As a baby GenX-er smartphones, and always-on internet didn't come into my life until I was at university so I straddle both worlds, and I definitely would not go back. What I have done in recent years is revolt against the always-on side of modern tech. My phone makes not a peep of sound or vibration, it shows no notifications unless I look in the tray, all app badges are turned off. I can't tell you how much this has improved my life!

I even went so far to run my phone in black and white for 6 months as an experiment. That was a real interesting experience! I found it way easier to simply read and then put down my phone. When I finished my stint and turned colour back on I actually felt dizzy using the phone for a few days.

When you look at how Kbin/Lemmy has exploded in a just a few short days it's clear that modern tech can be amazing for humanity in terms of creating communities and bringing people together, but how we do it in terms of app designs, notifications, dark patterns and all the hullabaloo of is somehow anti-human and I think with waves hands all that has befallen us in the past couple of years we are suddenly waking up and trying to find new ways to be people with tech.

Let's hope the fediverse is a good step in that new direction.

I think what people are really missing is being able to feel disconnected.

Like it used to be you'd send an email and you'd get a response tomorrow. Because people would go online occasionally.

Now if I'm not responding to a text within a few minutes people get upset. You'll see people answer the phone during a movie to say "hey I'm in a movie I'll call you back"

I'd like to go back to the world of being connected but having a slight delay is ok

anyone who says that forgets how bad tv sucked back then
I mean you'd have to at least bring back video stores or something

Not a lot of meat to the story, and it conflates tech itself with the social expectations that have sprung up because of it and the way it's used. "Instagram's pedophile network" (which seems only to be brought up for shock value) is not "cell service."

I'd hazard a guess that what respondents really want to return to is not being expected to be available to anyone at any time. And, crucially, they don't feel they can just ... do that.

Or you just stood around waiting for a person for 2 hours with no way to learn if they were running late or blowing you off or dead.

As someone who is Gen X or millennial depending upon the day and the years they pick, I don't want this. It's very easy to look back through rose-tinted glasses, but there are a lot of things, which many commenters already touched on, that were much harder or worse then. One that I didn't see early was maps and navigation. I had to lug around a giant atlas and plan out my routes to get somewhere. If there were a new street or development or something, I was SOL. Even in the early days, printing out MapQuest maps was far better, but still had its own issues. Aside from that, many other commenters mention many of the things that were decidedly worse or more inconvenient back then.

Tbf I think I'd like it more if we had online shopping, cell phones, instant messaging etc but we didn't have social media as we know it today. Like we stuck with phpbb, Usenet and IRC and didn't move much more beyond that into Myspace and Facebook