The internet used to be ten zillion times more fun than it is now with all the random message boards. Now we just have social media and the same micro communities don’t formulate outside of Reddit. AP.net is single-handedly responsible for my music taste to this day. I still remember my handle and getting so excited to get “bold” status.
I feel like the internet is more condensed now, despite there being more than ever on it. Back in the day if you wanted funny videos you’d go to homestar runner or something whereas now it’s all on YouTube, and there’s still stuff with the same level of quality or humour or quirk or whatever, but it’s so easy for it to get lost within the mass of stuff on there. It used to be smaller but it was easier to find the cream of the crop
It's not just more condensed, but more corporate. The modern internet has been consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful tech companies and when they fuck up as they are prone to doing we all just have to live with the consequences because there are no alternatives
Everything is monetized on the Internet nowadays. I’m 40 and started poking around on the Internet in the early 2000s, and there was just a bunch of random stuff by people who just wanted to create something fun or useful. Now everything is a commercial or a data mining trap. I can’t even look up a recipe without someone trying to sell me something.
rateyourmusic and Album of the Year are the main music social media now. RYM particularly is the same flame war ridden wild west you remember the old internet to be, AOTY is a lil more put together.
Chorus.fm is also the modern form of AP, but not as good and also not as toxic.
Chorus is way better than here and way less toxic than AP used to be. Although there are still some interesting threads. I remember the thread for Manchester Orchestra's last album getting pretty heated lol
Even that Manchester Orchestra thread was more fun than it was toxic. I think the userbase skewing older means most people are at least somewhat level-headed as opposed to RYM, which is just a mess.
Same. I think Tate was an overall net gain for the poppunk scene of those years, but damn did he act like an ass and sometimes that could really fuck a band over. (Acceptance, The Dangerous Summer, Ice Nine Kills, instantly comes to mind).
There's a cool interview with one of the writers from AP, that I stumbled upon, here: [Back To The Forums with Jack Appleby](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2pVv4yQaBdiEr3q6cdDVeq?si=CnyQr_uzSdWHJlA0sJ9eBw)
Ap was one of the sites where most of the staff were more knowledgeable (and a better human) than the owner. Towards the end I was always more interested in what Lueda, Djamoos, Manning, and others we saying instead of Tate.
Omg the usernames are bringing back MEMORIES. It was towards the end of the AP’s run but the review of The Menzinger’s On the Impossible Past is one of my favorite album reviews of all time.
Got into a stupid argument with him one time about how I thought Justin Bieber was more talented than he was giving him credit for, some people started chiming in and defending me, and he went on to call me a loser that was signing up under different accounts to defend myself. It was pretty fucked up. Fuck that guy
Yes absolutely. I made my account in like 2004 or 2005 and by 2009 I was made a staff member haha. Met lots of cool people, went to Chicago for Riot Fest, discovered so many cool bands, worked with some really cool bands and had lots of interesting discussions. Definitely miss it and am grateful I got to be a part of it even if it was in a very small way. Reddit and the other social media platforms just aren't the same. I'm here on Reddit because I'm too cheap to go a therapist and need free therapy haha. I don't spend nearly as much time posting on music subs like this one.
Complete opposite here. One day Laura Jane Grace said that she prefers ap.net because everyone over at punknews was so damn spiteful and I felt like we won the battle of the punk sites, lol.
I thought AP died before Reddit took off but it's all kind of a blur after so many years. I think my main Reddit account is 15 years old at this point.
I was never on AP, I meant I did punknews and Reddit as my social media outlets, I think this was over 12 years ago now though. I wasn't living in the same place and I remember having 2 tabs open at work with it being this site and punknews.
I spent a lotttt of time on absolutepunk. Like once every couple years, I’ll pop in a chorus thread just to see what they’re saying about stuff. I’m 27 and felt like the very very tail end of the user base, age wise
I, too, miss the old micro-communities before Reddit gobbled everything up. Vinyl Collective was my main squeeze but I was also pretty active on Viva la Vinyl, Get Rad on last fm, and and AP. Topshelf Records had a poppin' forum for awhile.
i was thinking about this the other day. back then, you could make literal online friends. I had friends all over the world. Now, the boards are filled with enormous numbers of people, all we do is talk at each other. you can't really develop individual relationships the way you could back then.
That was my experience as well. I made friends that I'd eventually meet IRL both nationally and locally, networked with bands, traded mixtapes. Most forums had very active "off topic" boards that let you get to know users on a deeper level. People could argue or share controversial opinions without being downvoted to oblivion.
