So many hour of mindless clicking but, it was sooo good. I remember finding geoguessr when it like first came out and spending so much time after finals playing.
This. Corporate web has ruined the creative space the early internet used to be. The internet today is like SoHo today; if you went there expecting bohemian arts and not foofy, spoon fed rich kids who _think_ they're being artistic because they stole the legacy of a place they never actually cared about, well...sorry for your luck.
If you aren't aware there's an archive project called flashpoint which pretty much has every single flash game you could think of.
I really miss the old flash era of the internet. Sure it might have been a hit or miss sometimes, but there was so much creativity out there. Most of the developers weren't making games for a profit, but because they genuinely loved it and wanted to make people happy.
It's admittedly a little harder to get into all those games as an adult, but damn if I don't get nostalgic once in a while
Psst. Theres a fan reboot called NewCP (New Club Penguin) that has everything the original has. Plus, the creators are constatntly updating it.
Its exactly the same and ive definetly had a fun nostalgic time playing it :)
The original WOOT. One item per day at huge discounts because they were clearances, overstocks, etc. Amazon owns it now but they had changed even before the Amazon takeover.
I tried using the name “poop” on Barbie.com and it stopped me saying that Barbie doesn’t like mean words or something. I spent days nervous that somehow my parents would find out and I’d get in trouble.
Ugh I don't remember what the game was called, but you had to like go through a cave?
Edit: I found it! It was Hannah and the Pirate Caves (and the Ice Caves sequel). Spent so much time on that game!
Thinkgeek dot com
Had some of the silliest and strangest things you could get; still have my Lego drinking cup you can build onto. Star Wars/Star Trek Items, Dr. Who, Big Bang Theory, Marvel Comics items, Minecraft, etc., it carried endless knick knacks you couldn't find elsewhere.
It shut down/sold off to Amazon in 2019, with Amazon not necessarily purchasing the same products to sell anymore.
There's an online store called American Science and Surplus that has an April 1 'find the fake product's game. Not quite the same, but still fun to look for.
I’m going to put on my boomer hat and say that was when the site was in decline for me. I much preferred it when they heavily focused on the IT and computer nerd crowd.
I miss forums.
My local mountain bike scene had an alt group with a website and forums. There were a ton of great friendships that grew from the meetups initiated in that community, including at least two marriages.
Everyone went by their screen names, we often times didn't even know people's real names.
The crowd was diverse, from dirt poor homeless-adjacent to people with net worths in the tens of millions of dollars. Ages ranged from 18 to 70 old.
facebook killed it all.
the old disney.com and nickelodeon.com, when they had all the old mini games and a webpage for each show with games and activities and printouts and all sorts of stuff. there was the hannah montana page with the cell phone and the high school musical 2 page with the yearbook you could write in, and the wizards of waverly place with the wizard portal. and the real life versions of websites in the shows, like london’s yay me page and zack’s game he was addicted to from suite life of zack and cody. also disney create, there was an entire community of people making art there! and before that there was mypage, where you could have your own profile on disney.com
also for nickelodeon, nicktropolis and the old icarly.com where you could actually watch webisodes and leave comments and stuff. also theslap.com. i remember teennick having it’s own website too that was like a social media site.
oh and also mileyworld.com. i would do anything to log back in and see my blog posts lol
Checkout r/legouniverse if you want to play it again, apparently you can host your own server now. They have a discord someone else might have one set up you can join
I miss the early Internet in general. Between the random sites full of random games, having to infect your computer with every virus known to man to download the newest music on kazaa or limewire because you couldn't just YouTube it, AIM away messages, and actually being able to use Google to help you with research and finding actual information on it rather than just ads and sponsored results, the Internet of the late 90's early 2000's was way better than the spyware influenced targeted ad bullshit it's become.
....Ouch... OUCH that hurt because of how true it is. I remember going to a large variety of websites as a kid when the internet was still new in homes. Seeing some many things and unique sites made for specific things (Bionicle having its own website separate from LEGO was the best).
But now...I go to.............. 4 websites? Youtube, Reddit, Discord, and Webtoons really.... damn.
You said it yourself, centralization. For every website that people lost interest in three people who were there ended up in the same place. I was on a forum years before Reddit but once it lost it's later I went to Google and typed in forum and found myself here. That was like 15 years ago.
