6 ms·
Using the internet like it's 1999
- pixel_popping 6mo agoOpenAI will love this article, noM nom nom
- t1234s 6mo agoThe best was the FTP search feature from alltheweb.com. You could find almost any software you needed.
- vunderba 6mo agoIf it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
- joshuablais 6mo agoand 1MB is "small" for the modern web!
- vunderba 6mo agoNo shade! I went and checked out of curiosity, since it looks like we’re both using Astro as a static site generator. Most of my articles are pretty media rich and weigh in between 1-2 megs. I do try to be pretty conscientious about asset compression (mozjpeg, h264 for video, etc.). I'd love to switch over to AV1 but I've heard compatibility on older devices is spotty.
- boudin 6mo agoCloser to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s. Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
- Loughla 6mo agoI was a lot more careful about clicking things when it took a full minute to load. Now I know that it'll be open in less than a second and I can leave immediately if I need to, so there's WAY less thinking beforehand.
- msla 6mo agoAlso, tabbed browsing was still a couple years off for most people, although some browsers got there earlier than others: > In 1994, BookLink Technologies featured tabbed windows in its InternetWorks browser.[citation needed] That same year, the text editor UltraEdit also appeared with a modern multi-row tabbed interface. The tabbed interface approach was then followed by the Internet Explorer shell NetCaptor in 1997. These were followed by several others like IBrowse in 1999, and Opera in 2000 (with the release of version 4 - although an MDI interface was supported before then), MultiViews October 2000, which changed its name into MultiZilla on April 1st, 2001 (an extension for the Mozilla Application Suite[11]), Galeon in early 2001, Mozilla 0.9.5 in October 2001, Phoenix 0.1 (now Mozilla Firefox) in October 2002, Konqueror 3.1 in January 2003, and Safari in 2003. With the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, all major web browsers featured a tabbed interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_%28interface%29 Also, Opera had a Multiple-Document Interface from the start, so 1995 or so. That's not "tabs" per se but multiple mini-windows inside the main window; much the same "Hey, I can have multiple things open!" deal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Opera_web_brows... My point is, you think more about clicking a link when it'll monopolize your whole UI and you can't just stash it in a background tab or mini-window.
- myself248 5mo agoI just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context. It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
- alex1138 6mo agoYeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
- vunderba 6mo agoI know flash had its downsides - but messing around with Macromedia Flash to make stupid little animations back in the day was so fun. Plus Silverlight made Flash seem like a dream.
- icedchai 6mo agoI got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
- t-3 6mo agoSome sites were fast. Some sites had pictures and it took long enough to load that I would sometimes make a sandwich while waiting.
- icedchai 6mo agoNot with cable (3 megabits down, 128kbits up!) Almost everything was fast.
- krapp 6mo agoI literally remember watching images load line by line. I know nostalgia for the old days is de rigueur especially on HN but I definitely do not want to go back to that.
- walthamstow 6mo agoI told a coworker born in 2001 about this and he could not believe his ears
- krapp 6mo agoWe dither on the shoulders of giants.
- vunderba 6mo agoNice! We were one of the first families on the block to have a 33.6 kbps modem, and were the envy of every filthy peasant who still had a 28.8 back in the day.
- icedchai 6mo agoMy first dialup modem was 1200 baud, back in 1987! I remember it taking an hour to download a game from a local warez BBS. My first modem to establish an Internet connection (SLIP) was 9600, sometime around 1993! Time flies...
- rootusrootus 6mo agoStill pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps. But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
- NDlurker 6mo agoI lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
- aworks 6mo agoI lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
- gnabgib 6mo agoOk.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
- theandrewbailey 5mo agoI was raised by cheap boomers that would never pay more than the absolute minimum for anything, no matter how shitty the option, and most of my friends lived way out in the country. Paying $40/month for DSL or cable internet was off the table, because the library ran a free dialup ISP, so thats what we used even though their line was almost always busy. The cheap ass modem wouldn't reset the line correctly either, requiring someone to physically pull the phone cord out and back in the modem, otherwise the line wouldn't hang up, so redialling on a busy signal required physical intervention. (At some point, I recall my mom's friend/neighbor convincing her to pay $99/year for a dialup ISP that connected the first time.) I moved off dialup when I got a fast food job in 2005.
