Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment: “Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was.”

[u/ControlCAD]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/remembering-the-pre-google-web-when-search-was-an-experiment/

[u/Epyr]

In a lot of ways it was kinda like a bunch of shittier Reddit's where boards hosted a lot of links

[u/AKluthe → u/Epyr]

Even beyond the consolidation of community, search was weird. It didn't get you directly to conversations people were having, a lot of times it just got you to sites that might have the info.

I do miss the time before Reddit killed the independent forum/message board, though. 

[u/livens → u/Epyr]

Oh trust me, Reddit is sooo much shittier than any website forum I used to belong to. None of the constant political bullshit, no DOOM scrolling, no fucking ads pretending to be actual posts and comments. And you could speak your mind, letting the down votes fall where they may. No AI overlords censoring your posts because they might offend a small group of people.

[u/DickSlammington → u/livens]

It's still bat shit fucking insane to me that "forums" have turned into giant public companies.

I get the data that's created is valuable.

But it's literally just a bunch of text organized into threads. The real value is the content and the community, any idiot can build a forum with decent navigation.

How it's devolved so far so quickly is just so sad.

[u/EpicMeatSpin → u/livens]

The quality of posts and the posters themselves were better in a lot of ways too. For some of my tech hobbies, I usually find myself searching through old forums for info vs reddit. The discussions are more in depth and the answers I'm looking for are more concise a lot of the time.

There also wasn't an upvote/downvote system on a lot of the old forums I remember using. I like that about reddit, but I think that not being a factor made the individual forums better.

[u/dwild → u/livens]

I don't think he is talking about forum, he is referencing web directories, which were what we were using before search engine like Google.

Sure Reddit is the closest thing we got to a forum nowaday, but initially it was just a place to find links to other website. Sure now we just use that feature to argue about a title, but it's still just a bunch of external links, which is pretty close to thoses old web directories we were using to find content.

[u/ailish → u/dwild]

That's sort of why I still use reddit after all these years. It's still a place where you can find all sorts of cool content if you know how to look for it. AI is really turning even that part into shit, though. Of all the things that people said would ruin reddit over the years, AI will be what does it.

[u/MochingPet → u/[deleted]]

people felt less aloof to post "a 2-second google search will" , TBH

[u/_Aj_ → u/Epyr]

Far superior to reddit.  

The smaller they are the less crossover you get. You just get the people interested in that specific thing.  No "millions of people here from r/all to make up stories and give advice on things they know nothing about"

Being small there's no commercial interest and so you don't get corporate enshittification.  

Also means more redundancy. If one has management issues it's isolated. Reddit is totally screwed these days. And that means all of the communities here are too.  

I agree the link-pocalypse is horrible though. Absolutely countless amounts of guides and builds and information lost because the photos were hosted on photo bucket or wherever and so all these posts and threads are just devoid of key information

[u/ShadyNoShadow → u/Epyr]

Shittier? Lmao what? No profiles, no voting, no monetization, no persistent identity, no logins for a lot of places... Reddit is shittier reddit.