Maybe I'm misremembering (completely possible), but it feels like the 2000s was the beginning of the end and shit was REALLY good in the mid-90s.
But then the normies invaded and, with them, corporate interests up the ass. Everything was monetized, sanitized and eventually censored to appeal to the advertisers' whims.
People younger than 30,35 simply do NOT know how good it was.
Yes, it took 5 minutes to load up a low-def picture of a naked woman, so beating your meat was really hard, but that's why those of us who were horny 10 year olds back in 94 would buy/steal physical playboys from newsstands (another thing which I haven't seen in ages: newsstands).
Basically everything was a lot less centralized and you wouldn't just go to reddit/facebook/twitter for all your online social interaction. You'd have to actively hunt down forums for each of your specific interests, which meant:
a) each forum had a pretty... "unique" vibe, so you weren't just always stuck in your little bubble.
b) Each forum was small, usually operated at a loss and was purely a passion project
c) Corporate interests didn't care about these forums. They were only for a tiny minority of nerds, who cares about them?
All of that meant that most people were exposed to a lot of different subcultures, so we'd (for the most part) be a lot more open-minded.
Not making money was crucial, because, if nobody's making money off of this shit, no one's kicking out other people to please advertisers either.
If anything, as soon as you started banning all the trolls and kooky crazy people to "bring order", the forums would GET BORING and everyone else started leaving too. You NEEDED these people to bring life into the forums and spice things up a bit, so censorship was something that was naturally discouraged.
Extra: AESTHETICS
Also, aside from censorship, this is a personal preference which NOBODY seems to share with me: websites simply looked a lot cooler back then. I loved the geocities aesthetic, it was (and still is) a lot more charming than the homogenous made-for-mobile bullshit of nowadays where every website looks exactly the same and feels very lame to use on a PC
Back then people would find weird ways to divide things into tables, there were animated gifs all over the place, music started playing in the background and sites actually used side frames. Mobiles killed sideframes, but it is a very handy and logical way to organize things.
Also: anybody could code a website, because it was just mostly raw html. Sites were essentially fancy word documents, which is how they should be.
Man, that shit was fantastic. Each person's website really felt like a window into their soul in a way that a facebook/twitter profile simply does NOT manage to feel like.
I mean, you CAN make a raw html website, but nobody will want to visit it, because:
a) nobody really visits small websites anymore. They find shit on facebook and twitter profiles instead.
b) even if you did find an audience to view your personal website, the majority of people browse the internet on their phones nowadays.
So you gotta design a "responsive" website to please your audience, but doing that with just raw html and css, even though it CAN be done, is a bit of a nightmare and really hard to test.
You CAN do it, but it's easier to just stack a bunch of frameworks on top of frameworks that deal with this nightmare for you. Or, even better, pay wordpress or something to deal with it for you and create a really bland-looking website.
people still do, you might not be aware of it. Maybe its because you only stick to the mainstream sites. And if more people would visit those sites, they wouldn't be small sites anymore...
b) ... is a bit of a nightmare and really hard to test.
and here I call total bullshit, its esier than it has ever been to that shit.
(first example that came to mind)
Maybe I'm misremembering (completely possible), but it feels like the 2000s was the beginning of the end and shit was REALLY good in the mid-90s.
But then the normies invaded and, with them, corporate interests up the ass. Everything was monetized, sanitized and eventually censored to appeal to the advertisers' whims.
People younger than 30,35 simply do NOT know how good it was.
Yes, it took 5 minutes to load up a low-def picture of a naked woman, so beating your meat was really hard, but that's why those of us who were horny 10 year olds back in 94 would buy/steal physical playboys from newsstands (another thing which I haven't seen in ages: newsstands).
Basically everything was a lot less centralized and you wouldn't just go to reddit/facebook/twitter for all your online social interaction. You'd have to actively hunt down forums for each of your specific interests, which meant:
a) each forum had a pretty... "unique" vibe, so you weren't just always stuck in your little bubble.
b) Each forum was small, usually operated at a loss and was purely a passion project
c) Corporate interests didn't care about these forums. They were only for a tiny minority of nerds, who cares about them?
All of that meant that most people were exposed to a lot of different subcultures, so we'd (for the most part) be a lot more open-minded.
Not making money was crucial, because, if nobody's making money off of this shit, no one's kicking out other people to please advertisers either.
If anything, as soon as you started banning all the trolls and kooky crazy people to "bring order", the forums would GET BORING and everyone else started leaving too. You NEEDED these people to bring life into the forums and spice things up a bit, so censorship was something that was naturally discouraged.
Extra: AESTHETICS
Also, aside from censorship, this is a personal preference which NOBODY seems to share with me: websites simply looked a lot cooler back then. I loved the geocities aesthetic, it was (and still is) a lot more charming than the homogenous made-for-mobile bullshit of nowadays where every website looks exactly the same and feels very lame to use on a PC
Back then people would find weird ways to divide things into tables, there were animated gifs all over the place, music started playing in the background and sites actually used side frames. Mobiles killed sideframes, but it is a very handy and logical way to organize things.
Also: anybody could code a website, because it was just mostly raw html. Sites were essentially fancy word documents, which is how they should be.
Man, that shit was fantastic. Each person's website really felt like a window into their soul in a way that a facebook/twitter profile simply does NOT manage to feel like.
you can't do that anymore?
Not really, man.
I mean, you CAN make a raw html website, but nobody will want to visit it, because:
a) nobody really visits small websites anymore. They find shit on facebook and twitter profiles instead.
b) even if you did find an audience to view your personal website, the majority of people browse the internet on their phones nowadays.
So you gotta design a "responsive" website to please your audience, but doing that with just raw html and css, even though it CAN be done, is a bit of a nightmare and really hard to test.
You CAN do it, but it's easier to just stack a bunch of frameworks on top of frameworks that deal with this nightmare for you. Or, even better, pay wordpress or something to deal with it for you and create a really bland-looking website.
people still do, you might not be aware of it. Maybe its because you only stick to the mainstream sites. And if more people would visit those sites, they wouldn't be small sites anymore...
and here I call total bullshit, its esier than it has ever been to that shit. (first example that came to mind)