My pick would be, dealing with the ‘wild west’ atmosphere. That being, before cyber bullying laws existed, you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.

  • @son_named_bort@lemmy.world
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    441 year ago

    Pop up ads. You’d be on a webpage and suddenly you’d be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.

    • @fubo@lemmy.world
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      121 year ago

      “Pop-up blocking” was originally found only in minority web browsers like iCab and Opera. Netscape didn’t want to include it at first, because Netscape was dedicated to the commercialization of the web.

      • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        61 year ago

        Which is ironic because Firefox (Netscape’s descendent) is the better one and Opera is chromium based, which is developed by Google, an ad-supported company that isn’t so keen on continuing to allow browsers to block them.

        • @tun@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Opera didn’t use chromium back then.

          Chrome was kind of late to the web browsers market.

          Opera was initially released on 10 April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers still actively developed. It was commercial software for its first ten years and had its own proprietary layout engine, Presto. In 2013, it switched from the Presto engine to Chromium.

        • @fubo@lemmy.world
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          21 year ago

          Google Chrome blocks pop-ups too. Google does not allow its own ads to be shown in pop-ups; this is a term of service of the AdSense product.

          • @CmdrShepard
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            41 year ago

            Pop-ups but not ads. They have moved to restrict what adblockers can block with newer versions of chromium.

            • @fubo@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Google has probably done more than any other major web company to ensure that ads aren’t allowed to harm users — whether through unsolicited pop-ups, malware, or other attacks.

              Malware ads used to be commonplace on ad networks; with “legitimate” websites like CNN.com showing ads (served via a third-party ad network) that attacked security holes in Windows users’ browsers.

              Ask anyone who worked in IT in the early 2000s. Web ads used to be a shitpit. Now they’re annoying at most.

              • @CmdrShepard
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                31 year ago

                Sure but now everyone is at parity with regards to blocking ads and malware, but Google is intentionally rolling some of that back. I won’t say they’re ‘evil’ or anything (at least in this instance) but they’re definitely greedy and there are much better options out there (though chromium makes up a huge majority of the market)

                • @fubo@lemmy.world
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                  21 year ago

                  When we’re talking about a for-profit corporation’s actions, “they did it for profit!” is not typically a very useful thing to say.

                  This is because no matter what they do, they’re doing it because they expect to profit from it.

                  When a for-profit corporation does something that’s good for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that good thing will cause them to profit.

                  When a for-profit corporation does something that’s bad for humanity, they’re doing it for profit. They expect that doing that bad thing will cause them to profit.

                  So really, we can just note that we’re referring to a for-profit corporation’s actions, and just say whether they’re doing something that’s good or bad.

                  And we can try to ensure that good behaviors are profitable and bad behaviors aren’t profitable.

                  But saying “it’s for profit!!” doesn’t by itself mean that it’s good or bad; just that a for-profit organization did it.

  • @Countess425@lemmy.world
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    361 year ago

    Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. “Don’t give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!” Shit I don’t want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it’s bringing people together. It’s not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.

    Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.

    • @soulifix@lemmy.worldOP
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      131 year ago

      There also used to be a huge stigma with being infamous online. Like, you were seen as an actual loser if your only claim to fame was online and not anything worthwhile in real life. That’s such an interesting turn of events where by the mid to late 2000s, people were getting crazy popular online and actually earning revenue for it through YouTube and it has built up since with the likes of Twitch, OnlyFans .etc

    • nepenthes
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      1 year ago

      The looks I got trying out online dating back in the day! The dates I got back then were… interesting. Dating sites were one aspect of the internet that needed a mainstream following.

      I miss when google still proclaimed to not be evil, and I didn’t need every damn ad and tracker blocker imaginable on Firefox just to kick around.

      • @CmdrShepard
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        51 year ago

        Online dating? What a weirdo! You should have put some personal ad talking about how you enjoy long walks on the beach in your local newspaper or called one of those party lines where you chat with random people to meet a partner like the normies! /s

        Kinda funny to look back on it now and see how opinions have changed so drastically.

