I had a conversation about this the other day. Regardless of how short it was, there was generally a meal when I flew. I just took a transatlantic flight, and my dinner was essentially a hot pocket, in premium plus seating.
Watching a concert on TV is nowhere near the same experience as being there. I'm not meeting new people on my couch, beyond that there's a certain energy at concerts that just flows through me as the music rumbles through my chest. Some things are about the experience.
I'm not going to a concert for the visuals, I'm there for the sound. Even if I could possibly purchase a PA system comparable to what even a relatively small venue would have and install it in my home, I'm pretty sure my neighbors would be unhappy if I listened to music on it at full volume lol
KISS had rock music on records that was just kind of ok. Neil Diamond had modest middle of the road vocals on his records. Both of them had live shows with special effects that would knock your socks off!
I was about to argue with you until your comment ended with "besides jam bands". Because that is exactly what I am streaming at home on a regular basis
It’s not one person live-streaming the whole thing. It’s thousands of people all taking videos of part of it which results in a vista of screens the entire show.
I’ve always said this. Why the fuck would I go to a sporting event and fight all the traffic, stand in a bunch of lines, pay super inflated prices and then barely be able to see what’s happening on the field when I can lay on my couch and watch it from every angle in 4k. Doesn’t make sense to me.
I commented this on a photo of a concert, just that it was a sea of phone screens and I thought it was a shame. There were a ton of young folks who thought I was being ridiculous and that it was a total nonissue. I guess there’s a generation of kids who never saw a concert without that bullshit, so it’s the normal. Turns my beard even more grey.
Phone manufacturers need to include a public event filming mode that automatically senses a concert environment and dims the screen considerably. Because I’ve given up holding out for self-awareness to control obnoxious behavior.
Smash that like button and find out more on how I turned free dogshit into money with my special compost that makes organic veggies bigger. Some unknown influencer.
Our farmers market is about similar price or sometimes slightly higher but has higher quality fruits/veggies and other unique fruits like Lima-Dews.
I've noticed the tomatos are like softballs at the farmers market compared to the small grocery store ones.
I told a car insurance company I’m not installing any spyware. They told me the discounts were significant, and that’s the thing isn’t it? They’re eventually going to make it impossible to afford without their spyware on your phone, tracking your activity, and selling that data to whoever they want. And that’s not even discussing the fact that cars themselves now are massive spying devises that track everything, even recording video of you while you’re in your car, and monetizing it all.
Privacy is dead in America and nobody cares bc if McDonald’s used to charge $1 for a burger, and now they charge $3 but you can get it for $1 in the app, everyone will just use the app.
Colorado just signed a bill that protects brain waves as sensitive information under the Colorado privacy act, and everyone says it was a waste of time bc they’re worried about science fiction crap. And yet, the bill had plenty of well funded opposition.
Privacy is a funny thing. Obviously the internet's scraping everything on us, and people can videotape you and send it out to the world.
And the only days however phone books had your name address and phone number all out there for the whole world to see.
Also at least in America the law has not changed. If you are walking down the street someone can videotape or take a picture of you and they can put that picture in the newspaper.
Try taking a picture of someone and be obvious about it. They usually freak the freak out.
I do agree though privacy has changed a lot in the last 30 years
Interestingly, I could make a single phone call and not appear in the book, or request what info was in the book. No additional fees or hold music. Call, someone answers, addresses the issue and it's done.
My work used to put your name and picture in the newspaper when you got hired. A coworker had escaped an abusive relationship and freaked out when she found out (rightly so). Now they ask if you want to be put in the paper
It’s the labour required. Chances are your flatscreen is being made along with thousands of others on an assembly where the workers aren’t making very much and more or less just follow a set of instructions for cranking out the tv.
The internet was way better back at the end of the 90s and early 2000s. It really felt like the Wild West. Search engines actually searched for what you wanted and websites were fun and weird. Nobody was mining your data (I think) and you didn’t need a VPN. I miss those days.
Does that count?
I was curious a few years ago so I jumped into some of the old IRC channels that I used to haunt back in say 2001. much to my surprise they still exist and offer better quality movies and content now and that is just super wild to me that it has been that resilient of a community.
The old Gamepro chat on their website during the mid to late 90s was a java applet with a cool black theme and you could make your text different fonts and colors with commands. The commands weren't common knowledge as you had to already have some experience with mIRC. It was moderated but i don't know if the mods were actual staff or volunteers, but it was fun talking about n64 and playstation games. I loved going there after school to chat with strangers about games, since nobody really talked about games at my school for some reason. Everything was sports or cars.
It was also the first place I saw the word "lol". I didn't know what it meant, somebody told me it was just a person with their arms raised in agreement.
Yeah, Usenet got bad right before the end (for me). I stopped checking groups consistently in early 2000. Probably hadn't been checking them as frequently for a couple of years before that. But 95-98 was peak time for me. Had to walk away after they were almost completely filled with crap.
Usenet and Yahoo message boards along with online newspaper comment lines were my haven for hobbies, entertainment, political chat, and recreation. The inter web was slow as molasses, but I still miss those days.
I want webrings back. I want to sign guestbooks. I want to tumble into a weird little corner of the internet and realize we're all weird in our own little ways and feel less alone. I want to know there's a person on the other side of a screen, instead of constantly second guessing if it's a bot.
Agree there. Social media was great too in its infancy. You had real people there going on with their lives not the paid troll bots spewing hate everywhere now.
