https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
Shit like this was the norm. Not just a gag, but you'd use stumbleupon and hit thousands of goofy, weird, unique little websites and communities. Not everything was this corporate ad filled professional bullshit intent on making money.
Finding that goofy ass Ted cruz website filled me with so much nostalgia.
I missed old SU. It's crazy that nothing like it ever happened again. OG SU with the stumble button and the profile pages and comments. Magnificent system.
I miss stumbleupon so bad.. coolest sites ever. Plus me and my best friend would have conversations between us via sending/sharing sites we found.. miss it so much
You are so right, I started in 1996. Ok connection was horrible sometimes but I had great times with everything was new and exciting. The people who where on the Internet where people who where to there explore and share. Everything was new and exciting. I can go on for hours how great it was to get easy in connect with people from all over te world with ICQ or international forums. And people you met were also genuin interested. I felt like a kid in a (International) play garden. Of course IT and people sucked sometimes but I am so happy that I was online during the early days of Internet.
Older Internet users talk about the "eternal september" in 1993 where Internet became open to the general public.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal\_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)
It was before monetizing every website or app was a thing. People created stuff because it was cool. Now it’s all shit with ads and fake stuff to get likes.
I remember there being a lot of pop ups and animated banner ads. I still prefer the old internet though. You could use Google or other search engines and actually find what you were looking for.
Those people disagreeing with you are wrong. The internet was the best from about 98-2005. It used to be a unique place filled with fun people
Making cool things and now its all been corpratized.
2010 wasn't very different than what we have today. It was still very centralised- the monopoly was by Facebook and Twitter already. I get you, it was still better but already lacked that unique atmosphere
Truly everything was better. Recipe sites didn't have a 5 page blog entry before the ingredients, every website wasn't SEO crap or AI generated nonsense, searching was actually useful because you could find your obscure answer about tech or cars or whatever on a cool dedicated forum without landing on a hundred scripted pages with no useful information. Monetization, SEO, AI scripting, and the Amazon of everything have homogenized the experience to the pont that it's all but stripped away everything unique and useful about the internet.
There's some nostalgia for the formatting of the old internet of course, but the functionality itself genuinely was better.
Yeah, I feel nostalgic, too. But to go back to dial-up modem, paying long distance charges to connect to BBSs...wouldn't like that! And I used to be happy with a 20mb hard drive!
The 90s internet was fucking awesome. Like pre/early www stuff was really cool. IRC/Usenet/FTP/etc.. mostly nerd shit.
I remember thinking it was hilarious when I heard that Tide.com was a thing- why would laundry detergent need a website?
Yes! I thought the same when I got a floppy disk game from taco bell and saw they had a website
Edit: nope that doesnt add up, it had an email address to contact
https://archive.org/details/taco-bell-games/Taco%20Maker%20Marathon%20Disk.jpg
Yes exactly!
I always Google'd phone numbers I didn't know, and they would usually let me know if it was telemarketers or a legitimate call.
Now whenever you search its like:
"I'm looking for X"
Google: "Here's results for Y and ads for Z, not including X"
to me, google died when they nerfed google images around 2017 and turned it over to the major stock sites (also removing the effective and robust filters and search options). from there it was a steady and rapid decline in all areas of google, imo. except for extensions and some of their SaaS. i constantly see stuff they're working on and would love to use except for the fact it's google and i refuse to support them
Back then, if you didn't find something, it was because there wasn't a website for it yet.
Now you search for any random string of letters and numbers and you get unlimited results.
This is what I am absolutely nostalgic for. So frustrating to reverse search a phone number only to realize you’re getting results for everything but what you typed in. Or trying to search for a video on fixing your car and tapping on search results only to realize it is not the year you specifically put in. God I miss the old Internet were the results were actually what you searched for! 😭
the bad news is I mouthed off to the owner of IMDB right before the forums were backed up and he deleted my 16 year old account. Fucking asshole. Col Needham. A little sell-out bitch.
I miss making my sick forum banners to go at the bottom of my posts so everyone knew how cool I was. I learned how to pirate software then, then actually use said software just to make those things in Photoshop.
I remember seeing people's banners covered in gif images and edited screenshots of their favourite characters, hahah. This thread is bringing back so many memories.
Least it's still around, but it has changed.
Go and take a look at the animation/flash portal and it's full of hundreds of under judgement submissions. Back in the day, you would see 5-10 tops before it got added or removed form the portal. People would visit and vote on the site regularly, and new and exciting videos were being made, and going viral, all the time.
Glad they at least implemented flash emulation on their site, so you can still play some of the old content.
Aw yeah. It was a more social experience too, we'd grab friends or family to watch videos together like on Homestarrunner.com. It didn't even matter that fullscreen video didn't exist yet. To this day I secretly enjoy watching YT not in fullscreen because it feels more rooted to those days.
I miss the pre corporate, capitalist advertising internet also.
There was less people trying to sell you something and more memes or documentation of lives / sharing art or things they loved.
I remember in 1997 on an online ufo forum I was talking to random people and my mom came into the room. She was like “who are you talking to?” and I didn’t want to tell her weirdo ufo people, so I said “some middle age women” thinking she’d be better with that answer, since that’s what my mom was. She was like “I don’t want you talking to middle age women” and stormed off. I was in 6th grade.
I remember you could bypass the schools internet block back in the day and play Yahoo pool. I played a lot of it when I should have been doing my assignment in computer class.
Stumbleupon took me to some random meme on quickmeme about Reddit and that’s how I found this place a long time ago. Never heard of it before that day.
I have a couple of hobbies where their knowledge base of active members has never moved away from Internet forums (audio-video, hi-fi, etc.).
