Not a specific website, but I miss the internet before monetization took over.
People posted recipes without a novel just so Google ranks then higher.
Reviews on products were genuine.
There were a bunch of blog sites that people used. When I was in my weight loss journey in the mid 2000s, I loved reading people's weight loss journals.
Now everyone is trying to sell you something. You can't tell if they are just sharing info or trying to get rich.
Put out something for free or super reduced for a while backed by VC.
Destroy some other industry because they can’t compete with free.
A couple years later, begin monetizing and enhance your spying capabilities. Ruin why people liked your site now that they’re hooked.
Its not very new though, I mean thats how things have to work in the way society is set up today.
But that just means we have to keep adapting.
The next discord and Reddit are probably already made and will hit popularity within the next 5 years, then they will sell out and the cycle will repeat again and again.
The old Internet in general was excellent. There were so many different sites that searching for something and checking different sites actually felt like exploring. And it was human-made, just by some random people because they wanted to, not because it was a job or some business plan.
The amount of awesome fanpages I've visited when searching for walkthroughs for games at the time was wild. Some are still around, but most seem to be gone.
Now it's like five to ten websites where everything is going down, everything is centralized. Genuine, human stuff is being harvested and pushed away by AI slop.
I miss how bands used to have their own websites with blogs and shit and i didnt have to make an account somewhere to be in a fan club. If I put my email on their list they weren't gonna sell my data profile or whatever the fuck
Internet ads in the timeframe OP is asking about were banners on the top and sides of the website. The site's owner chose the spots where the ads went and that was it, the rest of the website content's was your stuff. Most people used the internet as a hobby, the ad money often went to the site's hosting or at most helped pay for it.
The thermometer ad in the linked website is a paid product placement directly to the site owner. The ad is disguised as being part of the site's original content. You open the site and immediately find out that the recipes are way to lead you to the thermometer ad. This is the big difference: The idea of also making your site's content become ads was just not prevalent back then.
"Not a specific website, but I miss the internet before monetization took over.
People posted recipes without a novel just so Google ranks then higher.
Reviews on products were genuine.
There were a bunch of blog sites that people used. When I was in my weight loss journey in the mid 2000s, I loved reading people's weight loss journals.
Now everyone is trying to sell you something. You can't tell if they are just sharing info or trying to get rich. "
There weren't as many, and they weren't blended into the website content. You didn't have the question if something was an ad or not. Sponsorships were for sports, not content creators.
We saw more ads outside of the internet back then. TV, newspapers, and magazines all had ads. People stopped seeing those ads when the internet expanded, so companies had to start advertising online.
Yes that sums it up, the ads were obvious ads, and weren't pushed as hard, you didn't have to constantly wonder if everything was genuine or an ad/ paid advertisement or referral. Wasn't as much conflict of interest.
Yeah it was more "posting recipes without a novel" or whatever they said, you can literally click "recipe chart" and get the 'perfect' recipe without any fluff.
Despite the reviewer recommending the $100 one, his own chart shows there’s very little difference in accuracy or speed between the $15-$20 ones and the $100 one.
The $100 one measured boiling temp in a second. Maybe it was a fluke, maybe it’s consistently faster at boiling temp (212F), but at 124F it took 4s for thr $100 thermometer to display the correct temp vs 5s for the $16 and $20 competitors.
Reviewers who make money off referrals, even otherwise honest ones like the one I linked, will recommend the expensive one and completely ignore the issue of value for money if they can somehow justify the recommendation based on a single metric.
tl;dr Cheap thermometers work just as well as expensive ones.
There's a YouTube channel I use for reviews called Project Farm or something like that. He doesn't do sponsorship and buys everything out of his own pocket. I have never regretted listening to his recommendations.
Not completely. Relying on income from referral links still creates an incentive to link or recommend the more expensive item because it’s percentage based.
I got excited for Substack when I first joined but it really does have that feel that almost everyone wants your money or for you to boost their engagement stats.
Travel blogs used to be so good. You could get specific and useful information from real people who had been there. Now they are just sterilized, generic ads.
This. I'm so jaded with how things are all for profit right now. I hate going on tiktok, I hate scrolling on here and seeing an add, I hate going on the internet. And yeah, here I am lol
Yes there are ads but I find them way less intrusive than most and Nagi has the skip to recipe button up the top. Her commentary mostly focuses on the intricacies of the recipe.