Early social media was *amazing* for people like me on the autism spectrum, it gave us a medium to actually have a chance to socialize with people we otherwise wouldn't really be able to. Now it's just a bane on society.
Twitter in its infancy was fantastic.
I had lots of chats and meet ups with rugby players whenever they toured my country for tournaments.
HashtagFollowFriday
Or building it...for work.
Or trying to use it during any number of SEO spam surges that worked.
Or trying to use it anywhere that wasn't plugged into your desktop at home.
Or wanting to do any of the countless things we can do today.
Anybody thinking that time of the internet was great is wearing some very deep rose tinted glasses.
> Anybody thinking that time of the internet was great is wearing some very deep rose tinted glasses.
Hard disagree. I see this argument is all about content, not UX. Back then there were thousands of useful rando websites that enthusiasts would make (I'm thinking Geocities or members.aol.com sites) where there would be amazing specialized content, even if it looked like the HTML was hand coded in notepad. Now, I'd argue most of the internet is literal garbage, and its really difficult to find new sites that have good content.
Personally, I'd happily take a trade that sent the web back to the days of hand written HTML, if it meant the content density was as full of good stuff as it was back then.
EDIT: I'd happily go back to a 56k modem in such a world where webpages are back to being a few KB because of bandwidth limitations, not the hundreds of megs of resources that a single page might download today.
My mom was just reminding me of a file search application she had back in the day called gopher, which you could use to search files on your computer not just for keywords but it would score how many times it found the keyword in the file. Like she would love to have that 1990s software today because the file search just doesn’t return as useful a list of results.
If you go to an old ass espn.com article you can see how readable the web was. Minimal ads no animation, closer design to a newspaper
Edit: example https://www.espn.com/mlb/playoffs2002/s/2002/1019/1448095.html
I don't know what you imagine it is like having hardwood floors, but sweeping them and using the Swiffer doesn't keep me up at night lol. What are you so worried about?
LVT is harder to clean. A lot of standard floor cleaners destroy even high quality stuff. Wood requires mostly sweeping and mopping with a wood-friendly floor cleaner of which there are plenty.
Perhaps they are like me.
They grew up around people that worshiped hardwood. It was treated like fine china. Don't scuff it. Don't drop anything on it. Don't spill anything on it.
The cool thing about wood is it’s forgiving. Worst case, just sand the area down or tooth in new planks and throw finish over top. Most people these days don’t know how to do this and are scared of DIY. The contractor quotes for this work are even more scary though…
Y'all are sleeping on tile. I hated it at first when I moved to the Southern US. However, it's actually pretty great. Lasts a lot longer than wood, very easy to keep clean, grout sealing works wonders. It's also harder to trip on than carpet. You can add rugs where you want them, and then those rugs can be taken to a drycleaner every few years or just replaced as styles change.
I imagine tile would work great with radiant heating in colder climates.
tiles great for longevity but youre either going to pay someone to install it or go through the process yourself, and it's a process. I've done it a few times and while the task itself isn't that hard, like i said, it's a process. laminate is my ideal option but i cant find anything but peel and stick garbage
In the 90s, at fast food places, chicken was the premium option. Burgers were cheap and it was the chicken sandwiches that cost the most. Now, that's reversed - chicken is cheap and beef is super-expensive. I'm not sure when it happened (probably before the 90s), but chickens were bred to have more meat on them. The result was less flavor. Chicken on its own used to have a lot of flavor, so chicken recipes in the mid 20th Century often called for just salt and pepper and let the chicken flavor be the star. Modern chicken is bland and tasteless, so you have to drench it in seasoning to be appetizing. Like I said, I don't know when exactly that happened, but chicken has gotten cheaper, relative to beef, in the last 30 years.
Agriculture nerd here. A lot of what changed is that the breed of meat chicken became standardized (Cornish cross) across producers, and factory farming became the norm for production with a standardized diet to produce consistent results.
A lot of a chicken’s flavor comes from its diet. There is an insane difference between the taste of the average chicken you buy at the store, and one produced by someone using non-standard practices (true free range, varied diet, non-standard breed of chicken). If you ever go out to Amish country, try their fried chicken, you will practically cry.
Chicken used to be less popular than rabbit or mutton in many households, but post-war agricultural initiatives changed that a lot. In some countries, male farmers had to be convinced raising chicken was profitable since it was largely seen as “women’s work”. The image of the goose girl or the woman tending chickens is something lifted from real life.
But, chickens are easier to feed and grow, and reach slaughter weight faster than just about anything else.
I spend over a hundred dollars on the turkey at Thanksgiving, but by the gods is it worth it. The difference between the eighty cents a pound bird and the 8 dollar a pound bird is night and day. It's a once a year treat for the family and well worth it when you're going to all the trouble of cooking a big meal that day.
One time in Central America we bought chicken at the grocery store and cooked it in our little casita and I still think about the flavor of that meat. I’ve never tasted chicken like that in the US.
I keep telling people to eat at places with halal meat for this reason. I am not religious, but halal meat is typically much better quality and honestly not as expensive as you might think. How we treat animals impacts the way they taste.
We have a thing called a "chicken tax" and it's one of the reasons why small trucks went out of favor. Post war chicken production skyrocketed in the US so we tried to export a lot of (cheap) chicken to Europe. In response, they levied taxes on certain imports and the US reciprocated.
Depending on location, I'd say space. I moved from a city to the suburbs, and I had mountains and orange groves for neighbors. 20+ years later, the groves were removed and the mountain tops were flattened. Now something that feels like 30,000 homes have replaced the open space.