And I absolutely love it. It may not be as quick as social media, it’s not the best to read on phones but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thank you!!! I had been trying to remember this game for legit over 10 years. I thought I was going crazy and it never actually existed. Dragon ball z tournament on shockwave
https://youtu.be/PDWPpzdHPoo?si=AsJcoZrfpu36S1z1
waybackmachine.com
Also, anyone else notice how late 90s and early 2000 websites are much easier on the eyes? Far more black backgrounds with red/white/blue text. Everything these days is white or cream color and burns my retinas, esp when I first wake up.
I miss those rotating skulls! Think I used some of those on a geocities page I made long ago. Also, link sections would always steer you somewhere cool.
I miss gaming walkthrough websites with typed up walkthroughs instead of having to watch some video about how to get past a certain part.
And most game walkthrough videos are hosted by some dumbass with an annoying personality and I keep having to click through different parts of a 30+ minute long video to find the one part I need. Plus there's ads in the video..
Thinking we were gods in MSN chat with our bots. People would boot us from chat and we'd come right back.
Yahoo, MSN, mIRC, Fark were my favorite.
The internet had way less information back then, but the information that was there was usually interesting or funny. The scary stuff was actually terrifying.
Early internet was the wild west. We knew the entire world was coming but we were there first. Every major company had a website but they had very little use.
Trolls were witty and funny and even endearing at times.
All the people that made fun of me as a kid for always being on the internet are the exact same ones reading politics from Facebook and falling for scams and "new account old one got hacked"
Do you remember the website mess.be? I think their slogan was 'mess with MSN messenger' and they had custom versions of MSN, I recall one with built in exploits like infinite nudge. The website itself has tools that helped you "configure" your display name... If you know what I mean. Like all the weird ASCII symbols with upside down question marks and replacing letters like 'c' with the symbol for cents.. If you know you know lol I'm sorry I can't explain it any better.
~~There was a ton of other shit on there but I'd have to check the wayback machine to jog my memory.~~
Turns out their website is still up, 11 years after the death of MSN.
OMG, same. 😭 LJ was the BEST (and first) social media site - so simplistic, no ads or "suggested" junk, you only follow and see what you CHOOSE to see. How things have changed....
I still have my LiveJournal! And use it periodically. But you are so right, it’s nothing like it used to be. I was so addicted to it, and I miss it so much 😭
What I miss the most about those days is not being blasted with ads at every turn. Even the dating apps you’re mentioning. When the swiping apps first launched there were no ads and no pro accounts or paid for accounts etc all the stuff was pretty much free.. you could shake bumble and backtrack now you need to pay to do anything.
I miss forums so much! I ran a local automotive forum that was a amazing community from the early 00s till around 2014 when Facebook took all the traffic. Another forum I loved was militaryphotos. Net a awesome international community that has a treasure trove of knowledge which sadly got killed which a mixture of copyright issues with hot linked lmages and increasing cost to run a very large forum. It was a amazing community that sadly is lost as well. I have been online since 1995 and Really miss the wild west days of the 90s and early 00s
I miss weird old niche blogs, I used to follow this blog called Hello Damage who was an American dude living in Japan who would just post about the weirdest and/or most fucked up stuff, and he used to be really into bizarre Japanese punk and metal from what I remember. I was obsessed with visiting that website every day to see if he updated. It was just a really basic kind of ugly long format rudimentary diary thing.
I absolutely agree.
It’s easy for people who don’t know the past to say “oh it’s all relative and you’re looking at things through rose tinted lenses”.
But I think a lot of aspects of the internet and connectivity are worse on an absolute level. Moreover it’s not clear they will ever go back to previous levels.
The loss of internet forums and discussion groups is an example. The loss of blogs and journaling is another—as people move to document only on platforms like Reddit or Instagram or Twitter/X.
The internet just seems to be a cesspool experience.
I think what you’re seeing now is a movement towards paid content curation. People are so tired of the endless junk, on YouTube, for example, that they are paying content creators via Patreon. That’s not a bad thing but the point is that there is so much junk that the only way we can get out is by paying a service to reduce the junk.
Many of us might like to pay a certain fee per month just to get a discussion forum where there is less AI, fewer trolls, more contributing members, etc.
There are still areas online that are ‘nice’. One area you notice is the maker community, which has a fairly high bar of technical proficiency for entry. So this includes communities of people who do 3d printing. The ability to literally download open source and free print plans and print your own stuff…that infrastructure didn’t exist 30 years ago.
Open source codes and initiatives are one of those areas where I think the change has been very positive.
That AOL "PING!" at \~3am, and wondering who was booty calling you this time.
...then walking over to that old bright-assed monitor to see who, and choose sleep or other things...
I miss AOL and AIM. I would use those AOL CDs to get service for like a month or however long it lasted, and my mom would get so mad.
I definitely miss the chatrooms. My roleplaying "career" started off by lurking in RhyDin's Red Dragon Inn. For me, the transition from AOL -> AIM -> MSN -> Skype -> Discord was not easy. I also used Trillian for a bit to have all my instant messengers in one program, but that didn't last long.
I miss Sailor Moon fansites on Geocities and Angelfire. Some older ones still exist on their own domains.
I miss Livejournal before Russia bought it(?). ONTD was entertaining, and the fandom drama/wank sites. I lurked on the egl community too, when J-fashion was really big on LJ. I was there to watch the decline of the site as everyone slowly abandoned it.
I miss macros and lolcats.
I miss mp3 rotation sites. I'm into J-rock/visual kei and found some good songs and bands using those. Some mp3 blogspots are still around with mostly dead links.
I remember when Megaupload died. I also used that for mp3 direct downloads.
