I like the web now, but "the good old days" are basically everything before Facebook. Especially the 90s where it felt like a playground with unlimited possibilities and everybody was having fun.

(I know not everyone was having fun, it just felt like that).

most of the sites we visited were run by individual people whose personality was all over them

a few really BIG ones were run by groups of like five volunteers, in aggressively counter-hierarchical ways

not per se professional (-ly designed or written), but really authentic personal homepages. A feeling of autonomy: I can do this too. No / very few marketing posts.

Also: more rubbish, but without monetary drivers. No influencers.

the immense reading diversity that blogs gave - and getting to control what it was I was reading (via my RSS reader).

I still do! But f'book sucked up all the writing and g’gle killed the easiest-to-use RSS reader, and Twitter took up the attention of most witty writers - and many of the blogs I followed slowed down.

I miss community of word-based people, in other words.
(Here's a place I have it! But it's dwindled.) (I've been online-ish since 1981. Ups are great. Downs: bah.)

I came to the web a bit later, right around the Myspace era.

I guess what I miss the most is the sense of the web being fun and inviting exploration. Fediverse does bring some of that back though, for sure.

I miss when it was more person to person. People had "home pages" and websites, often part of a ring of like minded or thematically relevant places to visit.

I miss when the content was made by humans for other humans to look at, instead of being directed at some algorithm that must be gamed to gain visibility, or to ensure it generates value for shareholders.

Forums and Mailing list culture in itself, while not devoid of its own problems, was preferable. So from 90s to early 00s.

I miss when people made sites for fun and not everything was trying to sell me something or harvest my data.

I miss when an adblocker wasn’t a requirement to use the web.

I miss when websites had personality and design and it wasn’t just copy/paste cookie cutter blocky on a white background with the same 3 fonts everywhere.

I miss not needing 10+mb of JavaScript just to load a basic homepage.

I don’t remember the when specifically. It was just kind of a slow burn into death.

blogs (and this includes blog networks like Gawker, GigaOm and corporate websites with a blog section etc), personal websites about niche interests, only having to fight one algo (google) because there were a lot of real humans driving traffic places.

I remember making fun of web curators and now I'm like damn, I miss the curators. This is a weird question to answer because in a very real way it's that I miss when I was younger and more naively optimistic and the web felt like a big conversation among my friends, which is stupid and provincial.
but I also miss the part before "unicorns" and VCs with too much power. Like who gives a shit if a bunch of dudes are pretending your company is worth a billion dollars. Maybe it's hindsight bias but I feel like there was more making fun of dot com bubble companies and then in the zirp times more people took equally stupid companies seriously because far more money and power were involved.

I read someone say “I miss when there was a million websites about 3 things instead of 3 websites about a million things”. I think that’s what I miss in a way.

Curated lists of sites, Search results filled with websites made by real people.

Sites made with simple tools that you didn’t need to go to university to understand. A more human web.

The web needs more gardens and fewer shopping malls.

For me, it was the high level of "human" that was the original web. Directory builds, web pages, heck even protocols like HTTP were all fairly human friendly.

You knew someone had to make all of it. Someone had to bodge it together with only a vague idea if it might work.

We lost a lot of that in the ideal of being "efficient" and "optimized".

Information density. 'White space' and fancy graphics need to be carefully considered things at 800x600. Now 'white space' is shoveled in like sawdust into a sausage from 1943.

Also simple web pages. E.g Alien Adoption Agency and Cybots did a lot with very little.

And the absolute chaos of early P2P file sharing. Want Weird Al? We got that. Want the Japanese police database? We got that too.

And being able to self host without as many security bothers.

Up to the mid 2000s. cgi/php bulletin boards - some still exist - but hosting and moderation was a thankless task, so the people who did it, really wanted it. Digg then Reddit kindof killed those off, but a few (classic car and car repair) boards are still kicking and still have a wealth of good advice.

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independently run webforums over centralised forum-y platforms (reddit, discourse, ...); independent mediawiki wikis over wikia-at-best (and like, a discord with information on it at worst); independent blogs

(admittedly there were still some centralised services like blogger or invisionfree, but like, it still had more of an independently-run vibe? and more devolved control so to speak)

I'd place that era at maybe the 00s or so?

(self-hosted) blogs were great, because you'd get a link to something interesting, read the blog post, and the entire experience was tinged with quirks from the author. And then you'd find other interesting things on that same host, or linked to from the host.

