i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don’t miss the slow speeds.
Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.
Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson’s comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek
You’re right on the money.
The reason why the early web worked so well is exactly BECAUSE of that early adopter profile. Getting online was a nerd thing; it had a filtering effect of who could get online. And the ones that did all shared that same passion for the platform. There was an assumed baseline of shared knowledge and shared culture.
Today we consider such things problematic. Back then, that was just how it was. And why it worked.
Personally, I miss it.
