If you think the modern web is just spying and somehow “this wasn’t how it used to be,” go look up a history of spyware.

Toolbars were basically spyware and analytics were a very early part of the web too. They often installed themselves with drive-by downloads or even with software.

Many applications people used had spyware. Bonzi Buddy was infamous.

Basically if something offered something for “free” it was guaranteed to be spyware even back then.

I don’t know why people have this rosy view of a cozy web that didn’t have tracking or bullshit companies or monetisation everywhere because that web very much existed back then. I was the kid who had to routinely fix people’s computers.

Maybe the ones with the rosy views of the past web were the ones who were the reason I had to go in and remove toolbars from people’s computers 🥴

Idk I wouldn’t wanna go back to 1999 computing tbh, it’s very nostalgia-damaging when I use Windows 98 again

@Elizafox But MacOS 9 was, uh...it was a thing!

@mxchara Mac OS 9 absolutely did not provide sanctuary from the bullshit lmao

It was less targeted than Windows because the Mac OS install base was much smaller, but classic Mac OS had plenty of adware, browser crap, dodgy installers, extensions, and miscellaneous rubbish. Classic Mac OS had no security model whatsoever, similar to Windows.

It was less bad but still a dumpster fire :P

@mxchara that said I got an old laptop that has Mac OS 9 on it here

@Elizafox when I got a laptop at the age of 8 I immediately got it infected with a virus that splashes the desktop with porn ads, and the people yearning for “the old web” aren’t even usually your age, they’re my age. I don’t know why those people are so hung up on the ideal of a smaller web, just to completely ignore other people’s contemporary personal websites and judge webpages based on meaningless metrics and disapprove HTML5 because it’s… “new”? even though it’s… almost just as old as I am

@Elizafox it makes my blood boil to know that there are people who talk about webpages like it’s a logical puzzle to solve. it’s a really unrealistic worldview.

@Elizafox

Burnout is cumulative, haven't we learned that lesson yet?

@Elizafox yeah, I long for the time you could do literally anything to my computer because there were no protection whatsoever and any program could modify the system to their wishes

@Yuki pros: you could do anything to your computer

cons: you could do anything to your computer

@angelastella indeed. Been tired for years boss.

@twinkle so they’re people who didn’t really experience “the old web”, they experienced the web circa 2010 :P

Surveillance capitalism and analytics were very much everywhere and Adblock had just come out. Websites were already in an arms race against it.

Windows 7 was new and it was the last (imo) good version of Windows, although it still had its flaws

Flash was still everywhere and still a scourge, although starting to become irrelevant. People forget HTML 5 was a huge improvement over that shit.

The commercial web was a dumpster fire, social media flavoured. MySpace was… everyone had an actually horrible and impossible to read a MySpace page. :P Facebook was already eating its lunch. But even then Mark Zuckerberg famously said “They trust me. Dumb fucks.” (Yes really! He said this.)

Geocities was on life support by this point too.

Also people still harassed each other on IRC and on forums. That wasn’t exactly great either.

Some corners of the web were excellent! Very small, limited corners. But behind it was usually some patron with money who at best was somewhat benevolent and at worst was the dictator of the entire thing.

@Elizafox @twinkle i desperately need people to understand they don't hate the modern web, they hate capitalism.

@Yuvalne @Elizafox @twinkle Sometimes also the modern web. Loading text lazily so scrolling is a pain? The old fashioned web has the text directly in the HTML.

@Yuvalne @Elizafox @twinkle Yes I had that today... 🙃

@Elizafox

Make it decades for me. There's no recovery from recurring trauma.

@project1enigma @Yuvalne @Elizafox people with a hammer and jQuery have been doing this for more years than i have been alive

@twinkle @Yuvalne @project1enigma yeah pages have been needlessly requiring JavaScript since the early 00s when people started getting DSL. The text was readable… usually. But the layout would take longer to load.

@Elizafox @twinkle @project1enigma i still think capitalism and the need to track stuff made it worse. it also normalised needing JS and the fact that websites are justified in being heavy, which also made non-tracking JS worse