The nostalgia is entirely wasted on anyone who lived through 90s internet. It was cool because I was 12 and getting to drink from the information fire hose was a daily adventure. But it had all the same garbage politics, slop content, and horndog users of the modern internet.
The biggest difference between then and now is that Then Internet was considered a kind of counterculture (which meant 90s Reichwing Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh screeching like a stuck pig every time he heard about a new fad or meme he didn’t like) while Now Internet has your Rush Limbaugh tier content and your Chinese Rednote apps bumping into one another in the same oversized wave pool.
Yeah the internet now is so much nicer. And I don’t just mean the corporate spaces with the edges sanded off, but the indie web, fediverse, and random forums. There used to be this incredibly toxic masculinity that crept into everything.
A lot of us have also grown up. I know because I’m still in a forum with people I’ve known online from 20+ years ago, where we used to post the most heinous, edgy shit.
It’s not the early internet, but a lot of websites in the 00s (when I started using it) let you customize your profile. We all had horrible CSS and an autoplay song that only we liked on our Myspace profiles and it was great. Flash was both a buggy mess that could introduce viruses to your computer and an amazing outlet for creativity that I don’t think has been replaced. It was a lot less centralized and you were only being tracked across the whole internet by the NSA and not every internet company too.
Edit: I should say that I lose a bit of nostalgia every time I see forum posts from that era though, the casual bigotry was everywhere and so obnoxious
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Everything was somewhere in between https://slashdot.org/, https://ytmnd.com/, and 4chan.
The nostalgia is entirely wasted on anyone who lived through 90s internet. It was cool because I was 12 and getting to drink from the information fire hose was a daily adventure. But it had all the same garbage politics, slop content, and horndog users of the modern internet.
The biggest difference between then and now is that Then Internet was considered a kind of counterculture (which meant 90s Reichwing Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh screeching like a stuck pig every time he heard about a new fad or meme he didn’t like) while Now Internet has your Rush Limbaugh tier content and your Chinese Rednote apps bumping into one another in the same oversized wave pool.
Yeah the internet now is so much nicer. And I don’t just mean the corporate spaces with the edges sanded off, but the indie web, fediverse, and random forums. There used to be this incredibly toxic masculinity that crept into everything.
A lot of us have also grown up. I know because I’m still in a forum with people I’ve known online from 20+ years ago, where we used to post the most heinous, edgy shit.
It’s not the early internet, but a lot of websites in the 00s (when I started using it) let you customize your profile. We all had horrible CSS and an autoplay song that only we liked on our Myspace profiles and it was great. Flash was both a buggy mess that could introduce viruses to your computer and an amazing outlet for creativity that I don’t think has been replaced. It was a lot less centralized and you were only being tracked across the whole internet by the NSA and not every internet company too.
Edit: I should say that I lose a bit of nostalgia every time I see forum posts from that era though, the casual bigotry was everywhere and so obnoxious
Look up “indie web” and just start clicking links until you see URLs you’ve never heard of before.
Congrats, you’re surfing the web. Let us know if you find anything cool.