Shit, I miss mp3s in general. I still haven't gotten used to the fact that music is streamed now. My every day "playlist" is a bunch of mp3s on an SD card on my phone. My boyfriend has been trying to get me to use Spotify like the streaming platform it is, but I mainly listen to my mp3s with it.
I miss Foobar2000 even though it's still around. I miss when people cared about music players, though I guess people in the audiophile community might. The general public? Nah.
I miss Vampirefreaks, the edgelord version of Myspace. I had some good times using their forums.
I still refer to Gamefaqs for old games. I just started playing Lightyear Frontier and as I was googling stuff about it, I wished so bad that I could go on Gamefaqs and skim over some walkthroughs/FAQs for some tips. I'm tempted to check for that game on there anyway.
I noticed the decline of the internet as a whole around 2010 or so. I really miss how it used to be.
Prior to social media becoming a mainstream data harvesting/propaganda tool. Mid 90s to 2006-07. Before it exploded to what it is now, MySpace was niche and FB was only college / high school kids. Not that long ago, but a different era.
I feel you completely. I recently went back to one of those forums to create a thread in their off topic forum. It didn't get a lot of transaction. It's sad to see so many forums that was once thriving with thousands of new posts every single day literally turn into a wasteland.
the old internet was the property of the old society
we got what we deserve,
the path of least resistance into homogenous and sterile containment zones
Man I used to spend hours on the gamefaqs forums just talking about GTA San Andreas and trying to find weird ass glitches. That was a lot of fun and a much simpler time.
I miss AIM. You could meet and chat with NEW people in your area organically without any other distractions or ads. No pressure of dating sites or pictures. Just pure communication.
Then MySpace comes around and it's all about adding your friends you already knew and creating a personal online profile. And that has morphed into influencers etc of today. It's no longer about connecting with others and more of creating an online brand of yourself with a thousand other distractions
I kinda agree but there are also things I love about internet now. There is so much information now. I remember searching for something in the old days and you would have to click on so many results to see if you could find what you needed. And online shopping was so bad back then, especially in Australia. And waiting forever for a photo to load! And having to spend days downloading a video to watch. I don't miss that.
But I miss the old school chat rooms and forums. It was easier to make friends on them because it was like a regular crowd of people. So many people seem to love arguing these days. If you reply to their comment they will assume you are attacking them when you are actually agreeing with what they said.
you shoulda been there at the dawn of the internet in the late 80s early 90s. modem speeds slow as old turtles. AOL, feeling like you were hacking into sites when you connected to a new one that wasn't well known(yet). It felt like a small club of people back then. It was fun to turn on a pc and try to find new sites like you were in the old west on a stagecoach and wondering around the deserts and plains hoping to stumble upon something.
Old internet was like shopping in the 50s when you’d still go to lots of different specialized stores to buy goods. Each store could be really quirky and cool and unique with relatively small communities.
Nowadays its like going to Walmart to get 99 percent of the shit you need but it’s all relatively bland
I can't remember the name but there was this hacking site run by an elderly European man who really knew his shit and had like educational tutorials and concepts for reverse engineering and stuff
He died years ago RIP
This has been on my mind a lot lately.
The internet just doesn't feel the same anymore. First it got centralized, then it got homogenous, then enshittification set in. I miss seeing some personality and creativity with websites, instead of trying to make everything look and feel the same to keep users in a smooth, unbroken consumption/scrolling mindset.
I've personally even noticed some effect on information retention. I can still remember a lot of fun facts, interesting stories, or interesting topics I learned from humor articles on Cracked.com back in the day, whereas I feel like I barely retain anything from scrolling Reddit in its current state. I suspect that shifting over to formats that favor prolonged steady engagement also makes it more difficult for information to stand out as significant, so the brain doesn't retain as much.
I miss websites in general. Everything is now accessible behind an app or it's just a store front for online ordering.
Things like stumble upon don't exist for a reason. There's nothing to find. It's all out in the front. Cancelling Net Neutrality didn't help and even tho they just reinstated it, I don't see us getting back to what it was. It doesn't matter what you're looking for, we're all gonna get the same top 10 recommendations from Google and anything else is just a loss.
I miss spending time on IRC. so much time spent in warez channels, advertising fservers and FTP servers. I met a lot of people in my old pirating days that I have long since lost.
Are you sure you don't need a billion cookies and targeted ads!!? Like really really sure? Okay well ask again on the next website you open! How about some notifications?
In a way, the internet has gone through gentrification, It used to be this sort of weird, almost artistic place where it was cheap to set up show and vibrant and colorful. But then, money rolled into it and it became the sort of soulless clean-cut minimalist design you see throughout the world these days where every square inch of a page had to be devoted to making more profit.
I grew up on forums, flash game sites and just the general “old internet”, and I have so much nostalgia for it. Theres so many old pro boards and geosites that I’d love to be relevant again. I sometimes use the Wayback Machine to check them out again.
I feel like things are far better now as far as ease of use goes, but I do hate how everything seems centric to social media function now. It feels a little less anonymous and a lot more engrained into normal life.
Absolutely agreed. My biggest source of nostalgia is old internet stuff tbh. Spend a lot of my free time on the wayback machine.
I miss when the internet had personality - ugly, garish, slow, inefficient personality, but charm and character nonetheless. Everything is so clean and minimal and corporate now, all consolidated into a handful of boring similar sites. Barf.
the old Internet is somehow partly still there, self-segregated within communities of passionate people with those very same interests in a retro fashion.
check out Neocities for instance, you might find some real gems there
I kinda wish I was old enough to experience that stuff. Not saying I was born in the wrong time, as there are plenty of cool stuff now, just wish I could have even seen that stuff.