- chairmansteve 6mo ago"This page is about 1 MB of assets". And it could easily have been 10 KB.
- vunderba 6mo agoNow now. Don't be so tightfisted with the bandwidth. You know what they say, "People will hate you Steve, if you're too sting-ee!" https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html https://www.audioatrocities.com/games/lastalert/index.html
- b3ing 6mo agoNo tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information
- elevation 6mo agoWe used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
- flomo 6mo agoQuestioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA. So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)
- elevation 5mo ago> So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?) It was a commercial service - Bresnanlink, in a midwest university town. As I recall, the trickiest part was getting Internet Explorer suppress its urge to "dial up" and just use the stack you had in place. Prompted by another comment here, I've been trying to find some record of the configuration and service speed.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoFirstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate Was your upstream via analog dialup?
- elevation 5mo agoThe cable link was full duplex. I had friends whose service used dialup for the upstream but never heard good things about it - the latency made it frustrating and it seemed like a lot of apps weren't tuned to work well.
- prmoustache 6mo agoI knew dial up for a little while but I was lucky to have been on broadband for a couple of years already in 1999. This early access + a 4x SCSI CD burner made me one of the 2 official warez provider at school. I was even taking orders from parents of friends.
- d3Xt3r 6mo agoLuckily, we had web accelerating proxies like OnSpeed[1] back in the day that would compress web pages (including lossy image compression) so if you were one of the poor sods still on dialup (like I was), it was a lot more bearable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnSpeed
- vunderba 6mo agoOh neat, I'd never heard of them. Almost feels like a spiritual predecessor of CDNs, serving optimized assets from existing websites via their servers.
- nick__m 5mo agoI had cable internet in 1997; it was wonderful in it's unmetered¹ symmetric 10Mbs glory. 1) wasn't supposed to be unlimited but the ISP didn't bother to mesure it until sometime in 2000
- bitterhop 5mo agoOh how much I wanted those super expensive ISDN lines...
- zahirbmirza 6mo agoHow can we solve this problem, of the current state of the internet, without reverting to the compromises of the past? This has been on my mind for a while. The layer of trash some companies have built over the internet has been ruinous.
- joshuablais 6mo agoI theorize it is going back to the protocol layer. The "web" for most people is a bunch of social media frontends.
- abraxas 6mo agoYeah, it's quite sad where we landed. Circa 2004-2006 while the internet was mostly open and accessible I mentally grouped "the internet" into two buckets. There was the real web plus usenet plus email and then there was "facebook" with its weird garden wall and exclusive invites or some such shit. I didn't think of facebook as being "on the web" even though they used the http protocol. It was highly unusual then to have any web content behind a registration wall. So hardly anyone considered facebook to be a part of "the web". It was its own weird duck. Twenty years later and most people only frequent this "weird" part of the internet - this limited ensemble of paid and unpaid walled gardens.
- hdgvhicv 6mo agoThat applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.
- abraxas 6mo agoYeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?
- Terr_ 6mo agoTo me the what we wanted/got distinction is something like: 1. A kind of capital that is widely available, so that people could exercise control and agency with machines that do what you want them to do for your own needs. 2. A distribution tool controlled by mega-corporations as they decide what you should be able to see or have.
- jakedata 6mo agoJust go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions. Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
- zugi 6mo agoFark is farking great! Though its old-school HTML doesn't flow so well on mobile. Can we get the best of 1999 with the best of 2026? Probably not...
- ranger_danger 6mo agoI would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(
- aboardRat4 5mo agoSorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access fark.com Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What can I do to resolve this? You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.
- thot_experiment 6mo agoI don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing. Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise. I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kyledrake 6mo ago> On your router, you can and should setup blocklists for various malicious and nefarious domains, advertisements, adult content, etc. This is not “1999-esque” in practice, but is a requirement for the modern web. I worked on a Geocities archive restoration. There was a boat load of porn (including illegal porn), malicious domains, spamvertising, malware, predators, political extremists, etc on the 1999 web, and you can find all of it within the raw Geocities archive that was made before it shut down. The idea that the old web was some kind of pure place of innocence is a weird and factually inaccurate take. If anything, the late 90s web was more dark than it is now, perhaps in part because nobody had any idea of how to police anything on it and things like PhotoDNA didn't exist yet. If anything, my work on 90s site archival has taught me that the web has always been a place with a lot of dark places, and the narrative that the old web was some sort of pure innocent place that became evil is not matched by evidence. It's just as plausible to me that the general "misbehavior" of humans on the internet hasn't changed all that much, but that we have, frankly, adopted a more puritanical and intolerant approach towards it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of Section 230, carding people for 18+ before they could use IRC (or install an operating system, what the actual fuck is wrong with you California), and Congress wasn't dragging evil Geocities CEO David Bohnett into grilling sessions where they were accusing him of hooking kids on digital cigarettes. Perhaps it would be wise to have a little nostalgia for some of that too.