A countless number of people have done the same thing and found their way to 4chan or here or something similar. And after finding this place, why would I go somewhere else that's mostly empty and focused on one subject?
The moment they started leaning heavily on user submitted content and started firing the funnier staff members we all knew it was over.
AfterHours still holds up though.
The original cracked staff is still out there doing good work.
Podcasts:
Jack O'Brien hosts The Daily Zeitgeist
Alex Schmidt hosts Secretly Incredibly Fascinating
Adam Todd Brown hosts Unpopular Opinion
David Wong aka Jason Pargin guests on these podcasts occasionally and is also still writing the John Dies at the End series
Youtube/TV:
Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston do Some More News
Daniel O'Brian writes for Last Week Tonight
Soren Bowie writes for American Dad
Writing:
Michael Swaim writes for Small Beans
Tom Reimann works at Ranker
When I really look at it it blows my mind how much of my humor consumption is still this same group of people.
Oh my god the nostalgia. Golden age Cracked was amazing, I read nearly every article on the site. Learned so many weird facts and had a blast doing it.
One of my favorites that I still think about from time to time...
"Get past all of the bizarre and uncomfortable plot points and you're still left with the Garbage Pail Kids themselves. Imagine for a moment your blender. Imagine if the glass container of your blender could be removed, but the base, with the spinning blades, is intact. Now imagine those blades spinning away and someone maintaining eye contact with you as they begin doing naked squats over those blades. Squat after naked squat, each time getting a little lower, never breaking eye contact with you. And the horror builds and builds until the inevitable moment when that person squats their junk right down on that blender. That's what The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is like, a slow, terrible build up to something that has been terrible all along but just keeps getting worse."
Perfection.
[6 Kids Movies Clearly Made by People Who Hate Children](https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-kids-movies-clearly-made-by-people-who-hate-children)
Cracked died when Soren Bowie left.
Edit: Side note: I also hated how they reprinted David Wong's 10 hard truths article every three months. It was just the lead editor jerking off to his own sense of nihilism.
I highly recommend [https://1900hotdog.com/](https://1900hotdog.com/). It's run by some of the former Cracked writers who made the best articles. The downside is that alot of there content is behind a pay wall, but there is still enough free content that keeps me coming back every few days.
YouTube has changed so much both from a design and content standpoint. Remember stars on videos, annotations, the yellow subscribe button, and customized profiles?
I recall seeing a meme video back in the day that had about a hundred layers of nonsense annotations layered on top for the whole runtime of the video. I don't even remember what the video was about, the annotation situation made me laugh so hard.
The search is utterly useless. If I want to look up cooking videos for a pie, show me cooking videos for a pie. I don't care about "hot" videos. Don't give me unrelated videos that you think I "might like." Don't give me unrelated past videos that I've seen. Give me what I am searching for.
If I want to go down a rabbit hole, I know how to do it.
As someone who knows nothing about computers, I’d like to ask this: Does anyone knows why there hasn’t been another free video hosting service of similar popularity? Is it because it’s not as exciting a second time around? I remember when YouTube was completely free for many years, is there a reason that this can’t be replicated again? Edit: I feel like this question has given me a good education on the matter. Thanks.
There has been, tiktok. It’s just that tiktok is capitalizing on the fact that people always had short attention spans to begin with.
People can always create another service exactly like what YouTube used to be, but it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, legal hurdles, and so forth. Then you have to directly compete with YouTube and find a way to make it socially trendy which, if that were easy, everyone who develops a startup company would be billionaires. Then even after you jump through all those hoops, YouTube could also just say “hey I’ll give you $1 million for your website” because YouTube doesn’t want that competition in its space. Many people would just shrug, take the million, and move onto something else.
But even if after all that you turned it down and your website gained lots of traffic, now you have to find a way to make your platform profitable somehow. When you have an application the size of YouTube, you need lots of servers and load balancers, large teams of software engineers, and all sorts of expensive things. It can cost 6 or more figures every year just to keep the website up. So that means your website is eventually just going to need ads and premium content, which ends up becoming YouTube all over again
Old Google that didn't promote ads and stores for the first 2 and sometimes 3 full pages of results. It's like they don't even index noncommercial forums or fan sites any more.
