Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
This might be a controversial take, but I don’t think the 90’s internet or even the web 2.0 era was better than the modern web, just different.
The 90’s internet was so inundated with pop up ads it was unusable without an ad blocker to the point browsers themselves started integrating popup blocking. Finding quality content also was very difficult. You’d have to spend hours running through Lycos, Ask Jeeves, 86.com, and a half dozen other search engines and sift through hundreds of results just to find what you were looking for. Chat rooms were neat and nice for social interaction but you’d be just as likely to encounter some creep or dick bag as someone interesting to chat with and making friends online was just as hard then as it is now. Towards the end of the period we saw the democratizing of the web with the introduction of blogs which drove the final nail through the heart of the personal web.
The Web 2.0 era brought corporate social media. MySpace, LiveJournal, Digg, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, and many others, built on what blogging platforms had done before, created walled gardens where content was trapped. By this point most people had stopped hosting or maintaining their own websites that were accessible via search and links and now all user generated content was behind a password protected wall that required login to view. At the same time search became tainting by monetization. Before when you searched you would be returned the results that were the most relevant, now search results returned the most profitable links. SEO, which was initially developed to promote blogs was weaponized to fill search results with nothing but links to buy.
The modern era of the web is so different than it was back then. There is a wholly different type of person that uses it, digital natives. Young millennials, gen z, and gen alpha all had the internet from early childhood and how they use it is almost alien to older generations. The kids seem to be okay with the status quo and have options like the fediverse that didn’t exist in previous internet eras if they’re not.
If you’re willing for forgo using most of the commercial web you can have the best of both worlds. The weird pioneer vibes of the 90’s internet, the enthusiasm of the web 2.0 era, and the speed and conveniences of the modern web. You’ve just got to spend a week or two setting everything up.
I used to use Opera and they already had pop-up blocking years before any other browser did. I miss when they were innovative.