this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I'd argue it had reached its prime. Websites were just websites then, not data harvesting machines.
Maybe the content reached its peak, but I’d argue we are in a better place now UX-wise.
Full disclosure: I type this from a network running pihole. Flashing banner ads to other people’s blogs were definitely better than todays adverts — and I’m looking at you, most recipe sites.
Nononono, UX is fucking terrible at the moment, if you said this somewhere like 10-15 years ago I would probably agree with you, but everything is designed to serve ads and be as functionless as possible these days.
You're just visiting shit sites. It's on you.
2003 was also littered with browser toolbars, animated gif ads, scam links, popups, adware, viruses and worms, and purple apes. gotta go back another 10 years to get to the 'websites were just websites' era.
Oh, so the stuff that is built into the browser and social media apps now instead of requiring you to use an add on bar.
You forget how long sites took to load over 33.6k, and how limited your options were for email before Gmail became popular. Free email plans were measured in megabytes, and you could only send like 200k worth of attachments per message.
The bottleneck was your internet speed back then, now it’s your CPU.
Plenty of people had broadband, I was one of the first to get it in 1998. A whole 512Kbit.
In 1999, I had a 25mbps asymmetrical static IP for $25/month from a new technology called a cable modem. It rocked. I could download faster than the local school/college that was still using T1 lines.
They clamped down hard on upload speed when torrents became popular. If I recall, my IP was 72.45.27.220 back then. I ran websites, file servers, streamed my music library, and used QuickTime broadcaster to stream TV/VHS so I could watch videos while in class.
No cable modems where I lived. I worked for an ISP and we'd order fire alarm circuits then just put SDSL routers on them instead. Up to 2Mbit speeds depending on how far from the exchange you lived, I was only able to get 512Kbit reliably. We were selling them to customers at a nice markup for a profit.
British Telecom wised up to it a few years later when they started marketing ADSL themselves and started filtering our traffic, but for a few years it was a super cheap way to get broadband if you had the know how.
Yea, infancy? Been using it for at least 6 years by then, it's hardly infancy.
Were dial-up connections default still? I had been on cable for two years by then.