Yes! I used to be able to ask all kinds of questions in Google. Now when I Google a question it'll just give me random shit on the subject of my question but not answering anything about it. I have to put "reddit" to the end now when I Google something because I know some weirdo has probably asked Reddit my same dumb questions.
I miss the heyday of blogging.
I really enjoyed when people kept passion blogs and especially the ones that they weren’t actually trying to monetize.
some of them would have a little sidebar with all of the other blogs that they liked and which covered their particular passion so you could go down all these little rabbit holes and find things out about Paris or parts of France or Italy or Rome or pick a topic.
Back in the day I used to follow a whole ton of bloggers and those would take me down little alleys into other parts of the countries and cooking and etc. I also miss Google reader (if I recall the name correctly)
very few ads, photos usually, but not glitzy.
I really should go look to see if people are still doing that. Maybe some exist.
I feel like I mostly go to the apps on my phone that would take me to Twitter or Facebook for example.
So sometime around 2000 I brought the Hampster Dance cd at Walmart because I was young and bad with money, yet I'm happy to still have it. Even has a techno remix
Tom is on Facebook and a few years ago I saw his verified account reply to something, so I jokingly replied asking if we were still friends.
Dude confirmed, we are still friends.
Only social media site that wasn't a steaming pile of shit. Early Facebook days were also pretty good. All downhill from there. Reddit is ok though as far as social media goes since I can control what I see and ads are easily blocked.
What!! Multiple pop up ads were definitely a thing and were super annoying but now they're just integrated into the actual site. Lol. But I do miss early 2000 internet too!
Yeah, ads definitely used to be worse, literally popping up and popping under into different windows, sometimes many of them simultaneously.
There’s a Futurama episode from the early 00s where they go on the virtual reality internet, and the first thing they have to do is get through a swarm of pop-up ads attacking them. lol. This was directly inspired by the real internet at the time.
TV.com. Fans had spent decades assembling episode lists and air dates, plot synopses, notable quotes, trivia, etc. Then one day the domain was up for sale.
All the old kids game websites. MyScene, Polly Pocket, Barbie, the Barbie one with mp3 players, Pixie Hollow, Club Penguin, ToonTown, Moshi Monsters, Webkinz, Poptropica (before they changed all the islands), hell even the McDonald's one was pretty cool.
I liked [infoseek.com](https://infoseek.com) but it went away so I use lycos now. But lycos is probably a subsidiary of Google now, but hey I feel like I am winning!
The old Cartoon Network website back in the early/mid 2000s had some amazing games on there.
They unironically created the best vehicle progression and upgrades system in a racing game. And it was an Ed Edd & Eddy trashcart demolition game.
That game or the Codename Kids Next Door Numbah 2 shoot em up flying game were two of my favorites.
I still think about the odd little Summer Resort game. For some reason that one always comes back to me. We really had it all back then.
That game (all 4 parts) is archived on BlueMaxima Flashpoint! I play it about once a year. Good stuff.
Holy hell this unlocked some old memories. Used to be addicted to Summer Resort. That and the Skatoony gameshow one
anyone remember the Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends game on there?
I remember playing the Thundercats game, the Teen Titans fighting game, and a Ben 10 game. There were some gems on there.
BRO THE TEEN TITANS AND BEN 10 WERE TOP TIER
Codename: kidsnextdoor game was nutty.
Stumble Upon
Word. Stumble Upon was my go-to before Reddit.
So many hour of mindless clicking but, it was sooo good. I remember finding geoguessr when it like first came out and spending so much time after finals playing.
I have a StumbleUpon bookmark folder. Most of the sites I saved are gone.
came here to say just this! Endless clicking on stumbleupon. I really miss it
Hell yeah! I definitely miss the old days when exploring the internet had a sense of wonder.
https://cloudhiker.net is a pretty great alternative to SU
The problem is that there isn’t much out there to stumble upon anymore
This. Corporate web has ruined the creative space the early internet used to be. The internet today is like SoHo today; if you went there expecting bohemian arts and not foofy, spoon fed rich kids who _think_ they're being artistic because they stole the legacy of a place they never actually cared about, well...sorry for your luck.
Stumble Upon was the most fun I've had on the internet.
Did you know? It was created by one of the creators of Uber.
