What's something you wish to bring back from the late 90's/early 00's internet?

Not everything being about profit
Not being 1000% about data mining
No god damn pop up’s. Every fucking site I go to takes like minimum of 6 clicks to get rid of useless windows
Ads All.The.Time. At this point, if your ad even remotely annoys me, I will go out of my way NOT to use your product.
Real people. So much online interaction is with bots now.
Being able to believe more things. It used to be pretty apparent when you were looking at a computer modified image. With all the deepfakes, bots, AI, etc I assume absolutely nothing is real or accurate info.
Info. Like useful info. Secondary, niche communities you could relate to.
- No god damn pop up's
  We must have been on a different internet, popups back in the day were atrocious, and this was before adblockers were effective.
- Install Ublock Origin. Seriously.
  
  Doesn’t look like an option for safari.
- Atleast the Fediverse is not about profit.
  
  Yet.
  Call me pessimistic, but with meta wanting to be here, it’s likely to ultimately be ruins/commoditized too. Eventually. It’ll be great while it lasts.
- To be fair, I only came online late 90s and all we had was Internet Explorer, no Adblock and a constant barrage of popups, ads and toolbar installers and even child porn. I remember downloading one song and having to close 20 windows.
  
  There were ad blockers even then, like "Web Washer". Browser plugins/extensions weren't invented yet so these tools were locally installed proxy servers with simple black/whitelists. Worked really well!

The lack of ways for cooperations to gather information about internet users.
- Pretty much. I feel like everything is out to track you and to try and sell you garbage products. And if your in the US you have no rights to tell these companies to remove your data. Unless your in California.

Websites run by ordinary people, about things they're interested in. Explanations in text instead of monetized YouTube videos dragged out so they can cram more adverts in. Decentralization, with lots of little hosts and sites instead of large walled gardens of corporately owned "content". The absence of the concept of "content". Places where people would chat just because they enjoyed talking to each other. Email that wasn't mined for details of your personal life by megacorporations. Fascism still being universally reviled.
- Yeah, I miss finding some very barebones website called like "Gary's Favorite Garlic Breads", just run by Gary, who isn't trying to turn a profit or be an influencer. He just loves garlic bread and wanted to share.
  
  I miss Gary :c
- For the whole "websites ran by individuals" thing, there is Neocities

Net neutrality

NO SOCIAL MEDIA. I belive that Facebook has made the collective humanity a lot stupider. Groupthink, sheeple, influencers, contrails conspiracies...
- We had social media, it just wasn't cancerous like Facebook. It was more fun like MySpace, forums, blogs, IRC, etc.
  
  What we didn't have was algorithmic social media. That needs to a die a fiery death in the depths of hell.
  If it were up to me, algorithmic curation and promotion based on viewership history would be outright illegal.

I miss all the personal home pages. You could get a real sense of who somebody was based on what they chose to display. Maybe they had pictures of the favourite game or tv show, or their own little web diary. Now its all just santizied profile pages that have virtually zero room for creativity. It's too sterile now.
- One thing I enjoyed about myspace was how much you could personalize your page with even just a smidge of html-fu. I knew some people that got so good that you wouldn't even know you were still on myspace unless you looked at the address bar.
- Yes! I keep tumblr around for this exact reason. I want to have a billion cute pixel gifs all over whatever account I have. I know it's not for everyone but it just makes me so happy.
- I used to host my portfolio site through them actually.
- It is very simple and inexpensive (pretty much free) to host a personal website on GCP (Google) or AWS (Amazon). They reach have a free or near free tier. Unfortunately, that requires some technical know how, but it's nothing somebody that can write HTML by hand can't handle.

Hope for the future, that the days of widespread ignorance would soon come to an end.
Fast forward 20 years, and misinformation is rampant and most people believe it without question. 🤦‍♂️

user population made of geeks and nerds. also, usenet and bbs raise nostalgia.
- The population was the best. I think that's why I like the fediverse so much so far.

I miss the days when it wasn’t flooded with weaponised idiocy.
That and neopets.
- While not the same, neopets is still alive!

