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What do you miss the most about the old internet?
Personally one of the things I miss is when social media sites weren’t trying to emulate TikTok.
Personally one of the things I miss is when social media sites weren’t trying to emulate TikTok.
The fact that you could just exist on a site and not be a source of data and financing because of your activity. Plus there was a higher barrier of entry so there were less people who just wanted to spew garbage or hate or misinformation (though of course that was still around then too).
There were more people who were just ok with being ok, and that is seriously lacking most everywhere I go now.
The misinformation part especially. The flat earth and lizard people weirdos were funny and something to laugh at. Current day, we have them as active members of congress.
I too remember when misinformation was not dangerous
I miss when those things were more X-Files and less Q-Anon. I went to a small Bigfoot convention last year, and to my dismay there were a lot of Q-Anon folks reciting their hate and other usual spiels. It just sucks. Really bummed me out and cut the whole experience short.
Well put. I hate that I have to carefully consider what I share just because it can come around to bite at some point, even if it's not wrong.
Everybody making their own websites. We used to learn rudimentary HTML, often from inspecting other pages, and then scrape together our silly little fansites on geocities or angelfire. Each one had the personal flair of the creator, there were no templates, no corporate provided profiles. You started with a blank page. I lost my part Monster Rancher, part bad fanfiction website a few years ago to Freewebs going down, surprised it lasted as long as it did honestly. Even though it was long dead, logging in that final time and downloading everything really reminded me how much I miss the 90s-00s internet. I feel like these days, making your own website just to celebrate a topic or hobby is completely unheard of, and the individuality of the Old Internet is gone.
Have you heard of neocities? It's basically that old geosites/angelfire feel. There's actual community attempts on the back end, but that's optional. I have one, but like many of my projects, it's fallen by the wayside.
I should at least figure out some cool graphics to go on it...
I'm going to cry. Thank you.
I hope it's a good cry! Hugs on offer.
It is! This site gave a crazy dose of dopamine.
I have! And at least at a glance, I really like what they're about. I have the goal of making a site there some day, just have to have a little more free time before I can pursue it.
Cool! I wish you luck with it.
Yes, that individuality is sorely missed in my opinion. I remember being excited as a young teenager learning to build my own website with HTML, add a phpBB forum to it, and just put those little personal touches on it that made it mine. Social media in its current forum is far too "sterile" - everything conforms to a singular design. Everyone's little quirks and mannerisms have been scrubbed away in favor of easy-to-digest (and monetize) blurbs. It's really kind of depressing when you think about it.
This is it for me. It's the silver lining of all these giant conglomerate websites shooting themselves in the foot; their convenience killed all the little small communities that used to exist on the internet by absorbing them. Hopefully this will result in a more varied internet, where you're not required to make a FAAMG account to participate in small niche communities and hobbies.
While the megacorp sites absolutely killed most peoples motivation to build their own sites, drowned out what’s left, there’s a lot more of them out there than you’d think. Heaps of people still do blogs, personal sites, and hand made sites devoted to hobbies and projects. It’s just harder to find them now because Google/etc make more money sending you to megasites who buy ads odd them.
There’s a few old-web search engines and directories out there that focus on the smaller hand made sites, when I get home I’ll edit my post with the ones I have bookmarked.
When I was looking around for Reddit alternatives (before the API thing, I've been looking for a very long time now.), I realised that I really missed webrings.
I would find a site I kind of liked but wanted to find something similar to it, or some other site they might recommend.
But sites just don't do that anymore. I want more sites to be friends and recommend each other.
Also, my friend showed me https://build.mmm.page/ , but I've not gotten around to trying it myself. He seems to be having fun with it though.
My favorite part about the internet. I used to build some awesome layouts and loved looking at everyone else's.
I found a tiny bit of success googling "classic internet websites" and similar phrasing, but still so very few.
Your definition of old internet seems a bit more recent than mine. I’m thinking pre WWW. :)
I miss when “netiquette” was a commonly used term, when the majority held that as a core principle, when Usenet and IRC were useful and not just a bunch of warez and noise.
While the modern internet is very useful (online ordering, maps, being able to look up store hours/inventory/etc), the quality of discussion content has continually declined ever since Eternal September began.
Off topic but I'm just now realizing that warez is probably pronounced wears and not whar-ez/Juárez as I've been reading it my whole life. I never actually looked up the definition until your comment to see that it was short for software with the z because it's illegally copied.
