Are there any decent webrings left, or newly existing?
Using the internet like it's 1999
61–70 of 203 posts
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#62I feel like 'Party like it's 1999' could become the slogan for a movement. Sure, the tech was a little less convenient, but overarching control was also less hard-wired into everything.
It even comes pre-packaged with a theme song.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#63This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to…
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#64Turn off javascript and use a text based browser? What? May as well not use the internet.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#65Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions. Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
I would like to relive my fark memories but I only get endless captcha loops on it now :(
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#66This is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to…
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions. And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.
I respectfully respect the premise that the choices are "paper books" or "Youtube influencers", though I'll note we didn't have Gilbert Strang's 18.06 course back in 1999 either.
I'd also note that the Internet of 1999 was loaded with spam, bursting at the seams with it, so much so that it was actually a big deal when ~30 months later Paul Graham wrote a post about Bayesian filtering.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#67[dead]
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps. But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lived in rural North Dakota and had dial up until 2005. It really sucked the last couple of years.
I lived on a suburban street a mile from the Stanford campus that didn't get broadband until 2003. I would go to the local copy center to rent an hour of computer time to edit my blog.
Ok.. so broadband in 1996, route-able (unique) IPv4 broadband in 1997 (177.1..), route-able satellite internet in Nigeria in 2002 (it sucked when it rained). Your Stanford proximity apparently didn't help.
Re: Using the internet like it's 1999
#70If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
No tabbed browsing and if IE crashed it locked up Windows 95/98 with it. No 2fa, no comment spam, and Java applets that froze the browser for 10-30 seconds. No content creator bs just people making fan pages just for the heck of it before Wikipedia gobbled all that information