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Cars, “They don’t build them like the used to”, because crumple zones save lives.
I’m still amazed at how many people I know still think cars are better before because they were “harder to break.” Yeah, you can sit on the hood of an old car and it won’t do anything to it, but try crashing at 80km/h and you’re gonna wish that unbreakable object broke. Anything higher and you might not have a chance to wish for anything. Lol.
Also survivorship bias. A few old cars lasted for a really long time, but you don’t see or think about the majority that didn’t.
Cars were so unreliable that gas stations had mechanic garages. Compared to modern times where you pretty much only change the oil for the first 100k.
Most things?
What WAS better?
Yearning for the past always has a reactionary vibe.
I’ll start by saying that GUIs have gotten a lot better since the 90s. Many people seem to think Windows 95 or 2000 was the pinnacle of the user interface design, but it was clunky and terrible and I much prefer literally any contemporary GUI.
A lot more is understood about how users interact with GUIs and how to best make them, but this is often exploited for monetary gain rather than end user experience.
The current thing that’s annoying me is discords new paid for super reactions. Absolutely by design they have been put in the spot the regular reaction button used to occupy in order to trick you into pressing it.
Discord is actually a great counterexample to my point, I hate that app.
I couldn’t agree less. All the GUIs since Vista, KDE4 and iOS are infuriating. Worse, the functionality behind them is often crippled and the user is infantilised.
I’m mostly a command line guy, but whenever I have to interact with one of them modern, simple GUIs I’m quite happy with how much thought they put into cleaning them up so there’s not a million icons and menus and stuff. I also like that there’s more space (to some degree, you can obviously have too much space), because space is a good visual separator and my eyesight isn’t getting any better.
Well yea there isn’t a million icons and options, because all of them are removed and all that’s left are the defaults.
What’s the logic that in Win95 (or even 3.x) you could customize every color of the interface, and in Win8+ you can only either use some of the predefined options or use the (often borked) dark mode?
How come that until W7, you could disconnect a Bluetooth device without having to turn off either all of the Bluetooth or the device, and from W8 you can’t?
How is it that until a certain version of iOS you could just send files to another device over Bluetooth and now you need to use their retarded proprietary bullshit transfers?
And how come that even with all that simplification, setting up keyboard and language combination in W10 is the most incomprehensible and broken bullshit?
Modern interfaces are cancer.
Ed: btw my eyes also aren’t the best, I’m very sensitive to light and as such have been suffering from terminal white backgrounds on everything for the last 15 years because some corpo decided that’s what we all have to do now.
Yeah those things do seem shit. Pretty happy here on Linux with the dark theme and Dark Reader extension on Firefox, can’t remember the last time I had to contend with a white background.
I agree, but I definitely think we reached a high point a decade or two ago. Windows switched to that weird hybrid GUI with 8, and websites now are obsessed with whitespace, scrolling fuckery, and the like.
While word 2003 was probably the high point for that product, I don’t think that about windows, Linux, or the web.
I want you to take a look at the spotify UI
Right. At least WinAmp (actually XMMS, the theme compatible clone for Linux in my case) was kind of fun.
I loved winamp. I’m still nostalgic for it. Honestly. Some of the buttons where questionable in size and function but generally I don’t think there is any better UI for a music player.
I wish I could listen to spotify through third party apps…specifically through winamp.
America
Are you certain? It seems like it’s never been worse in America right now.
Yeah idk, slavery was pretty bad. Maybe the genociding of native peoples a bit worse? or where women were house slaves or when they were burning people for not appearing christian enough?
I don’t know what burning you’re referring to, but if you’re talking about Salem 1692, no one was ever burned. And it wasn’t about “Not looking Christian enough”, it was most likely either mass hysteria combined with a lying slave girl trying to get out of being executed, or ergot in their bread producing psychedelic affects.
You could be talking about a different even, but I am not aware of it.
Maybe for white people
Nah, not even, I’d rather live like I do now than live like my ancestors did in the early 1800s, dirt poor, addicted to alcohol, barefoot, no chance of social mobility, and worst of all, without air conditioning. Although to be fair its not like the Appalachians have changed all that much apart from the air conditioning.
Yeah maybe.
When were the good old days? Maybe America was better like 8 years ago, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone call 2015 the good old days lol.
Being LGBTQ+, or not white, or not a man, or disabled.
Yeah I was in school during the 90s. It was bad. Very little awareness back then.
Medical care …
Seems to have gotten worse around here actually. The nurses and doctors are getting worse pay and worse working conditions every year, and many quit. They’re also closing down hospitals because of “efficiency” or something.
Maybe they meant the capability of medical care and not the execution. Lol
Ah it’d be good to make an edit of that, it felt ambiguous to me too.
I totally agree that medical tech is just insane and only getting better.
The xenophobia. I have pretty bad anemoia for the '90s, but as a queer person I probably wouldn’t be able to live back then.
Internet speeds.
Gasoline
The good old lead gasoline, who does not miss that.
Almost everything has seen significant improvements. Technology has improved at an astounding rate. The only down side of improvement is higher expenses for more complicated tech. Phones are so much better than they used to be. We don’t have to carry a brick anymore but they cost a fortune now
Heh. It’s funny to me that what one considers a regression others may see as an improvement.
Btw, prices actually went down (unless you’re buying the latest iphone). It only makes sense, since the easier the production gets and the more efficient the technology gets, the cheaper it is to buy said technology. See https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/history-of-cellphones-prices
Medicine.
Math education, probably. I don’t have any numbers, but there are probably far more people taking calculus in high school than there used to be, and a lot of them are probably taking it earlier than senior year. At least that was my experience compared with my parents’.
Also, this is unrelated, but it’s strange that this post has (at the moment) 20 comments but only 5 votes.
What’s more strange is that 5 people today commented on this 4 month old post.
I was really lonely and scrolling up really old posts in this community to talk in, and maybe others sort their feeds by recent comments meaning my activity pushed it up. Or maybe I just like ascribing more responsibility to myself :PEdit: I sort by recent comments, so this post showed up in my feed. I don’t know why the others started commenting on it 10 hours ago though.
The USA
Having to sit at a desk (with a computer) to access the Internet, rather than being able to bring a device with you, to access the Internet wherever you want.
