I think that many of us grew up with the desire to learn and explore when we first came into contact with a computer. Before the internet, there were BBSs that brought together people with the same interests, but the internet expanded access to information even further. Web pages with simple HTML, without trackers, ads, or loaded with crap.
For me it was a golden age, both in my learning and in the friends I have made to this day.

Who remember ATZ and AT&F1 ?
Good times on IRC channels, sometimes war... bo2k, winnuke involved..🤣

Forums -> Discord has been really sad for me. It's hard to find discussion of niche topics in Google now.
Apart from that, the volume of content that moved onto Facebook from individual pages has made it inaccessible to me since I've never had a Facebook.
Finally, the latest trend has been to dehumanify the Internet by replacing human content with AI dribble.

The Internet has less to offer me each year.

Absolutely agree that the absolute centralisation of all info and communities from dedicated websites / forums / IRC to Social Media and Discord is pretty depressing - over the past year or so it seems like some communities are starting to branch out a bit more which is nice to see. VOGONS is a real stalwart and I hope more communities follow suit.

I think my main worry recently is the amount of information that is stored in Discord, it's near impossible to search archived posts as-is and with them going public and the amount of awful features now rearing their heads, I feel like we're 2-3 years away from losing millions of hours of content and information.

100% agree. One thing that comes to my mind right away is google search. Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you just have to dig for them, and might not even find anything, because the website you need is out of google's index after sharing some warez piece or whatever.

And yeah, I get that the internet is “safer” now - you're less likely to get virus-nuked by a random link - but honestly, I never struggled with that back then either. If you know what you're doing, it’s really not that big of a deal.

I definitely do not miss my 56k modem though - funky sounds aside, being stuck with it until 2006 was pure torture - 🤣

kickarse wrote on 2025-05-31, 20:14:

One thing that comes to my mind right away is google search. Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you

Google?
We had Altavista and Yahoo Search.

We had Altavista and Yahoo Search.

Or Fireball, web.de.. :)

Yup, Google's clean and effective design was actually a breath of fresh air when it just showed up compared to all the "download yahoo messenger" and "check out geocities" stuff that was blinking at you all over Yahoo (and you had to wait for all that junk to load through on a dial up too). I switched over to google around 1999-2000 as my main search engine, pretty early on.

Disruptor wrote on 2025-05-31, 21:35:

kickarse wrote on 2025-05-31, 20:14:

One thing that comes to my mind right away is google search. Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you

Google?
We had Altavista and Yahoo Search.

When I was in school we had to ask some guy named <blink>Jeeves</blink> to fetch us the information we sought. The web really was more personal then.

Dogpile was my goto then (a meta search which could also search for files!!!) but eventually that died with some hollow imitation in its place. But when it worked, I was more annoyed by the Google results that were included as there'd be a lot of redundant ones to scroll through...

If you get to a first social sites or chatrooms trolling for sex you really got desperate housewives from your area. No hypergamy and no fraudsters. I was a late teen/early 20s chubby average guy and I got real hookups weekly usually with nice older women. I got a multihunderd bodycount. Those days are gone. It was in late 90s and early early 2k.

Ovenchips wrote on 2025-05-31, 19:14:

Absolutely agree that the absolute centralisation of all info and communities from dedicated websites / forums / IRC to Social Media and Discord is pretty depressing - over the past year or so it seems like some communities are starting to branch out a bit more which is nice to see. VOGONS is a real stalwart and I hope more communities follow suit.

I think my main worry recently is the amount of information that is stored in Discord, it's near impossible to search archived posts as-is and with them going public and the amount of awful features now rearing their heads, I feel like we're 2-3 years away from losing millions of hours of content and information.

yes, that's one aspect - while the overall web has grown in size there is a corresponding trend in more and more data being behind paywalls (either $ or your data as payment) in the form of social media, discord etc

it is not generally available, even to search from outside, and will all disappear in time

Today, 30 years ago, the first Internet movie was streamt. ^^
On an Apple Macintosh computer, of course. It was the best there was.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WRgD5StBcys

Disruptor wrote on 2025-05-31, 21:35:

kickarse wrote on 2025-05-31, 20:14:

One thing that comes to my mind right away is google search. Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you

Google?
We had Altavista and Yahoo Search.

Don't forget "Netscape" and "Ask Jeeves"

Ugh. Waiting minutes for a single *ahem* "nature" photo to display. While that's loading someone shouting up to get off the phone because they want to call relatives. Then getting back to it, only to discover the next day that while online I missed a phone call from my huge crush wanting to ask me out. I never got a second chance.

