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.
Oh my sweet summer child, Facebook has always been part of the new Internet.
The Internet has existed since the 1960s. At the time, it was a distributed network for storing documents. Email was invented as a way to send a file from one person to another, but people quickly realised it was more useful for asynchronous conversation. Usenet and IRC later arose, also as communication tools. The WWW began in 1993 at CERN as a way to store files and make them easily viewable by anybody.
Most of that was before my time, but I’m old enough to remember when the web was new. Email had existed for ages, but had only been used by American universities and DARPA. For most people, it was a brand new, futuristic communication system. People had actual personal conversations over email. We developed genuine friendships with people all over the world. Entire new types of jokes were formed.
On the WWW, which is what most people mean when they say Internet, HTML was a much smaller, simpler language. There was no PHP, no JavaScript, not even CSS. There were no rules, conventions, or expectations, and scant documentation; we were all making it up as we went along, and if you saw something cool on another site, you pressed Ctrl+u to view the source code and figure out how they did it.
Websites at the time were gloriously hideous. Objectively modern websites look better, but there was a craftsmanship in ye olden dayes. Nowadays, websites are built with CSS frameworks, which means they all look the same.
But the web was also distributed back then. Now, as someone put it, we have four huge websites, each full of screencaos if the other three. Back then, we talked to each other on forums, over email, in IRC channels and newsgroups. Those all still exist, but people have gradually abandoned them in favour of social media
But social media is crucially different from the old ways. Forums are built around threads; accounts exist, but the basic unit of interaction is the conversation.
The basic unit if social media is the account. You don’t follow conversations, you follow people. As such. there is an inherent push towards cultivating a persona and performing for an audience above having a genuine discussion. Sure, there were a few people who used Usenet that way (Kibo comes to mind), but social media encourages everybody to be Kibo.
And as others have said, SEO also devastated the web. SEO is as old as search engines. Used benignly, it’s simply a way to ensure people looking for information your site provides land on your site. But it turns out that it’s a deal with the devil in which the devil doesn’t even fabe to sign a contract or provide any services. Google, through its algorithms, decides what web pages people can find. Big sites spend money hiring people to make webpages with no intention of showcasing expertise, but in showing up on the first page if a Google search. Small sites run by enthusiasts are crowded out.
This was probably inevitable, but it’s still unfortunate.
Still, there are alternative search engines that focus on the small web and replicate the early days of searching. I use Mojeek and Marginalia; only if (as frequently happens) they don’t turn up useful results, I resort to DuckDuckGo.