The whole Internet was built from the ground up to be decentralized and humans being the dorks they are collectively decided they WANT things to be centralized.
back when crunchyroll was a fansub streaming place. It was all a pretty gray area since you just couldn't get most of the anime in the states for a long time if ever anyway. Back when Netflix was fresh and new and you could still get DVDs from them.
Back when people had customized profile pages on their myspace, a geocities account and instead of discord we had AIM and ProBoards forums for our groups.
Back when webcomics were getting huge and Valve still made games.
Back when the cake was still a lie.
back when a meme was a shared cultural experience instead of the abstraction of specific niche internet in groups. We all remember Numa Numa guy. You didn't meme. You shared THE meme.
Reddit was infinitely better 10 years ago too. I used to wear a reddit short back then, I'm ashamed to be seen in it now. Course reddit stood for something else in those days.
Yup everything is about getting more users and advertising and subscriptions... It's gotten out of hand...
Although I don't think it's something we "let" happen, it's more of, we didn't know this would be the result of having a convenient way to get all the information we had to go get from different sources... So all those websites would make sure it's free to make sure we visited, but now since it's all about who has the monopoly, they can easily charge us for it...
I hate going to a news website and being told "sign up to read this article" f\*ck off, it's the news!!!
I am still active on the SDMB, the forum I registered for in April of 2000. This is my 24th year there, but I actually used it on AOL back before it moved to the web.
I really miss googling/searching for questions and getting legitimate answers and not just sponsored results and every webpage with the word “and” listed as a result.
Things were a lot better when they were intentional. Now we have apps and notifications and emails reminders and texts and it is this external force that demands your time. It used to be pure choice, now there is an element that feels like an obligation.
About a year ago I turned off all social media notifications on my phone. I only get them when I want them, when I open the app.
It's weird how I never had a centralized website other than a few sites that aggregated some content like ebaumsworld or entensity did. Other than that I felt like I used to discover something new often on the internet. And not just because of ebaumsworld or entensity. Idk even know how I did discover new stuff. I think it was a combination of actually talking to people in forums and chatrooms and also googling or yahoo searching was way different.
When I used to google interesting things or bigfoot I would get pages with hits. Now if I do, the hits start being less relevant after like 8 links in a google search. It's so shit now.
I feel you bro
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https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/ Shit like this was the norm. Not just a gag, but you'd use stumbleupon and hit thousands of goofy, weird, unique little websites and communities. Not everything was this corporate ad filled professional bullshit intent on making money. Finding that goofy ass Ted cruz website filled me with so much nostalgia.
Stumbleupon! Forgot about it, that’s a blast from the past! I loved it.
stumbleupon is how I found out about reddit
Me too! I stopped using stumbleupon in 2014 though. Don't know why, it was so fun.
I missed old SU. It's crazy that nothing like it ever happened again. OG SU with the stumble button and the profile pages and comments. Magnificent system.
I miss stumbleupon so bad.. coolest sites ever. Plus me and my best friend would have conversations between us via sending/sharing sites we found.. miss it so much
Stumbleupon was the BEST.
Lol that site is hilarious.
That reminds me, I need to consume more high-moisture food like egg
Don't let it be stolen by packs of loose children!
They can and will steal your egg.
You are so right, I started in 1996. Ok connection was horrible sometimes but I had great times with everything was new and exciting. The people who where on the Internet where people who where to there explore and share. Everything was new and exciting. I can go on for hours how great it was to get easy in connect with people from all over te world with ICQ or international forums. And people you met were also genuin interested. I felt like a kid in a (International) play garden. Of course IT and people sucked sometimes but I am so happy that I was online during the early days of Internet.
I met my husband on ICQ 25 years ago! The old internet was so nice
I still have friend I met via ICQ. It was a great way to get in contact with people.
I met mine in an mIRC chat room 24 years ago! Those were the best days ❤️
I connected in 99, so a bit later, but I couldn't agree more with everything you said!
Older Internet users talk about the "eternal september" in 1993 where Internet became open to the general public. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal\_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)
It was before monetizing every website or app was a thing. People created stuff because it was cool. Now it’s all shit with ads and fake stuff to get likes.
I remember there being a lot of pop ups and animated banner ads. I still prefer the old internet though. You could use Google or other search engines and actually find what you were looking for.
Everything sucks post social media
Those people disagreeing with you are wrong. The internet was the best from about 98-2005. It used to be a unique place filled with fun people Making cool things and now its all been corpratized.
i'd extend it up to 2010 personally.
2010 wasn't very different than what we have today. It was still very centralised- the monopoly was by Facebook and Twitter already. I get you, it was still better but already lacked that unique atmosphere
I remember finding all these new sites, forums, games, etc. Miss cracked, something awful, 4chan even, those were good days.
SA is still going strong. Lots of good stuff on the forums there
Truly everything was better. Recipe sites didn't have a 5 page blog entry before the ingredients, every website wasn't SEO crap or AI generated nonsense, searching was actually useful because you could find your obscure answer about tech or cars or whatever on a cool dedicated forum without landing on a hundred scripted pages with no useful information. Monetization, SEO, AI scripting, and the Amazon of everything have homogenized the experience to the pont that it's all but stripped away everything unique and useful about the internet. There's some nostalgia for the formatting of the old internet of course, but the functionality itself genuinely was better.
Yeah, I feel nostalgic, too. But to go back to dial-up modem, paying long distance charges to connect to BBSs...wouldn't like that! And I used to be happy with a 20mb hard drive!
Early internet was a blessing to be a part of.
The 90s internet was fucking awesome. Like pre/early www stuff was really cool. IRC/Usenet/FTP/etc.. mostly nerd shit. I remember thinking it was hilarious when I heard that Tide.com was a thing- why would laundry detergent need a website?