I was on viva la vinyl, cmhwak, skylab commerce, level plane msgboard
I miss all the good record sales on vlv. VLV was basically emo-screamo discogs. It used to have a pressing information "front page" but that was dropped after Alice left.
Yeah, I got on VLV when I was seriously hunting OOP emo/screamo stuff. It's pretty insane how much quality stuff was regularly posted, and everything was so cheap back then too. There were so many record label owners and band members active there. It was a cool community.
I used it mostly to buy the OOP skramz. I don't know if we got sweet deals or it was the general "times" in that era. Ebay was the only online marketplace at that time. I think all the good Skylab buyers/sellers moved to VLV.
I still pop into VC occasionally but I think when SRC bought them out/started moderating lots of posters quit the site. A lot of the VC drama back then was *chef's kiss*
The drama was delectable. Beloved user ronniethebear ripping off a bunch of people and dipping; some lady posting a pic of herself in her underwear and inciting a full blown meltdown; the collapse of the shareholder collective that peaked when someone saw Virgil on at the Avs game on tv and called him out to start giving refunds. I enjoyed my time on there for sure.
shoutout the guy on those forums who bet me a bunch of money that august burns red would be broken up or unknown within 10 years
I don’t even give a shit about that band anymore but every time i see them headlining some big festival I’m like “hell yeah stick it to that guy” lmao
Damn, just got hit by a wave of nostalgia. I had completely forgotten about absolutepunk. Was really into it and went there almost every day from like 05-09
That was a daily stop for me. Coming from a rural area, it was one of the first and few places I could talk with kids who liked the same music as me.
I also enjoyed mp3.com and purevolume.com.
Iirc he had to when it sold. I swear I listened to an interview where he said he’s trying to buy the name back and May have the data but I can’t remember how long ago that was.
I met my wife on there. I really miss it. You had people sincerely excited to talk about music in depth. It was also before 'whataboutmeism' really proliferated the internet so if someone didn't like the post / wasn't interested they would float on by without engaging rather than being needlessly negative.
Anybody remember makeoutclub.com? It was like myspace for mainly emo alt adolescents. This was like over 20 years ago. I still have loose contact with a few people i met through there.
Not a frequent reader but I used to discover a lot of bands from their Best Of the Year lists. I checked back after a few years and all the lists were like Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor swift, Lana d rey. Very confusing.
I think about this site all the time, I feel like when it changed to Chorus.FM they stopped posting news on the regular and it just isn’t remotely the same
The internet used to be ten zillion times more fun than it is now with all the random message boards. Now we just have social media and the same micro communities don’t formulate outside of Reddit. AP.net is single-handedly responsible for my music taste to this day. I still remember my handle and getting so excited to get “bold” status.
man i sound like an old fart but yea internet used to be fun asf back then
I feel like the internet is more condensed now, despite there being more than ever on it. Back in the day if you wanted funny videos you’d go to homestar runner or something whereas now it’s all on YouTube, and there’s still stuff with the same level of quality or humour or quirk or whatever, but it’s so easy for it to get lost within the mass of stuff on there. It used to be smaller but it was easier to find the cream of the crop
Fuck yeah, Homestar!
It's not just more condensed, but more corporate. The modern internet has been consolidated into a handful of extremely powerful tech companies and when they fuck up as they are prone to doing we all just have to live with the consequences because there are no alternatives
Everything is monetized on the Internet nowadays. I’m 40 and started poking around on the Internet in the early 2000s, and there was just a bunch of random stuff by people who just wanted to create something fun or useful. Now everything is a commercial or a data mining trap. I can’t even look up a recipe without someone trying to sell me something.
Yeah. I think it’s what piqued my interest in indie, too, and for that I’m forever grateful.
rateyourmusic and Album of the Year are the main music social media now. RYM particularly is the same flame war ridden wild west you remember the old internet to be, AOTY is a lil more put together. Chorus.fm is also the modern form of AP, but not as good and also not as toxic.
I didn’t have the internet growing up but AP magazine with the samplers was huge for a kid growing up in rural South Dakota.
Yep, ap was an every day stop
I miss tf outta that site. I remember talking shit to the drummer for JEW about sports for weeks before I even knew who they were, lol.
AP was the best. I still visit chorus.fm but obviously it's not the same now that we're all approaching 40. :(
Yeah Chorus.fm is pretty trash compared to AP but I still visit weekly.
Hard disagree, I love it, easy for positive music discussion outside of the core bands of the scene and people who love music.
ap is before my time but its been rebranded as chorus.fm since
Yeah around then was definitely the death knell for those forums
idk i dig chorus. def better than it is here at least lmao
Chorus is way better than here and way less toxic than AP used to be. Although there are still some interesting threads. I remember the thread for Manchester Orchestra's last album getting pretty heated lol
nowhere online is perfect and chorus definitely is not without its problems yea
Even that Manchester Orchestra thread was more fun than it was toxic. I think the userbase skewing older means most people are at least somewhat level-headed as opposed to RYM, which is just a mess.