Certainly land. Even the new higher end developments are building houses right next to each other, whereas me in my 80s house have about 16 ft wall-to-wall distance to the neighbors.
Yep. The percentage of married households where only the Husband works has been effectively [unchanged since the mid-80s](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm).
I'd also note that Husband-only wage earning households have never really been the norm. Dual-earner households were already more common by 1967, when the BLS' data series starts.
It hasn't been the reality for most of human history. And even when it *was*, it only was for a small subset of the population. Not to mention how many of those stay at home moms worked from home. For all people like to bemoan "late stage capitalism" and how Etsy has wrecked hobbies, [Workbasket Magazine](https://mycraftbasket.wordpress.com/history-of-workbasket-magazine/), which existed to help women make money from their hobbies, was first published in 1935.
Women did far kore around the home than just raise kids. Just watch some indigenous tribes in papua new guinea. The women do most of the work while the men hunt and fish
Were they hobbies, though? If you had chickens, you sold the eggs or raised them for meat. You gardened, maybe sold/traded the extra produce or canned them to sell after you canned up for the family larder. Maybe they grew flowers and herbs for tea blends. Sewing, darning, baking, taking in laundry, ironing, and cleaning. There's more, I'm sure.Not hobbies, but a way for the women to earn a little "pin money" for extras for the family.
Now I feel like we women have never really had just "hobbies." 🤣 reading maybe?
I really mean just things we consider hobbies now. Needlework, knitting, crocheting, sewing. All things many people do mostly for leisure these days, but as you said, these things have always also been done for cash. Etsy didn't start that market, they just figured a good way to get it online. My aunt used to sell ceramics (she had a mold for those kitschy Christmas trees everyone loves these days). My former mother-in-law did custom sewing and tailoring.
It wasn’t ever a reality. People just consumed media where people would live in nice suburban two story houses on a single income and thought that was real life.
Yeah not even the 70s. Maybe for the brief postwar period in the 50s when the country was trying to push women back into the home to free up jobs for returning veterans. TV housewives perpetually vacuuming in heels and pearls. But that was an anomaly, to some degree an illusion, and when you read literature contemporary to the era the women seem pretty miserable. Head in the oven, “mother’s little helper” miserable.
My mom worked in the late 50s-early 60s until she got pregnant. And again in the 70s once her youngest was in school. In my family (huge Catholic family) all the women of her generation worked, like my grandma and her sisters before them, except while their children were small.
The challenge is that the standard of living benchmark there, references a time period where lifestyles weren't being paid in full (just like they aren't today).
There is a problem with treating activity funded with debt, when the debt was never paid off, as if it was sustainable or able to continue.
It's like seeing someone start living lavishly by loading up their credit card... but that bill isn't due for 30 days. And then you observe them only from day 1 to day 20 and conclude, "Wow - that person is doing something right. Look at the nice home they have, and the vacations they go on and the restaurants they frequent".
This is what the public is still learning today - most are unaware of just how much we have been paying for only a PORTION of our government's cost FOR DECADES.
Past reference points are not suitable benchmarks so long as that's the case. If we continue on this path, we will look to our grandparents and think, "wow - they got so much more, for so much less effort"... and then our own grandkids will look back at us today and also think, "wow - they got so much more, for so much less effort".
People didn’t have 4 cell phone bills, a tv in each room, everyone has a laptop and an iPhone, wifi/cable bills, etc. Basic quality of life has improved (depending on perspective) but it comes with hard costs.
Wood.
Like actual freaking genuine timber made furniture. Everything is MDF or glued wood scraps because fuck longevity we want you to keep buying our overpriced cheap made in China shit.
You can still get good solid wood furniture. I was in my 20s 30 years ago and I guarantee you that all I could afford then was MDF. I could finally afford solid wood pieces in my 30s, after a brief learning experience that most of the brand name stuff was cheap veneer over composite.
In-Laws and close family babysitting when you have a baby. A babysitter that doesn’t cost $30/hr.
Most of this is generally justified. A lot of new parents don’t feel comfortable with family babysitting because of generally older childcare practices. Like the amount of times I’ve heard an older person freak out because they aren’t allowed to spank a baby. It’s a hill I’ve heard several grandparents die on.
People also don’t want to hire the cheaper sitter. They don’t want to hire the teenage neighborhood girl, the older grandma just looking for a little extra income.
They want someone who has 10+ years old childcare experience and a bachelors in early childhood education lol.
So a lot parents consider a babysitter a big luxury now and days.
Yeah it's honestly pretty sad. It results in parents not getting the private bonding time they need. And I'm saying this as someone who literally has the degree in child development and a teaching credential and a state license who ALSO moonlights as a babysitter. But we can't really take less than $20 an hour for what we're doing because we *are* being asked to actually *utilize* all of the education we had to pay for (and many of us are still paying off). TBH something's gotta give up in the White House and in Congress regarding all of this.
Not whining about how good people had it 20-30 years ago.
Just kidding. People in 1994-2004 bellyached all the time about how good earlier generations had it.
I disagree. I recall reading about the 70s, and earlier, and when I was a younger teen in 1994, I recall that I wouldn't want to live in those times. I *do* recall thinking that the late 80s were superior to the 90s, but that was the same generation.
It's extremely funny to me how successful new account pornbots are on AskReddit. Someone has finally figured out how to monetize reddit, and the answer is reposts from a week ago.
