Just as we were once young, so was "the (internet) world"/the websites.
It's maybe kind of like missing flying before 9/11 changed security procedures permanently across the globe. There's nothing invalid at all about saying that was an overall better quality of experience and I'm sad that there seems to be no means to bring it back.
I read some article about back when train travel was new and borders weren't secured and passports weren't a thing. IIRC, "wander lust" was a bonafide mental health diagnosis applied to people who would just up and leave and go elsewhere for a time, abandoning their lives and families and claiming to forget they existed.
That mental health diagnosis ceased to exist once that more of travel ceased to exist. Trains still exist, but you can't just up and go somewhere on a whim without a passport in the same way.
The world actually does, in fact, change in important ways. It's not really fair to dismiss that entirely on the idea that you just miss being young.
Though I certainly do miss being young in some ways. I miss being young and naive and just talking with people without wondering what their agenda is and whether or not it will be a serious problem for me because I've seen too much of that. In some sense, worrying about that doesn't seem to do a great job of protecting me from a certain type of person, but it does kill a lot of spontaneity and my online relationships just aren't the same.
And I wonder at what I've gained and at what I've lost and if it's worth it. But like with post 9/11 plane flight, there's no going back and I'm stuck with it, for better or worse, like it or not.
I dont buy that. I dont miss 9600 Bauds modems, Windows 95 or monochromatic monitors. But some things were better before. Not every current thing is better, give me the Godfather 1,2 and Silence of the Lambs versus all movies made in the last 10 years. Compare the kind of discussions you could have in Usenet (cranks included) or the first blogs to the things you see in Twitter or -shudders- Facebook.No contest there.
I personally miss Windows 98. I'm aware of bugs and the boot time it took being longer than current boot times on decent machines. I miss the responsiveness of well-behaved applications. I miss having native applications. I miss having themes and fine control over colors and fonts that allowed me to change the look of almost every application installed due to everything being built with the same toolkit and inheriting the same settings. I miss being able to make pixel art in paintbrush (why did MS have to add antialiasing to paint?). I miss WEP games (Chip's Challenge is on steam, but I've never found a good Jezzball clone).
Also, I miss ZoneAlarm firewall. Windows firewall is sufficient for my needs, but I really wish there was a way to make windows pop up a prompt the first time an application tried to go online, and white/blacklist specific destinations from the prompt.
I miss browsing with less styling and images and such nonsense.