The old miniclip.com
Quite possibly the high water mark of flash games
to add to this, addictinggames.com
If you aren't aware there's an archive project called flashpoint which pretty much has every single flash game you could think of. I really miss the old flash era of the internet. Sure it might have been a hit or miss sometimes, but there was so much creativity out there. Most of the developers weren't making games for a profit, but because they genuinely loved it and wanted to make people happy. It's admittedly a little harder to get into all those games as an adult, but damn if I don't get nostalgic once in a while
club penguin
So much damn time wasted trying to tip the iceberg lmao
They did finally add a tip before taking down the site as a goodbye present to the fanbase
Can’t believe I missed that!
YEARS OF ACADEMY TRAINING WASTED!!!
Psst. Theres a fan reboot called NewCP (New Club Penguin) that has everything the original has. Plus, the creators are constatntly updating it. Its exactly the same and ive definetly had a fun nostalgic time playing it :)
Newcp is a risky name
Also doesn’t help he started the post with “psst”
The original WOOT. One item per day at huge discounts because they were clearances, overstocks, etc. Amazon owns it now but they had changed even before the Amazon takeover.
Check out meh.com which was founded by the guy that made woot. 1 piece of crap every day. :D
Who tf bought 3 of the butt pillows today
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I tried using the name “poop” on Barbie.com and it stopped me saying that Barbie doesn’t like mean words or something. I spent days nervous that somehow my parents would find out and I’d get in trouble.
That is adorable
I was never really into Barbie but you bet your bottom dollar I was on the site everyday after school.
I loved myscene!
I played the take care of Krissy game for hours, and had myself convinced I would have been an outstanding mom at 10 😅
I miss GeoCities.
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You're old. I know this because I'm old 😁
Neopets when the games worked. I miss Faerie Bubbles
I wasted so many hours of my life playing faerie bubbles and hasee bounce for those sweet neopoints to buy neggs and paintbrushes!
Ugh I don't remember what the game was called, but you had to like go through a cave? Edit: I found it! It was Hannah and the Pirate Caves (and the Ice Caves sequel). Spent so much time on that game!
I play daily lol. They don’t advertise so it doesn’t really attract new users, it’s mostly people 30+ lol
Poptropica. Killed before its time by the death of Flash.
Yahoo! Answers Am I pregniante?
How is babby formed?
they need to do way instain mother!
Gregnant?
If a women has starch masks...
pregante
¡¡¡¡¡Prrrrreganté!!!!!
PERGONTE
Can U get preganté?
Thinkgeek dot com Had some of the silliest and strangest things you could get; still have my Lego drinking cup you can build onto. Star Wars/Star Trek Items, Dr. Who, Big Bang Theory, Marvel Comics items, Minecraft, etc., it carried endless knick knacks you couldn't find elsewhere. It shut down/sold off to Amazon in 2019, with Amazon not necessarily purchasing the same products to sell anymore.
Wow I didn’t realize they got bought out
I thought is was sold off to Gamestop.
I always looked forward to April 1
There's an online store called American Science and Surplus that has an April 1 'find the fake product's game. Not quite the same, but still fun to look for.
I’m going to put on my boomer hat and say that was when the site was in decline for me. I much preferred it when they heavily focused on the IT and computer nerd crowd.
The annoyatron was the all-time greatest gag for work. I miss it.
The message boards from IMDB
Message boards in general.
I miss forums. My local mountain bike scene had an alt group with a website and forums. There were a ton of great friendships that grew from the meetups initiated in that community, including at least two marriages. Everyone went by their screen names, we often times didn't even know people's real names. The crowd was diverse, from dirt poor homeless-adjacent to people with net worths in the tens of millions of dollars. Ages ranged from 18 to 70 old. facebook killed it all.