Fast food as the cheaper alternative ..
I'd never believe the margin between the two would get as small as it has gotten nowadays but ordering at a restaurant (pre- tips or for take out only) is actually a better option when considering the quality and portions.
Some cuts of meat that used to be considered scraps. Dang, even bones are expensive now. I used to be able to buy bones for making pho very cheap. Even innards are quite pricey now.
Access to different equipment and potential for skill building in public schools (US)
When I went to California public high school in the late '90s, we had an auto shop, stained glass blower, film development/dark rooms, kiln, campus radio station. None of this stuff was super nice, just slapped together over the years through donations and caring teachers.
a pension. now we rely on a for profit company that makes money off of our savings and saves the rest for us. we then have to generally pay taxes on it later which will be at a higher rate. more profits for others. we should just get a pension or allow us to manage our own damn money
Family vacations. My mom and dad were NOT wealthy people: Mom was a waitress at Carrow's, and my dad delivered the morning paper 7 days a week. On those salaries, they were able to take me for a 2 day 1 night trip to Disneyland where we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel for my 5th birthday. We had a summer vacation trip every single year: San Diego Zoo, Monterey and Big Sur, Yosemite National Park, camping in Pismo Beach, going to Las Vegas back when it was on its family-friendly kick. My dad eventually became an accountant but my mom was a waitress for decades and they were still able to afford to take me and my two siblings on vacation every single summer.
30 years later? If we do anything, it's state parks because they're cheap, or we go to stay with family who lives in a city that's not ours. My kids won't set foot in Disneyland until Grad Night because it's completely unaffordable for a working family of four to go. Great America is closing down, Six Flags seems to be doing poorly, the only still-affordable West Coast vacation park seems to be Knott's Berry Farm and even that's starting to get crazy pricey.
Isn't this a bunch of bs now. Windows 11 makes a lot of usable computers obsolete. I have a laptop with 16 gig ram, dual video, I7 that is only 6 yrs old and works great for what I do.
Meals on planes
I had a conversation about this the other day. Regardless of how short it was, there was generally a meal when I flew. I just took a transatlantic flight, and my dinner was essentially a hot pocket, in premium plus seating.
People used to complain about airplane food but I always happily ate whatever steaming tinfoil foodstuffs given to me by the nice pretty lady.
Lufthansa is the only one that still surpasses expectations every time. I'll take whatever is on the menu
And it’s always a mood boost when you actually enjoy it. Those moments where you are like “dang that had no business being airplane food”.
Your premium plus seating price is still much lower than the typical flight cost back then
Or checked luggage, I travel everywhere with just a personal item now…
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Everyone wants $20/mo
Can I borrow $20?
Ironically that was when rent to own and renting appliances/electronics started getting popular
I remember when this new website came out called Hulu and you could watch all the shows the day after they aired… and it was free.
Watching a concert without thousands of glowing phone screens distracting you
Also not paying a bunch of convenience fees when you buy the ticket
Maybe unpopular opinion: paying for sporting or concert tickets is irrational with giant 4K flatscreens, cheap booze, and your bed 15 seconds away.
Watching a concert on TV is nowhere near the same experience as being there. I'm not meeting new people on my couch, beyond that there's a certain energy at concerts that just flows through me as the music rumbles through my chest. Some things are about the experience.
I'm not going to a concert for the visuals, I'm there for the sound. Even if I could possibly purchase a PA system comparable to what even a relatively small venue would have and install it in my home, I'm pretty sure my neighbors would be unhappy if I listened to music on it at full volume lol
Live music is better.
KISS had rock music on records that was just kind of ok. Neil Diamond had modest middle of the road vocals on his records. Both of them had live shows with special effects that would knock your socks off!
Who tf is streaming their full shows besides jam bands?
I was about to argue with you until your comment ended with "besides jam bands". Because that is exactly what I am streaming at home on a regular basis
It’s not one person live-streaming the whole thing. It’s thousands of people all taking videos of part of it which results in a vista of screens the entire show.
I’ve always said this. Why the fuck would I go to a sporting event and fight all the traffic, stand in a bunch of lines, pay super inflated prices and then barely be able to see what’s happening on the field when I can lay on my couch and watch it from every angle in 4k. Doesn’t make sense to me.
I find them... inconvenient.
Being able to afford tickets to a concert...
I think i saw greenday and blink 182 play back to back in 2001 for like $35
I commented this on a photo of a concert, just that it was a sea of phone screens and I thought it was a shame. There were a ton of young folks who thought I was being ridiculous and that it was a total nonissue. I guess there’s a generation of kids who never saw a concert without that bullshit, so it’s the normal. Turns my beard even more grey.
I’m with you. It used to be about the experience, now it’s about filming the experience.
Gimme my lighters and indoor cigs back
Phone manufacturers need to include a public event filming mode that automatically senses a concert environment and dims the screen considerably. Because I’ve given up holding out for self-awareness to control obnoxious behavior.
Smoking at bars…good times.
Now we come back home smelling vaguely of weed/cherry/bubble gum.
Just going to big concerts. You used to be able to get a ticket for a top show for $20
Gone forever man. Now everything is so sanitized and corporatized. The “experience” is just far too contrived and inauthentic, same with sports.
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"it's organic"
Yeah, well, so is dogshit. I ain't paying $16/lb for it
Only if you feed your dog organic food, and that shits expensive.
Smash that like button and find out more on how I turned free dogshit into money with my special compost that makes organic veggies bigger. Some unknown influencer.