    • Dan
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      21 year ago

      But are “most people” on Fedi?

      As an autistic person, all of the normal people are weird (to me).

      I wonder if Fedi still has that perceived barrier to entry (even thought it’s not that hard) so the normies aren’t here here, and that it’s not “the popular thing that everyone does by default” yet so the people are here because they want to be.

      I think Fedi feels kind of like the wild west early days, in a nice way.

        • Dan
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          21 year ago

          Boo. Sorry for upsetting you lol. Sometimes discussions branch out. Have a nice day

    • GeekFTW
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      271 year ago

      This. Downloading a bunch of songs on Napster on dial up at a max of 3.5 kb/s download speed, each song taking 15-20 minutes on average to finish downloading, and right around 97% on the one you really want it’s “GET THE FUCK OFF THAT DAMNED INTERFUCK NOW GODDAMNIT I GOTTA CALL MILDRED!”

      2 1/2 hours later you get to go back and restart downloading Limp_Bizkit_-_nookie_4kbps_mp3.exe like you originally intended.

    • Nougat
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      41 year ago

      I had a pager so that my wife could contact me when she was at work.

  • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?

    Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?

    Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn’t even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.

    • @sbv@sh.itjust.works
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      101 year ago

      First Gmail and then Google Maps were amazing. In a world where webpages looked like ass and any interesting technology required a plugin, those two apps were mind-blowing.

      When someone in my lab told me about Gmail, I thought it would be a janky mess. How could a web page be good? But it was. It was great. It felt almost like a native app.

      Then Google Maps came around. After MapQuest, I was expecting goofy tiles and weird hot spots to click on. Nope. They hit it out of the park again. Zooming in and out was… fluid.

      Those were good days.

      • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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        XMLHttpRequest had to be invented before GMail could exist.

        But yeah, Gmail was the first online webapp that I personally used that extensively used XMLHttpRequest (aka: Javascript’s function for “automatically fetch more data from the server”)


        Before that point, you wore out your F5 key waiting for new emails. Gmail comes out and “magic”, the new data just arrives because Javascript is hitting the F5 key in the background for you.

      • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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        81 year ago

        You’ll pry “Slime Volleyball” away from my cold, dead, fingers. Also Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first. Also Robocode.

        So many good Java things in that old web…

        • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
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          41 year ago

          Minecraft, which I believe was as Java applet first

          It was indeed! I remember playing it that way.

        • @dragontamer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’re making me remember codecs.

          Remember when DivX finally unified us upon MPEG2 and that codec just worked? Forget Youtube videos, I’m talking just making videos in general usable on the internet.

          Kids these days don’t even know what they’ve missed. Non-standard video formats. Ugggh. With everyone smoothly using mp4 or AV1 these days, life is so much better.

  • cassetti
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    271 year ago

    Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you’d have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.

    • @CmdrShepard
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      When I used to pirate music back in the late '90s/early '00s with dial-up, I’d setup like 3-4 songs to download and then leave them running overnight with our 28.8Kbps dial-up internet. If anyone called in on the phone during that time, it’d kick the computer off the internet and I’d have to start the downloads over again. Browsing porn (or just images in general) was interesting too as you would literally see images load top down, line by line. Video was essentially out of the question back then and the best we got was like 2 second looping gifs.

      • cassetti
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        21 year ago

        Lol yeah I was lucky enough to get a dedicated phone line for dialup.

        Although even at max download speeds, I think the fastest I ever saw on dialup was around 4.5kbps because our phone signal was so low quality haha.

        Damn I’m getting nostalgic for the old internet, pre 2008 when the average person wasn’t online. The internet had it’s trolls, but it was a far more civil place compared to the modern era of vitriol and hate prevalent in many online communities.

        Remember the IRC and downloading files using automated chat rooms with simple queues to request files from hosts. It’s crazy to know they’re still in existence and still pretty active.

    • @RisingSwell@lemmy.world
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      31 year ago

      Browser downloads still have this issue, at least partially. If it fails itself it’s fucked, but if you pause it manually it’s fine.