Kind of like going down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole, if every Wikipedia page had vastly different colors/themes/fonts/layouts, copious information about the page's author, and no standards at all.

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I miss sites where no comment was posted until after it was approved by a responsible human, but were still somehow popular enough to contain substantial discussion on a topic.

I miss being able to put specific phrases I knew to be on particular websites in quotes in a search engine and have those results come up near the top of the results.

I miss the feeling of interacting with content on a "pull" basis — actively choosing to click a link and deciding where look next — vs. the flood of content that is constantly *pushed* to us now.

I used to have that sense of following a breadcrumb trail and discovering new things. Now I'm a curator of a flood of homogenized stuff, and it feels as though I'm expected to just to sit back in my chair and consume each piece indiscriminately, no matter the quality.

It was more grassroots back in the day when I started. Now it's like super predatory commercial maximize the profits for the corporations and spy everything you do. Back then it was just silly people making silly websites and sharing things just out of the goodness of their hearts.

What has ruined things for me:
- Search Engines find just garbage results
- Everyone "values my privacy"
- The content to ads ratio has flipped from 9:1 to 1:9
- Chat boxes, chat boxes everywhere.

Individuals sharing their experiences, passions, and knowledge via personal blogs. The longform, _discoverable_ posts from non-techies were gold.

Would love The Big G to offload Blogger to an indieweb group who could relaunch/revitalise the community with ActivityPub support.

for "being online", it'd probably be local BBS (Smitty's Place!) then IRC and the vast new world of communication these brought. Plus bigger hubs like Prodigy and Compuserve. You could dial in from a hotel! Carmen Sandiego!

For the 'web', the era of "this website is UNDER CONSTRUCTION!", starfield repeating backgrounds, java music players for mod files or midi files. At that time, a website felt more like someone's room, slightly messy, rather than polished marketing and perfection.

I liked the pre-social-media web around 2000-2010 with lots of personal websites, blogs, and forums where I was interacting with a small-ish number of people.

A few days ago I also noticed that even material from university courses seems to be harder to find these days. Before professors would host it on their websites. Now it’s often available only to students

for me its the sense of exploration and being in a space that was inherently not commercial or actively anti-commercial

but part of it was also being naive to how capitalism was ruining the world and the web, so im sure that if i had naive goggles again, perhaps that would be a big part of that experience

mostly I miss the blogging days when folks online had a different CMS, some homegrown, there weren't really "themes" but just bespoke designs so everything looked quirky and different.

i also miss online recipes that just had... a recipe and not three pages of SEO goop.

I miss my Google-fu skills, where in 42 seconds I could find anything I had ever read. Alas.

But I really miss the early days of Science Blogs--when scientists could really do #scicomm and people seemed to want to engage with that, instead of bringing all their conspiracy theories there instead.

It felt like there was a huge interest in interoperability and forming communities - after finding a good blog, you could check their blogroll and find others.

If you liked the content but didn't want to visit you could subscribe to an RSS feed.

Big companies online acted more like internet infrastructure providers than companies - e.g. RSS support and easy "use your own domain" email addresses from Google; people were using Twitter to trigger automation services. Fun stuff.

What I miss the most is the "good old days" of the Internet (which I first got access to in the mid-90s) that were driven by protocols more than "sites" and "apps."

Which meant much more choice of user interface (mailreaders, newsreaders, IRC clients, etc), and not having to have a separate browser tab (we barely had browsers, much less tabs!) open for every different forum, chat system, etc, that you interacted with people on.

For me the good old days were 2000 to 2005. Today, a lot of websites feel like gated communities. They often nudge you to make an account or are unusable without one, and visiting them feels like being monitored. Back then, a website was just something you read.

Another thing that was better was that when you found a website about a topic, it was usually because someone cared about the topic, and not some content farm. Thus, it was easier to find actual information.

not having idiots blabbering 100% nonsense and seeing their thoughts and ideas spread like wildfire and be repeated by thousands of people immediately.

It would be nice if we didn't come up with a like button on things to vote/downvote and spread ideas.

The web seemed a lot more navigable, either through webrings or just links, it was felt easier to stumble on new and interesting websites.

A lot of websites were more creative and artistic. Literally interactive art with bespoke interfaces that could feel like anything, as if they were alternative universe operating systems.

Search before google was better. AskJeeves was clever, Fido and Altavista were perfect for finding what you wanted.

Fun effects to boot!