Anti-nostalgia thread: what are y’all happy is gone and hope never returns?

The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
- Damn, came to make this joke myself.

smoking everywhere

I’m so fucking glad we’ve stopped calling women “hysterical” whenever we don’t believe them. That word is so blatantly misogynistic and it seems to be dying out now.

Smoking sections
- As long as the law is properly enforced. It's worse to have smokers just all over the place

Leaded gas.

Smoking everywhere and anywhere. Younger folks have no idea how ubiquitous it was, not to sound boomerish, but everything smelled so bad, and people would smoke in places that would shock you now, like in hospitals they would smoke in the nurses station, if you walked into a clothing store at the mall they'd be smoking at the counter, etc. Even when they did things like making that glass room for smokers at Tim Hortons, I once saw a woman sitting in there with her toddler in a stroller puffing away. It was actually amazing that anyone put a stop to public smoking because so many people did it.

white dog poop
- For anyone that doesn't know, dog food used to contain a lot of bone meal; as dog poop degraded (?), the bone meal would remain. Hence white dog poop. I think that this changed due to tighter regulations on pet food.
- This is probably completely uninteresting to everyone else, but this has re-surfaced an old memory for me. I had a really dull data entry job one summer, and the crowd I worked with included a few odd figures. One particular guy was always making jokes that were just a bit too edgy for the workplace, especially amongst a bunch of people that didn't know him well enough to know how much he meant any of it. For some reason, completely unprompted, he brought up that "you never see white dog turds any more". Everyone heard this as "white doctors" and immediately winced in anticipation of some incoming racism, and everyone still heard it that way when he tried to clarify several times. Turns out no, it was 100% innocent, just weird.
  He was fired for unrelated reasons a few weeks later; he had gone to the nearby pub on his lunch break and had several pints
  
  goals, honestly

Objectively, dial-up.
Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.
Also, I would nominate the fact that the 'It's obsolete as soon as you get it in the door' meme hasn't been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.
- Yup! Spotify removing things off my playlists was a big initial factor into me getting into self hosting. All my music streams through Plex now and I haven't looked back
  
  Even DRM-free storefronts like 7Digital for music or GOG for games aren't immune to random delistings.

George W. Bush's presidency. I don't know what the kids are smoking when they say current republicans make him look "classy" or that Trump's first term was worse than his. He bred a constant state of paranoia and xenophobia and used it to justify killing countless people in the middle east. The damage done to that part of the world is staggering and everyone just treats it like background noise.
Also that decade post-SpongeBob where every kid's cartoon was about a loud, annoying, dumb guy.
- Imagine being 6 years old and your mother hugging you while crying. You have no electricity. It's night time. Artillery shell explosions followed by the crumbling buildings and injured crying in pain are the only break you get from your mother's sounds of sobbing. They're destroying your entire block, but what you feel is terror. You can look out a window and see flashes. You don't even know what politics or weapons of mass destruction. You're just there scared until you die. You wonder what you did for this to happen. Now imagine hundreds of that same experience per night.
  That never makes it into the news. I would love to see people's responses. Show the child and mother live. Then, people are randomly asked, "Push button to kill this person immediately or you will be put in jail and shamed for life." Let's see how they react to that guilt for eternity.
  There's a quote from Game of Thrones that I think of often. The setting is that 3 brutal high-class leaders have to decide which one of them will die as punishment. They start getting nervous, so Tyrion says:
  It always seems a bit abstract, doesn't it, other people dying?
  I find it validating.
- GWB definitely had a scarier presidency than Trumps first term for sure. but this second term is unlike anything I've ever seen
  
  Absolutely, that's why I specified the first term! Even during Biden I kept seeing people say GWB was better than Trump, when they didn't have this current nightmare fresh affecting their judgment. The kids just really want to redeem Bush for some reason.

It's not "gone", but the notion of it being "acceptable" is gone:
Using 'retard' as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities but also just for people or things you think were stupid.
- Using ‘retard’ as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities
  That's actually the one group of people I've never seen anyone call that, lol.
- Sadly that slur's starting to become in vogue again ⚰
  
  I was gonna say the same. I saw the R word casually dropped in a CRT enthusiast group the other day and called the guy out, and a bunch of people stood with me, but nearly as many brushed it off as no big deal.