We could create a personal website without having to pay and without giving up personal details. Everything was anonymous.
Search engines actually found what you were looking for. No censorship or bad suggestions or trying to sell stuff.
Always finding something new and interesting, not being limited to a few commercial websites.
People were much friendlier and open to share.
- God i hate how utterly useless search engines are now
  
  That's why I just use a metasearch engine (a public searx instance). It's not perfect, but it usually pulls what I'm looking for from the cached web pages of other search engines and doesn't let them know I'm searching.

We used to receive more real e-mails than SPAM e-mails.
- Same with phone calls
  
  And snail mails.

StumbeUpon
- Feels like a good time to bring it back
  
  There's CloudHiker

I'd like to see less use of JavaScript tracking and more "simple websites"!
- I agree. I use Pelican to build my website and I don't use any javascript. It's simple, it's fast (it doesn't really have much content that would be interesting to anybody, but it's mine and I like it!)
  
  One of the things I like about Lemmy is that the devs had the forethought of developing in Rust rather than PHP or another prototyping language that doesn't scale as well.

Goofy, random flash videos. AlbinoBlacksheep was like the internet in its prime
- A badger badgers badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM!
  
  Snaaaake, a snake. Oh it's a snake
  It's a

Better search. Even with modifiers, results are so chaotic and not what I’m looking for. Just the other day I was trying to find recent information and set the parameter to only results in the past month. Three separate search engines (Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing) all showed year old results first. Not to mention the bubble they put you in.
- Yeah the first 10 results are all ads or clickbait SEO things that don't answer the question, and even you set the results to only the last year it just ignores it and gives you results from 2013 anyway.
- You might like Kagi Search. I've found the results much better than the alternatives.
  
  Thanks! I’ll give it a look.
- Then you don't remember what search was like before Google. Google changed the game and was for a long time so superior to Altavista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves etc for search results that it became the defacto search engine.
  Of course, eventually it all goes to shit and Google is getting there by serving more and more ads across all their services.
  
  Google was awesome when it appeared. Great search results, quick, no ads, clean UI. I'd pay to have it like that again.

That it wasn't flooded with the everyday person's idiocy.
- I used to think the internet was awesome because it would allow everyone to communicate with each other without limits. Now I think it's awful, for the same reason.

I liked forums. It was a bit easier to develop a close rapport with a small group of users than I’ve found on Reddit or Lemmy. Small Discord servers can replace that to some extent though

I really miss IRC and usenet. And I know both still exist but I miss the communities there 😊
- I do sometimes go back, but most of the places I used to visit are empty other than bots sharing crap. It used to be such a great place, had really supportive groups but also many many weird ones.
- usenet seems to be mostly used for filesharing/piracy these days. It'd be cool to have a resurgence of active, moderated text based usenets but most of them AFAIK are bot filled these days.
  
  Yeah, those dang bots! I haven’t found a place I used to visit without tons of spam
- I never really used Usenet but IRC I definitely miss. Its main problem was that keeping yourself connected and seeing messages when you are away involved having bots that replay them to you or some screen running on a remote server that lets you connect to it.
  All these various communications apps we use today are largely just worse, but prettier versions of what IRC could do.
  
  I agree. IRC was definitely great. Staying connected was definitely a problem, but the conversations made up for that. I had so many good friendships there, and I loved the ease of creating a new channel and gather there with friends. The ops system was definitely really good. You could do everything with the channel.
  I do frequent old servers I used to hang out on sometimes, if they still exist, that is, but like usenet, most channels are for downloading or nsfw stuff. Really sad, it was such a cool place to be!

The basic privacy. You could post on a forum and it was just you and the people on the board talking. Today you post anywhere and it's the whole world looking at the conversation.
- Privacy was worse back then but search engines got better since.