      Only really applicable in large (200MB+) files and bad internet, but definitely a thing that can still happen and make you start the download from scratch

      • cassetti
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        1 year ago

        True, but at least you can pause a download. That wasn’t possible twenty years ago with any software that I can think of… aside from maybe usenet newsgroups where a single file is split into millions of text documents and then uploaded to services ultra compressed and then recompiled into the file after downloading. That tech has been floating around since the 90’s but it’s still very niche and very few people even knew what a newsgroup was back then.

  • Lemdee
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    171 year ago

    you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.

    Looks at Twitter and Facebook…

    Uhhhh… Who’s going to tell them that’s still a really big issue? lol

    Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin’ BonziBuddy…

  • @HerrVorragend@lemmy.world
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    171 year ago

    Many different search engines with many different results. Searching for stuff was not very intuitive.

    The wild west atmosphere was rather cool being a teenager, I must say.

    • Nougat
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      111 year ago

      “Search engines” were often just human-curated indexes.

      • @fubo@lemmy.world
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        191 year ago

        Well, search engines e.g. AltaVista or Lycos always used “spiders” to crawl the web and index pages. But web directories like the original Yahoo! or Dmoz focused on human-curated classifications.

        • Plaid_Kaleidoscooe
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          41 year ago

          Those Yahoo links were great. Old Yahoo was fucking awesome. Especially pool… I remember everyone played. Using icq. It was great.

    • GeekFTW
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      31 year ago

      The wild west days of using Infoseek for your above-board searches, and Sinfoseek for the below-board ones.

    • @soulifix@lemmy.worldOP
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      21 year ago

      Nowadays, Google just gives you results. Relevance may vary.

      DuckDuckGo can give you more accurate results, but feels thin.

      And search engines like Bing and Google, try too hard on being swiss army knives that do everything. From calculating to weather to showing movies from local theaters. Anything they do to keep you glued to them.

  • @fubo@lemmy.world
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    151 year ago

    File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn’t have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you’d be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.

    Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.

      • @fubo@lemmy.world
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        61 year ago

        A couple times I downloaded a “video file” on my Mac which, when played in VLC, just showed an image saying “Open this file in Windows Media Player”.

        Yep, that would be malware looking to attack WMP and Internet Explorer.

    • livus
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      21 year ago

      The worst thing was the cp, for sure.

      Yahoo used to have these nsfw “clubs” where people shared porn and bizarrely enough there was even cp in a few of them.

    • GeekFTW
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      21 year ago

      Fun pro life tip for Yarring purposes: Some of Ye Ol’ Networks™ are still around and glorious. I still routinely use DC++ for comic books lol.

  • @Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    141 year ago

    I was there way before “wild west”. Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.

    But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.

    Our “search engine” was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.

  • Tekchip
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    131 year ago

    Siblings or parents picking up the phone causing a disconnect.

  • @breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.

    edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.

    • @gleph@lemmy.world
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      81 year ago

      Ah yes, the good old days of “can you help me, my internet is slow” and you find half a page of Internet Explorer toolbars.

      • livus
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        51 year ago

        Or “help, I’ve been hacked!” And all it was is their browser homepage has been changed to something dodgy.

    • @soulifix@lemmy.worldOP
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      21 year ago

      They’re only as strong as long as there’s persistence. But, that doesn’t mean that when it is used, it won’t have an affect. People have been getting arrested and charged for alluring people to kill themselves online. Whereas, back then, it felt like quite an uphill battle because everyone would’ve just told you to block the person or close the IM window.

    • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
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      41 year ago

      $40/month for 10 hr/wk. And that was back when $40 was a significant amount of money.

  • guyrocket
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    61 year ago

    Content.

    There is MUCH more stuff of almost any kind on the web now.

    • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      41 year ago

      Other than jokes, the internet used to be way better for jokes. Or at least, I assume it is. I don’t spend as much time these days looking up jokes like I did back then.

      Christian and Scott’s interactive top ten list was a great one, anyone remember that? I might have even had a few submissions that made it in to the top ten over the years.

      And rinkworks, loved the computer stupidities.

      Wow both sites still | exist.