- alex1138 6mo agoHey Kyle! Neocities is great
- kyledrake 6mo ago<3
- marginalia_nu 6mo agoIt's worth keeping in mind how much more fringe the web used to be. You were almost by definition a bit of a deviant if you spent significant time online in the '90s and early '00s ("nerd" was a pejorative). People who found no acceptance in the physical world many times found like minded people online, which sometimes was a good thing and sometimes unfortunate.
- GaryBluto 6mo agoI'm not opposed to the message but it perplexes me the amount of people who bemoan the loss of the "old web" and then use a web page comprised of massive modern frameworks to deliver said message.
- NetOpWibby 6mo agoPeople clamoring for the old web are almost never talking about slow speeds or XHTML, they're talking about the FEELING of being on the web.
- keepamovin 5mo agoYES! You were there. Takes one to see one. :) Truly, I think you’ve over the target here. I think it's more than just being young. It was the transition from an analog life to a 'cosmic' one. We are the bridge generation! I remember waiting for a Zine or a Phrack manifest, or for an image to waterfall down the screen. It wasn't 'inefficient'—it was a frontier. People comparing the 'load times' and 'inconveniences' are kinda missing the point. I grew up with a telephone. Remembered my friends' phone numbers. Then the interenet exploded down those phone lines. And the world was changed forever. From my desk, I could touch the world. A world i Had never seen. And it could all come to me...And I was reading about other people having similar experiences, similar excitement. There was an excitement in the air, except it wasn't in the air - it was in the space we all shared - that space that came down those wires, over those modems, with that distinctive siren-like mating call. It was the fucking 90s and the Internet came online. You had to be there. It was incredible. You have no idea if you didn't live through it. That feeling of connection. Somehow it's tied up in the aesthetics for me, too. The juxtaposition between that aesthetic combining poverty-of-content with the compared-to-modern "visually stunted" aesthetics, compared with the shocking immediate global access of the analog to "cosmic" transition, somehow symbolizes it precisely and strongly for me. But the part that isn't conveyed (tho I try), is how I felt at the time. The graphics are the finger pointing at the moon. You had to walk that path, you had to have been there. I tried to recapture that specific 'gateway' feeling in a Win98 demo: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html https://win9-5.com/desktop.html. I used modern sound and RBI to try to recapture the feeling of using the web when it was 1999. It's evocative, if you were there. Playing with it, sometimes i get a sense boundless horizon again. But then it flashes and is gone. That fire that I felt of excitement and expanse at that time is an endless source of inspiration for me. I long to somehow recreate an experience that gives it form, so others can know.
- pjmorris 6mo agoI feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
- pragma_x 6mo agoIt even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
- pjmorris 6mo agoI confess that I had this in mind. Is it time to start running LAN parties again?
- cosmicgadget 6mo agoElectrical panels and air conditioning have not kept pace with graphics cards.
- kombookcha 6mo agoI hear you. Topless Quake LAN sweatathon, the sport of gentlemen.
- myself248 5mo agoI've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both. Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen. Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake. The only thing missing was the Josta. RIP.
- deadbabe 6mo agoI think it’s time to give up on the old web. What made the old web cool, is that it was the first time we can communicate with so many random people in far away places digitally and share information through cool web pages. That novelty has mostly died now. Communicating with people in distant lands is mundane now. And there is little new things to share that we haven’t already seen or heard before. So what’s the point of the web now? Maybe the internet will become purely a utility for exchanging data for infrastructural and business purposes, and the idea of using the internet as a source of entertainment or recreation will fade away. It would be nice to retreat back to an analog world, where the internet still exists, but only as a layer of glue in the background that orchestrates multiple technologies that power our world, and nothing more.