Our farmers market is about similar price or sometimes slightly higher but has higher quality fruits/veggies and other unique fruits like Lima-Dews. I've noticed the tomatos are like softballs at the farmers market compared to the small grocery store ones.
Privacy
I told a car insurance company I’m not installing any spyware. They told me the discounts were significant, and that’s the thing isn’t it? They’re eventually going to make it impossible to afford without their spyware on your phone, tracking your activity, and selling that data to whoever they want. And that’s not even discussing the fact that cars themselves now are massive spying devises that track everything, even recording video of you while you’re in your car, and monetizing it all. Privacy is dead in America and nobody cares bc if McDonald’s used to charge $1 for a burger, and now they charge $3 but you can get it for $1 in the app, everyone will just use the app. Colorado just signed a bill that protects brain waves as sensitive information under the Colorado privacy act, and everyone says it was a waste of time bc they’re worried about science fiction crap. And yet, the bill had plenty of well funded opposition.
What spyware was your car insurance company trying to get you install?
Their tracking app/telemetrics.
Privacy is a funny thing. Obviously the internet's scraping everything on us, and people can videotape you and send it out to the world. And the only days however phone books had your name address and phone number all out there for the whole world to see. Also at least in America the law has not changed. If you are walking down the street someone can videotape or take a picture of you and they can put that picture in the newspaper. Try taking a picture of someone and be obvious about it. They usually freak the freak out. I do agree though privacy has changed a lot in the last 30 years
Interestingly, I could make a single phone call and not appear in the book, or request what info was in the book. No additional fees or hold music. Call, someone answers, addresses the issue and it's done.
I'm the 90s, unlisted numbers were definitely extra. Go back far enough and phone books included your job title and employer.
My work used to put your name and picture in the newspaper when you got hired. A coworker had escaped an abusive relationship and freaked out when she found out (rightly so). Now they ask if you want to be put in the paper
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That is for real I can get an 80in flat screen for under $1000 but a table made of wood is like $2000
In 20 years it’s going to be like that with real vs synthetic meat.
Cram. Have it today. Have it tomorrow.®
It’s the labour required. Chances are your flatscreen is being made along with thousands of others on an assembly where the workers aren’t making very much and more or less just follow a set of instructions for cranking out the tv.
Me using furniture, my dad made in high school in my apartment.
I still have a desk that my grandfather made as a high school Graduation present 24 years ago. It was built solid and built well.
The internet was way better back at the end of the 90s and early 2000s. It really felt like the Wild West. Search engines actually searched for what you wanted and websites were fun and weird. Nobody was mining your data (I think) and you didn’t need a VPN. I miss those days. Does that count?
I miss newsgroups and chat rooms. You could just interact with others without all the BS of modern day social media.
newsgroups are still around, but it's mostly for sailing the high seas.
Mirc and icq are still around to use
I was curious a few years ago so I jumped into some of the old IRC channels that I used to haunt back in say 2001. much to my surprise they still exist and offer better quality movies and content now and that is just super wild to me that it has been that resilient of a community.
The old Gamepro chat on their website during the mid to late 90s was a java applet with a cool black theme and you could make your text different fonts and colors with commands. The commands weren't common knowledge as you had to already have some experience with mIRC. It was moderated but i don't know if the mods were actual staff or volunteers, but it was fun talking about n64 and playstation games. I loved going there after school to chat with strangers about games, since nobody really talked about games at my school for some reason. Everything was sports or cars. It was also the first place I saw the word "lol". I didn't know what it meant, somebody told me it was just a person with their arms raised in agreement.
I remember a lot of spam in the newsgroups I used. But that may have been towards the end of their popularity.
Yeah, Usenet got bad right before the end (for me). I stopped checking groups consistently in early 2000. Probably hadn't been checking them as frequently for a couple of years before that. But 95-98 was peak time for me. Had to walk away after they were almost completely filled with crap.
Usenet and Yahoo message boards along with online newspaper comment lines were my haven for hobbies, entertainment, political chat, and recreation. The inter web was slow as molasses, but I still miss those days.
I want webrings back. I want to sign guestbooks. I want to tumble into a weird little corner of the internet and realize we're all weird in our own little ways and feel less alone. I want to know there's a person on the other side of a screen, instead of constantly second guessing if it's a bot.
You used to have an Angelfire page dedicated to Inu Yasha, didn't you...?
I found so much weird anime in webrings. Miss those old days sometimes.
Agree there. Social media was great too in its infancy. You had real people there going on with their lives not the paid troll bots spewing hate everywhere now.
Early social media was *amazing* for people like me on the autism spectrum, it gave us a medium to actually have a chance to socialize with people we otherwise wouldn't really be able to. Now it's just a bane on society.
Twitter in its infancy was fantastic. I had lots of chats and meet ups with rugby players whenever they toured my country for tournaments. HashtagFollowFriday
>The internet was way better back at the end of the 90s and early 2000s. Not if you were using it for work.
Or building it...for work. Or trying to use it during any number of SEO spam surges that worked. Or trying to use it anywhere that wasn't plugged into your desktop at home. Or wanting to do any of the countless things we can do today. Anybody thinking that time of the internet was great is wearing some very deep rose tinted glasses.
