I really never have believed times improved, and i am almost positive things will only get worse.
30 years ago we had a future to look to, the unshittified internet, great music, affordable land/housing, affordable durable cars, people actually interacted in real life, no social media trash. Now, we have billionaires and LLMs. I don’t see how anyone can possibly think times are better or going to improve.
Yes, everyone will say “civil rights improved” and yes thats maybe the only thing that has changed, however it’s getting taken away every day again so I don’t think you can even use that point anymore.
Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn’t like what MySpace looked like a decade later.
As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90’s cars were far better than the 70-80’s cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990’s a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70’s-80’s) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990’s cars didn’t rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990’s cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it’s still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60’s-70’s driving around in the 1990’s.
Most of the internet in the 90s was either that or the complete opposite, i.e. a bare text with links. Tell me since you said you actually remember the internet back then, what did you used to do in it? What websites did you frequent?
As for the cars I never said they were worse than before, my point with the purely mechanical cars from the 60s or before is that people still keep them because they’re fully mechanic, but that cars from the 90s don’t have that appeal. Everything that made the cars from the 90s better than the ones from the 80s was improved upon since then, realistically today’s cars are much better in any metric you want to compare.
Well, actually thinking about you would have to split the 1995 internet into the internet and the world wide web. I actually spent a considerable amount of time on usenet - this of course being back when it was more than alt.binaries. Probably around then I also discovered MP3s, and the main way I had of getting a hold of those long before the days of Napster was public FTP sites. With any luck, when I found a good one there would be others mentioned in the greeting and/or some sort of readme that I could then go check out. I could also try snagging them on usenet, but the server my ISP ran didn’t really put much effort into making sure the binaries groups had any sort of decent retention, but every once and a while I could snag something. I also still had access to AOL, but I don’t recall doing much in their client other than checking email.
In any case, that was all outside of the WWW. As for the WWW I remember using to do things like look up guides to video games I was playing, and other fun stuff like looking up Star Wars and Star Trek fan sites. It was more of a toy for me - for things like getting news, looking at the weather, or researching things I tended to go to “traditional” sources. Honestly, the whole every website had had animated gifs, blink tags, MIDI music, and horrible background images is more a meme than anything else. Sure, that’s not to say there weren’t sites like that, but even so that was more of a late 1990’s-mid 2000’s thing (coughMySpacecough). In 1995 most things still pretty simple. In 1995 trying to get too fancy would result in your site taking a while to load at 14.4k (a single MP3 took forever), and would grind the average PC (something like a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM) to a halt.
As for cars, I agree with the OP is the 1990’s is when the typical new car took a big leap in terms of quality. What they lack is the cool factor that cars from the 60’s have. Things have gotten better since then in general, though I’d argue that some things like usability and ergonomics have taken a hit.
Personally, I do the same things on the internet now that I did in the 90’s. That’s one thing that hasn’t really changed.
Care to give more concrete examples of what you do on the internet now? You’re on Lemmy, which didn’t exist back then, neither did reddit. Other than that I don’t know what you do on the internet, but what I do is certainly different, even if we were to consider that Lemmy is not so different from the various forums that existed then, and do the same with Whatsapp and IRC, just yesterday I used: YouTube, Spotify, Banks, Maps, Ordering food, Netflix, and Video calls none of which was available in the 90s.
I browse websites related to my interests more than anything else. I don’t think the specific websites are important. Lemmy not existing as a brand name doesn’t mean anything. I had the same experience on dozens of other websites. In terms of experiences/activities, everything on this list was around by the mid 90s except for ordering food, but I didn’t spend much time doing those things.