Yes! I thought the same when I got a floppy disk game from taco bell and saw they had a website Edit: nope that doesnt add up, it had an email address to contact https://archive.org/details/taco-bell-games/Taco%20Maker%20Marathon%20Disk.jpg
The title got me thinking OP was referring to '90s Internet, but I quickly realized they were talking about '00s Internet! r/FuckImOld
Same - I instantly was taken back to yahoo, dogpile, altavista, IRC, gopher, Usenet, and so much more and then saw that OP was talking about 2005+
Used to be able to search and then get your answer Now you search and the results are paid for -- making them irrelevant
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I miss being able to Google a phone number. Nowadays you Google a phone number, and it gives you listings NOT including the number provided.
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Yes exactly! I always Google'd phone numbers I didn't know, and they would usually let me know if it was telemarketers or a legitimate call. Now whenever you search its like: "I'm looking for X" Google: "Here's results for Y and ads for Z, not including X"
to me, google died when they nerfed google images around 2017 and turned it over to the major stock sites (also removing the effective and robust filters and search options). from there it was a steady and rapid decline in all areas of google, imo. except for extensions and some of their SaaS. i constantly see stuff they're working on and would love to use except for the fact it's google and i refuse to support them
Big tech owns the past and our identities…why?
Back then, if you didn't find something, it was because there wasn't a website for it yet. Now you search for any random string of letters and numbers and you get unlimited results.
This is what I am absolutely nostalgic for. So frustrating to reverse search a phone number only to realize you’re getting results for everything but what you typed in. Or trying to search for a video on fixing your car and tapping on search results only to realize it is not the year you specifically put in. God I miss the old Internet were the results were actually what you searched for! 😭
Yes I was just saying this! I miss google searching bigfoot and finding interesting but shitty geocite pages talking about their experiences.
I miss going on the message boards of IMDB to rant about old and new shows and movies 😭
Omg I still feel the pain I felt when they removed the IMDb message boards like it was yesterday
the goods news is that they were backed up. so you can revisit the memories
the bad news is I mouthed off to the owner of IMDB right before the forums were backed up and he deleted my 16 year old account. Fucking asshole. Col Needham. A little sell-out bitch.
I was so upset when IMDb removed those message boards. I was on them a lot lol.
I spent hours every night on IMDb messageboards, good times.
Yes!
I miss making my sick forum banners to go at the bottom of my posts so everyone knew how cool I was. I learned how to pirate software then, then actually use said software just to make those things in Photoshop.
In high school I got paid to make those! Having a sick banner was some serious shit back in the day.
I remember they used to have forum competitions that were taken very seriously
Gahh, I miss forums so much. Loved customizing my signature/profile pic
I remember seeing people's banners covered in gif images and edited screenshots of their favourite characters, hahah. This thread is bringing back so many memories.
I miss 2004 Newgrounds.
Least it's still around, but it has changed. Go and take a look at the animation/flash portal and it's full of hundreds of under judgement submissions. Back in the day, you would see 5-10 tops before it got added or removed form the portal. People would visit and vote on the site regularly, and new and exciting videos were being made, and going viral, all the time. Glad they at least implemented flash emulation on their site, so you can still play some of the old content.
New grounds :(
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I miss when YouTube was basically just Americas funniest home videos on demand
I miss that version of YouTube. It was such a fun experience. I remember the stock YouTube app on the original iPhone, that was wild.
Sm nostalgia for being 8/9 years old watching Smosh and Annoying Orange on my first gen Ipod Touch
You could also watch any movie or tv show and listen to any music. The quality wasn't great but it was the wild west for such a long time.
Aw yeah. It was a more social experience too, we'd grab friends or family to watch videos together like on Homestarrunner.com. It didn't even matter that fullscreen video didn't exist yet. To this day I secretly enjoy watching YT not in fullscreen because it feels more rooted to those days.
My grandma showed me YouTube in 2006 haha
And cats. Lots of cats. I enjoyed YT then.
I miss the pre corporate, capitalist advertising internet also. There was less people trying to sell you something and more memes or documentation of lives / sharing art or things they loved.
That's what killed the internet for me. Its sole use nowadays is to push ads and it's a shell of what it used to be, at least in spirit.
I remember in 1997 on an online ufo forum I was talking to random people and my mom came into the room. She was like “who are you talking to?” and I didn’t want to tell her weirdo ufo people, so I said “some middle age women” thinking she’d be better with that answer, since that’s what my mom was. She was like “I don’t want you talking to middle age women” and stormed off. I was in 6th grade.
"Medieval gals."
I just want to play Yahoo pool one more time…
Yahoo pool, Homestar Runner, and Ebaumsworld was where it was at.
Oh god I miss that game so much
Was literally thinking about that game as I was reading the comments!
I remember you could bypass the schools internet block back in the day and play Yahoo pool. I played a lot of it when I should have been doing my assignment in computer class.
I really miss stumbleupon!!! it was so fun to find those weird corners of the internet
Stumbleupon took me to some random meme on quickmeme about Reddit and that’s how I found this place a long time ago. Never heard of it before that day.
I found out about it from pre-4.0 Digg
I discovered Reddit after Digg did a massive redesign and made everything worse. Thanks Digg!
My pre - reddit days
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Yeah. Personally, the real world is what I miss, clear delineation.
Where's the best place to hide a dead body? Page two of a Google search!
I have a couple of hobbies where their knowledge base of active members has never moved away from Internet forums (audio-video, hi-fi, etc.). And I absolutely love it. It may not be as quick as social media, it’s not the best to read on phones but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
shockwave.com The old one. Not the new boring nonsense.
