What's something you wish to bring back from the late 90's/early 00's internet?

Not everything being about profit

Not being 1000% about data mining

No god damn pop up’s. Every fucking site I go to takes like minimum of 6 clicks to get rid of useless windows

Ads All.The.Time. At this point, if your ad even remotely annoys me, I will go out of my way NOT to use your product.

Real people. So much online interaction is with bots now.

Being able to believe more things. It used to be pretty apparent when you were looking at a computer modified image. With all the deepfakes, bots, AI, etc I assume absolutely nothing is real or accurate info.

Info. Like useful info. Secondary, niche communities you could relate to.

The lack of ways for cooperations to gather information about internet users.

Websites run by ordinary people, about things they're interested in. Explanations in text instead of monetized YouTube videos dragged out so they can cram more adverts in. Decentralization, with lots of little hosts and sites instead of large walled gardens of corporately owned "content". The absence of the concept of "content". Places where people would chat just because they enjoyed talking to each other. Email that wasn't mined for details of your personal life by megacorporations. Fascism still being universally reviled.

I'd like to bring back the absence of some things.

Nothing was "mainstream" because it was all still weird, and populated by people with a sense of curiosity and adventure. I'd like the absence of 'normal' back.

Corporate presence was minimal. They sometimes had their own websites, and a few had flash games and/or media sites mostly as a PR thing. But that was the extent of it. The main corporation involved was the phone company whose bill you'd have to pay. I'd like corporations to step back and to let people take over again.

And finally, customer service and other business functions. They moved those over to the internet to save a ton of money, but the quality of services plummeted as a result - hurting employees and customers. But they save enough money that they'll never go back, and it also allows businesses to market to a far wider customer base than they can honestly provide for. Scamming people is the new standard because it's so easy to get away with when expectations have gotten so low.

Net neutrality

NO SOCIAL MEDIA. I belive that Facebook has made the collective humanity a lot stupider. Groupthink, sheeple, influencers, contrails conspiracies...

I miss all the personal home pages. You could get a real sense of who somebody was based on what they chose to display. Maybe they had pictures of the favourite game or tv show, or their own little web diary. Now its all just santizied profile pages that have virtually zero room for creativity. It's too sterile now.

Hope for the future, that the days of widespread ignorance would soon come to an end.

Fast forward 20 years, and misinformation is rampant and most people believe it without question. 🤦‍♂️

user population made of geeks and nerds. also, usenet and bbs raise nostalgia.

I miss the days when it wasn’t flooded with weaponised idiocy.

That and neopets.

We could create a personal website without having to pay and without giving up personal details. Everything was anonymous.

Search engines actually found what you were looking for. No censorship or bad suggestions or trying to sell stuff.

Always finding something new and interesting, not being limited to a few commercial websites.

People were much friendlier and open to share.

We used to receive more real e-mails than SPAM e-mails.

StumbeUpon

I'd like to see less use of JavaScript tracking and more "simple websites"!

Goofy, random flash videos. AlbinoBlacksheep was like the internet in its prime

Better search. Even with modifiers, results are so chaotic and not what I’m looking for. Just the other day I was trying to find recent information and set the parameter to only results in the past month. Three separate search engines (Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing) all showed year old results first. Not to mention the bubble they put you in.

That it wasn't flooded with the everyday person's idiocy.

I liked forums. It was a bit easier to develop a close rapport with a small group of users than I’ve found on Reddit or Lemmy. Small Discord servers can replace that to some extent though

I really miss IRC and usenet. And I know both still exist but I miss the communities there 😊

The basic privacy. You could post on a forum and it was just you and the people on the board talking. Today you post anywhere and it's the whole world looking at the conversation.

1. Web directories like dmoz

2. Small web (personal websites are bringing this back with nojs and minimal css)

Bring back the <blink> HTML tag! You can't have a good blog without it!

Serious now. I miss the blogosphere. It was just a bunch of casual writers messing with their HTML (this was before CSS), writing whatever the fuck they wanted, and linking other blogs that they read. One of my favs was literally some guy making shit up about his own life, you could see the bullshit from a distance but it was enjoyable bullshit. Another was poking fun at other blogs.

I also miss being able to fully load a simple page with a 56k connection. My connection nowadays is orders of magnitude faster, then why the hell things are so slower?

Demon Torrentz. Also, the absence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Threads. Did I miss anything?

Homestar runner

I miss not having the expectation of every social media being so heavily moderated and sterile.

The old internet was like walking down a busy city street. You might walk by someone doing something absolutely batshit crazy, but you just think "Weird. Moving on." and go about your day because getting emotionally invested would be dumb. The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they'll get what's coming to them.

It's not all bad, but I miss the sort of "wild west" feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn't real life.

Low quality gif animated images.

Easy to use interfaces.

The crap that has being put out now makes many products almost unusable. Microsoft office is one example. The web page for my city is another.

Rotating gifs all over every homepage

AOL with its You Got Mail 😭😭

• Usenet. Eternal-September.org still provides free access.
• Scorefiles / killfiles were brilliant

I miss gopher and usenet

I really miss MSN, I had really good times on it.

Pre-Eternal September.

Permanently Deleted

This may be too new but Justin.tv

A lot of what I'd mention has already been said, so I'll add the lack of influencers.

Message boards without likes or upvotes

The internet itself.

Get off my lawn.

The joy of having a landline without caller ID and running like crazy to be the first to grab that brick just to find out that maybe the next phone call might actually be for me, good times

Nobody needed a pseudonym back then.

You could just speak your mind openly and always write your real name to it, and it was THE NORMAL thing to do.

And yes of course we all had some f*ing "controversial" opinions back then. It was our youth after all :-) No holding back with what you would probably call unbearable extremes nowadays. And then nobody needed to do any canceling or banning or crushing our skulls....