That's funny -- I've had similar realizations long after I probably should have figured them out! Hey, we all learn something new every day, right? :)
Unless you count IRC, newsgroups and Geocities/Angelfire as social media, I remember the internet from before social media.
I know some of these overlap, but that's how much I miss privacy, I guess.
AltaVista and AskJeeves! I feel like that combo was my go to for a while, but honestly it’s hard to remember and AskJeeves may have been more of a novelty.
I never really understood the appeal of AskJeeves. To me, the advertising always seemed like a bit much. Just like Yahoo search was. Then Google came around and at the time was much better. Of course, google is riddled with ads now too.
I don't remember much about the advertising on AskJeeves but do remember always thinking of it as a novelty more than anything. I have a vague memory of Dogpile as well but AltaVista is the most clear in my mind from the era of the early net. Like you said once Google came around everyone else fell by the wayside.
I remembered going to Altavista to use their video search because Google didn't have it. I THINK. I don't know if I'm remembering it wrong.
But I do find it interesting how we'd have away status messages on ICQ or MSN because people weren't online all the time. But there's no need for that now. It's strange if you're not immediately contactable.
Yep and even looked down upon in some cases to not respond to any notification immediately. Kind of a sad state of the world.
It occurs to me that I haven't seen the phrase "IRL" in years. Online has become real life.
Fansites and forums. They were awesome.
I miss the old forum days so much. Used to frequent a lot of InvisionFree and later ZetaBoards when that was a thing.
The closest I get to those days now is being on Something Awful.
Jcink is great and I’m glad to see them still around. I mostly hung around the IF/ZB support forums mostly. You know the boards that popped up for design and forum help.
I know a guy who still to this day makes Admin oriented forums, still get emails and everything. I roll my eyes every time I get his emails but there’s still a bit of nostalgia there.
I used to spend an ungodly amount of time on a forum for Line Rider back in the day. It was a great community to talk about all sorts of things. I miss those days a ton.
It was Pokémon forums and fansites for me... Those were the days.
waytoomany.com was my forum of choice. Specifically their flower section, haha.
I really missed those. I've been looking for an alternative to Reddit for a very long time. I didn't actually want another Reddit. I wanted old school forums. I would try to find other game, art, books, sci fi or tv show forums and most of them were kind of dead.
Most active forum I found was for Fire Emblem, and I didn't play Fire Emblem. I briefly contemplated playing Fire Emblem just so I could join in.
Yes! I miss the heyday of sites like Kirby's Rainbow Resort and PSO-World. Not to mention the Chao Garden BBS from the Dreamcast days :)
I still have a few forum accounts dating from the 00s, some forums still have enough of the old regulars and an enjoyable enough culture that I'll log in from time to time to be the resident Grandpa Simpson.
I miss how fast simple websites could load, and the general lack of annoying UX design (aside from HTML blink...). Nowadays all of the SEO, analytics, trackers, ads, GDPR banners, and modal windows make using the internet feel like a chore. old.reddit was / is still a breath of fresh air.
People have already covered things like forums and bbs'es and such, so I won't revisit those.
What I will say is: private game servers.
At some point around the dawn of Halo 3 through to Overwatch, multiplayer fps games overwhelming switched to party-based matchmaking. Games were ephemeral, they end and you move on and never see those same people again. If you are a solo player you're in for a lonely experience, voice chat is most likely done on discord for the people who are in groups, text chat -- if it even exists -- is quiet. The match ends and you move on to the next, never sure if you're playing against real players or bots (for some games like Brink this was a genuine issue, since half the players in games really were bots).
I miss chilling on servers, chatting with people, becoming a regular, building up a community. If that even exists anymore, it's incredibly hard to come by. All gaming communities now are discord-based and pop in to games as a party. You can't just swing on to a server like Norm in to Cheers, welcomed by familiar faces.
Think someone pointed this out here on Tildes? I'm not sure. But I think you'll dig it:
https://devon.lol/blog/the-old-web/
This is the big one for me. I used to be on so many small forums and fan sites and niche news sites, and now I have no idea where those things are. There have been subreddits and communities on tildes/fediverse but it’s somehow…not the same? I’m not sure what exactly the difference is but it just doesn’t feel remotely the same.
Even superficially, I miss how different everything used to look. It’s all the same design principle across the web now, I’m guessing based on accurately curated ideas of what’s “best” but it loses the charm and character.