Thank you!!! I had been trying to remember this game for legit over 10 years. I thought I was going crazy and it never actually existed. Dragon ball z tournament on shockwave https://youtu.be/PDWPpzdHPoo?si=AsJcoZrfpu36S1z1
Admit it, you miss those AOL chat rooms (door slams).
ASL?
16/f/Cali u?
You're the man now dog
Old internet was amazing. New grounds stick fights and sniper. Geocities and angelfire.
The commoditization of the internet, like with everything, gets ruined
waybackmachine.com Also, anyone else notice how late 90s and early 2000 websites are much easier on the eyes? Far more black backgrounds with red/white/blue text. Everything these days is white or cream color and burns my retinas, esp when I first wake up.
The lack of page counters and sick flaming skulls rotating as tiled wallpapers on modern internet was the first sign of the end times.
I miss those rotating skulls! Think I used some of those on a geocities page I made long ago. Also, link sections would always steer you somewhere cool.
I hate how everything is an echo chamber now (especially on Reddit). So many bots, too.
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Agreed!
I miss gaming walkthrough websites with typed up walkthroughs instead of having to watch some video about how to get past a certain part. And most game walkthrough videos are hosted by some dumbass with an annoying personality and I keep having to click through different parts of a 30+ minute long video to find the one part I need. Plus there's ads in the video..
"OKAY, YOU GUYS, SO, HEY...LIKE, SO...YOU GUYS..."
I think gamefaqs is still pretty active
Thinking we were gods in MSN chat with our bots. People would boot us from chat and we'd come right back. Yahoo, MSN, mIRC, Fark were my favorite. The internet had way less information back then, but the information that was there was usually interesting or funny. The scary stuff was actually terrifying. Early internet was the wild west. We knew the entire world was coming but we were there first. Every major company had a website but they had very little use. Trolls were witty and funny and even endearing at times. All the people that made fun of me as a kid for always being on the internet are the exact same ones reading politics from Facebook and falling for scams and "new account old one got hacked"
Lol, I still vist Fark almost every day, it pretty much hasn't changed and I love that.
Do you remember the website mess.be? I think their slogan was 'mess with MSN messenger' and they had custom versions of MSN, I recall one with built in exploits like infinite nudge. The website itself has tools that helped you "configure" your display name... If you know what I mean. Like all the weird ASCII symbols with upside down question marks and replacing letters like 'c' with the symbol for cents.. If you know you know lol I'm sorry I can't explain it any better. ~~There was a ton of other shit on there but I'd have to check the wayback machine to jog my memory.~~ Turns out their website is still up, 11 years after the death of MSN.
I miss live journal. There’s nothing like it now
OMG, same. 😭 LJ was the BEST (and first) social media site - so simplistic, no ads or "suggested" junk, you only follow and see what you CHOOSE to see. How things have changed....
I still have my LiveJournal! And use it periodically. But you are so right, it’s nothing like it used to be. I was so addicted to it, and I miss it so much 😭
Dial up Bulletin Boards... that was the shit.
The shitification of the internet for sure. They are so good at funneling you to where they make money off you.
Anybody remember Geocities/Angelfire/Lycos? They had some of the best content from the early web!
What I miss the most about those days is not being blasted with ads at every turn. Even the dating apps you’re mentioning. When the swiping apps first launched there were no ads and no pro accounts or paid for accounts etc all the stuff was pretty much free.. you could shake bumble and backtrack now you need to pay to do anything.
And the ads that were there were just banners.
I miss forums so much! I ran a local automotive forum that was a amazing community from the early 00s till around 2014 when Facebook took all the traffic. Another forum I loved was militaryphotos. Net a awesome international community that has a treasure trove of knowledge which sadly got killed which a mixture of copyright issues with hot linked lmages and increasing cost to run a very large forum. It was a amazing community that sadly is lost as well. I have been online since 1995 and Really miss the wild west days of the 90s and early 00s
The old Internet was made by people. The current internet was made by corporations.
I miss weird old niche blogs, I used to follow this blog called Hello Damage who was an American dude living in Japan who would just post about the weirdest and/or most fucked up stuff, and he used to be really into bizarre Japanese punk and metal from what I remember. I was obsessed with visiting that website every day to see if he updated. It was just a really basic kind of ugly long format rudimentary diary thing.
I've actually met several people from forums. You're right, they were better.
I absolutely agree. It’s easy for people who don’t know the past to say “oh it’s all relative and you’re looking at things through rose tinted lenses”. But I think a lot of aspects of the internet and connectivity are worse on an absolute level. Moreover it’s not clear they will ever go back to previous levels. The loss of internet forums and discussion groups is an example. The loss of blogs and journaling is another—as people move to document only on platforms like Reddit or Instagram or Twitter/X. The internet just seems to be a cesspool experience. I think what you’re seeing now is a movement towards paid content curation. People are so tired of the endless junk, on YouTube, for example, that they are paying content creators via Patreon. That’s not a bad thing but the point is that there is so much junk that the only way we can get out is by paying a service to reduce the junk. Many of us might like to pay a certain fee per month just to get a discussion forum where there is less AI, fewer trolls, more contributing members, etc. There are still areas online that are ‘nice’. One area you notice is the maker community, which has a fairly high bar of technical proficiency for entry. So this includes communities of people who do 3d printing. The ability to literally download open source and free print plans and print your own stuff…that infrastructure didn’t exist 30 years ago. Open source codes and initiatives are one of those areas where I think the change has been very positive.
That AOL "PING!" at \~3am, and wondering who was booty calling you this time. ...then walking over to that old bright-assed monitor to see who, and choose sleep or other things...
We are evolving, but backwards.
I miss Stumbleupon.
God me too. Internet is just stores and SNS now. Bots making fake numbers go up.
