I spent hours on the Star Wars webring. Practiced jedi meditation, was convinced I could move stuff with my mind, and learned all about Kashyyyk.

Pop Up Blockers.

It's 2024 and popup ads are everywhere despite being legislated away in the early 00's.

Fuck ads, and fuck pop up ads more.

everything

Almost everything except the fact that it was dominated by one language, from a culture with an emphasis of computers being an interest that was unnecessarily gendered, and that the internet nd the tools used to create it were only accessible to the wealthiest able-bodied people from a specific demographic due to systemic inequity. And the speed. I don't miss the slow speeds.

Just about everything else about the early internet was better than today by huge margins. Imagine being able to search for a niche topic and not turning up thousands of seo-optimized paid-advertizing affiliate-link-program ai-generated tangentially-relatedish user-tracking sales links. Sure, there were times you found nothing, and it was ugly, but that was better than wasting time sorting through total shit.

Edited to add nostalgia: video of The Simpson's comic book guy attempting to view naked Captain Janeway from Star Trek

No AJAX

I miss ICQ and all the security holes it opened.

Livejournal. It still exists but is pretty dead save for Russian people. I made the best friends of my life on there, and writing there was more helpful than any therapy.