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I miss being able to tell at a glance whether an instructional video was trash. I have the "return youtube dislikes" extension but it doesn't work as well for a multitude of reasons.

When I was a teen, way before the internet, if the outside didn't hold much appeal (usually because it was raining) staying in my room and reading sci-fi and listening to music and stand-up comedy on cassette was a viable option. I'm ok with going back to that. My ebooks directory runneth over.

No, 1990s internet just hadn't actually fulfilled the full potential of the web.

Video and audio required plugins, most of which were proprietary. Kids today don't realize that before YouTube, the best place to watch trailers for upcoming movies was on Apple's website, as they tried to increase adoption for QuickTime.

Speaking of plugins, much of the web was hidden behind embedded flash elements, and linking to resources was limited. I could view something in my browser, but if I sent the URL to a friend they might still need to navigate within that embedded element to get to whatever it was I was talking about.

And good luck getting plugins if you didn't use the right operating system expected by the site. Microsoft and Windows were so busy fracturing the web standards that most site publishers simply ignored Mac or Linux users (and even ignored any browser other than MSIE).

Search engines were garbage. Yahoo actually provided a decent competition to search engines by paying humans to manually maintain an index, and review user submissions on whether to add a new site to the index.

People's identities were largely tied to their internet service provider, which might have been a phone company, university, or employer. The publicly available email address services, not tied to ISP or employer or university, were unreliable and inconvenient. We had to literally disconnect from the internet in order to dial into Eudora or whatever to fetch mail.

Email servers only held mail for just long enough for you to download your copy, and then would delete from the server. If you wanted to read an archived email, you had to go back to the specific computer you downloaded it to, because you couldn't just log into the email service from somewhere else. This was a pain when you used computer labs in your university (because very few of us had laptops).

User interactions with websites were clunky. Almost everything that a user submitted to a site required an actual HTTP POST transaction, and a reloading of the entire page. AJAX changed the web significantly in the mid 2000's. The simple act of dragging a map around, and zooming in and out, for Google Maps, was revolutionary.

Everything was insecure. Encryption was rare, and even if present was usually quite weak. Security was an afterthought, and lots of people broke their computers downloading or running the wrong thing.

Nope, I think 2005-2015 was the golden age of the internet. Late enough to where the tech started to support easy, democratized use, but early enough that the corporations didn't ruin everything.

This is why I'm a big fan of Lemmy and federated social media. It removes the monetization incentive, and it's obscure enough to barely be targeted by bots (so far). The remaining piece that is still an issue, in my opinion, is that we're still engulfed in the more modern internet culture of rage-bait, walling ourselves into our echo chambers, and occasionally seeing heavy-handed moderation.

I'll take two wins out of three any day though.

What that taught us was to be fucking careful about what you click on on the internet.

Oh, that's what the old Facepunch forum evolved into, right? Yeah, that was a really nice place when I last visited, but that was years ago. I just felt like I had grown out of it.

But surely if you hit any bumps while driving, the disc skipped, right?