- krapp 6mo agoTons of people still use the internet as a source of entertainment and recreation. Just because you're too jaded to care doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
- anatoli_k 5mo ago[flagged]
- myself248 5mo agoAnd we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price! Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree. I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
- kungfuscious 6mo agoA lot of these recommendations seem prudent. I especially like the idea of POSSE for using social media without actually using it (every time you open a site to post is an opportunity to be ensnared). Completely stripping the browser from your smartphone is a bit extreme and excessive for me, but doesn't invalidate the other reccomendations.
- 01nate 6mo agoOne minor 'gripe' for lack of a better term, is that I feel like a push to go backwards in technology is a bit misguided. I feel like a lot if people see ads and trackers, then look to older protocols like Gopher/Gemini/IRC (or at least 'inspired' by older stuff like Gemini). The issue isn't javascript, it's ads/trackers/algos/slop. I feel like tracker/ad/algorithm free static site on the status quo of http, or something newer like IPFS, is worlds better than trying to use arbitrary restrictions on something like a Gemini capsule.
- tptacek 6mo agoThis is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
- chromacity 6mo agoDunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions. And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
- tptacek 6mo agoI respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either. I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
- jjulius 6mo ago>Id also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it... [gestures wildly at all the bots in 2026]
- datadrivenangel 6mo agoYou can still email people! A genuinely interesting email will probably get at least a 20% success rate
- petee 6mo agoAre there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?
- cosmicgadget 6mo agoDecent is a matter of opinion but there are active ones. There've been a few HN posts on the subject in the last few months. I compiled some old web meta links here: https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html https://outerweb.org/blog/web-discovery.html
- brisray 5mo agoI thought webrings had died when things like Webring, Ringsurf, Ringo, Rail and others went offline years ago. But there is a new interest in them. I've listed all the ones I know of at https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
- globalnode 6mo agoTurn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.
- takihito 6mo ago[dead]
- Rekindle8090 6mo ago[dead]
- onchainintel 6mo agoThanks for the bit of nostalgia today OP. I remember the first time that I saw that browser screen. Pure discovery back in those early days of the web. I can still hear the dial-up modem crackling...
- keepamovin 5mo agoYes, that crackling! God, that shreak. You hear it and it just pulls you right back. Like some kind of rhythm that told you something was happening, something exciting was about to occur. For us bridge-generation kids, that sound is probably etched like vinyl. Quiet room, 2 AM, and then that thrum, shreek and hiss. I literally missed it, whatever the next thing was. Whenever "modems" became obsolete. It was sad. It was the audio reminder, the signal hanging in the air, of the literal lifeline out of your analog bedroom and into a cosmos filled with electricity, buzzing with knowledge and light. For me, half the experience of that era was purely sensory. The clunky physical sounds of the machine doing the heavy lifting to connect you... the clunky graphics....the need to wait...the gradual adjustment to the pace of life and the "gentle introduction" these "reduce speed" effects had to the threshold moment that that was, were somehow the right gentleness to take the world on such an epic journey. I have labored a lot to recapture that feeling. Across many projects. Idk why exactly, but there was something so hopeful and exciting about the internet at that time. And I know it's worth remembering. Like a precious flame you have to protect from the rain, I guess. Check out this one: https://win9-5.com/desktop.html https://win9-5.com/desktop.html Just a small set of experiments to see if I can grab that feeling. The modem sound evoke the vibe. Browsing the modern web with it is a little strange, if you can do that "in the gallery watching the walls between the paintings" kind of mind-job and not focus too much on the web portal content (which is designed to always suck you in, even framed retro like this).
- Dwedit 6mo ago1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max. The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
- calpaterson 6mo ago"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now
- prawn 6mo agoI remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
- theandrewbailey 5mo ago56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.
- bergie 6mo agoNow, I think the author would consider it "solutionism", but the other day I spent a bunch of time browsing Reticulum's NomadNet sites (using the Columba mobile app). And while aesthetically it was more early 90s than 1999, it filled me not only with nostalgia, but also with some optimism for the future of the Internet. Something I haven't felt in a while...
- nullbyte808 6mo agoDid not even consider encrypted IRC as an alternative to Matrix or Signal. Or even running my own search engine. Good writeup! Very much for the 1%ers in tech skills.
- anovikov 6mo agoInternet in 1999 was like democracy in 1791. An elite club for the few percents of best people. Good days indeed.
