Back in mid-December last year, I stumbled across an archive of an old fan site – last updated in about 2004-5 – for the classic  Y2K-era British videogame-themed TV show “Bits” (1999-2001). Whilst I probably shouldn’t link directly to the fan site archive – given the amount of awkwardly dated early-mid 2000s British “Lad culture” on it – the fan site was very clearly designed for dial-up internet and this made me think of some of the ways that the internet used to be better in those days.

And, yes, I know that modern-style broadband internet gradually started to become popular during the first two or three years of the 2000s, but I was still using dial-up (and floppies) as late as about 2005. And, for anyone who hasn’t heard of dial-up before, it was a much slower version of the internet – 56k – which also took up an entire phone line as well. You had to manually log on to the internet – complete with the famous screeching sounds from the modem – and then log off afterwards, especially if anyone needed to make a phone call.

Objectively, the internet was “worse” during the dial-up days. Slow, expensive etc…. But it also had some advantages.

1) Decentralisation: One of the really cool things about the old dial-up days was that the internet still genuinely felt like an international network. In other words, everything had its own separate stand-alone website rather than mostly being focused around a few large US social media and/or shopping sites.

This is a really subtle thing but it took seeing an old HTML TV show fan site to remind me just how well-distributed the internet used to be. How websites came from all sorts of countries – including Britain – and were written for different audiences. How there weren’t a few central US tech oligarchs who wielded a disproportionate amount of power over the internet, because every website was its own separate entity – rather than a sub-page on Facebook or Youtube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

This also meant far less in the way of “algorithms” or “surveillance capitalism” or anything like that. After all, that sort of thing only really works when a small number of websites have a disproportionate amount of influence, power or “reach”. And, back in the dial-up days, this just wasn’t a thing. Everything had its own separate website, the internet was mostly run by hobbyists (though, of course, online shopping existed too. Amazon started – as an online bookshop – in 1994-95, after all…). It felt a lot less centralised and a lot less “controlled” as well – whether by corporations and/or governments. It felt like freedom. Even if it ran slowly.

2) Text-based internet: Another “Old, but it seemed totally normal at the time” thing which surprised me when I looked at that old archived early-mid 2000s TV show fan site – designed and optimised for dial-up – was just how much text there was on it. All of the images were small or low-quality enough to load quickly, and the few downloadable clips from the TV show were short, heavily-compressed low-resolution ones (typically less than 5mb in size) which would have taken minutes to download back then.

No, for the most part, the website was filled with old-school text 🙂 Even a very “low-brow” website like that would have long-form essays on it. Yes, as you can probably tell from the fact that I’m still writing and posting blog articles in 2026 – rather than recording videos or making podcasts – I’ve never truly moved on from this era of the internet. But there was just something to this – an era when even the most frivolous of websites required you to read long-form texts. It’s the polar opposite of all of those scary Youtube videos about how short-form videos and and A.I. are supposedly making everyone stupider or “frying everyone’s brains” or whatever.

And, yes, the world used to be a lot more text-based in general. If you read an old “low-brow” pulp horror or thriller novel from the 1970s-80s, then you’ll probably notice how the sentences are longer and the vocabulary is more complex than they are in a modern novel. Back when I read second-hand copies of these old novels during my teenage years in the 2000s, they just felt sort of “normal”. But, whenever I’ve re-read any of them during the 2010s-2020s, the quality of the writing always surprises me. Back in the past, even fun “low-brow” stuff – pulp novels, many websites etc… – typically required a higher standard of literacy than the modern internet is designed for.

And I miss this, because it probably made everyone a bit smarter. It was also good for the creative side of things because, well, it’s a lot easier and quicker to write and edit an essay (I can usually get a first draft of one of these articles done in 30-120 minutes, depending on length/inspiration/motivation) than it is to light/script/edit an online video. Plus, you can write blog articles on an absolute “potato” of a PC – something you can’t really do with, for example, video editing. So, it was more open to everyone than the modern internet is.

As well as this, one of the cool things about the written word – especially in the civilised pre-A.I. times – is that it requires actual thinking time. You actually have time to think about and edit what you are going to say. Case in point, I went back and added this paragraph whilst writing the third segment of this article. If you want to evoke or express emotions, you have to work out how to do this with writing. And this probably made the internet at least a mildly more relaxed and civil place than it is today. Because everyone had to think a bit more before posting stuff online.

3) Less ego: Another cool thing about the old dial-up internet was that it was a lot less of a “popularity contest” in a lot of ways. When someone made a website, it was often about a topic – rather than themselves (though, of course, personal websites obviously existed too). The closest thing to “social media” in the old dial-up days was probably forums, where people would often discuss whatever topic the forum was based on.

Because of the two things I mentioned earlier – the internet being spread across more websites and being more text-based – it was less of a place for “showing off”. After all, it’s difficult to “compete for views” when everyone has their own separate websites, rather than jostling for popularity and attention on one large social media site. Likewise, one of the many cool things about the written word is that it doesn’t care what you look like or how “trendy” you are or anything like that. In the English language at least, everyone gets the same twenty-six letters.

And all of this made the internet a bit less of a vain and superficial place as it is today. If you started a website, it was usually about a topic that you were interested in – rather than about yourself. Modern-style “Influencers” also just didn’t exist during the old dial-up days. Seriously, can you even imagine someone trying to be an “influencer” back then? Too funny!

And, like how everything being more text-based required everyone to have better literacy skills and gave everyone more “thinking time” before posting things online, the lack of a few large centralised social media sites also made it much less of a competition back then too. As such, the internet as a whole was a much less superficial and egotistical place than it is today. And, wow, I really miss it!

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