VessOnSecurity
Nafnlaus 🇮🇸 🇺🇦@bontchev Lol, the internet was never like on the left. Early search was *awful*.
Hitsu Yonai@hitsuyonai @bontchev AltaVista was garbage, which is why everyone jumped ship to Google. Pre-pagerank search was just awful.
And no, the internet was never devoid of SEO. In fact, SEO used to be FAR easier before Pagerank. Even in the early days of pagerank, people immediately started gaming the system by loading each other's pages up with mutual links to climb the graph.
People need to stop looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. The early internet was terrible.
Bill Woodcock@nafnlaus @hitsuyonai @bontchev
I think you mean that the early _web_ was terrible. I kinda liked email that worked, and MUDs and MOOs, and Usenet. And even Gopher, a little.
I think you mean that the early _web_ was terrible. I kinda liked email that worked, and MUDs and MOOs, and Usenet. And even Gopher, a little.
@woody @bontchev @hitsuyonai Email that worked on the early web, are you kidding me? I administered an email server at the time, it was a bloody nightmare. How have you memory holed the whole "confirmation emails often take hours to arrive if they ever even arrive at all" thing? And early spam filters were way worse than today, if you even had access to one at all.
MUDs and MOOs were certainly *fun*, mind you :) I had even more fun as a coder. LP MUD all the way - objects are OBJECTS!
@nafnlaus @bontchev @hitsuyonai
I'm distinguishing between the "web," the "world wide web" of HTTP stuff, and the Internet more generally, which supports, and supported, many other kinds of standards-based communication. You appear to be saying that the early Internet was crap, and we're viewing it through rosy glasses. I would counter that it was not crap, it was actually quite pleasant, though on almost unrecognizably different terms. There weren't spam filters in the early Internet, because there wasn't spam on the early Internet. Finger worked because nobody cared whether someone knew that they were logged in, because that wasn't some kind of privacy violation, because we weren't thinking in those terms yet. There weren't "confirmation emails" because there wasn't a second-class of "unconfirmed" citizens.
The technology was simple, it didn't have a polished user interface, compiling cnews was a pain in the ass, there weren't search engines, because there wasn't an expectation that arbitrary information would be available online... you discovered things by word of mouth, and you were surprised and charmed to find them. Snoopy calendars!
It was a different time, the challenges were different ones, it's very difficult to make meaningful comparisons between the Internet of 1990 and the Internet of 2024. But in 1990, nobody's personal information was being sold, and nobody's thermostat was live-streaming video of the inside of their house, and nobody's vote was being manipulated by Russians and Facebook for pennies. And people weren't spending all day doomscrolling. Overall, I think it was a lot healthier.
I'm distinguishing between the "web," the "world wide web" of HTTP stuff, and the Internet more generally, which supports, and supported, many other kinds of standards-based communication. You appear to be saying that the early Internet was crap, and we're viewing it through rosy glasses. I would counter that it was not crap, it was actually quite pleasant, though on almost unrecognizably different terms. There weren't spam filters in the early Internet, because there wasn't spam on the early Internet. Finger worked because nobody cared whether someone knew that they were logged in, because that wasn't some kind of privacy violation, because we weren't thinking in those terms yet. There weren't "confirmation emails" because there wasn't a second-class of "unconfirmed" citizens.
The technology was simple, it didn't have a polished user interface, compiling cnews was a pain in the ass, there weren't search engines, because there wasn't an expectation that arbitrary information would be available online... you discovered things by word of mouth, and you were surprised and charmed to find them. Snoopy calendars!
It was a different time, the challenges were different ones, it's very difficult to make meaningful comparisons between the Internet of 1990 and the Internet of 2024. But in 1990, nobody's personal information was being sold, and nobody's thermostat was live-streaming video of the inside of their house, and nobody's vote was being manipulated by Russians and Facebook for pennies. And people weren't spending all day doomscrolling. Overall, I think it was a lot healthier.
"There weren't spam filters in the early Internet, because there wasn't spam on the early Internet."
As someone who administered an email server, I don't think I can even read past this retcon. How can you have been alive then and not remember all the endless spam? People gathered emails everywhere and sent it *en masse*. After a trip to Japan where I had stayed at hostels, and some required email address, all of the sudden I got a new flood of spam *in Japanese*
@woody @bontchev @hitsuyonai Early spam was relentless because so little spam filtering was done. The 419 scam spam emails in particular date from this time. The FTC started holding spam hearings in 1997. This ultimately led to congress passing the CAN-SPAM act in 2003. Spam was a BIG problem on the early internet, one you seem to have entirely memory-holed.
CATPCHAs started being introduced in 2000 to fight the growing spam problem.
There's surely a higher total percentage of email volume as spam now (though the CAN-SPAM act helped shift a lot of it to semi-legit things with opt-outs), but the far less common / poorer implementation of filtration back then meant that you saw a lot more of it.
NYT article from 1995:
