[dunnevens]

Did you notice the reduction of information density on web pages? I think that would be the biggest immediate difference. Old Reddit vs. new Reddit as one prominent example. The dominance of responsive designs now, as compared to the old separation between main site and mobile site, as another example. I guess hamburger menus weren't a big thing in 2013? I honestly can't remember. Maybe time to hit the Internet Archive and look at pages from 2013.

It's interesting thinking of the changes. I guess many of the current trends were well underway by 2013 so the current state would be different but not too different to you. At any rate, I'm glad you're out and hope you can sort the ID mess.

[kingcharles]

I actually like New Reddit, except for the advertising.

Design is much more responsive now, I'll give it that. Lots and lots of huge photographic headers. Hamburger menus? I'm guessing that is the name for the 3-line icon? They were pretty new in 2013 on mobile sites on my iPhone 5. And the 3-dot thing for "extra" options ... I don't remember that existing back then.

There is a reduction in information density.. some of it is warranted by an increase in white space which is good. A lot of sites now have super-intrusive advertising posted all the way through the copy, which wasn't common in 2013.

The sheer amount of data I burn through just browsing the Web.. that's a huge change. Even my mobile plan with 100GB of data gets burned in no time just browsing around. Sites are so, so heavy now. I saw that post yesterday about Discord having an enormous favicon file and so I can see that people just gave up trying to trim their code. I look at some HTML source now and I lose my shit because it is literally megabytes of bullshit. People were more careful with their code in my time.

One weird thing is that my brain doesn't know it is 2021 yet. I saw a show the other day where a woman said her son was born in 2011 and I did the maths and my brain said her son was two years old. This happens to me constantly. It's like my brain stopped counting time as soon as I entered the jail.

[fencepost]

Strong suggestion: uBlock Origin ad blocker, including in Firefox on Android.

Other options include the Brave or Duck Duck Go browsers - similar features built in, but possibly less bookmark portability, etc

[kingcharles]

Thanks. I have ethical issues with ad blockers. As someone who has built businesses based on ads it pains me to hurt these sites, even though the ad situation is really fucked up in 2021.

I just found out about Brave this week. It looks promising. I didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser. I've been using the search occasionally. People say they can't switch from Google, but honestly their search quality is over-rated. They are really sanitizing their results more than the others recently. Even Bing is bringing back more results from really useful obscure sites than Google is.

[fencepost]

Adblock Plus might be an acceptable solution for you, IIRC it has an "acceptable ads" program designed to only filter out the heavier or more intrusive ads.

[kingcharles]

Thank you for the tip. Just installed it. Open source, and powered by donations. Awesome.

[psd1]

Wait till you get a raspberry pi and install pi-hole