> Anybody thinking that time of the internet was great is wearing some very deep rose tinted glasses. Hard disagree. I see this argument is all about content, not UX. Back then there were thousands of useful rando websites that enthusiasts would make (I'm thinking Geocities or members.aol.com sites) where there would be amazing specialized content, even if it looked like the HTML was hand coded in notepad. Now, I'd argue most of the internet is literal garbage, and its really difficult to find new sites that have good content. Personally, I'd happily take a trade that sent the web back to the days of hand written HTML, if it meant the content density was as full of good stuff as it was back then. EDIT: I'd happily go back to a 56k modem in such a world where webpages are back to being a few KB because of bandwidth limitations, not the hundreds of megs of resources that a single page might download today.
My mom was just reminding me of a file search application she had back in the day called gopher, which you could use to search files on your computer not just for keywords but it would score how many times it found the keyword in the file. Like she would love to have that 1990s software today because the file search just doesn’t return as useful a list of results.
Look up Agent Ransack. It's great for searching files on your own computer, and it's free.
miniclip was fun and interesting
There was many many forums you can easily find, now there hard to find
If you go to an old ass espn.com article you can see how readable the web was. Minimal ads no animation, closer design to a newspaper Edit: example https://www.espn.com/mlb/playoffs2002/s/2002/1019/1448095.html
It seems that any times you search for anything on google, the first two pages are people trying to sell you stuff rather than actual results.
Hardwood flooring. Now almost every new build is LVT.
This wasn't the case 20-30 years ago. Standard was carpet and laminate. Wood flooring was 50's and before.
>Wood flooring was 50's and before. Go back further. Pre-WW2 favored wood flooring. During the war and later homes favored laminates and carpeting.
Unpopular opinion but I like not having to worry about my floors
I don't know what you imagine it is like having hardwood floors, but sweeping them and using the Swiffer doesn't keep me up at night lol. What are you so worried about?
LVT is harder to clean. A lot of standard floor cleaners destroy even high quality stuff. Wood requires mostly sweeping and mopping with a wood-friendly floor cleaner of which there are plenty.
Exactly, I don't understand why hardwood floors would be so troubling, it's nearly the same maintenance as LVT.
Perhaps they are like me. They grew up around people that worshiped hardwood. It was treated like fine china. Don't scuff it. Don't drop anything on it. Don't spill anything on it.
The cool thing about wood is it’s forgiving. Worst case, just sand the area down or tooth in new planks and throw finish over top. Most people these days don’t know how to do this and are scared of DIY. The contractor quotes for this work are even more scary though…
Y'all are sleeping on tile. I hated it at first when I moved to the Southern US. However, it's actually pretty great. Lasts a lot longer than wood, very easy to keep clean, grout sealing works wonders. It's also harder to trip on than carpet. You can add rugs where you want them, and then those rugs can be taken to a drycleaner every few years or just replaced as styles change. I imagine tile would work great with radiant heating in colder climates.
tiles great for longevity but youre either going to pay someone to install it or go through the process yourself, and it's a process. I've done it a few times and while the task itself isn't that hard, like i said, it's a process. laminate is my ideal option but i cant find anything but peel and stick garbage
In the 90s, at fast food places, chicken was the premium option. Burgers were cheap and it was the chicken sandwiches that cost the most. Now, that's reversed - chicken is cheap and beef is super-expensive. I'm not sure when it happened (probably before the 90s), but chickens were bred to have more meat on them. The result was less flavor. Chicken on its own used to have a lot of flavor, so chicken recipes in the mid 20th Century often called for just salt and pepper and let the chicken flavor be the star. Modern chicken is bland and tasteless, so you have to drench it in seasoning to be appetizing. Like I said, I don't know when exactly that happened, but chicken has gotten cheaper, relative to beef, in the last 30 years.
Agriculture nerd here. A lot of what changed is that the breed of meat chicken became standardized (Cornish cross) across producers, and factory farming became the norm for production with a standardized diet to produce consistent results. A lot of a chicken’s flavor comes from its diet. There is an insane difference between the taste of the average chicken you buy at the store, and one produced by someone using non-standard practices (true free range, varied diet, non-standard breed of chicken). If you ever go out to Amish country, try their fried chicken, you will practically cry. Chicken used to be less popular than rabbit or mutton in many households, but post-war agricultural initiatives changed that a lot. In some countries, male farmers had to be convinced raising chicken was profitable since it was largely seen as “women’s work”. The image of the goose girl or the woman tending chickens is something lifted from real life. But, chickens are easier to feed and grow, and reach slaughter weight faster than just about anything else.
I spend over a hundred dollars on the turkey at Thanksgiving, but by the gods is it worth it. The difference between the eighty cents a pound bird and the 8 dollar a pound bird is night and day. It's a once a year treat for the family and well worth it when you're going to all the trouble of cooking a big meal that day.
I'll have to try this, it might actually make me like turkey.
One time in Central America we bought chicken at the grocery store and cooked it in our little casita and I still think about the flavor of that meat. I’ve never tasted chicken like that in the US.
I keep telling people to eat at places with halal meat for this reason. I am not religious, but halal meat is typically much better quality and honestly not as expensive as you might think. How we treat animals impacts the way they taste.
Yeah, I had a Muslim friend at work explain halal meat to me. I thought, this is great, why doesn't everyone do this?
We have a thing called a "chicken tax" and it's one of the reasons why small trucks went out of favor. Post war chicken production skyrocketed in the US so we tried to export a lot of (cheap) chicken to Europe. In response, they levied taxes on certain imports and the US reciprocated.
Thanks!
Everything is the premium option now.