Web directories like dmoz
Small web (personal websites are bringing this back with nojs and minimal css)

Bring back the
<blink>
HTML tag! You can't have a good blog without it!
Serious now. I miss the blogosphere. It was just a bunch of casual writers messing with their HTML (this was before CSS), writing whatever the fuck they wanted, and linking other blogs that they read. One of my favs was literally some guy making shit up about his own life, you could see the bullshit from a distance but it was enjoyable bullshit. Another was poking fun at other blogs.
I also miss being able to fully load a simple page with a 56k connection. My connection nowadays is orders of magnitude faster, then why the hell things are so slower?
- Because of all the JavaScript. I swear like 90% of the Web nowadays is just JavaScript. Look into the NoScript add-on. It allows you selectively block (or allow) JS scripts on any given webpage/site/etc.
  It actually makes it SO much faster to load webpages. Plus the privacy & security benefits are pretty nice too. 👍 :)
  
  I've used NoScript for some time, but it breaks a lot of sites - because those 99% of bloat are all intertwined with the 1% of actual content. So even if I'm aware of the privacy, security, and speed benefits, I ended ditching it. (Actually I just deactivated it, but it's still there.)

Homestar runner

I miss not having the expectation of every social media being so heavily moderated and sterile.
The old internet was like walking down a busy city street. You might walk by someone doing something absolutely batshit crazy, but you just think "Weird. Moving on." and go about your day because getting emotionally invested would be dumb. The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they'll get what's coming to them.
It's not all bad, but I miss the sort of "wild west" feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn't real life.
- The new internet feels like a workplace where people want to run to HR to report anyone who acts out so that they'll get what's coming to them.
  This. Probably the most thing I hate about today's internet, bunch of over-protected snowflakes who get offended by anything.
  
  And what's worse is how that's spilled into everyday life. Movies like Blazing Saddles and Revenge of the Nerds would get obliterated if they were released today. Everyone's immediate reaction to something they find unseasonable is to go absolutely nuts and cancel it instead of "huh, whatever."
  I still think we need to take most of the safety signs down and let darwinism take its course.
- It's not all bad, but I miss the sort of "wild west" feeling where nothing on the internet mattered because it wasn't real life.
  Well.. We have lemmy and kbin now, without algorithms promoting stupid shit like in social media.
  
  It's a weird feeling not being targeted with content and ads. I forgot what it was like.
- I kinda miss the days of the internet being a bit of a gamble, where you might see cute puppies or someone shoving a Mason jar in their ass (back on the easier internet). Those days are gone, unfortunately.

Demon Torrentz. Also, the absence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Google-owned YouTube, and Threads. Did I miss anything?
- Stickdeath.com
  
  Is that like XiaoXiao?
  I just searched about it. It sounds like original newgrounds. Sounds awesome

Low quality gif animated images.
- dancingbaby.gif

Easy to use interfaces.
The crap that has being put out now makes many products almost unusable. Microsoft office is one example. The web page for my city is another.

AOL with its You Got Mail 😭😭
- I did some tech work for a wealthy old guy and his wife. They used AOL Gold Desktop Browser as their web browser as of late June 2023. His issue was caused by him using AOL. I put them on chrome with Ublock and bookmarked aol email. They should probably have a password manager with 2FA but switching from AOL to chrome was a big step.
  
  Probably boomers
- You've Got Mail, the romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks is a very weird time capsule.

Rotating gifs all over every homepage

Pre-Eternal September.

Usenet. Eternal-September.org still provides free access.
Scorefiles / killfiles were brilliant
- Yeah, Lemmy is more or less just a new way to do what Usenet has been doing for decades.

I really miss MSN, I had really good times on it.

I miss gopher and usenet

This may be too new but Justin.tv

A lot of what I'd mention has already been said, so I'll add the lack of influencers.

The internet itself.
Get off my lawn.

Message boards without likes or upvotes

The joy of having a landline without caller ID and running like crazy to be the first to grab that brick just to find out that maybe the next phone call might actually be for me, good times

Nobody needed a pseudonym back then.
You could just speak your mind openly and always write your real name to it, and it was THE NORMAL thing to do.
And yes of course we all had some f*ing "controversial" opinions back then. It was our youth after all :-) No holding back with what you would probably call unbearable extremes nowadays. And then nobody needed to do any canceling or banning or crushing our skulls....
- What? I think anonymity was much more prevalent then. "Don't give anyone your real name on the internet, for anything ever" was a rule generally followed until Facebook came around. It wasn't even common for a non-business email address to be a variation on your real name until around 2008
  
  I think that was later, when money started to take over.