Nostalgia hit hard when I read about MTV wiping its 30-year archive from the web. It made me think back to the early days of the internet—those clunky, HTML-filled sites that were somehow both ugly and awesome. I immediately headed to archive.org, scrolling through snapshots of the MTV website through the years, remembering how avant-garde their designs were. It’s wild how much the web has changed. We’ve lost that raw, quirky charm and replaced it with polished, corporate uniformity. I miss the wild west of the internet.
The Golden Age of Random Discovery
Remember when Google wasn’t that smart (or before it even existed)? Back when the internet was less about algorithms and more about discovering new content through random hyperlinks? You’d stumble across a niche website, fall into a rabbit hole of links, and before you knew it, hours had passed (well, that is if your parents allowed you to spend that much time on the internet because you were squatting their one and only phone line). That was the golden age of the internet for me—one click at a time, discovering weird and wonderful corners of the web. I miss that feeling.
AltaVista in 1999
Building the Web by Hand
This was the pre-blog era, before Web 2.0 took over. I remember learning HTML 3 at a summer camp in the mid-90s. I’d throw in an “under construction” banner, some marquee text, a guestbook, a dumb visitor counter, and those cult Homer Simpson or Beavis & Butthead animated GIFs. The content didn’t really matter. It was more about the process, the joy of watching your raw code - typed out in Notepad - transform into a blinking, scrolling masterpiece.
I made web pages about whatever fascinated me at the time: the Independence Day movie, GoldenEye on N64, the battle between AltaVista and Yahoo, or Netscape vs. Internet Explorer. Every page linked to another, like a maze of my own interests. It was chaotic, but it was fun. It was so freeing. You didn’t have to deal with complex frameworks or endless configurations. No JS libraries or CSS preprocessors to mess around with. Just raw HTML and the thrill of uploading your files via FTP. You refreshed the page, and there it was—your creation in all its glory. Sure, we had limitations, but that simplicity was a thing of beauty.
At the time, hosting a website was an adventure in itself. Also, does anyone remember free hosting sites like Geocities (or Mygale, if you are French or remember that one)?
GeoCities website in 1995 - Web Design Museum
I also miss webrings. Yeah, those things. Everything was curated by humans back then, not some algorithm telling you what to look at. If you wanted to explore a topic, you found someone passionate about it, and they’d link you to more people equally passionate. No shortcuts, no machine learning trying to guess your next move.
Borrowed from Reddit
The New vs. The Old
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not just some grumpy old-timer stuck in the past - well maybe I am but that’s beside the point. I love Vue.js, want to dive into Svelte, and have built plenty of projects in Python, Node, and PHP. I enjoy playing around with the latest tech as much as anyone. But no matter how cool the newest framework is, I never quite get that same feeling of satisfaction and simplicity that I did back then. Maybe it’s nostalgia. Or maybe there’s something to be said about the magic of building something from scratch, in an era when the internet felt like a wide-open frontier instead of a neatly organized algorithm-driven experience.
Looking Forward
There are still some remnants of the old web. There are also new websites looking like old ones, and I’m here for it! From Neocities to the Fediverse and these active webrings, I feel like there is still space for the old weird chaotic web in little corners of today’s internet. I still get lost in them, what about you?