Missing the early internet
Link: I wish I didn't miss the '90s–'00s internet
Pining for the good ol' days of anything is often a fool's errand, but there was something exciting about the early internet. It didn't feel as dysfunctional or captured back then, even if that wild west aspect presented its own risks. As the Verge recently highlighted, 2004 was the first year of the future.
My family had internet from the time I was five or six. We used AOL, and Juno, and ZiaNet dial-up. I remember mom using AIM and Yahoo Messenger to keep in touch with friends. In high school, we used Yahoo Messenger more and people still had Yahoo email. Then Gmail came out (2004) and everyone switched. YouTube came out (2005) and was immensely popular with the high school crowd (I didn't get the appeal). My friends had MySpace pages (I wasn't allowed to at the time) and then started hopping onto Facebook when that opened up to the public (2006).
I tried keeping a free blog on places like Blogger back then. And I'd go onto some forums like the PopSci Predictions Exchange. To be honest, forums had a lot of the same bad attitudes that exist on social media now, but there was still more friction back then, and that probably helped foster community to some degree. You had to want to be there.
We seem to be at the end of a web era again. So it's super cool that Rohan is old-school blogging despite being born in 2006! I was happy to see a young blogger using something like Bearblog linked to by Dave Winer.