With websites, you know it's on purpose. With dial up, it was just the technology back then
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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I’m embarrassed to admit how naive I was back in the 90s. I truly and genuinely thought that all limitations were inherently technological in nature.
Even though I knew capitalism was the enemy of humanity, I still very much naively thought that it would keep progressing because “of course it would”.
Just waiting for this epic battle in my browser between YouTube and uBlock Origin to conclude before it finally loads the play button...
When I download a youtube video with yt-dlp, one of the output lines is always
[download] Sleeping 5.00 seconds as required by the site...
I think this is hardcoded into the site at this point, especially if you don't use Chrome.
Well it's correct behavior. Websites from the 90s should load instantly now. Any website loading longer should deliver some amazing content that was impossible in the 90s
Why do websites have to ship 12 MB of JavaScript before they even start to load? In lots of cases SPA have no benefits for the user and just make everything bloated and complex as hell and due to the insanity of the JavaScript packaging also super hard to keep safe / up to date.
People building spas for everything when literally 99% of sites on the planet would function better as a static site is infuriating. I’ve had so many arguments with devs because they will make up any thing they can to justify using react or angular or vue or whatever, instead of building a fucking static site.
One of my employeers had a multiple megabytes SPA with a shitload of dependencies (Angular) in production that was just a glorified upload form. All the heavy lifting and verification was done by the backend anyways and it was a pain to upgrade, especially with angular major updates etc.
Since we replaced it with a vanilla HTML upload form and some templating to display feedback from the backend no more maintenance was necessary and the users and testers where still happy.
A lot of it too is 3rd party tracking scripts and garbage like Full Story that has to also load on apps
Tbf you did experience when websites took 0.1 seconds to load also.
That's the answer.
You have every right to be enraged if you see progress happening in reverse on purpose.
Why do you need so many JavaScript libraries!? I just need to know if I can afford to eat today!?
Non corpo sites I wait. Corpo site, i quit and conclude that site is broken without its ads.
I remember there was a fan made Star Trek you could download from their site and watch. For the early 00 or was very high quality.
And on our dialup internet it would literally take a whole day to download lol. We'd start the download then we'd all just leave the house to not curse the download and when we came home it was loaded.
We got broadband soon after, I went to test and I COULD SEE THE BAR MOVING ON THE DOWNLOAD
It was amazing!
I get angry at websites now that do not load in an instant. Oops.
It was Starship Exeter! I don't know if that's the old website, it's been too long and my brain is cheese. I only know the name because it was twin who was into it and twin remembered when we talked about it recently (because of the comment I made we started talking about it)
"Did my time waiting"
Websites were quick back then too because they were incredibly basic. XHTML was the beginning of the downfall of mankind
Not XHTML, JavaScript.
Came part and parcel didn’t they? And ActiveX
And Java applets and flash websites, and the need to install codec packs
That's because you know that it doesn't have to be that way with current technology
I'll just say remember old 240p YT buffering
Me too, but you could pause it and it would load the whole video. Now pausing it only loads the next little bit and there is no way (probably is some way I'm not familiar with) to have it download and not buffer anymore.
Does copy/pasting youtube URLs into VLC still work?
I'm still pissed to took Google almost a decade to add the 144p option so I could finally watch videos without buffering. And shortly after they finally added it my home got a faster internet connection anyways
Of course is it a German handle. Kenn ich kenn ich
Yeah, because you remember that magical moment when you first got DSL or Cable Internet while the web was still built for dial up. Like any available overhead, and bandwidth gets stuffed.
For a while now pages load "at once" as if it's a single thing to load, but back in the day you could actually see pages load in parts. If things were dire you could turn off image loading, or simply click the stop loading button because the content you wanted was loaded, just not the whole page.
Some still load "in parts" . When I go to click something on IMDB, a new panel appears and moves everything down so I click the wrong thing.
With an adblocker, sites load faster, but some still take fucking forever.
I also remember one airline company's site used to work perfectly and was very quick back in 2010-17. One of the more recent "updates" was seemingly to make it stop working on desktop browsers - no, seriously, when trying to buy seats on a desktop browser, the fucking thing will fucking crash when it reaches the "choose your seat" page. My dad complained about it ~2 years ago. Of course the company didn't do shit, as I recently found out firsthand.
Running ad blockers speeds things up. They always load those first.
Back in the day, you'd keep a small TV next to your computer so you have something to do while you wait for a page to load or download a 3MB file.
Tbf, a lot of that wait it all the trackers getting swatted away. Rarely is it just too much shit coming from too far away on a shitty series of nodes.
I stayed on BBS at home until broadband became available at my house.
I'm not that old and honestly I don't mind if a web page takes 5 seconds to load, after that I start to wonder if they or I fucked something up. But I'm not fed up or anything, just anxious
Even the heaviest JavaScript sites still load in under 5s. Static sites are not viable for most sites these days. Users expect responsive design, not needing to load a new page all the time.
True, as in most of them manage to show a background and loading spinner before sitting around doing fuck all for 30s. 5s used to be considered way too slow by the way.
5s during dial up era was absolutely not considered way to slow.
Dude looks rough to allegedly be under 40
Dude looks completely normal for his age, he just suffers from androgenetic alopecia which can affect people at many ages.
He's just a balding guy with very visible pixels in his face, could be any age between 20 and like 55.