Yup, this is exactly it. Ultimately a subreddit is and never was a replacement for a website, despite it working OK in some cases. Having a dedicated forum allowed for so much more internal structure and freedom without fracturing the community, which meant you actually had a community. Even on some of the better subreddits it never really felt like a community to me. Sure there would be in-jokes and such, but it just wasn't the same. You never got to know anyone, there was never community lore.
It isn't the same! It is easy to spot something that is "commercial web" (at least for old folks who've been on the internet 25+ years), but it's difficult to describe. It's the recipe blogs with the person's life story and painstakingly staged photos, the horrifying level of cookies and trackers, the pop-ups that prompt you to sign up for a newsletter when your cursor goes over the URL bar/back button. It's commercial, it's transactional, and it's sad.
When I think of old internet, I think of nerds - people who were just really into a thing and were excited to share that thing with other people. We weren't trying to make money or become famous or anything like that, we were just excited to share the thing with other people who were also excited about that thing. And pre-SEO, websites would let you FIND that thing! The small-scale but popular sites would show up in search results. It's commercialization and SEO that killed good internet. It's the kind of thing I feel can be fixed, but there needs to be a search engine that can drive traffic to cool sites and not towards the life-story-before-bland-recipe-mommy-blog sites (which you can tell is a significant gripe for me right now as I'm trying to find a good recipe for a picnic next weekend... grrr...)
That is a great way to put it! Someone else linked an article in this thread that talked about SEO and how it has affected the way we find sites and communities. I do think that one of my biggest gripes is the homogenization and centralization of the Internet. It all looks the same, feels the same, and is the same few pieces of content recycled through a handful of different sites.
As for the recipes, I agree wholeheartedly! Though thankfully most of them have a “Jump to recipe” button now ^^
That part. Granted, I had about 15k subscribers on an old blog from 2010–2013 before I stopped; it started to feel like I was obligated to keep it running. In 2015 I tried to use a social media site to share my artwork and gained several hundred followers in one month, and then left because I started to care too much about the numbers. The way they've designed these apps and sites to make them addictive had definitely got me here and there, but now I'm fed up.
I've been on and off from social media since then, and it's just not the same. I deleted all but one account that I don't use anymore within the past couple of years. The ones I have created were anonymous, private, and only to watch the videos that my friends send me. I deleted those too, recently. One asked me when I'm going to use social media again and I said probably never.
It's 99% inauthentic now.
Not to mention that when all of these "forums" are on a single platform run by a single company, they all live and die by the decisions of that company. Individually hosted forums were simpler to create an alternative to if the current host went south.
I miss the days of stumbling on just the most weird and goofy shit from the Flash animation days.
Part of me is nostalgic for the time before that, i.e the file sharing, music from the high seas days. I had this software that turned my screensaver into a video slideshow, and I would pirate numetal/alternative music videos to add to it every day. What a time to be alive!
Flash animation and games are a lost art form. That said piracy is still live and well, with all the streaming services deciding to be shit recently there's plenty of disgruntled people seeding out of spite.
Homestar Runner dot net! It’s dot com.
A while back I saw someone on twitter say that their dad used to watch the Strong Bad emails and I immediately collapsed into a pile of ancient dust, hahaha.
I also loved YTMND and I have to say I was absolutely thrilled to find out that Lemon Demon/Neil Cicierega was still making music because The Ultimate Showdown and the eBaumsWorld songs were some of my favourite old-internet things. And Radio Free Tiny Pineapple, where someone just streamed their CD collection and it was the soundtrack to my late night undergrad lab work :)
Also, shoutout to The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which was my favourite internet humour site for as long as it operated. “Times when I am truly happy/Times when I am wearing pants” was a Venn diagram for the ages
The younger web felt small, grassroots, niche, and communal.
You felt an affinity with others in your community because you were all in on that secret, tiny little place on the internet that meant the world to all of you, and because communities were so small you almost had this pseudo-proximity with others that forced you to create bonds.
If someone had a website, that was really cool, as was building tiny websites together for your small group of 20 people to call home... There was a culture of sharing and excitement over what the future would bring... and the landscape was constantly evolving to meet that hype.
I miss the smaller gaming communities and guilds - the ability to find a small tribe of 20 and have that be big enough. They're not so much a thing anymore, and no big company's trust & safety policies will allow that to happen.