- stra1ghtarrow90 6mo agopart of the problem is that most people don't own a pc or personal laptop - they use their phone and apps. None of my friends (35 years +) use laptops other than for work and openly say how much they have regressed technically. Some of these guys grew up with the internet in the early 00's and would be setting up switches for lan partys, using torrents and usenxt, limewire etc. These days they can barely open up microsoft word - but on instagram/twitter they're all over it. Sad really. I would always reach for my laptop first before my phone and I tend to very rarely visit social media sites (other than reddit) on laptop/desktop. I use glance - https://github.com/glanceapp/glance https://github.com/glanceapp/glance to parse my rss feeds - it's pretty good.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jjbinx007 6mo agoI always find it strange when people refer to twitter and YouTube etc as apps rather than websites.
- 9dev 6mo agoThat's what they are by now, though. The websites of social media sites are crippled and bug-ridden - try using Instagram in a browser, for example. They want to coerce you into using their apps, because that gives them better tracking opportunities.
- ben_w 5mo agoSometimes. YouTube (and Google Maps, and old.reddit.com but not default reddit) I find to be better on the website than the app.
- klondike_klive 5mo agoThat's just what I've been doing after deleting Instagram from my. phone. I can't trust my evening dopamine-seeking behaviour with the phone app, but there's much much less stickiness in the browser.
- dhruv3006 6mo agoLemmy is the closest thing to internet in 1990s.
- anthk 6mo agoNo. IRC, EMail lists, Usenet and webs like https://deadnet.se https://deadnet.se are closer. Also, everything from https://wiby.me https://wiby.me.
- mentalgear 6mo ago> We took a wrong turn by locking ourselves into content silos and embracing comfort instead of seeking truth, and it will not end well unless we do a hard u-turn to authenticity and sovereignty. We didn't do that: capitalist interests did.
- tommica 6mo agoPretty sure we still chose the silos. We voted with our wallets.
- spankibalt 6mo agoHaving used the internet in 1999, it's mostly cookie cutter stuff mixed with some intellectually lazy generalizations, especially of specialist use cases. You gotta love the subtle religious hooks leading to Christian apologetics elsewhere on the site; back in '99, and especially these days, that stuff was often enough more overt. But maybe renaming the piece to Using the internet like a Born-Again Worshipper is both more honest and accurate. ;)
- anilakar 5mo agoWe should also also embrace offline mode more. Disable all network connections until you make a conscious choice to go online. Heck, make a Windows 3.1-esque GUI for it and call it Trombone Winsock just for fun. If any program complains it needs network connectivity for offline features, it goes into the Recycle Bin.
- dannyw 5mo agoOffline mode, and self-hostable apps. I'm very happy with my self-hosted and open source apps; e.g. photo library, media centres, etc; the convenience of cloud, but my cloud that I fully control.
- myself248 5mo agoI found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day. I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that. Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
- swingboy 5mo agoDoes anyone remember that Pokédex game that the original Pokemon website had in the late 90s where you could collect/unlock Pokémon? I feel like you could trade them too but maybe not. I tried to ask ChatGPT but it doesn’t seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. Maybe this is a Mandela effect thing.
- tsylba 5mo agoAlbeit I agree with the general thesis, I find it funny that the very next sentence after the author say: > the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on. He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement: > I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop. The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.
- 101008 5mo agoTo be fair, it's different. The order is important. If he would have written "It is not LLM slop what I want, is real people, real creators, and real content no my feed", it would have sound like AI. But not in the way he wrote it.
- GuardCalf 5mo ago[dead]
- _egtx 5mo agoJoin the alivenet - https://projectvv.de https://projectvv.de
- aboardRat4 5mo agoYou have useless javascript there.
- vovanidze 5mo agothe nostalgia for 1999 isnt really about missing dial up or basic html, its about mourning the loss of user agency. back then the browser actually worked for you. today the client is basically a hostile enviroment running megabytes of third party js just to track telemetry. going back to gopher or text-only browsers feels like admitting defeat tbh. we can still build incredibly fast modern apps if we just stop treating the users hardware like an infinite resource for adtech. you dont need massive frameworks and client--side bloat to make something good.
