[o_o]

Personally I've never gotten to experience old internet to its fullest as I was very young, or maybe not even alive if talking about the OLD old web.. But I'm curious to hear from people that actually have experienced it, as I want to find out more about it, I honestly just have no idea what else to research from it as I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. I want something new. So I figured posting here would maybe help!

What peaks my interest the most for now definitely is old avatar forum sites and old personal blog sites,especially the ones that are themed after one specific movie/cartoon from those times, they're just so beautiful in a way. The new internet is just.. too basic compared to what it used to be and that upsets me quite a bit. I feel like the whole personalisation aspect is gone

Im not sure how many people will even see this as usually when I log on Noone is online, but from what I've seen it's still surprisingly quite active for a site as old as this! That's fun to see

[Stabbsworth]

a lot of the old blog sites, and being unable to participate in earlier fandom culture as a whole. plus old avatar, forum sites and such. i have an account somewhere on spacebattles, but never really used it.

i ended up on the wrong side of deviantart and youtube as a kid, though. man.

in order to rephrase your main complaint with the newer internet, it's the corporatization of a third space - everything is so clean and sterile, sexless, even. you don't get to deal with old jank from old forums or anything anymore. and like. yeah, sure, the internet of today is much better when it comes to treating autistic people not-like-shit, but it's also so much worse in other aspects. it's incredibly easy for me to stumble upon some shitty stuff on tiktok even though i fundamentally do not look at that stuff.

additionally, there's downright nothing for kids outside of some niche projects like ovipets and itch.io having some free incrementals and stuff, and even then... for how long? stuff like moshi monsters and club penguin have shut down, and while ovipets is undeniably still going strong, it's probably going to have to do something to get more funding.
> the main issue with marketing to kids is that they are not a demographic with disposable income.

[KittyBeary]

I miss the old cosplay.com site, now it's just a mess. :( Also miss when forums were more active and one of the main things of the internet.

[Coda]

I'm definitely an oldbie when it comes to the Web. I built my first website in 1995.

It's kind of hard to compare what it was like then to what it's like now. There's even a little bit of a paradox in there. It used to be the case that putting content online took some effort -- nothing too particularly difficult, but if you wanted something online you had to make a website for it, and that took time and specific skills, and often it took money. And that doesn't even begin to talk about what you had to do in order for people to be able to find it -- search engines weren't even a thing yet, and even once search engines did exist you had to make sure that enough other websites were linking to yours for them to even find you.

But the paradox is: It's so much easier now for anyone to post content online. You don't have to make a website. We have search engines that can find just about anything. And yet... almost all of the traffic on the Internet goes to a fairly small number of services.

I don't know if I really miss those early days of the web. It was more like a library -- there wasn't really much in the way of interactivity. Having a guestbook where people could sign their name and leave a comment was cutting-edge technology because web browsers had only recently added support for text fields you could type in! Web forums were a pretty obvious extension of the concept but the ones that existed back then didn't look a thing like what they look like now. (The idea of having threads instead of replies was controversial -- many people would not have appreciated the way forums like this one have a single line of posts in a thread instead of having a branching tree of conversations.)

Sure, there was a certain kind of charm to how things were simpler then. Advertising existed but it was a one-to-one thing where you agreed to link to someone else rather than having random ads in a banner coming from an ad network.

But on the other hand, the quality wasn't necessarily better than what we have now. The web was harder to navigate. People were just as likely then to publish factual errors than they are now, but it was harder to cross-reference information to be able to identify them. Sites like Time Cube were not actually unusual in terms of design and layout. (Though the actual content on that site is particularly nutty.)

I guess you could analogize the modern web to how it was back then to comparing a big city with an old-fashioned rural community.