In 2003, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy. Dial-up connections were still the default and YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail had yet to be invented.
I’d argue it had reached its prime. Websites were just websites then, not data harvesting machines.
Maybe the content reached its peak, but I’d argue we are in a better place now UX-wise.
Full disclosure: I type this from a network running pihole. Flashing banner ads to other people’s blogs were definitely better than todays adverts — and I’m looking at you, most recipe sites.
Nononono, UX is fucking terrible at the moment, if you said this somewhere like 10-15 years ago I would probably agree with you, but everything is designed to serve ads and be as functionless as possible these days.
2003 was also littered with browser toolbars, animated gif ads, scam links, popups, adware, viruses and worms, and purple apes. gotta go back another 10 years to get to the ‘websites were just websites’ era.
You forget how long sites took to load over 33.6k, and how limited your options were for email before Gmail became popular. Free email plans were measured in megabytes, and you could only send like 200k worth of attachments per message.
I’d argue it had reached its prime. Websites were just websites then, not data harvesting machines.
Maybe the content reached its peak, but I’d argue we are in a better place now UX-wise.
Full disclosure: I type this from a network running pihole. Flashing banner ads to other people’s blogs were definitely better than todays adverts — and I’m looking at you, most recipe sites.
Nononono, UX is fucking terrible at the moment, if you said this somewhere like 10-15 years ago I would probably agree with you, but everything is designed to serve ads and be as functionless as possible these days.
You’re just visiting shit sites. It’s on you.
2003 was also littered with browser toolbars, animated gif ads, scam links, popups, adware, viruses and worms, and purple apes. gotta go back another 10 years to get to the ‘websites were just websites’ era.
Oh, so the stuff that is built into the browser and social media apps now instead of requiring you to use an add on bar.
You forget how long sites took to load over 33.6k, and how limited your options were for email before Gmail became popular. Free email plans were measured in megabytes, and you could only send like 200k worth of attachments per message.
The bottleneck was your internet speed back then, now it’s your CPU.
Plenty of people had broadband, I was one of the first to get it in 1998. A whole 512Kbit.
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Yea, infancy? Been using it for at least 6 years by then, it’s hardly infancy.
Were dial-up connections default still? I had been on cable for two years by then.