Before the proliferation of ai-slop unleashed by Sam Altman.

I miss pre-2010 Internet!

It is worse now, but it is not like the internet wasn't full of ads and trash before AI Slop came around.

Yet with the right tools the ads were completely obliterated and fake trash sites were easy to spot

Yes, I specifically miss the untroubled joy of discovering new music. Nowadays I have to check when it was released (< 2022), check how often the artist puts out new music (multiple albums per year could be done by a human, but it's unlikely), check the biography and search for more info about the artist (have they played concerts etc.), just to confirm that the music or the whole artist isn't AI generated.

Before, it was just "Oh, I like this music". It was beautiful and simple.

Forums were so much better than social media that killed many of them.

No. I miss some aspects of the pre-2022 internet, but I'm always wary of thinking that things were "better in the good old days".

I'm also wary of pinning technological shifts on individual people. If Sam Altman didn't exist, would large language models and diffusion models not exist? I don't think so.

It's nice that we have the Threadiverse now. And some projects run their own Discourse forum. We can still run our own stuff.

You need to go back to like 2015, before the massive right wing propaganda machine got a wedge into the gamer demographic

Gamergate was a clownshow.

I mean yeah but I miss pre-smartphone way more.

Or tech before the old tech illiterate incompetent rich fucks died/retired more accurately. Think Jack Tramiel. That's what I mean. They had no real idea what to do with the internet to manipulate and control. Modern tech bros do. The Wild West is over, and that's what I really miss.

No.

I miss the internet from pre 2012 though, back when most interest use was in front of a PC.

mobile users destroyed the internet.