The Old Internet Was a Mess, But It Felt Human

I have been thinking a lot about why I miss the old Internet.

And no, I don't think the old Internet was perfect.

It was a mess.

Websites were badly designed, links were broken, downloads could be painfully slow, finding information wasn't always easy, security was terrible, and sometimes you had absolutely no idea what you were clicking on.

But there was something about that Internet that I feel we have slowly lost.

It felt human.

You could find a website made by one random person about something they genuinely loved. Maybe it was a game, an anime, Linux, UFOs, cars, music, programming, or just their personal life.

The website could have a terrible background, blinking GIFs, MIDI music, a visitor counter, a guestbook and twenty 88x31 buttons at the bottom.

But it was THEIR website.

It had personality.

Today the Internet is technically much better in almost every way.

Connections are faster.
Browsers are better.
Security is better.
Video and audio quality are incredible.
We have access to an amount of information that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago.

I don't believe that "old = good" and "new = bad."

That is not my philosophy.

My problem is what the Internet has become economically.

A huge part of the modern Internet is built around tracking people, collecting data, advertising, influencers, engagement metrics, recommendation algorithms and keeping you on a platform for as long as possible.

Infinite scrolling is probably one of the best examples.

There isn't even an end anymore.

You don't "finish" visiting a website.

You just keep scrolling.

The system always has another video, another post, another controversy, another product, another notification.

And slowly the Internet stopped feeling like a collection of places and started feeling like a collection of feeds.

That difference is important to me.

The old Web was something you explored.

You went from website to website.

You bookmarked places.

You discovered strange little communities.

People created things without constantly thinking about followers, monetization, personal branding, engagement or whether an algorithm would promote them.

Of course advertising existed.

Commercial websites existed.

Big corporations existed.

I'm not pretending otherwise.

But commerce wasn't the identity of almost the entire Internet.

There was still an enormous amount of digital wilderness between the commercial areas.

That wilderness is what I miss.

I also miss when owning your little corner of the Internet meant something.

Your homepage was yours.

You decided how it looked.

You decided what appeared first.

You decided what links were important.

If you wanted a black background with blue text, a dancing skeleton and a picture of your cat in the middle of the page, nobody could stop you.

It wasn't optimized.

It wasn't standardized.

It wasn't trying to become a "platform."

It was simply yours.

I think modern technology could actually give us the best of both worlds.

We don't need to abandon modern security, modern hardware, fast connections or everything we have learned during the last twenty years.

I would rather take the good parts of modern technology and combine them with the philosophy of the older Web:

Smaller communities.

Personal websites.

Forums.

Direct links.

User-controlled spaces.

Less tracking.

Less algorithmic manipulation.

Less obsession with engagement.

Software that still works on older computers when possible.

And websites designed primarily to be useful or enjoyable instead of extracting the maximum amount of attention from the person visiting them.

Maybe that is what "retro" means to me.

It isn't simply nostalgia for Windows 98, CRT monitors, dial-up sounds or old HTML.

It is nostalgia for an Internet where people felt like participants instead of products.

I don't want the Internet of 1999 back exactly as it was.

I want some of its spirit back.

A modern Internet with a little more freedom, weirdness, creativity and humanity.

And maybe a few more terrible animated GIFs too. :)

What do you miss about the old Internet?

And if you could bring ONE thing from the old Web into today's Internet, what would it be?