Was the internet really better before 2007?

Was the internet really better before 2007?

Yes, social media changed a lot of things and change isn't always positive.

It was. Everything wasn't centralized to a handful of websites. The change to what the internet is now, obviously, but I'd say early 2000s were the golden age of the internet.

>The change to what the internet is now
had begun*

Yes, unequivocally. The great normie influx and their social media cancer ruined not only the internet, but society as a whole.

yes i remember i had multiple forum accounts nowadays i dont even bother

Internet aka (((google))) aka (((kikebook))) aka amazon

Yes because now people just yell things loud enough and that makes it true
"That's illegal"
uhh no it isn't
"Yeah huh"
>goes to jail

Yes. The Jews didn't have their claws into the internet as deeply as they do now.

Social media used to be nice because it was a containment zone for normies. What went wrong was when the rest of the Internet bent backwards to accomodate it.

you could open a reasonable amount of tabs and your computer wouldn't freeze because the good browsers weren't written by pajeets

also, vendors of those browsers didn't want to censor the internet

the average speed was fucking aweful i was on 1mbit symetrical

But the actual Internet? Yeah it was WAAAAAAAAAAAY less cencored and the normie mobile phone shitfucks had not discovered it yet and it was still deemed as "nerdy"

This.

But before that, I miss all the personal fansites on GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod.

The speed wasn't so much an issue because the page weight was far less then.

>you could open a reasonable amount of tabs and your computer wouldn't freeze because the good browsers weren't written by pajeets
this
also every page wasn't loading a shit-ton of javascript just to spy on you constantly

Fuck you, I browsed the internet on my (smart)phone back then.

no it was always shit internet is a meme

Go back to the Gopher General.

don't forget that those tabls contained html 4 webpages and not a two megabyte big javascript webapp that "looks like" a webpage.

Not to mention webpages weren't fucking 20MB and didn't all have an overworked javascript soft auto scrolling eyecandy flash video covered bullshit trend about them.

yes, you need 350 MB of memory to display an A4 size page with text and some images

you had a ""smart""phone in 2007?

>Social media used to be nice
I remember seeing Hi5 for the first time and thinking it was kind of neat. Too young to figure out the implications I guess but by then our fate was already sealed.

I had a proper full fledged smartphone, yes.

all that neat stuff
plus some lightweight ads
>that's an actual fuckhuge video ad playing in the background

Please bring HTML4 back. Speaking of, what the fuck happened to XHTML? The last time I checked it was supposed to be the future of the Web, replacing HTML4. Now I looked it up at the W3C website and they haven't updated the specifications since the release!

I had a palm smart phone.

Deprecated. HTML5 now has an XHTML5 specification instead.

HTML 6 under development.

There weren't just a couple sites you went on. It wasn't as serious and censored as it is now. People were making youtube videos for fun, to share something with everyone else, and not for money. You could find a lot of fansites dedicated to anything. Websites weren't made for smartphones, even though resolution was lower, they had more information in them. Internet wasn't perfect back then, but damn, compared to what it is now, it was a fucking paradise. I wish we could go back. I'm afraid of what internet will become in 10 years or so.

The time from roughly 1996 to 2009/2010 was the golden era of internet. Since 2010, it's been mostly downhill, with very little actual positive development.

Even just a decade ago...

- Websites didn't have multi-megabyte JS shits attached to them.

- You actually could browse without needing an ad blocker (though adblockers helped).

- Only some sites tried to track you, now they all link to Facebook and who knows where else, all trying to monetize you.

- Autoplay videos were very rare, because you needed Flash/Java plugins for them and many people hated them and they had slow connections, so you just couldn't really do that except in some exceptional situations.

- There was no "modern" or "flat" design. Web sites actually looked different. Thousands of unique styles to choose from. No hamburger menus. And there were colors. Not just monotone shades of gray.

- People still had homepages, with thousands and thousands of more unique styles. Now they just set up a Facebook page and call it done.

Sigh...

I fear what the web will look 10 years from now. It's probably all "VR this", "augmented reality that". With ads covering every damn surface.

I'm sure they'll fuck with things even more for "semantics".

> is depreciated, use ,,, instead.

You're some autist if you can't open 30 tabs in this day and age. My average moderately low end laptop handles 30-50 tabs on Firefox with ease. You're an idiot.

The fact that this is a remote but real possibility, angers me to an unimaginable extent.

My father had an I Mate, these were the shit.

Saw yesterday on some news the prototype for kikebook vr. It's disgusting.
Also you need to weight the real downfall began when masses got smartphone. That opened the web for all sort of idiots, and the majority of people let's face have sub 100 iq.

