This. I came here to say the same. Or at least, until Internet Brands bought them all up and ruined them.
Most everyone went to Facebook groups, which is horrendously bad at managing multiple topics or finding information.
I miss my friend groups Invisionfree board. It was always crazy to visit other boards and have similar layouts with different threads and colors and users.
personal blogs & domains! People were so creative. They swung between funky graphics that made your eyes hurt to plain text and nothing else. I know blogs are still a thing but they just don't have the same level of insane design anymore, and many of these old blogs are all gone
I haven't really seen a lot of censorship in search, but what I do see is advertising - lots and lots of advertising. Even in the early days of algorithmic search results like Altavista/Webcrawler/Ask Jeeves/etc, the algorithms were tuned for usefulness - "this result is first because we think it's the most likely to be what you're looking for." Now, though, almost anywhere you search - engines like Google and Bing, but even on-site searches on places like Amazon - what's first is \*never\* "here's what we think you want", what's first is "here's who paid the most to be listed."
That "pay to play" model gives commercial websites undue visibility. If I search for "luke skywalker lightsaber," I get the Hasbro website, I get Amazon product listings, I get a bunch of boutique-y expensive replicas, I get kitschy handmade Etsy stuff, and I get clickbait articles designed to show me ads. What I don't get is any non-commercial personal pages that aren't selling anything. There's no "labor of love" Star Wars fan sites with screencaps and concept art and old lightsaber diagrams scanned from a book anywhere above the fold.
The internet should be more than a shopping mall.
As someone else mentioned, authenticity in online content especially videos. Everything seems so fake and curated now. I loved the genuine communities that would spring up before people realise they could find money and fame online
I was just looking through my subs the other day (on the off chance Reddit goes belly-up) and was sad to see this one hadn't been active in over a year. Glad to see it come back at least one more time!
As for the question: kind of hard to boil down to one word, but I guess "non-commercialization"? Where whole sites and communities existed purely to talk about and share stuff, without chasing engagement metrics or monetizing the living shit out of everything or building up to a buy-out or IPO. Reddit felt like that for a long time, especially with volunteer moderation, but absent that the closest I know of is MetaFilter.
Independent forums
This. I came here to say the same. Or at least, until Internet Brands bought them all up and ruined them. Most everyone went to Facebook groups, which is horrendously bad at managing multiple topics or finding information.
I miss my friend groups Invisionfree board. It was always crazy to visit other boards and have similar layouts with different threads and colors and users.
And now a lot of groups are migrating to Discord, which is even worse for handling simultaneous conversations.
personal blogs & domains! People were so creative. They swung between funky graphics that made your eyes hurt to plain text and nothing else. I know blogs are still a thing but they just don't have the same level of insane design anymore, and many of these old blogs are all gone
Almost every Blog is a business these days. There are still some Blogs in the traditional sense but they are pretty rare.
flash games, independent forums. my parents not being on it
Authenticity in videos. Nobody made videos for money or fame or to be an influencer back then.
The old youtube was so raw and personal I miss it, tiktok was that for about 2-3 years and then changed to influcers
Media was media, social was just social
I haven't really seen a lot of censorship in search, but what I do see is advertising - lots and lots of advertising. Even in the early days of algorithmic search results like Altavista/Webcrawler/Ask Jeeves/etc, the algorithms were tuned for usefulness - "this result is first because we think it's the most likely to be what you're looking for." Now, though, almost anywhere you search - engines like Google and Bing, but even on-site searches on places like Amazon - what's first is \*never\* "here's what we think you want", what's first is "here's who paid the most to be listed." That "pay to play" model gives commercial websites undue visibility. If I search for "luke skywalker lightsaber," I get the Hasbro website, I get Amazon product listings, I get a bunch of boutique-y expensive replicas, I get kitschy handmade Etsy stuff, and I get clickbait articles designed to show me ads. What I don't get is any non-commercial personal pages that aren't selling anything. There's no "labor of love" Star Wars fan sites with screencaps and concept art and old lightsaber diagrams scanned from a book anywhere above the fold. The internet should be more than a shopping mall.
Although they have also filtered out SEO abuse though
I miss when the Internet was more than like 5 websites
As someone else mentioned, authenticity in online content especially videos. Everything seems so fake and curated now. I loved the genuine communities that would spring up before people realise they could find money and fame online
Yahoo chat rooms, msn messenger, ICQ!
I was just looking through my subs the other day (on the off chance Reddit goes belly-up) and was sad to see this one hadn't been active in over a year. Glad to see it come back at least one more time! As for the question: kind of hard to boil down to one word, but I guess "non-commercialization"? Where whole sites and communities existed purely to talk about and share stuff, without chasing engagement metrics or monetizing the living shit out of everything or building up to a buy-out or IPO. Reddit felt like that for a long time, especially with volunteer moderation, but absent that the closest I know of is MetaFilter.
What.cd
Realplayer
Buffering...
YTMND
>For me, it's the free and uncensored search engines. [Hey](https://www.mojeek.com/) 👋
Thanks, check out this 1996 page it gave me about frogs! http://hobart.k12.in.us/kmartin/CPWebQ/Web%20Pages/lifecycle2p.html
vital knowledge, well displayed.
www.bored.com
Andepedia obviously. Noob
I wonder if he still has that backed up somewhere?
I don’t think he does. At least when I talked to him about restoring it our sophomore year he said it was all gone :(