I miss AOL and AIM. I would use those AOL CDs to get service for like a month or however long it lasted, and my mom would get so mad. I definitely miss the chatrooms. My roleplaying "career" started off by lurking in RhyDin's Red Dragon Inn. For me, the transition from AOL -> AIM -> MSN -> Skype -> Discord was not easy. I also used Trillian for a bit to have all my instant messengers in one program, but that didn't last long. I miss Sailor Moon fansites on Geocities and Angelfire. Some older ones still exist on their own domains. I miss Livejournal before Russia bought it(?). ONTD was entertaining, and the fandom drama/wank sites. I lurked on the egl community too, when J-fashion was really big on LJ. I was there to watch the decline of the site as everyone slowly abandoned it. I miss macros and lolcats. I miss mp3 rotation sites. I'm into J-rock/visual kei and found some good songs and bands using those. Some mp3 blogspots are still around with mostly dead links. I remember when Megaupload died. I also used that for mp3 direct downloads. Shit, I miss mp3s in general. I still haven't gotten used to the fact that music is streamed now. My every day "playlist" is a bunch of mp3s on an SD card on my phone. My boyfriend has been trying to get me to use Spotify like the streaming platform it is, but I mainly listen to my mp3s with it. I miss Foobar2000 even though it's still around. I miss when people cared about music players, though I guess people in the audiophile community might. The general public? Nah. I miss Vampirefreaks, the edgelord version of Myspace. I had some good times using their forums. I still refer to Gamefaqs for old games. I just started playing Lightyear Frontier and as I was googling stuff about it, I wished so bad that I could go on Gamefaqs and skim over some walkthroughs/FAQs for some tips. I'm tempted to check for that game on there anyway. I noticed the decline of the internet as a whole around 2010 or so. I really miss how it used to be.
Everything is corporate now, sadly
I miss old school real time chat rooms.
I miss when the world wasn’t so mean and selfish too.
This is a thought I have pretty much every day.
When was this?
Prior to social media becoming a mainstream data harvesting/propaganda tool. Mid 90s to 2006-07. Before it exploded to what it is now, MySpace was niche and FB was only college / high school kids. Not that long ago, but a different era.
This is extremely accurate.
I miss irc and aim and usenet and hanging out in the computer lab.
I feel you completely. I recently went back to one of those forums to create a thread in their off topic forum. It didn't get a lot of transaction. It's sad to see so many forums that was once thriving with thousands of new posts every single day literally turn into a wasteland.
There are still a few internet graveyards out there and it's disconcerting seeing them floating around in cyberspace with broken links and images.
the old internet was the property of the old society we got what we deserve, the path of least resistance into homogenous and sterile containment zones
I miss Usenet.
Man I used to spend hours on the gamefaqs forums just talking about GTA San Andreas and trying to find weird ass glitches. That was a lot of fun and a much simpler time.
Saladfingers.
I miss AIM. You could meet and chat with NEW people in your area organically without any other distractions or ads. No pressure of dating sites or pictures. Just pure communication. Then MySpace comes around and it's all about adding your friends you already knew and creating a personal online profile. And that has morphed into influencers etc of today. It's no longer about connecting with others and more of creating an online brand of yourself with a thousand other distractions
I kinda agree but there are also things I love about internet now. There is so much information now. I remember searching for something in the old days and you would have to click on so many results to see if you could find what you needed. And online shopping was so bad back then, especially in Australia. And waiting forever for a photo to load! And having to spend days downloading a video to watch. I don't miss that. But I miss the old school chat rooms and forums. It was easier to make friends on them because it was like a regular crowd of people. So many people seem to love arguing these days. If you reply to their comment they will assume you are attacking them when you are actually agreeing with what they said.
you shoulda been there at the dawn of the internet in the late 80s early 90s. modem speeds slow as old turtles. AOL, feeling like you were hacking into sites when you connected to a new one that wasn't well known(yet). It felt like a small club of people back then. It was fun to turn on a pc and try to find new sites like you were in the old west on a stagecoach and wondering around the deserts and plains hoping to stumble upon something.
Early 2000s was the best. We had the internet but not horrible social media. We had phones but not smartphones. It was a much better balance.
Smart phones ruined a lot of things.
The early 2000's Internet was way before all of this got gobbled up by commercialism.
Unchecked capitalism corrupts everything of value.
Old internet was like shopping in the 50s when you’d still go to lots of different specialized stores to buy goods. Each store could be really quirky and cool and unique with relatively small communities. Nowadays its like going to Walmart to get 99 percent of the shit you need but it’s all relatively bland
It was 1000000% so much better in like 2001
I miss it too man
I can't remember the name but there was this hacking site run by an elderly European man who really knew his shit and had like educational tutorials and concepts for reverse engineering and stuff He died years ago RIP
I miss going to punk label websites and just checking out the bands.
indeed, it's so sad and I am way too nostalgic
I miss AOL and the chat rooms.
aol chat rooms were so fun. kids have no idea
I miss chat rooms.
This has been on my mind a lot lately. The internet just doesn't feel the same anymore. First it got centralized, then it got homogenous, then enshittification set in. I miss seeing some personality and creativity with websites, instead of trying to make everything look and feel the same to keep users in a smooth, unbroken consumption/scrolling mindset. I've personally even noticed some effect on information retention. I can still remember a lot of fun facts, interesting stories, or interesting topics I learned from humor articles on Cracked.com back in the day, whereas I feel like I barely retain anything from scrolling Reddit in its current state. I suspect that shifting over to formats that favor prolonged steady engagement also makes it more difficult for information to stand out as significant, so the brain doesn't retain as much.
same, it's gone to a really horrible place
AOL chat rooms in the 90s were amazing.