Big companies want infinite growth, and with that, their communities also tend to be pushed towards infinite growth... many discord communities have no business being so big, to the point where they become completely unusable PR arms more than anything. The faceless feeling of Reddit very much parallels the faceless feeling of matchmaking, where your opponents might as well be bots (and in the case of many mobile games, actually probably are bots masquerading as real users!).
I miss the individuality and creative expression that came with personal websites.
Even on MySpace you could change your whole profile background and CSS. Plus people would add lots of tacky widgets like music players.
Now everybody has the same cookie cutter Facebook page. It's very bland. The Old Web was colourful and creative.
Back in the MySpace days you could just make a small living if you knew just a bit of CSS. It was awesome.
For a time, old.reddit was like that too. Every sub wanted intricate custom CSS.
I miss those tacky widgets! Don't forget the animated backgrounds and custom pointers too lol.
I guess it's unavoidable now with everyone having smartphones and TVs with Youtube/Social Media/Twitch etc but I kind of hate how every video game has to be meta'd out the wazoo. Be it a gun in an FPS, a build in an ARPG or certain-whatevers in an MMORPG.
Fond memories of 02-03 Runescape and just being amazed at my first MMORPG experience. I could ONLY imagine the sweat if technology was 2002 level, but somehow we had Twitch/Youtube culture back then.
I still play my games largely blind like in the old days if I can.
Mostly browsing the internet and stumbling upon the wildest, most niche sites. I remember finding some site with people uploading supernatural experiences, spent a couple hours reading it that day. One particularly memorable site I remember was some sort of forum-style site, with a long post by a man who claimed to be abducted by aliens and gained weather controlling powers. He detailed directing a hurricane to go off-course and head more north to prove it to the government. According to some other users it was an excerpt from the man's autobiography, and would periodically get posted by his followers after his death. Say what you will about it, it was a fascinating read. Haven't been able to find it since.
On a smaller scale, I miss the culture of forums with matching avatar/signature sets. There was just something so satisfying about having a matching set.
I miss BBSes the most, to be honest. The dial-in message boards, each with their own styles and personalities and entertainment offerings, some even letting users play limited-turn games lot LoRD, TW2002, BRE, etc. And the ansi/ascii art scene that was based around them was a thing of beauty.
A few boards managed to transition to telnet access and survive a while after the AOL boom hit the nation, but it was really just life support. Forums would eventually somewhat capture that feeling again, but nothing really has done it fully.
I spent way too much time figuring out what would be the optimal build order in Falcons Eye. I kept getting withdraws when I ran out of turns for the day and had to wait until FidoNet updated the info from the enemy BBSes.
I only just started figuring FE out before the one board in town that had it went offline for good. Most everyone had LoRD and BRE which were the major addictions for me. I remember Usurper and Falcon's Eye appearing one day and I was blown away at how cool they were.
Usurper was a lot of fun too. I liked that there was a lot that you could do on it aside from just go out and fight stuff.
Like sniffing glue, you could sniff glue. Yep.
Ultimately at the end of the day a message board is a message board. I'm not sure why I miss a dial in interface over a website. Maybe it was just the complete package that came with it, a bunch of little things that are hard to recreate on their own.
There's a lot of nostalgia in it for me, I know. It was my first exposure to any kind of online interaction, and that rush I felt every time the modem made its final successful handshake was a rush I have rarely felt since.
I miss most everybody being known by their real names, and nobody exploited it.
Using command line internet tools from shell accounts.
Fingering people.
Gopher.
That monthly sheet of worldwide internet resources that somebody put out.
Long conversations on Usenet.
Thank you for the flashback to me in university finding out if my crush was online using ‘finger name@domain’!
One of my first Usenet groups was for The X-Files and WOW did people just go on and on. It was really something.
I miss the seemingly endless number of websites run by passionate people that you could find through a few Google searches or exploring a site's links page. These last few years I've found that a lot of them are still around, but the loss of discoverability is still a huge blow.
I miss how the majority of sites weren't hyper optimized for SEO.
I honestly miss the early LiveJournal / MySpace / Facebook social media that was just a feed of your friends stuff and not full of ads/suggested content.
I miss needing to press a next page button instead of the forever scroll.
Flash games lol Being able to jump on and games might not be littered with ads. When communities were small-ish and focused and when you weren't forcing you to use their app. When you could just exist.
I miss old Newgrounds so much. I’d spend hours every day just watching flash videos, and playing games. It’s wild how so many YouTube people now got their start on Newgrounds.
