Pop up ads. You'd be on a webpage and suddenly you'd be in a completely different browser window and had to x out of that one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on.

Not everybody used to be on it. There was a stigma to socializing online. "Don't give out your address, full name, or credit card info online!!" Shit I don't want to have to give it to a person these days. Online dating, not my thing, but I love that it's bringing people together. It's not as strange to quit your job and move across the country to get married to your internet boyfriend as it used to be.

Most people on the internet are normal people because most people are on the internet.

needing to disconnect so your parents could make a phone call.

Remember the time before we had HTML5 or worse, Flash?

Flash is bad enough. But what about Shockwave? Java? Or Java 1.4 (that was a big update IIRC). A whole slew of different ActiveX plugins to download/install/debug each time you wanted to visit a different webpage?

Javascript back then was so primitive you couldn't even do XMLHttpRequests, so that necessitated the use of rich plugins to deliver a better browsing experience. But it was incredibly non-standard and non-consolidated.

Remember when downloads could not be paused/resumed. Back in the day if your download was interrupted, you'd have to restart the download. Then apps like Downloadzilla and other programs let you download large files and resume as needed which was critical for large downloads that took hours/days to complete.

The wild west part was the best part. It felt real. Now it's all watered down.

Many different search engines with many different results. Searching for stuff was not very intuitive.

The wild west atmosphere was rather cool being a teenager, I must say.

you had bunches of people getting off scot-free with telling you to off yourself or call you a list of derogatory terms.

Looks at Twitter and Facebook...

Uhhhh... Who's going to tell them that's still a really big issue? lol

Back in the day everything was kind of worse. The tech, the UI, having to use Java and Shockwave before even Flash was a thing let alone HTML5. Having everything spread out and in hard to locate sites. Which was kind of fun at first, but it got old. Mainly for me, it was the speed and the UI. So many things were incredibly unintuitive, we look back and remember the good ones and forget all the shovelware that was absolutely atrocious. OH! And BonziBuddy. That fuckin' BonziBuddy...

File-sharing services for buccaneering purposes in the early 2000s didn't have previews. So if you wanted to, say, buccaneer some video erotica, you'd be going just on filenames, which might not be accurate.

Aaaand you just downloaded some child porn. Oops.

I was there way before "wild west". Back what you could safely assume that anyone you met on the internet either had a degree or was currently on the way to get one.

But what I would miss mostly if transported back in that time is the complete absence of any search engine or centralized knowledge repository. Just imagine a web without google, bing, etc, and with no wikipedia site equivalent.

Our "search engine" was a hand-written notebook in the terminal room, where everyone noted down interesting internet services they had found, including the numerical IP address of the server in case the DNS was flawky.

Siblings or parents picking up the phone causing a disconnect.

mistyping goggle instead of google would fill your pc with malware.

edit - are cyberbullying laws really that strong? plenty of derogatory terms thrown around today.

Price. My first ISP had no flat rate option.

That logo appearing when the image wouldn't load.

No tabbed browsing. At least not until Firebird, IIRC. Also, "110mb download? Shit, I'm going to have to leave the computer on overnight." Then waking up to find the download failed for some reason.

Content.

There is MUCH more stuff of almost any kind on the web now.

internet explorer sucked then and still sucks now

Internet Explorer 6 and Flash can go eat a bag of dicks.

But you know what is timeless?

zombo.com

We need more zombo.com and Homestar Runner.

No mention of Mosaic (first web browser)? What sucked was you generally had to compile it yourself. That meant installing all the build tooling, building it, and turning it loose. Oh. Windows? Lol. No go. Gotta get an early version of Linux up and running first. That usually meant 20+ diskettes of Slackware installation.

But then you could surf in all the basic HTTP glory. It was a new world and it was awesome.

Maybe not the internet per se but going over to a friend's house and finding out about a game or movie you never heard of and not having the resources we have now made it hard to find out as a kid with limited time online.