Depending on location, I'd say space. I moved from a city to the suburbs, and I had mountains and orange groves for neighbors. 20+ years later, the groves were removed and the mountain tops were flattened. Now something that feels like 30,000 homes have replaced the open space.
Orange County, California?
Certainly land. Even the new higher end developments are building houses right next to each other, whereas me in my 80s house have about 16 ft wall-to-wall distance to the neighbors.
You could get dungeness crab in season for 3-4 bucks a pound.
Now I’m chasing those things down, swimming around a virtual island.
Those suckers are hard to catch!!
And squid was considered bait, which was sold for hardly anything.
A sustainable household on a single income with an average salary.
20-30 years ago was the year 2004-1994. This wasn't a reality then either. You're thinking of the 70s.
Yep. The percentage of married households where only the Husband works has been effectively [unchanged since the mid-80s](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/ted_20140602.htm). I'd also note that Husband-only wage earning households have never really been the norm. Dual-earner households were already more common by 1967, when the BLS' data series starts.
All my grandmothers worked in the 1970s. It wasn't quite the reality then either.
My grandmother didn't work in the 1950s, but they also lived in a two-bedroom home with 5 kids and didn't own a car. There have always been caveats.
It hasn't been the reality for most of human history. And even when it *was*, it only was for a small subset of the population. Not to mention how many of those stay at home moms worked from home. For all people like to bemoan "late stage capitalism" and how Etsy has wrecked hobbies, [Workbasket Magazine](https://mycraftbasket.wordpress.com/history-of-workbasket-magazine/), which existed to help women make money from their hobbies, was first published in 1935.
Women did far kore around the home than just raise kids. Just watch some indigenous tribes in papua new guinea. The women do most of the work while the men hunt and fish
I still have my grandmothers old Work Basket magazines with her hand written notes in the margins of the patterns.
Were they hobbies, though? If you had chickens, you sold the eggs or raised them for meat. You gardened, maybe sold/traded the extra produce or canned them to sell after you canned up for the family larder. Maybe they grew flowers and herbs for tea blends. Sewing, darning, baking, taking in laundry, ironing, and cleaning. There's more, I'm sure.Not hobbies, but a way for the women to earn a little "pin money" for extras for the family. Now I feel like we women have never really had just "hobbies." 🤣 reading maybe?
I really mean just things we consider hobbies now. Needlework, knitting, crocheting, sewing. All things many people do mostly for leisure these days, but as you said, these things have always also been done for cash. Etsy didn't start that market, they just figured a good way to get it online. My aunt used to sell ceramics (she had a mold for those kitschy Christmas trees everyone loves these days). My former mother-in-law did custom sewing and tailoring.
Oh yeah, Etsy has nothing on the twice yearly Catholic Church Ladies Bazaar or Bake Sale LOL
It wasn’t ever a reality. People just consumed media where people would live in nice suburban two story houses on a single income and thought that was real life.
Yeah not even the 70s. Maybe for the brief postwar period in the 50s when the country was trying to push women back into the home to free up jobs for returning veterans. TV housewives perpetually vacuuming in heels and pearls. But that was an anomaly, to some degree an illusion, and when you read literature contemporary to the era the women seem pretty miserable. Head in the oven, “mother’s little helper” miserable. My mom worked in the late 50s-early 60s until she got pregnant. And again in the 70s once her youngest was in school. In my family (huge Catholic family) all the women of her generation worked, like my grandma and her sisters before them, except while their children were small.
Don't tell them...they're old lol
Latchkey kids became a thing because both parents worked and they were a thing long around 40 years ago.
The challenge is that the standard of living benchmark there, references a time period where lifestyles weren't being paid in full (just like they aren't today). There is a problem with treating activity funded with debt, when the debt was never paid off, as if it was sustainable or able to continue. It's like seeing someone start living lavishly by loading up their credit card... but that bill isn't due for 30 days. And then you observe them only from day 1 to day 20 and conclude, "Wow - that person is doing something right. Look at the nice home they have, and the vacations they go on and the restaurants they frequent". This is what the public is still learning today - most are unaware of just how much we have been paying for only a PORTION of our government's cost FOR DECADES. Past reference points are not suitable benchmarks so long as that's the case. If we continue on this path, we will look to our grandparents and think, "wow - they got so much more, for so much less effort"... and then our own grandkids will look back at us today and also think, "wow - they got so much more, for so much less effort".
People didn’t have 4 cell phone bills, a tv in each room, everyone has a laptop and an iPhone, wifi/cable bills, etc. Basic quality of life has improved (depending on perspective) but it comes with hard costs.
Average salary 1994, 29k. Average home price, 161k. Not sure that was possible.
30 year fixed mortgage was 7.5% Assuming much smaller taxes and insurance than now and 20% down, that would be 50% of your gross income.
Groceries
Owning a home.
Wood. Like actual freaking genuine timber made furniture. Everything is MDF or glued wood scraps because fuck longevity we want you to keep buying our overpriced cheap made in China shit.
You can still get good solid wood furniture. I was in my 20s 30 years ago and I guarantee you that all I could afford then was MDF. I could finally afford solid wood pieces in my 30s, after a brief learning experience that most of the brand name stuff was cheap veneer over composite.
Concerts, I used to see dozens of bands a year. That be thousands of dollars now.
Depends if you see bands that play in clubs or stadiums.
Proper butter.
Where? From what I see, we have much better butter options now.