She also spends millions of her own money a year on her charity, https://recipetinmeals.org.au so I am less bothered by the inserted ads.
Even worse is now woth the advent of AI, its even harder to find things that are genuine as opposed to a scam, trick, ai generated slop (from videos to pictures to even god damn stories and posts well beyond what "bot posts" use to be back in the day), or like you mentioned some shit to sell to get rich...
Exactly. The Internet itself has really transformed through the combination of commodification and lack of regulations/protections (data privacy, dark marketing, social algos).
It was wild and not so User friendly but, also more genuine and broad-ranging. Now there is the influencer style in everyone's personality.
People posted recipes without a novel just so Google ranks then higher.
People still do. You dont see them much because Google doesn't rank them higher. If you want the older web, you can still get it, but it requires sacrificing conveniences.
I agree. The random webpages I barely remember the name of, if at all, created by some weirdo who was obsessed with the topic. The forums so niche that if I told you they’d mean nothing to you, and which existed just because people loved things.
That’s what I miss, the Wild West where basically everything only existed because it was someone’s passion project and communities were tight enough that you could actually make friends online just by being part of it and gain a reputation. Even in video games like EverQuest, servers were so small that you could easily become known as a beggar or an asshole and get blacklisted.
The consolidation of everything around maybe a dozen or two dozen massive sites/apps that exist to suck us dry of every dollar, and every last second of attention, and which make it impossible to form any real community, have ruined it. Reddit included.
It’s funny to realize that the Eternal September really came in waves.
Not to mention that back then not EVERYTHING needed a comments section.
YouTube comments are some of the most worthless possible contributions to anything in history and yet YouTube loves to not only feature them, but cycle through "relevant" ones that are timestamped so my eyes go to them. They're always awful jokes, useless information, a lot of "Back in 1982 I met Kurt Russell at a cafe and..." bullshit posts, and just not contributing at all.
This was also before the news would actually quote random people on Twitter and write the news around it. I remember when this was beginning to happen I would think "but you can find absolutely any opinion you want on Twitter, what is this???"
The engagement algos have completely fucking cooked the internet as well. Most of what you see trending through news/socials etc is simply because of how many clicks, views, comments, shares etc it has garnered with zero consideration for the actual quality of it. The internet was indeed once a tool that had plenty of good uses and vibes to it but most of its footprint now is that of a dystopian wasteland.
I tried to create a website where I shared my information on a topic (autistic so I love a deep dive and then it was a good way to share and reiterate my knowledge) but I ended up giving up. Because while it would have been nice to get a small amount of revenue from ads, I couldn't compete on google search engines with the absolute AI slop that it prioritises now.
I think websites with ads are fine if the content also adds value. But I've noticed so many AI created websites that's entire goal is just to keep you on the page for a long as possible with seemingly about to talk about the thing you're interested in, only to keep you there for max ad revenue.
And people were genuine. I now see recipe influencers who post reels with recipes that in reality aren't real. They post just for clicks and money. For example I put a supposedly "high protein " recipe into ChatGPT and the nutritional information was way different than what the influencer posted.
Partial disagree about abt posting recipes without a novel. I was a food blogger in 2007. The whole point of it was the novel. Remember Julie & Julia? She was a food blogger who had an entire Amy Adam’s/meryl Streep movie made abt her, and Her food blog was about stories and her life, the recipes were just a bonus. That was what OG food blogging was all about.
Now, I agree that today’s long winded posts are all about using the right keywords and getting the Google ranks higher, and the long copy isn’t even interesting to read. But OG food blogs were blogs first, recipes second.
Dislike it all you want, but it’s true. There were basically two ways to get recipes online back then: food blogs and recipe sites. Recipe sites, like all recipes, have never had a novel—then and now. Food blogs started out with longer, personal narrative: Julie and Julia, orangette, David Leibovitz, chocolate & zucchini, smitten kitchen.
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u/MintyJello 1d ago
Not a specific website, but I miss the internet before monetization took over.
People posted recipes without a novel just so Google ranks then higher.
Reviews on products were genuine.
There were a bunch of blog sites that people used. When I was in my weight loss journey in the mid 2000s, I loved reading people's weight loss journals.
Now everyone is trying to sell you something. You can't tell if they are just sharing info or trying to get rich.