Yes, those were great times...

dionb wrote on 2025-06-03, 11:30:

someone shouting up to get off the phone because they want to call

that experience of shared lines and using modems, that seemed 'normal', was actually quite a short period in time for many. Back then you had to consider the timing and duration of being online!

gerry wrote on 2025-06-06, 07:47:

[...]

that experience of shared lines and using modems, that seemed 'normal', was actually quite a short period in time for many. Back then you had to consider the timing and duration of being online!

Here it lasted from first going online 1994-ish to getting first cable modem in 2001. That was a sizeable portion of my youth. Other features included heading off to uni to use their computer rooms, including the struggle to get the relatively modern systems and not be stuck with 486DX-33 machines trying and generally failing to run Win95, or to have to head off to the science faculty and their Tektronix X-terminals and SparcStation 5 workstations. And slightly later volunteering for various student organizations and NGOs at least in part for the unfettered inter

It wasn't just the duration either, also the cost. Hours online back then could be a major expense, with both the phone line and the ISP themselves metered. It was enough (at least in the mid 1990s in Belgium) that when I moved to student digs a 5-minute walk from the nearest computer lab I gave up on home internet entirely, invested in a parallel Zip drive and spent what would have otherwise gone to Belgacom and whatever ISP I would have been using at the time on beer instead.

gerry wrote on 2025-06-06, 07:47:

dionb wrote on 2025-06-03, 11:30:

someone shouting up to get off the phone because they want to call

that experience of shared lines and using modems, that seemed 'normal', was actually quite a short period in time for many. Back then you had to consider the timing and duration of being online!

In some countries, mine included, it wasn't until deep in the 90s that the cost of a call got associated with duration. The cost was per call so you could in theory make a call in the morning and disconnect 12 hours later, in practice of course there were disconnections. Many got a second land line during these times only for modem use so that the house's main one would be available for voice calls.

This was a thing in the BBS era and during the early internet, once the internet really caught on it didn't last long and got "fixed" quickly.

Man, now I'm trying to really remember how I used to find things back then. Not with search engines, because I didn't even know what I wanted. But just "browsing" like one might channel hop. I think it mostly was curated news/community sites like Blues News (still going strong), NVNews (long dead) or the plethora of Gamespy hosted PlanetGAME sites, also long since dead.

Of course as I got older the aggregates I frequented shifted from gaming to... more adult. Stile Project was popular. Yeah there was lots of porn, but it also had tons of random interesting links. I remember once it posted a video of electricity arcing massively at a power substation. I was taking an circuits class at the time in college, and shared the video, not the source, with the professor to share with the class. I was called out in class about what a good example of the principle we were discussing it was, and he asked where I found it. I just stammered something about "The internet" not wanting to mention Stile Project in public.

I'm not sure how many of those sites are still around. Like I said, Blues News is still running. Virtually every one site I remember like it from when I was a teenager has been gone 10+ years at this point. Honestly I'm shocked Blues News is still around, I had just assumed it vanished with all the rest. I went there on a lark digging through old headlines of driver releases for the Riva 128, and it was the only source that didn't require heavy use of archive.org.

i agree the content was better but and this is a big but, it was a pain to use. some of us already covered dial up and phone line pains. but dose anyone remember long distance call charges for using sites and servers outside your area code? being billed by the minute. all the darn pop up adds, "you need xyz addon/app/decoder to view this page" all the malware, and so on?

one thing i do really miss are old school and often animated smileys. emoji are boring.

and for anyone wanting to relive some old school web give this a go https://makefrontendshitagain.party/

😂
on a more serious note wiby is a search engine for mostly older sires.
https://wiby.org/

kickarse wrote on 2025-05-31, 20:14:

100% agree. One thing that comes to my mind right away is google search. Google used to help you find the obscure stuff - now it buries it under SEO garbage, AI-generated filler, and Wikipedia clones. The actual useful or interesting results still exist likely, but you just have to dig for them, and might not even find anything, because the website you need is out of google's index after sharing some warez piece or whatever.

And yeah, I get that the internet is “safer” now - you're less likely to get virus-nuked by a random link - but honestly, I never struggled with that back then either. If you know what you're doing, it’s really not that big of a deal.

I definitely do not miss my 56k modem though - funky sounds aside, being stuck with it until 2006 was pure torture - 🤣

Over recent years this has become more and more true.
Google used to be a great way of finding info but now like you said its buried under so much crap its hard to find anything useful so the old idea of "google it" doesnt work so well any more.

It is still there but it takes some finding now.