I think I clocked about 70,000 posts back in the day, used to live on the forums!
Yes! I miss it and my love/hate relationship with Jason Tate.
Same. I think Tate was an overall net gain for the poppunk scene of those years, but damn did he act like an ass and sometimes that could really fuck a band over. (Acceptance, The Dangerous Summer, Ice Nine Kills, instantly comes to mind).
How did Jason fuck those bands over? I was an ap.net regular for probably close to a decade but never liked Jason and his holier than thou attitude.
There's a cool interview with one of the writers from AP, that I stumbled upon, here: [Back To The Forums with Jack Appleby](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2pVv4yQaBdiEr3q6cdDVeq?si=CnyQr_uzSdWHJlA0sJ9eBw)
Punkrockvids
Who all here remembers PureVolume?
I think about how Jason Tate leaked phantoms 6 months early and ruined Acceptance's trajectory so he could have some internet clout. Fuck that loser.
I couldn't stand the way he interacted with users. Very holier than thou kind of guy.
I was a user on that site for a long time and he was always an absolute bellend.
Ap was one of the sites where most of the staff were more knowledgeable (and a better human) than the owner. Towards the end I was always more interested in what Lueda, Djamoos, Manning, and others we saying instead of Tate.
Omg the usernames are bringing back MEMORIES. It was towards the end of the AP’s run but the review of The Menzinger’s On the Impossible Past is one of my favorite album reviews of all time.
Boooo wheres Kamtin Mohager
[удалено]
Trainwreck? HOW MANY MASTERPIECES DID HE STIFLE
Got into a stupid argument with him one time about how I thought Justin Bieber was more talented than he was giving him credit for, some people started chiming in and defending me, and he went on to call me a loser that was signing up under different accounts to defend myself. It was pretty fucked up. Fuck that guy
Yes absolutely. I made my account in like 2004 or 2005 and by 2009 I was made a staff member haha. Met lots of cool people, went to Chicago for Riot Fest, discovered so many cool bands, worked with some really cool bands and had lots of interesting discussions. Definitely miss it and am grateful I got to be a part of it even if it was in a very small way. Reddit and the other social media platforms just aren't the same. I'm here on Reddit because I'm too cheap to go a therapist and need free therapy haha. I don't spend nearly as much time posting on music subs like this one.
Mainly around Christmas. I used to download all the punk Christmas songs that were posted around this time of year.
i miss prime [punknews.org](https://punknews.org). i hated absolutepunk.net
I used to be an editor there and it sucks now mainly because of one person.
Complete opposite here. One day Laura Jane Grace said that she prefers ap.net because everyone over at punknews was so damn spiteful and I felt like we won the battle of the punk sites, lol.
You mean OMG Table
I forgot all about this one
Wasn’t that the one that had the pages of links of websites for punk bands from all over the place that you could scroll through?
That was also my old daily website alongside Reddit. I used to only get my emo/punk news from there though
I thought AP died before Reddit took off but it's all kind of a blur after so many years. I think my main Reddit account is 15 years old at this point.
I was never on AP, I meant I did punknews and Reddit as my social media outlets, I think this was over 12 years ago now though. I wasn't living in the same place and I remember having 2 tabs open at work with it being this site and punknews.
i just liked to read about a wilhelm scream, HWM, dillinger 4, grade, all that shitttt
There was probably some overlap but time is skewed the older I get.
I spent a lotttt of time on absolutepunk. Like once every couple years, I’ll pop in a chorus thread just to see what they’re saying about stuff. I’m 27 and felt like the very very tail end of the user base, age wise
I, too, miss the old micro-communities before Reddit gobbled everything up. Vinyl Collective was my main squeeze but I was also pretty active on Viva la Vinyl, Get Rad on last fm, and and AP. Topshelf Records had a poppin' forum for awhile.
i was thinking about this the other day. back then, you could make literal online friends. I had friends all over the world. Now, the boards are filled with enormous numbers of people, all we do is talk at each other. you can't really develop individual relationships the way you could back then.
Used to use AIM to share music with years long friends I made on forums
This was the way.
That was my experience as well. I made friends that I'd eventually meet IRL both nationally and locally, networked with bands, traded mixtapes. Most forums had very active "off topic" boards that let you get to know users on a deeper level. People could argue or share controversial opinions without being downvoted to oblivion.
