Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
Blocking dumb trolls. Get a life.
When we say ‘old Internet’, we mean ‘before most people could get on the Internet’. Sorry to say it, but it was people that ruined the Internet. Just people.
I think it was corporate people, specifically.
I remember the first time I looked on a food tin and the company had a website listed, and I thought “Why the fuck would some soup need a website?”.
Back then, a lot of websites were very personal, like “Neil’s web site of things I like” or something, and that website would be some photos of him and his dog, a list of songs he liked, how to run Frontier: Elite II on a modern PC, plus the world’s #1 database of converting imperial and metric bolt sizes.