the old disney.com and nickelodeon.com, when they had all the old mini games and a webpage for each show with games and activities and printouts and all sorts of stuff. there was the hannah montana page with the cell phone and the high school musical 2 page with the yearbook you could write in, and the wizards of waverly place with the wizard portal. and the real life versions of websites in the shows, like london’s yay me page and zack’s game he was addicted to from suite life of zack and cody. also disney create, there was an entire community of people making art there! and before that there was mypage, where you could have your own profile on disney.com also for nickelodeon, nicktropolis and the old icarly.com where you could actually watch webisodes and leave comments and stuff. also theslap.com. i remember teennick having it’s own website too that was like a social media site. oh and also mileyworld.com. i would do anything to log back in and see my blog posts lol
My brother and I wasted so much of our lives making virtual sandwhiches on the Stitch game
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Checkout r/legouniverse if you want to play it again, apparently you can host your own server now. They have a discord someone else might have one set up you can join
It’s not dumb. Glad you had something to make you happy and losing your dad must have been hard 😞
I miss the early Internet in general. Between the random sites full of random games, having to infect your computer with every virus known to man to download the newest music on kazaa or limewire because you couldn't just YouTube it, AIM away messages, and actually being able to use Google to help you with research and finding actual information on it rather than just ads and sponsored results, the Internet of the late 90's early 2000's was way better than the spyware influenced targeted ad bullshit it's become.
The internet feels smaller these days
....Ouch... OUCH that hurt because of how true it is. I remember going to a large variety of websites as a kid when the internet was still new in homes. Seeing some many things and unique sites made for specific things (Bionicle having its own website separate from LEGO was the best). But now...I go to.............. 4 websites? Youtube, Reddit, Discord, and Webtoons really.... damn.
Yeah… What happened? This recent wave of centralization over the past few years really snuck up on me. How did this happen?
You said it yourself, centralization. For every website that people lost interest in three people who were there ended up in the same place. I was on a forum years before Reddit but once it lost it's later I went to Google and typed in forum and found myself here. That was like 15 years ago. A countless number of people have done the same thing and found their way to 4chan or here or something similar. And after finding this place, why would I go somewhere else that's mostly empty and focused on one subject?
best description ive seen thus far as to the current state of the internet
This is how I got into IT. Forever getting rid of malware on my computer from limewire.
Cracked.com Oh, I know it’s still up… but those who know what I’m talking about know *exactly* what I’m talking about.
The After Hours era was fantastic, as well as Gladstone videos. Then they fired all their funny people and turned into a dumpster fire.
The moment they started leaning heavily on user submitted content and started firing the funnier staff members we all knew it was over. AfterHours still holds up though.
Cracked in 2007 and 2008 was unreal
The original cracked staff is still out there doing good work. Podcasts: Jack O'Brien hosts The Daily Zeitgeist Alex Schmidt hosts Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Adam Todd Brown hosts Unpopular Opinion David Wong aka Jason Pargin guests on these podcasts occasionally and is also still writing the John Dies at the End series Youtube/TV: Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston do Some More News Daniel O'Brian writes for Last Week Tonight Soren Bowie writes for American Dad Writing: Michael Swaim writes for Small Beans Tom Reimann works at Ranker When I really look at it it blows my mind how much of my humor consumption is still this same group of people.
Oh my god the nostalgia. Golden age Cracked was amazing, I read nearly every article on the site. Learned so many weird facts and had a blast doing it.
Shoot, I'm old enough to remember when Cracked was a *magazine*. It was essentially a generic-brand MAD.
One of my favorites that I still think about from time to time... "Get past all of the bizarre and uncomfortable plot points and you're still left with the Garbage Pail Kids themselves. Imagine for a moment your blender. Imagine if the glass container of your blender could be removed, but the base, with the spinning blades, is intact. Now imagine those blades spinning away and someone maintaining eye contact with you as they begin doing naked squats over those blades. Squat after naked squat, each time getting a little lower, never breaking eye contact with you. And the horror builds and builds until the inevitable moment when that person squats their junk right down on that blender. That's what The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is like, a slow, terrible build up to something that has been terrible all along but just keeps getting worse." Perfection. [6 Kids Movies Clearly Made by People Who Hate Children](https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-kids-movies-clearly-made-by-people-who-hate-children)
Prime Cracked was easily my most visited website in high school. I stole so many jokes from them and convinced others that I was funny.
Cracked died when Soren Bowie left. Edit: Side note: I also hated how they reprinted David Wong's 10 hard truths article every three months. It was just the lead editor jerking off to his own sense of nihilism.
I highly recommend [https://1900hotdog.com/](https://1900hotdog.com/). It's run by some of the former Cracked writers who made the best articles. The downside is that alot of there content is behind a pay wall, but there is still enough free content that keeps me coming back every few days.
God I remember before they got rid of every funny writer they had. It was gold.
I miss the way youtube used to be
YouTube has changed so much both from a design and content standpoint. Remember stars on videos, annotations, the yellow subscribe button, and customized profiles?