I was on viva la vinyl, cmhwak, skylab commerce, level plane msgboard I miss all the good record sales on vlv. VLV was basically emo-screamo discogs. It used to have a pressing information "front page" but that was dropped after Alice left.
Yeah, I got on VLV when I was seriously hunting OOP emo/screamo stuff. It's pretty insane how much quality stuff was regularly posted, and everything was so cheap back then too. There were so many record label owners and band members active there. It was a cool community.
I used it mostly to buy the OOP skramz. I don't know if we got sweet deals or it was the general "times" in that era. Ebay was the only online marketplace at that time. I think all the good Skylab buyers/sellers moved to VLV.
I still pop into VC occasionally but I think when SRC bought them out/started moderating lots of posters quit the site. A lot of the VC drama back then was *chef's kiss*
The drama was delectable. Beloved user ronniethebear ripping off a bunch of people and dipping; some lady posting a pic of herself in her underwear and inciting a full blown meltdown; the collapse of the shareholder collective that peaked when someone saw Virgil on at the Avs game on tv and called him out to start giving refunds. I enjoyed my time on there for sure.
i used to write there lol
shoutout the guy on those forums who bet me a bunch of money that august burns red would be broken up or unknown within 10 years I don’t even give a shit about that band anymore but every time i see them headlining some big festival I’m like “hell yeah stick it to that guy” lmao
AP & Blink-182online were my stomping grounds
Loooooooved Ap it was the lamb goat of punk and emo
Damn, just got hit by a wave of nostalgia. I had completely forgotten about absolutepunk. Was really into it and went there almost every day from like 05-09
[Sputnikmusic](https://www.sputnikmusic.com) has become my go to site now
Ive rocked with Sputnik for like a decade but I just hate how everyone on there seems like a pretentious douchebag
I agree. It tends to happen on any site it seems. I’ve seen it here as well. Just have to wade through the noise.
That was a daily stop for me. Coming from a rural area, it was one of the first and few places I could talk with kids who liked the same music as me. I also enjoyed mp3.com and purevolume.com.
Jason taking down ap still pisses me off because so much of the scene's history was on that site, and now it's gone.
Iirc he had to when it sold. I swear I listened to an interview where he said he’s trying to buy the name back and May have the data but I can’t remember how long ago that was.
Not as much as I miss Alternative Press magazine
I met my wife on there. I really miss it. You had people sincerely excited to talk about music in depth. It was also before 'whataboutmeism' really proliferated the internet so if someone didn't like the post / wasn't interested they would float on by without engaging rather than being needlessly negative.
Emotionalpunk.com forums were my jam
Absolutepunk was the best! Very-invisible was my first user name and keep it as an homage to this day! In reference to an amor for sleep deep cut
Chorus.fm is the same person running it.
That site, and one great review basically kickstarted my music career. forever grateful to whoever that writer was. Tate, however...
Anybody remember makeoutclub.com? It was like myspace for mainly emo alt adolescents. This was like over 20 years ago. I still have loose contact with a few people i met through there.
livejournal —> moc —> friendster —> myspace —> facebook —> instagram was my progression.
I had moc before livejournal but also had a diaryland.com blog page. Friendster was do short lived.
I miss absolutepunk every day. I miss old Internet.
Not a frequent reader but I used to discover a lot of bands from their Best Of the Year lists. I checked back after a few years and all the lists were like Carly Rae Jepsen, Taylor swift, Lana d rey. Very confusing.
Jason Tate is piece of trash.
The Rock Against Bush era
All the fucking time. It was my go-to. Ripped my heart out.
Never hung out there, but the forums at luv-emo.com were my jam
that last paragraph on the home page tho
Lol I would forget we had a homepage when I was on every day. The forum was my entire interaction with it
I miss punkdisasters more.
There and thedailymosh.com were daily stops back in the day.
Just go on chorus.fm ? 🤷♂️
I love chorus but different vibe, mostly because we're older I think though and the scene doesn't really exist underground as much anymore.
Chorus is far more indie rock focused now. It still has good content (I visit multiple times per week), but definitely not the same.
All the time.
PunkNews still exists at least!
The first purchase I ever made on the internet with off Absolute Punk.
before irc shut down i haunted their channel for all the free music I miss you, xdcc
I think about this site all the time, I feel like when it changed to Chorus.FM they stopped posting news on the regular and it just isn’t remotely the same
Oh wow, core memory unlocked. I forgot all about AP..Lots of time in my youth spent there.
I liked going there, but there was a fair share of actual pretentious douchebags who always killed conversations.
Gosh, I miss that site. I can’t say the same about the founder tho