[xtracto]

Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.

Also Flash, most people don't realize what we lost with Flash. The amount of non-professional multimedia content available was so great. It was a cooking ground for people to experiment with animation ideas. Very low hanging fruit.

HTML5/Canvas/CSS just don't have that accessibility.

Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.

Aaaanyway, sorry for the rant. I love your website. I'm a Metalhead myself, and this year I'll go back to Wacken for a 2nd time after 15 years!!

[ravenstine]

Amen! The only things that made the early web bad by comparison were popup ads and the lack of tabbed browsing. Popup windows that didn't rely on user interaction were always a bad idea and should never have existed. But besides that, yeah, I miss those days. I miss the days when I was a kid and I could stick some HTML on a server and people would actually find it. No SEO, ads, or shameless self promotion required.

[zx8080]

> popup ads

Have you open any US news website in 5 years? Usually there are 2 or 3 layers of popups: subscribe!, cookies box, and news video stream playing on top of everything.

[ravenstine]

Modals rendered in the DOM are less bad than full blown windows that clutter up your taskbar and automatically play audio.

[stavros]

Lack of tabbed browsing? Opera begs to differ.

[butlike]

Seriously. EVERY game style that is now on the app store with ads between levels was completely free and hosted on sites like kongregate, ebaumsworld, or other flash game sites. Incremental games specifically were available in droves. It was a pretty cool time.

[errendgame]

You’re the man now, dog!

[Cthulhu_]

Creativity is still there, it's just on other platforms and / or through other media besides the web - tiktok, youtube, roblox, podcasts, fanfiction, art sites, etc.

It's still there, but you have to look AND be interested in it. Many of us were only interested in e.g. newgrounds and ignored deviantart. Many of a younger generation are only interested in e.g. tiktok and ignore tumblr.

Overall, I think it's fine, and / or the kids are alright.

[HappMacDonald]

Let's go back to a websiiiiite!

https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite

[Jarwain]

With LLM's, I wonder how far away we are from "a cooking ground for people to experiment with ideas"

[bigfishrunning]

Getting further all the time; with LLMs you're offloading all of your experimenting to VC jerks

[fsflover]

You can sort of get that old-internet vibe today from the I2P network.

[dylan604]

> Now the internet is a complete different beast. There are 10 main websites that everyone sees only, and everyone wants to monetize. All content is full of "antipatterns" to maximize monetization. It's very very sad.

This was going to happen regardless of if we had Flash or not

[naravara]

> Younger people would never understand how amazing the internet was back in the 90s. Particularly before ads and SEO became an industry.

I don’t even think they’d value it to be honest. The culture of putting stuff out online now is to view everything as a potential revenue stream. If you can’t monetize it, why do it?