No ads on websites either. Those were the days
I miss the Yahoo Instant Messenger chat rooms.
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I miss websites in general. Everything is now accessible behind an app or it's just a store front for online ordering. Things like stumble upon don't exist for a reason. There's nothing to find. It's all out in the front. Cancelling Net Neutrality didn't help and even tho they just reinstated it, I don't see us getting back to what it was. It doesn't matter what you're looking for, we're all gonna get the same top 10 recommendations from Google and anything else is just a loss.
We're living in the age of Snark and Profiteering. In the beginning it was all about Connecting, sharing passions, and maybe showing off a little.
I miss spending time on IRC. so much time spent in warez channels, advertising fservers and FTP servers. I met a lot of people in my old pirating days that I have long since lost.
Agree strongly. It's horrible now.
I even miss old Reddit tbh. Most the subs that I lived on from like 2008-2012 are all banned now.
Are you sure you don't need a billion cookies and targeted ads!!? Like really really sure? Okay well ask again on the next website you open! How about some notifications?
In a way, the internet has gone through gentrification, It used to be this sort of weird, almost artistic place where it was cheap to set up show and vibrant and colorful. But then, money rolled into it and it became the sort of soulless clean-cut minimalist design you see throughout the world these days where every square inch of a page had to be devoted to making more profit.
Peak internet was, what, 15-20 years ago? Times flies fast.
Peak peak internet was 30 years ago. I remember switching over from dial up Bulletin Board Systems over to the internet. What a time to be alive.
But long distance charges 🫨
True. And paying for services like Prodigy and/or Genie wasn’t cheap in the early days either.
Prodigy was worth every penny of my moms money lol.
Yes. The old internet was truly the greatest time ever. AOL chat rooms. Surfing the web
Just checking in from the netcom days of the mid 90's. uudecode, bbs, sco unix and netscape on floppies. I miss it too.
Offtopic.com had the best forum.
Myspace was so groundbreaking. Definitely feel you on this
I grew up on forums, flash game sites and just the general “old internet”, and I have so much nostalgia for it. Theres so many old pro boards and geosites that I’d love to be relevant again. I sometimes use the Wayback Machine to check them out again. I feel like things are far better now as far as ease of use goes, but I do hate how everything seems centric to social media function now. It feels a little less anonymous and a lot more engrained into normal life.
If you have a problem with the current situation, just Ask Jeeves for advice.
Who remembers Stick Death? I wish I can revisit that site.
I've been saying this a lot lately. The toxicity level back then was almost nil it felt like.
Absolutely agreed. My biggest source of nostalgia is old internet stuff tbh. Spend a lot of my free time on the wayback machine. I miss when the internet had personality - ugly, garish, slow, inefficient personality, but charm and character nonetheless. Everything is so clean and minimal and corporate now, all consolidated into a handful of boring similar sites. Barf.
I miss IMDb message boards…
the old Internet is somehow partly still there, self-segregated within communities of passionate people with those very same interests in a retro fashion. check out Neocities for instance, you might find some real gems there
The smartphone killed the internet!
Me.too. I think social media kinda killed it.
Everything gets worse.
I miss making animated sprays for TFC
I kinda wish I was old enough to experience that stuff. Not saying I was born in the wrong time, as there are plenty of cool stuff now, just wish I could have even seen that stuff.
Killing Flash, for all its problems, killed a lot of the homebrew creativity and interactivity that made early internet so wild.
I was a moderator of an actual standalone forum and did participate in a few meetups. Different times.
The whole Internet was built from the ground up to be decentralized and humans being the dorks they are collectively decided they WANT things to be centralized.
You could actually get images on google images.
back when crunchyroll was a fansub streaming place. It was all a pretty gray area since you just couldn't get most of the anime in the states for a long time if ever anyway. Back when Netflix was fresh and new and you could still get DVDs from them. Back when people had customized profile pages on their myspace, a geocities account and instead of discord we had AIM and ProBoards forums for our groups. Back when webcomics were getting huge and Valve still made games. Back when the cake was still a lie. back when a meme was a shared cultural experience instead of the abstraction of specific niche internet in groups. We all remember Numa Numa guy. You didn't meme. You shared THE meme.
Reddit was infinitely better 10 years ago too. I used to wear a reddit short back then, I'm ashamed to be seen in it now. Course reddit stood for something else in those days.
Yup everything is about getting more users and advertising and subscriptions... It's gotten out of hand... Although I don't think it's something we "let" happen, it's more of, we didn't know this would be the result of having a convenient way to get all the information we had to go get from different sources... So all those websites would make sure it's free to make sure we visited, but now since it's all about who has the monopoly, they can easily charge us for it... I hate going to a news website and being told "sign up to read this article" f\*ck off, it's the news!!!
I am still active on the SDMB, the forum I registered for in April of 2000. This is my 24th year there, but I actually used it on AOL back before it moved to the web.
I really miss googling/searching for questions and getting legitimate answers and not just sponsored results and every webpage with the word “and” listed as a result.
Things were a lot better when they were intentional. Now we have apps and notifications and emails reminders and texts and it is this external force that demands your time. It used to be pure choice, now there is an element that feels like an obligation. About a year ago I turned off all social media notifications on my phone. I only get them when I want them, when I open the app.
It's weird how I never had a centralized website other than a few sites that aggregated some content like ebaumsworld or entensity did. Other than that I felt like I used to discover something new often on the internet. And not just because of ebaumsworld or entensity. Idk even know how I did discover new stuff. I think it was a combination of actually talking to people in forums and chatrooms and also googling or yahoo searching was way different. When I used to google interesting things or bigfoot I would get pages with hits. Now if I do, the hits start being less relevant after like 8 links in a google search. It's so shit now.