Was talking to a friend about kikebook, a d avg user. He told me people these days go to Facebook and actually use it as search engine, like I want a pizza, and fb happly will show you who can sell. Idiots don't even get out of fb anymore.

light untarageted ads back in the day were comfy as fuck to be honest. I genuinely discovered new things because they weren't targeted to my search interests. I wouldn't mind them, but nowadays disabling adblocker means inviting malware into your machine.
I wonder what went wrong.

It really upsets me to think how much things have degraded. It's not just a case of nostalgia, the web now is just exceptionally lousy by every measurable metric.

Sometimes I hope for an attack or disaster that makes the web slow again. Not 5KB/s, but slow enough that normies get impatient and don't bother any more.

I miss old Sup Forums. When it was the wild west of the interbutt. Anything and everything was fair game. Now it's all PC bullshit and censoring anything mods don't like. Well they did that too but it was more of a 'mods are gods' kinda banning.

lmao I''m sorry but all I can remember about trying to use tabs in 2007 was that it consistently didn't work on any computer or browser I used and I just thought at the time it was a fad because of it.

The true impact of smartphones was the ability of normies to take the internet with them, and constantly have access to their normie shit and an ability to partake in their normie snapchat tweet faceberg shit.

What's even worse is that people went from thinking I was lord of the nerds to a moron because I don't know how to work snapchat when people ask.

Not really.
Web sites looked like shit

I think you're missing the point. Those personal websites, for all that was wrong with them, represented the person making them, even if the red text on black background ("because I like Alkaline Trio!") was hard to read, it said something about the one who made it.

>2mb for a page
no wonder it eats mobile data like a retarded horse

Also bear in mind that's the AVERAGE, meaning some (the kind likely to be viewed by someone who browses the web on a mobile on 3G/4G) will use a lot more.

>screenshot (1.2mb)
yea that too , embed pics used to be small af
also use ublock to fuck that ad

you can open way more shit on opera presto than you can using chrome that barely works when you're dealing with more than 5 tabs on 2 GB of RAM. it's stupid that i now have to buy more memory for my mother's computer that can do everything else on winders 10 just fine.

my brother still uses windows 7
is he based?

>moderatly low end
specs pls

Most forums are so utterly terrible they're barely worth browsing.

Yes. DC++, many forums with lots of people there, no retarded memes (at least, they didn't feel like spam).

But, the internet in late 90s-early 00s was the best, that was the age of local networks, slow connections and VALUABLE information. Now information doesn't require anything and therefore is completely devalued.

as terrible as flash was, its still much better then webgl shit
>uses 80% of your memory and crashes your browser for the simplest program

i recently moved and i was having a chat w/ the roomates to get to know em , he asked me if i had a FB , i told em no
he asked me what do i use on the web besites youtube , i told em that i browse forums and shit , that guy didnt know what a forum was , showed him one and he was just like "so its just like facebook"

i died a little that day

Sup Forums has mods? last time i went there i saw someone getting impaled , that was ~3 years ago

i recently moved and i was having a chat w/ the roomates to get to know em , he asked me if i had a FB , i told em no
he asked me what do i use on the web besides youtube , i told em that i browse forums and shit , that guy didnt know what a forum was , showed him one and he was just like "so its just like facebook"

i died a little that day

Sup Forums has mods? last time i went there i saw someone getting impaled , that was ~3 years ago

>"so its just like facebook"

That makes me unhappy in a very deep part of my soul.

That is because average retard on smartphones seen internet as a handful of apps like kikebook and Snapchat.
They don't know and don't care whatever it is the more streamlined the better.
The bad part of it is that majority of resources, patterns, business and operations will always flock to where is the biggest usage due to volumes, so you will naturally end with worse and worse content.

The pathway is really interesting:
First wave: mostly academia, universities
Second wave: academia and tech
Third wave: wild web, first commercial operations, dot com bubble
Current : mass internet usage, service convergence, content regulation, mass advertising

not until he installs gentoo

worst thing is , that idiot goes on youtube on MOBILE DATA to LISTEN TO MUSIC (i checked , he does not even lower the quality from 720p to like 480 or 360)

god you shud legally ban people from using smartphones until they are 16 or so so they learn how to use a device properly

Just imagine if we kept all the bloat out, we'd probably all be running a protocol similar to NNTP, but on our personal computer.
>turn on computer
>sync favourite sites
>downloads all changes to your computer

Instead we have people all over the place treating the web like a kind of broadcast media. Look at Sup Forums losing its mind trying to find a new "station" for their normie e-moaning videos.

No, worst thing is that they take something amazing and make us hate it.

You can access anything, from anywhere, the internet is literally in the air. That is astoundingly cool...But all it's used for is uploading pictures of what you're eating or tweeting some shit (140 characters? Really? Why has anyone accepted that trash?)

Today is all about personal opinonions

There used to be functionalities for that on bulletin-board systems. You could download a packet of posts since a set date, your fidomail, and then push up your mail and posts.