I miss geocities. Web anonymity. Freedom to troll and not be too serious. Being able to use a search engine for information rather than being bombarded with fake ads. Seo and ppc has ruined the Internet for me
Yeah soft flaming was fun, or a bit of bickering. Now it's toxic. A little bit of spice is OK IMO (As long as you're not a MASSIVE cunt, or deranged :P)
Twitter apparently has this thing where someone is the "main character" for the day, where someone did something dumb/was an asshole/was just kind of cringe, and then everyone just dogpiles them. Like destroys them with garbage. And the algorithm is more or less built to encourage it, because it drives engagement and therefore ads. Which is just horrifying to me, like damn can't a person be kind of cringe and live in peace? Even if they're an asshole, do they really deserve thousands upon thousands of people screaming it at them and ending up in the news for some offhanded assholery?
I hate Twitter because it actually has brigading systems built in. Imagine some kid says something stupid, like we all did as teenagers, then an influencer picks it up and retweets. You've now got a post that was meant to go out to 20 or so friends being viewed by millions - with a direct link to that person.
It encourages harassment.
Yes I agree and much worse for younger generations who derive their self worth from their Internet friends and followers. Sure it's caused more than a few suicides and mental breakdowns.
Yep the slightest jokey comment leads to a back and forth argument. What made reddit terrible for me. I also think they anonymity aspect of reddit caused this. I've done away with that and using my real name here. Maybe make me think harder about what I type!
Yeah everything is an argument, or snap backs - I just ended up blocking people with dumb replies, I learned many years ago, never bother arguing back on the internet lol
My earliest web memories involve watching Homestarrunner and other weird flash animations. I miss that silliness, and how content creation wasn't a career path so much as a celebration of the fact that you could just make something and put it out there for the world to see. I miss not being asked to subscribe. I miss hearing "You gotta check out this webpage," and not immediately assuming it was gonna be some advice/politics/polarizing nonsense. I miss zombocom. Nobody asked you to subscribe to zombocom. It just was.
You can do anything at Zombo.com…
also please enjoy this flashback
I feel like I keep banging on about this to basically everyone, everywhere but: BLOGS! I miss plain blogs with frequent updates. Yes, I do want to know that you bought a new pair of shoes for the first time in 3 years. I do think your dilemma about training your puppy is interesting. I miss getting to know my internet friends through their comments on their blog...my blog... back and forth. Now my placeholder for the blog experience is reading internet celeb gossip and that sucks because we definitely don't exchange comments.
kinda depends on how old you mean... I'm guessing that word means very different things to different people in here. Regardless of what that means to you, or others, I think overall it's lost the "wild west" feel and become overly commercialized.
You'd actually surf the Internet.
Back in the day I'd visit Newgrounds or Miniclip to waste time, visit various gaming forums to socialise, YouTube for tutorials...
Then social media came along and ruined it.
View Source not showing minified/obfuscated code.
There was an era where people learned by seeing what others did. Now it is more a "I got mine, pull the ladder up". Obviously there are enough teachers out there willing to teach but we are probably under a few years from outright drm built and the whole spirit of what originally existed will be gone.
Speaking as a (backend) web dev it’s not intentional- most cases it’s difficult to read because we don’t actually write HTML, plain javascript, or css anymore, we write other code that generates the terrible mess you see in view source. And then all browsers are not equivalent, so you use a framework or a compatibility helper like babel, and condensing the javascript to be as few bytes as possible is a simple trick to make a dynamic website faster… all this comes together to make an incomprehensible mess, but the motive is to make fancy websites that look and behave consistently on as many different browsers and devices that people are using as possible, not to hide how it was done
Fortunately there are more informative resources these days, like css-tricks, Mozilla Developer Network, stack overflow, github, that do a better job of explaining, so it’s not all bad
In some ways I really do miss the simple days of hand crafted HTML and vanilla JavaScript
Meh, what can't you do to make a nice swishy website in plain old HTML and CSS these days? Do we really need 10k of jQuery to do a simple loading bar or is it just that this is what is taught now rather than opting for a simple solution?
