I’d be cool with having Stumbleupon back.
Seriously. A search engine that literally just returns results where the search terms are in the visible content of the web page.
That's basically what made Google popular and allowed it to quickly outpace other search engines. Then, once it won out, it wasted no time in becoming exactly like the shit it replaced.
Being able to find weird crackpot sites where people post their alien encounters, ghosts, cryptid sightings and astral projection blogs. Being able to find bizarre sites in general.
Now you search for stuff like that it's all the same copy-paste articles from BuzzFeed and Vice all with the same "top 10 weird alien stories to keep you up at night!" articles they all copy from each other.
https://fusionanomaly.net/TechNode.html is a great relic of that weird internet era and is probably the only site of its kind that is still around.
Per-user customization.
Avatars, people who insist on using an illegible font color, pages that autoplay someone's awful taste in music, all of that trash. Not everywhere like it was back in the day, but also it's such a misstep to have no spaces like that anymore.
tumblr still has custom html, but it's apparently so hidden that i've noticed hardly any new users customize their blogs
I kinda miss forums, TBH. The paged, linear format wasn't great, but the decentralization was excellent.
Hopefully we're bringing them back right here, with Lemmy allowing shit like HexBear to get us away from corporate Reddit, at least.
Other "social media" where there aren't topical communities and they're really just big conglomerations of linked users with no structure...I have less confidence they will ever not be a cancerous blight on the Web again.
eh in practice it just meant threads often became dominated by a couple of people replying back and forth. Any tangents or side discussions made threads difficult or impossible to follow. The forum model only works if you want threads to be singularly focused on one idea like stackoverflow. The reddit model is much better for casual discussion and using the op as a starting point to branch off from.
I suppose that's fair too. Fortunately, decentralization also allows for a diverse range of solutions, so that not everyone is stuck with the same model of presentation, organization, or moderation.
Tumblr before they got rid of porn.
(No, that's not my real answer. I couldn't think of an answer so I decided to deflect by making a joke. But then that seemed weird, so I decided to explain the joke.)
Random weird websites. I remember one that was a dedicated John Gotti (the mob boss) fan page and had all kinds of info on him. Or there was another one where this girl posted up pics and profile info for her toy robot collection, all with names and intricate backstories. Another was a forum site where people would go into public and shit their pants for the thrill of it, then come back and write a detailed description of the event for others on the forum. These people were like doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, etc. In general there was a genuine strangeness that just doesn't seem to exist in many places these days.
Another was a forum site where people would go into public and shit their pants for the thrill of it
:data-laughing:
The strangeness is still there but it mostly manifests as YouTube or TikTok channels. It is not nearly as large a presence as it once was, for sure.
Old-style creepypastas. Immersive, personal horror stories that organically grow and spread across the internet, originally posted in obscure corners by authors who maintain kayfabe. Stuff like Ted The Caver, Killswitch, and Ben Drowned (before it jumped the shark). I want to plumb the depths of the internet and unearth stories that send chills down my spine.
Web forums. I much prefer them to this new style of Reddit clones. There are still a few of them out there.
But many have dumped the forum and gone to Facebook. Not even once.
It’s either fb groups or slacks/discords which has its own issues.
really shitty website design with links on individual pages that lead to other pages that you can't navigate to anywhere else on the site which have their own links that you can't get to from anywhere else which in turn... etcetera etcetera until the site goes from seeming like a tiny little thing that was made in a brief spasm of passion that maybe took a few hours to make, to seeming like an endless well of useless info about how the aliens taught the egyptians to levitate rocks with bongos and that's how they really made the pyramids
i used to run a geocities site. those were the days of free exchange of information!
Imagine the flash games that would have come out of the 2016 Democratic primary, let alone Trump
I'm imagining a bullet hell where you play the bird trying to get to Bernie Sanders' podium and then when you get there you poop on it