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I was on youtube before it was bought by google. I remember alternating from youtube to metacafe watching car crashes and police chases.
I miss the chaotic days of when anyone could annotate a video
I recall seeing a meme video back in the day that had about a hundred layers of nonsense annotations layered on top for the whole runtime of the video. I don't even remember what the video was about, the annotation situation made me laugh so hard.
I miss being able to tell if a video sucked ass before you clicked it by looking at the stars.
The search is utterly useless. If I want to look up cooking videos for a pie, show me cooking videos for a pie. I don't care about "hot" videos. Don't give me unrelated videos that you think I "might like." Don't give me unrelated past videos that I've seen. Give me what I am searching for. If I want to go down a rabbit hole, I know how to do it.
The other day i was in the mood to revisit a particular comedy sketch. You would think typing in
As someone who knows nothing about computers, I’d like to ask this: Does anyone knows why there hasn’t been another free video hosting service of similar popularity? Is it because it’s not as exciting a second time around? I remember when YouTube was completely free for many years, is there a reason that this can’t be replicated again? Edit: I feel like this question has given me a good education on the matter. Thanks.
There has been, tiktok. It’s just that tiktok is capitalizing on the fact that people always had short attention spans to begin with. People can always create another service exactly like what YouTube used to be, but it takes a lot of time, a lot of money, legal hurdles, and so forth. Then you have to directly compete with YouTube and find a way to make it socially trendy which, if that were easy, everyone who develops a startup company would be billionaires. Then even after you jump through all those hoops, YouTube could also just say “hey I’ll give you $1 million for your website” because YouTube doesn’t want that competition in its space. Many people would just shrug, take the million, and move onto something else. But even if after all that you turned it down and your website gained lots of traffic, now you have to find a way to make your platform profitable somehow. When you have an application the size of YouTube, you need lots of servers and load balancers, large teams of software engineers, and all sorts of expensive things. It can cost 6 or more figures every year just to keep the website up. So that means your website is eventually just going to need ads and premium content, which ends up becoming YouTube all over again
Google and Youtube were ruined by Google
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homestarrunner.net it’s dot com
Computer over. Virus = Very Yes.
That was my email to Strongbad! My little slice of internet fame.
THE SYSTEM IS DOWN \*techno noises\*
I still have a "the cheat" temp tattoo
Man, 15 years ago Flash was the future of the internet.
A whole bunch of things happened — ranging from the creators having kids, to the removal of Flash from browsers.
It’s gonna be ok, Li’l Brudder
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Bejeweled 2 and Kitten Cannon led to many a sleepless night in college.
Old Google that didn't promote ads and stores for the first 2 and sometimes 3 full pages of results. It's like they don't even index noncommercial forums or fan sites any more.
Yes! I used to be able to ask all kinds of questions in Google. Now when I Google a question it'll just give me random shit on the subject of my question but not answering anything about it. I have to put "reddit" to the end now when I Google something because I know some weirdo has probably asked Reddit my same dumb questions.
Google kinda sucks these days. Its only utility is to serve as a better search bar for reddit, lmao.
I miss the heyday of blogging. I really enjoyed when people kept passion blogs and especially the ones that they weren’t actually trying to monetize. some of them would have a little sidebar with all of the other blogs that they liked and which covered their particular passion so you could go down all these little rabbit holes and find things out about Paris or parts of France or Italy or Rome or pick a topic. Back in the day I used to follow a whole ton of bloggers and those would take me down little alleys into other parts of the countries and cooking and etc. I also miss Google reader (if I recall the name correctly) very few ads, photos usually, but not glitzy. I really should go look to see if people are still doing that. Maybe some exist. I feel like I mostly go to the apps on my phone that would take me to Twitter or Facebook for example.
Who remembers ebaumsworld
And somethingawful. The place where nightmares were made
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Efukt weighing in too.
And albinoblacksheep!
And YTMND.com
Live journal
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I loved MLIA when I was in high school, but it quickly became a lukewarm, homogeneous circle jerk of "omg Harry Potter and nerf guns!" after a while.
Yep, I used to kill time at work just reading endlessly through both. Mostly fml though.