- jazzypants 5mo agoIn 1999, hostile websites would pop up endless new windows full of advertisements that you were powerless to stop unless you simply held down "ALT+F4" or "CTRL+ALT+DEL". Part of Mozilla Firefox's appeal is that it came with a pop-up blocker. [0] Do you know anything about the Browser Wars? People literally had to put up images telling you which browser to use if you wanted to actually experience their website the way it was intended. Otherwise, it was just broken. [1] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-revolt-a-rush-to-block-pop-up-online-ads.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dVA.X7Hv.dZ8ZGYeD7EAB&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/business/as-consumers-rev... (sorry for the tracking code, but this is a "gift" article and it was the best source I could find on popup ads) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- franga2000 5mo agoHostile pages did that. Today, nearly every page has a dozen tracking scripts, starts off with a cookie popup, probably pops up a "please log in" or "please give me money" after you scroll half way down, still has ads that even more effectively mimic the site topic and design to trick you into clicking them, pops up a newsletter or cupon code popup if your cursor leaves the viewport, might be secretly running experiments on you by A/B testing titles, images or testimonials... The assault on your attention is way worse these days, it's just (mostly) contained to the viewport.
- sardinhada 5mo agoim a fan of this philosphy i really am. sadly it is utopia. who is going out of their way to use the internet like this? if youre someone whos totally oblivious to the old internet, you will have to work very hard to use it in an old fashioned way. no one will pursue this. the internet today reminds me of the matrix
- dadrian 5mo agoThe Internet in 1999 was not good at all. Browsers barely worked, computers crashed constantly, the ability to actually search for useful things was limited, and many things we take for granted as being online (news, people, documentation) were not. The mid-to-late 2000s are perhaps closer to what the author is looking for.
- einpoklum 5mo ago> Browsers barely worked They worked pretty well actually, AFAICR. Internationalation was a bit sketchy in some cases though. > computers crashed constantly You did need to be careful with Windows 98, for sure, but it wasn't that bad. Also, if you put in some elbow grease you could install Linux, which didn't crash (but had limited support for peripherals and for the latest graphics cards, and almost no games). > the ability to actually search for useful things was limited It is arguably more limited now than it was then, since commercial search engines did not manipulate the results as much.
- mholt 5mo agoIt was FUN though.
- keepamovin 5mo agoProbably sounds really weird but I get almost teary eyed when I see those Windows teal-background era graphics and a Netscape browser. Those days! These are the nights that never die. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtF6Jej8yb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtF6Jej8yb4) I don't know if you felt it, but I felt it. Back then, in those days. It wasn't just the heat of summer, roaming the beautiful city at night as a teenager: it was the internet. It was amazing.
- superkuh 5mo agoIt's not wrong in the direction but it goes a bit too far. Text-only really limits the capabilities. The difference with the modern web is that it is not hyperlinked web pages between web sites but instead javascript application content silos. HTTP/1.1+HTML 5 is just fine, images and video are just fine. Javascript is not fine. That's where we should draw the line. And without javascript most of the security/privacy issues that make domains require HTTPS-only to prevent MITM attacks simply disappear. When you aren't automatically executing random programs that random places send you the web can be a lot more fun, silly, and with a lot less fragile continuing maintainence required.
- einpoklum 5mo ago> Using technologies from yesteryear, we can solve the problems we face today on the modern advertisement riddled, javascript focused, etc. etc. I wouldn't say you need technologies from yesteryear to achieve that. Or rather, you don't need an old browser to not be on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and so on. Just visit _other_ sites, with your new browser. But I would recommend beefy adblocking and tracking-avoidance - uBlock Origin [1] and EFF Privacy Badger for example - or even disabling JS if you want the more static old-school feel. NoScript is a browser add-on which does this for Firefox or Chromium-based browsers: https://noscript.net/getit/ https://noscript.net/getit/ [1] : uBlock Origin is no longer supported on Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, since they've limited the already-limited extension capabilities with 'manifest v3'.
- dormento 5mo agoOne thing that i just realized is i don't know exactly when things got bad. I remember the 90s when we had to "go" online, when the digital was apart from the analog and we kept online and offline separate. I remember simpler sites, not as many ads, I remember a time before "feeds". However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. It might be that I was busy with other things in life, but still it leaves me with an unsettling feeling. Maybe it was around the arrival of home broadband? The end of Orkut (community based social media)? The advent of algorithmic feeds?
