest slow-downs were things like Autocad and Photoshop. Today, the worst hard disk thrashing happens when I open Facebook. WTF.

j7n wrote:

IRC is awesome. As an anti-social person, I discovered it only last year. I'll talk to the last few users before I'll seek company in "social" media.

Also, IRC is lean and fast. Yahoo Messenger, on the other hand...

Supporters of this kind of "progress" argue that the "browser" is no longer just that. Instead it runs intelligent web "apps", which aim to replace the functionality of a graphics editor and a chat program among others. Of course they do it with poor efficiency. But look at the YouTube online "video editor", or the places that allow to crop your avatar (photo) after it's been uploaded.

SquallStrife wrote:

It's easy to shake your cane and whinge about kids on your lawn and the fancy-shmancy social media features you don't like, but let's be honest, the web used to be crap.

In the bad old days of "web directories" and crude search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler, it was tough to find quality information. It wasn't always that the information wasn't out there, it was just because it either hadn't been manually submitted to the indexers, or because their result ranking was based on worthless but easy-to-implement criteria, like the number of times your words appear on a page.

Then there were frames, <MARQUEE>, <BLINK>, splash/landing pages, radically differing browser-specific HTML quirks, background auto-start MIDIs, animated GIF overload, and so on. I remember the past fondly, but to say I miss it would be plain wrong. The web is so much nicer to use now.

^sarcasm

luckybob wrote:

I for one welcome our NSA overlords.

FTFY

Also, I miss NNTP (and FidoNET). Back then you wouldn't have needed a mouse (and a "browser" which is now far more complex than your OS) for posting on a "forum" like Vogons.