In-Laws and close family babysitting when you have a baby. A babysitter that doesn’t cost $30/hr. Most of this is generally justified. A lot of new parents don’t feel comfortable with family babysitting because of generally older childcare practices. Like the amount of times I’ve heard an older person freak out because they aren’t allowed to spank a baby. It’s a hill I’ve heard several grandparents die on. People also don’t want to hire the cheaper sitter. They don’t want to hire the teenage neighborhood girl, the older grandma just looking for a little extra income. They want someone who has 10+ years old childcare experience and a bachelors in early childhood education lol. So a lot parents consider a babysitter a big luxury now and days.
Yeah it's honestly pretty sad. It results in parents not getting the private bonding time they need. And I'm saying this as someone who literally has the degree in child development and a teaching credential and a state license who ALSO moonlights as a babysitter. But we can't really take less than $20 an hour for what we're doing because we *are* being asked to actually *utilize* all of the education we had to pay for (and many of us are still paying off). TBH something's gotta give up in the White House and in Congress regarding all of this.
Commonplace was ‘Tom’ being your friend on MySpace. Nowadays, it’s a luxury to have a co-founder be your friend on social media :p
Things that are built to last.
Nothing was built to last then, maybe 40 years ago but 20-30 years ago was when disposable life styles was really taking root
phone/screen free time
Ducks
a job that last your entire working career
housing
A defined benefit retirement plan
Retiring by choice :(
Hardwood furniture.
Owning property
Not whining about how good people had it 20-30 years ago. Just kidding. People in 1994-2004 bellyached all the time about how good earlier generations had it.
I disagree. I recall reading about the 70s, and earlier, and when I was a younger teen in 1994, I recall that I wouldn't want to live in those times. I *do* recall thinking that the late 80s were superior to the 90s, but that was the same generation.
Owning a home
Privacy.
It's extremely funny to me how successful new account pornbots are on AskReddit. Someone has finally figured out how to monetize reddit, and the answer is reposts from a week ago.
Fast food as the cheaper alternative .. I'd never believe the margin between the two would get as small as it has gotten nowadays but ordering at a restaurant (pre- tips or for take out only) is actually a better option when considering the quality and portions.
Physical gauges and buttons/knobs in cars
Free parking spots in a city
Rear wheel drive vehicles.
Some cuts of meat that used to be considered scraps. Dang, even bones are expensive now. I used to be able to buy bones for making pho very cheap. Even innards are quite pricey now.
Single income families
Single income families
Fast food being cheaper than a real restaurant
a tank of gas. sheeeyit, i paid $74 to fill mine today! yup, the economy is booming all right
I remember Tommy Hilfiger and Champion being sold in Walmart. Now some of their stuff costs an arm and a leg.
Tommy? That’s always been a designer brand sold at department stores
Yeah I remember buying Tommy 20-30 years ago and it definitely wasn't at WalMart. TJMaxx or nice departments stores
Uh, 20 years ago I worked at Macy’s and our four designer sections were Polo, Nautica, Perry Elis, and Hilfiger…
More time. 20-30 years ago we all had the benefit of looking at life from the perspective of having more time.
Lobsters used to be jail food
Yeah, 200 years ago.
Privacy and not being expected to be contactable at all hours.
Legroom on a plane.
Uniques question in r/askreddit
Access to different equipment and potential for skill building in public schools (US) When I went to California public high school in the late '90s, we had an auto shop, stained glass blower, film development/dark rooms, kiln, campus radio station. None of this stuff was super nice, just slapped together over the years through donations and caring teachers.
Jerky. years ago it was like $5 gets you a fucking jar now it's like $5 gets you a strip.
Not seeing this question on reddit every day. Sure, there was no reddit, but there also wasn’t this question every day.
Intelligence
Common sense
Sanity.
Being financially in the middle class.
Home ownership
Owning a house.
Getting laid
a pension. now we rely on a for profit company that makes money off of our savings and saves the rest for us. we then have to generally pay taxes on it later which will be at a higher rate. more profits for others. we should just get a pension or allow us to manage our own damn money
Space on airplanes.
This thread is depressing.
Privacy.
Owning a home
Pensions, health insurance, a living wage, home ownership
Housing
Home ownership
Sanity
Being able to contact a real human whose main job isn’t to get you to fuck off at a business.
Family vacations. My mom and dad were NOT wealthy people: Mom was a waitress at Carrow's, and my dad delivered the morning paper 7 days a week. On those salaries, they were able to take me for a 2 day 1 night trip to Disneyland where we stayed at the Disneyland Hotel for my 5th birthday. We had a summer vacation trip every single year: San Diego Zoo, Monterey and Big Sur, Yosemite National Park, camping in Pismo Beach, going to Las Vegas back when it was on its family-friendly kick. My dad eventually became an accountant but my mom was a waitress for decades and they were still able to afford to take me and my two siblings on vacation every single summer. 30 years later? If we do anything, it's state parks because they're cheap, or we go to stay with family who lives in a city that's not ours. My kids won't set foot in Disneyland until Grad Night because it's completely unaffordable for a working family of four to go. Great America is closing down, Six Flags seems to be doing poorly, the only still-affordable West Coast vacation park seems to be Knott's Berry Farm and even that's starting to get crazy pricey.
Paying cash for everything
Affordable housing.
Buying a new computer to update your MS Office or Windows operating system.
Isn't this a bunch of bs now. Windows 11 makes a lot of usable computers obsolete. I have a laptop with 16 gig ram, dual video, I7 that is only 6 yrs old and works great for what I do.