You need to be 18 to post here. The answer to that question is obvious.

No, it was better before 2001.

I think the 95-2000 and the 2000-07 are both two different kinds of good. We could argue over which is preferable, but anyone would take either over what we have now.

>2007
>not needing an adblocker
Holy shit you're retarded, enjoy your driveby downloads.

The web has always been shit, just in different flavors over the years. Please note that "internet" is not synonymous with "the web", judging by your question and the responses to this thread I can only assume everyone here is underageb& and never actually experienced the internet outside of the web.

>driveby downloads
How was it like using IE in 2007?

this

An 18 year old today would have been 8 in 2007, not old enough to remember or experience the internet in the way that a teen/young adult would.
I'm 21 years old and have little memory of the internet before 2007.

you mean before the web? the internet is still a thing, which is used by much more than just the web

Mostly an IE problem and it's inability to not execute everything you threw at.

IE exploits were practically a daily occurrence, actual exploits for Firefox and Opera were rare and got fixed within days, while Microsoft spent months twiddling thumbs.

Most exploits required Flash or Java. Actually, they still do.

The non-web internet isn't much of a hive of activity.

Though in a minor way there seems to be some push from the Gopher community to assert itself a bit more.

Gopher + Usenet is real
We need to give them love

Social media exist since 1999. I remember Sup Forums talking shit about SomefulAwful and Haboo Hotel

I'd rather not line the pockets of shady usenet providers.

Yeah I don't think the Java driveby exploit was ever fixed.

>shady
Don't believe the hype.
Avoid the binaries and stick to the news.

>Social media exist since 1999
It did but it was a really niche thing. It didn't really pickup until later when platforms like Myspace started to really pull in users.

Of course there are other important factors like cost and speed of access but none of them shaped the internet quite as much as social media.

>didn't put (((amazon)))

>tfw nobody hosts their own website at home on their PCs
>tfw everyone uses shit like AWS or whatever to host
Its like people dont know every machine is a "server" and not just those rack things

>tfw you spent all your time making browsing pixel2life, nsl, and a tiny forum you called home
>spent every day making stupid forum signatures and battling with other forums like you were some sort of artistic pirate crew
Man being 13 was fun.

>I was lord of the nerds to a moron because I don't know how to work snapchat when people ask.

>YOOO SUP MY MAN I CHANGED MY FB NAME WHILE I WAS SUPER DRUNK AND IT ONLY LETS ME CHANGE IT ONCE EVERY HOLOCAUST CAN YOU FIX IT
sorry I don't use facebook I can't help you
>OHHH I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOOD WITH COMPUTERS SENPAI BAKA

yes and no
it's a very complicated matter

No, it has always been shit, but nostalgia makes it look a little bit better.

Also this
You'd think your average webdev with heavy ass javascript ridden pages would know a great deal about hosting, and networking and all the intricacies, but turns out, they're very, very ignorant about networks.
Turns many webdevs dont even know what port the various services they use (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP) are hosted on by default

Shocking really

>can be sued for offending people
>can go to jail for a tweet
>can get fired for a memo
yes the new internet is great. i can't wait for the gestapo to come knockin' for this post too

>You'd think your average webdev with heavy ass javascript ridden pages would know a great deal about hosting
kek, i think they *should* know, but never have i seen that to be the average case

it's not hard not being a fucking racist online my friend

If they knew that they wouldn't be web devs.

did you know they now consider eating cheese to be sexist? it's a "product of rape"

Dafuq are you talking about newfag?

"My biggest wish for christmas is white genocide"
>80k retweets
"the mass-influx of Muslims bears economic as well as socio-cultural problems"
>jail time

i consider everything they say to be ear rape

You also get around the encroaching bloat of the web (both in terms of size and general userbase). I could probably swap my PC for a Pi or other SBC of it wasn't for the web.

It was since google was working correct and not giving me filtered results.
God dammit

I almost heard a Christopher Nolan horn.

In some ways.

>forums were much more plentiful and active and were much less cancerous than places like neogaf in its current state
>internet culture as a whole was more similar to Sup Forums culture of the than it is now
>people had thicker skin
>far far fewer women and blacks on the internet
>more anime
>ebay had better deals
>there were actual undiscovered gems for old consoles to discuss
>webcomics were better

There were some downsides too though
>furries had a greater presence back then
>everyone was liberal by default, kind of like 2012 reddit
>youtube had much less content
>troubleshooting weird problems was much more difficult
>searching for, downloading, and installing drivers manually
>antivirus was an actual necessity
>more anime

Overall I prefer the old internet, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't find the lack of certain modern conveniences highly frustrating were I to go back.

Yes
The web wasn't cancerous as it is now. Late 90/early 2000s were the sweet spot

>forums much less cancerous
user I think you are not feeling well.