Ask Lemmy

The internet.

Public health and the general belief that vaccines work.

StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.

It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.

Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010's. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.

The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.

Democracy
Human rights
Rule of law

Having hope for the future. Believing it would be better than the present.

There was a brief moment when broadcast television networks just put their shit on the internet for free. Like you just had to go to their website, and then like the whole catalog of Scrubs or something was just there to watch.

Season cliffhangers.

Young people will never understand me in 1990, banished up to my parent's bedroom to use their TV because they had a movie on downstairs, watching William Riker calmly say "Fire" on a borg cube containing HIS CAPTAIN, and then the music du-du-du-du-duuuuu and the words "to be continued"

And then having to wait an entire goddamn 3 months to find out the outcome.

Ending seasons on cliffhangers was magical. It's still attempted sometimes today, but in the age of binge-watching and in some cases years between seasons, most shows just wrap up one season arc and start a new one. Kind of sucks.

Windows XP and 7. Before all the “AI”, bloatware and unnecessary features. Oh and that pinball game that was on xp.

the transparent electronics vibe, the whole y2k was a fast and awsome era

Hanging out and house parties after high school let out, with no cell phones

Democracy

I'm back in the 70s and 80s we had but we called the dime store. Where a lot of the products were only a dime and then they raise the price to quarter and then raise the price again to 50 cents. And then eventually we ended up with dollar stores. But I mean overall they're all the same junk some good some really really not. But I know when I was younger and poor the dollar store was always fantastic for whatever I needed. Hell even now for things that I can use I still go there and pick it up even though some stuff is $1.25 or more. It's still less expensive than a lot of other places.

Amateur porn.

Now it’s all OnlyFans and Christians doing hate campaigns to shut it all down.

Geocities

The internet’s creative centers pre YouTube algorithm.

Now, not just to make it big, but to get popular, you need someone talking for 10 minutes every week to draw attention - maybe even every day.

That forces hundreds of creators to consider what content can be made lazily with no effort, rather than with skill over the course of a few months. Rewind back to the better days of Flash animations and even my own hobby of Garry’s Mod / Source Filmmaker animations to see a lot of what I mean.

Yugoslavia. Party scene. Some relationships.

Democracy.

Digg, reddit

Physical media, physical buttons, watching sports without a subscription.

Inbox by Gmail

Friends and I used to be able to throw DJ parties at clubs. Now corporations make the artists sign non-compete contracts so they cant play anywhere else in the city for several months surrounding their show with the company. So the DJs just stick with that company

y/a answers before i jumpted to reddit, then oracle killed it.

INDEED FORUMS, and glassdoor reviews before the astroturfing, legal threats.'

the golden age of shows/movies pre-2010, everything after that were replications of each other, and mostly filled with boring titles and copaganda militaryganda, funny enough started appearing around P45 first term. sci-fi had a pretty bad streak after 2010s, if any was remarkable enough to be re-watched. the decline of cinema quality correlated with the rise in streaming.

My youth.

Adult swim. Was top tier absurdism but slowly degraded into just boring.

The McDonald's Arch Deluxe. I got mine with bacon.

90s Japanese cars.

My last marriage.

Hope