I get the really big, super complex, social media sites that farm everything from speed of scroll through to how you click, but for your average page, blog or media outlet page, is it really required?
it's not that you can't some of it the old plain way, it is very much still possible, but it's significantly faster to do it the way it's done these day, much easier to make it work consistently across browsers, avoid bugs. Websites that actually do things absolutely need more though, HTML and CSS are not programming languages, they can only do so much.
here's the thing, website/software development is a lot like carpentry. Can you create something beautiful with just the most basic hand tools? 1000% yes. With a little more knowledge, you can use more and more powerful tools to get the same job done faster, easier, safer, more consistently, and in ways that then allow non-technical people to use it
in the end though, nothing and nobody is stopping you from making websites the old way except yourself
I'm thankful for the resurgence of source code in the form of JS source maps, which are the best of both worlds. However, a lot of sketchy ad engines are purposefully obfuscated, and it's a constant arms race between ad blockers and advertising agencies, all this obfuscation is not helping us.
I miss having internet friends. Forums were much more conductive to instilling community and friendship. Meanwhile Reddit is probably on of the most antisocial platforms I have ever participated on.
Getting to know people on IRC and #freenode and becomming better programmers together.
Not having to worry about having a different 54 character passphrase including a mix of numbers, special characters, upper case, lower case, middle case, then dealing with a captcha, then having 2FA. I get why we are where we are, but I miss the days when you just had like hunter2 as your password for like, everything.
No it’s fine, you type ‘hunter2’ but all I see is *******.
I think miss homemade fan sites the most. It was a simple time, when if you could get online, you could learn a little html, and then throw something together about your favorite thing, and that was enough. I miss how many different random but actually interesting websites and BBS forums there used to be, before everything had to be aggregated. I miss when things could be up online just because, and it didn’t need to be monetized because it wasn’t expensive or involved, it was still mostly about the joy of sharing something with the world, like a little flash game you made. Man do I miss flash games. And I miss the old netiquette, especially “don’t feed the trolls”
Around 2005 is old for me since that’s when I first started using the internet.
There was a charm where content was aimed at small groups and made for fun. Take the ‘ultimate showdown’ video and song. I first saw that in 2006. That’s quite a lot of work for something quite niche.
I miss all the BBSs that I visited in the 1980s with my 300 baud, and later 1200 baud, modem. My first experience with the internet was in 1991, when my company got a Netcom account for us to use. You would dial into Netcom, and get into a text terminal, and from there, could access all the cool stuff like Gopher, Usenet, and ftp.
How old are we talking?
Xanga? Asian Avenue? ICQ? MSN? Netscape? usenet (although I think this is still around... I used to use it to actually message with people).
What I legit miss the most are HOW-TOs. "How to setup qmail", "How to setup bind", "How to setup a home Linux firewall". Someone said it earlier how they loved the learning experience and I have to agree.
I don't know HOW people these days learn about how the Internet works. We learned the hard way that a closed port and a filtered port were not the same (and all the lessons therein), and how a file on your drive could actually be served to the Internet.
Now I think people just click this, click that, enter a value here or there and somehow it just works...
That search results could be totally random after three or four pages
I think it was that sense of early days, the conversion between analog to digital, and the wild experimental start to everything. That's just lost today as everything seems you have connected on a general sameness.
Absolutely mad content and web design like that of Mike Sparks's Combat Reform Group being closer to the norm, and visible without having to log into Facebook.
Old Internet is pre-TikTok to you? Wow.
Internet from the 90s for me is the conversations.
I had pen pals over email and back then could only dial-up with my modem once per day. I would retrieve new mail, send any mail that I had been writing, and then it was wait for next day to come.
When you take immediacy out of communication, it can become so much more meaningful.
The old internet of 1993 was like a small town. No ads. People just doing their thing and not to turn a buck. No push for fame or notoriety.
Everything is commercial now. There are still a lot of playgrounds left, but they're decidedly outcompeted by the commercial ones because the random blogger doesn't care if they rank high in search engines whereas the commercial ad farm depends on it.
The search engine millionshort is an interesting experiment, it excludes (configurable) the N most popular websites (where N goes up to one million) so you find more obscure sources. In practice, it seems to come up with failed ad farms that also match your search query but didn't get traction. (It's been a while since I used it, though.)
I keep thinking that a human-curated index of the internet may not be so bad after all, based on invites like tildes, and if someone turns out to be adding garbage then you just cut them off and anyone they invited, or if someone is benign but invites a lot of users who then add garbage, the writing is also on the wall. Indexing every page would be too much work, but at least human vetting of domain names (or if users own parts of the site, like a subdomain or subreddit, then vetting those individual parts) and the crawler can take it from there. Anyway, so many project ideas, so little time...