- Tade0 5mo ago> However, for the life of me I can't remember exactly when it started to suck. Whatever the date, it's tightly coupled with the explosion of internet-capable mobile devices. My personal pick would be 2012, because that's when the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and outsold its predecessor more than twofold. Coincidentally that's when the small agency I was working for at the time started offering making pages look on mobile devices. In terms of units the market for mobile devices peaked just four years later.
- negura 5mo agoyeah, a lot of people pinpoint the moment when it started going downhill at around 2010. re: explosion of mobile devices, i'd say the release of apple's iPhone was a key event
- retired 5mo agoCookie wall was a big shift. I noticed that since the introduction of the cookie wall, websites now have about 3 to 4 modals that I have to click away before I can start interacting with the website. Typically it is the cookie wall I have to reject first through a secondary modal, then something about a newsletter, then the paywall and finally I have to hit ignore on the "Do you want to login with Google" on the top-right.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- techteach00 5mo agoOnly possible without the smartphone. That's the device that destroyed the internet. Thanks a lot Apple
- fasterik 5mo agoI've come to the conclusion that nostalgia is almost never about the objective quality of something. It's about the associations we make between a certain time in our lives and the media/technology that surrounded us at the time. It's also filtered through selective memory, emphasizing the positive while ignoring the negative. We're all afraid of dying and we all wish we were 25 years younger. That's how I translate nostalgia when I read it. By any objective metric, the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better.
- rawTruthHurts 5mo ago"the world is better than it's ever been, technology is better than it's ever been, and it's all continuing to get better." Those guys in Sudan or blue whales beg to differ.
- fasterik 5mo agoYou can always point at bad things happening, no matter what time period you're in. You need to look at the graph over decades/centuries. Poverty, child mortality, literacy, standard of living, access to healthcare, etc. etc. are all better than they have ever been, even in the poorest places in the world.
- rawTruthHurts 5mo agoI can't help thinking how those graphs conveniently ignore the damage such improvements have on the environment, on which they themselves depend. Damaged environments -> scarcity -> war. But I agree it's nice to have that happening away from home.
- bigmadshoe 5mo agoI think the world really sucks in developed countries right now in a way that's hard to put your finger on. Optimism and enthusiasm is very low in young people right now. People's attention spans are shot. Kids in high school and college are less social than ever, barely date, and spend more and more time doomscrolling. Rising inequality, rise of far right politics, etc. I get that the world is doing great by some basic metric like 'number of people starving', and that is fantastic. But the world really feels off to a growing number of people - me included - in modern America.
- GuB-42 5mo agoIt feels like the article is seeing the 1999 internet like the internet of the early 1990s. 1999 was during the dotcom bubble, Internet Explorer 4/5 was the leading browser, Yahoo! the leading search engine, pop-up ads everywhere, it was also the beginning of Flash, for the better and for the worse. Residential broadband existed, but dialup was still the norm. I don't really miss it, despite growing into it. It was an important transition period, but it was slow, lacking in content, small and yet too big to create a sense of community, and also just as full of ads as it is now. There were good sides compared to now, but I still take today's internet. The early 1990s (before the eternal September) looked nice, but I didn't get to know it.
- nunez 5mo agoInternet user since 1996, so still a bit new to it. I don’t miss the old web that much (the old web was AOL for a lot of people, at least in the US). DEFINITELY don't miss 28.8k and 56k and having to hog up our family's one phone line overnight to download Netscape 7, only for it to be a steaming pile... I definitely absolutely miss open instant messaging platforms. The days of XMPP and open clients. Trillian and Pidgin specifically. I loved having a single app for all of my messages across all of the networks I talked to people on. Nowadays everyone is on FB Messenger, Instagram DMs, iMessage, WhatsApp and Google Chat. All of them have separate apps; all of them are loss leaders; all of them are closed. (I tried Beeper. Loved the idea but didn’t invest time in it since it was always two lawsuits away from me getting “An update on Beeper” email.) I guess I also miss content existing for content’s sake. Early YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc. People helping other people...well, usually, anyway. Nowadays everything is growth-maxxed. It's all about engagement. Text-only websites would have never been born in this iteration of the Internet, and that's sad.
- dzhiurgis 5mo agoYoutube added Ask AI where it gives you pretty good summary with timestamps. Absolute timesaver to drill down to essence. They should just summarise and timestamp every video for everyone, but it would tank engagement and ad revenue.