CRT screens and incandescent lamp.
- Having recently played some retro games on era appropriate hardware, I'm actually a little sad CRTs are gone.
  Obviously they were heavy, hard to manufactur safely, and were filled with toxic materials, but man are they like the perfect anti-aliasing tool for retro games. I'm sure some good filters exist to replicating it on newer monitors tho.
  Overall tho I am glad both of these things are no longer the defacto used tech.
- Yeah those things would get HOT. like, hot enough to melt plastic. And they were really wasteful.

Vinyl (for music, not floors).
- I don't care much about the supposed fidelity, but having a group of mates around each pick an album from my stack is a lot of fun.
  It stops people from focusing too hard on the music and going "oh wait lemme queue up this track" etc.
  
  CDs would fulfill the exact same use-case while being more convenient, space efficient and cheaper.

Not to parrot everyone else but, Smoking for sure. The damn smell.
Another is probally lead based products. Such a health risk and was so pointless

The Hedolith.

The US.

DEI

Not 100% gone yet, but gas powered yard tools are dying. Battery powered tools are just better in 99% of use cases.
Two stroke engines do seem dead though which is awesome, because mixed gas was a massive pain in the ass.
- Oh god I want to gift ALL OF MY NEIGHBOURS BATTERY LEAF BLOWERS. I bought one, it's amazing, and we're about to go into autumn 🤢
- Even better: tools on a wire
  
  It's getting legit difficult to find corded tools, corded mowers are fine for the size of yard I have, but choice in those was extremely limited. Yeah battery ones exist, they're twice the price for the cheapest ones and only go up from there, I can live with an extension cord.
  
  Wired tools are also a pain unless you have a limited scope for movement.
- Really? Some appliances are a great fit for battery but others less so.
  An electric mower just doesn't feel right to me.
  
  The mower is in that 1% unless you have a really small lot. It gets cost prohibitive if you need multiple sets of batteries to finish your lawn.
- I had a 11kW two-stroke motorbike and while it was very important for my rural youth, I do not want it back. Fuck the constant oil refueling, fuck the fumes, fuck the noise. If I ever get a motorbike again, it'd be electric.
- The fumes and noise of those little engines makes me excited that the battery versions are taking over.
- I remember fighting with gas weed whackers endlessly as a teen trying to do chores… having to dick with the choke for a cold start, having to pump prime them (and it being possible to over prime and lock them out), then you had to carry them around and use them with the exhaust at steak searing temperature… and if you didn’t know how to tune an idle they’d just die in your hands if you didn’t goose the throttle occasionally
  This is a great one - don’t miss small gas engines even a little bit lol
  
  Ngl I always thought starting 2-stroke engines was pretty fun. But I certainly don't miss the noise or the horrible pollution.
- Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
  
  Do you keep the battery inside or on a shed? Much better for the battery to be kept indoors if that's an option.
  
  Just gotta have backup batteries that you keep charged.
  
  I'm perfectly content with my little electric chainsaw. Basically I only ever use it if a tree dies or falls in a storm, it actually starts unlike the gas ones I've had...It wouldn't be up to the task of chopping enough wood to heat my house through the winter but for occasional use it's better than gas.
  
  The electric chainsaw is the only one I still don't like being battery powered. Indeed the battery life is too short for most jobs.
  But the noise is also part of the experience, it just doesn't feel as Powerfull without it.

Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn't around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there's just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.

At the risk of becoming too anti-casual, anti-gay slurs were so common in the US up until the mid/late 90s, if you weren't there for it you just have no idea. One of the Bill and Ted movies (I think the first one?) just randomly dropping it in there as a joke, where the slur is the joke, is a good example of just how it was then. There's still bigotry but it's not as casual and pervasive.
- a lot of media used the F slur well into the 2000s. it's pretty shocking to watch nowdays
- It's weird watching average sitcoms from then because of this. The more popular ones are sometimes better but even Seinfeld wasn't great with it.
- Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
  
  He dropped like a thousand of them. He was using it regularly until sometime in the 2010s.
  Eminem is weird cause he leans left but will use any word— save for n word and now f— as long as it rhymes or fits the scheme, then does nearly nothing else offensive. It’s like words are exempt from his morality.
  
  the marshall mathers lp alone has like 4 tracks where he does
  
  As does Tyler, The Creator, a decade later.

Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I've been downloading something for 3 hours.
- We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s...
  
  Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
- @simple@lemm.ee Minitel was even worse. But then, Minitel was a French exclusivity.
  @Servais@discuss.tchncs.de
  
  obligatory quick Sylvqin video (in french though)
  I haven't known the minitel but I guess that the novelty of BBSes compensated the loading time

Henry Kissinger
- May he rot into nothing and be forgotten

The Ozone hole.
- Also acid rain. Two massive environmental Ws that aren't celebrated enough.

The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
- yeah I always wanted to be an adult and now that I am it's fucking awesome

Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).

I'm glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
- furby was so creepy. esp when he bugs out
- Disposable cameras are making a return.
  
  Like 35mm point-and-shoots? That's surprising. I wonder why?

Medicine in general has gotten a lot better. I'm also able to buy stuff like silken tofu without having to drive quite far to find a specialty store that sells it.

Smallpox

CDs and DVDs and (video)casettes. Took up so much room, annoying to use while travelling.
- CDs are great though :( I love that I can rip them and back them up, play them wherever I go, no licences or streaming. :)
  
  So you don't actually love CDs but the fact you can not use them after buying them. You can still buy non DRM music you don't have to subscribe and you could rip or copy streamed music if it wasn't easier to pirate it.
  CDs by the way also are subject to licenses and DRM has started to appear on them. The reason they did not try as hard as with DVDs and Blurays is that Music is trivial to copy, people have been ok with taping from the radio after all. If video on physical media was still a thing you would have plenty of DRM, they'd probably make you buy a newer player after 5 years or so.
- Quality was also very low. Nostalgia blurred our memories, watching/listening that stuff today is wild.
  
  CDs still sound better than streaming.
  DVD and VHS, absolutely they look like trash now.
- We could always bring back the 8 Track Tape!

Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
- Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it's so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you're competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
  
  Is funny how we have all this tech for it and they’ve only managed to enshittify the process. Some sites are going back to the original purpose like indeed but it’s still like tossing your resume into space.
- Pagers certainly still exist.
  Troubleshooting issues with them is a pain too.
  That being said, I've only seen them in the medical field.

Orkut, Flogão (kind of a precursor to instagram, it was mostly used by high schoolers around 2004-6), Skype, Internet Explorer and ActiveX
- And Adobe Flash.
  
  I kinda miss Flash because of the amount of interesting games made with it. Some very cool animations too, good thing Ruffle exists nowadays.
  The problem (besides Adobe buying Macromedia) was every fucking business deciding to make their entire sites in Flash
  
  Literally installed Flash 8 today because it's the comfiest way to animate for me.

phones with curly cords
- Phones with dials.

CRT displays.
- I like to have one around 😅. I like the look and it'll probably survive me
  
  Survive you or outlive you?
- Still using mine daily! Older shows and movies just look better on it.

Susan Wojcicki
- She got replaced by her right hand man, meh

Hair bands.
- I have a whole bunch on my night stand tho
- :(

Nazis
- You haven't been paying attention, have you?
- Let's hope it stays that way

Catholic clergy are done molesting children...
- No, they're not
- Since when? Has Hell frozen over?
  
  A couple years ago it was an issue in Christian religious organizations bad enough that there's plenty of memes about it. How much this is still the case, I do not know

While not technicly gone outright , forums
Hate juggling accounts to be part of communities , some forums (have strict rules|ban VPNs|.) . There's reason they've been succeeded by (subreddits|discord servers|.)
- Sorry, but focused forums are far superior than any of the things that supposed to replace them (Reddit and its -alikes, Discord and its -alikes, etc. etc. etc.).
- Oh, I preferred that. There was much less pressure to conform. All fora had their own "personality", in a way. Small little islands inhabited by people having fun in their own ways.
  
  we need to go back to forums
  
  Isn't this true for Lemmy instances to an extent?
- Discord is so much worse than forums though. Lemmy/reddit are better than every website having their own forums though.
- Hard disagree. I much prefer forums and still am a member of some. The only thing reddit really had going was how broad and easy-to-create it was. It allowed for non-technical people to make cool, niche forums and people to find and participate.
- I miss forums. If I went to a specific car forum, that's what discussion would be about. No random assholes bringing politics into every conversation. No trolls or people just there to make a joke for upvotes.
  
  Or if someone did try to derail the focus of the forum, they'd get booted and it was over.
  
  Or if someone did try to derail the focus of the forum, they'd get booted and it was over.
- Yeah, no, I really miss the forums days.
  In general I miss the pre "just a couple of sites for everything" internet.
  And I mean, there's a reason that Discord added a "forum" channel type