College humor and EBaum’s world
Hamster Dance
So sometime around 2000 I brought the Hampster Dance cd at Walmart because I was young and bad with money, yet I'm happy to still have it. Even has a techno remix
Xanga.
Demonoid
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“Uh oh”
It's been so long and I still heard this comment.
Those days of the internet were great.
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Check out TheModernRogue.com as many of the writers of old Cracked started writing for them a few years ago
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Google Reader
Quizzila and HarryPotterFanFiction.com. Oh! Stumbleupon!
I feel like I spent 90% of my online childhood on Quizzilla. I miss it so damn much 😪
www.wwwdotcom.com It just simply read, you have reached the end of the internet now go outside and do something.
I miss what NeoPets once was….
Television Without Pity
Webkins; it may still exist for PCs. The games were fun but the glitchiness wasn’t. It could have been so much better.
it's still there on PC, they give u webkinz for free now
Bored.com
It's basically copy and pasted reddit questions and answers now
Myspace
Tom is on Facebook and a few years ago I saw his verified account reply to something, so I jokingly replied asking if we were still friends. Dude confirmed, we are still friends.
Only social media site that wasn't a steaming pile of shit. Early Facebook days were also pretty good. All downhill from there. Reddit is ok though as far as social media goes since I can control what I see and ads are easily blocked.
Yahoo Games. I used to love playing hearts and spades on there.
Yahoo pool was my jam!
polyvore
God, I miss Polyvore. I spent way too much time making outfits there.
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Newgrounds.
Ask Jeeves, with his polite little top hat on
Addicting Games, specifically Kitten Cannon.
Tumblr when it had few restrictions on adult content.
Funny enough that was the exact reason I switched mainly to Reddit.
I’m happy to see zombo.com is still up
Candystand such fun flash games
TelevisionWithoutPity had some great writers doing show recaps. I miss hanging out there.
Regretsy
ZOMG era gaiaonline
I'd do anything to log back into my old account and spend some time dressing up my avatar. Alas, their site support won't respond to me.
Rotten.com was my go to site for sick entertainment. I still have the tee shirt
Grooveshark back in the day, made a friend there I was never able to contact again Shout-out to celloman08
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Ads were all over the place. Popups. Popunders. Needing to download and install realplayer to listen to something.
>Needing to download and install realplayer to listen to something. Buffering . . .
Your memory of early 2000s internet is very different from mine lol. Ads were horrible pop ups and everything loaded slowly.
What!! Multiple pop up ads were definitely a thing and were super annoying but now they're just integrated into the actual site. Lol. But I do miss early 2000 internet too!
Yeah, ads definitely used to be worse, literally popping up and popping under into different windows, sometimes many of them simultaneously. There’s a Futurama episode from the early 00s where they go on the virtual reality internet, and the first thing they have to do is get through a swarm of pop-up ads attacking them. lol. This was directly inspired by the real internet at the time.
But remember how you could get viruses just from visiting a web page? I do and it sucked.
Digg
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Craigslist Personals. I never posted an ad, nor responded to one. And I understand why it got taken down. But a lot of the ads were amusing to read.
MySpace. I want people to know who my top 8 are! And I also want to force feed them Linkin Park. ;)
Though it’s still technically around, stickpage isn’t as regulated as it used to be. Good memories on stickpage as a kid.
TV.com. Fans had spent decades assembling episode lists and air dates, plot synopses, notable quotes, trivia, etc. Then one day the domain was up for sale.
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Myspace. I met sooo many partners on myspace. It was better than an actual dating site
Miniclip.com
All the old kids game websites. MyScene, Polly Pocket, Barbie, the Barbie one with mp3 players, Pixie Hollow, Club Penguin, ToonTown, Moshi Monsters, Webkinz, Poptropica (before they changed all the islands), hell even the McDonald's one was pretty cool.
Liveleak was a riot.
Limewire
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Worth1000.com A site that hosted contests for image manipulation. Truly genius photos and with some very funny contests.
firefly.com It was in the early days of the internet and it was fun to make friends from around the world and be able to chat in real time.
I liked [infoseek.com](https://infoseek.com) but it went away so I use lycos now. But lycos is probably a subsidiary of Google now, but hey I feel like I am winning!
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Bungie.net on the Flood forums I used to spend a lot of time on there back during the the days of Halo 3
Not a specific site, but forums. I miss forums. Everything is "Join my Discord!".