I feel the same about the early (home) internet (years 1994-1999). Adverts if they even existed on a page were just a few lame gifs on a page. IRC and usenet were the “social media” of the time, except no-one called it that. Almost everyone online was as much of a geek as you (except AOL users), because the hoops to get online were significant enough to keep most normal people away. Businesses were convinced it was a fad, so didn’t get too involved.
It was basically universities, students and a handful of modem owners that could get a TCP/IP stack to work and write a login script (ppp was quite rare in the beginning).
Rose-tinted glasses? Maybe, but there’s a lot not to like about the modern internet.
Bassboost and deepfrying are already outdated and old memes by now
you dont miss old roblox, you miss having fun , a Roblox YouTuber
Influncer didn’t exist yet? I think young mind OP just didn’t understand that he was market to lol
I mean, I can’t speak to OP in particular, but there were definitely lots of years where people made shit for free, sold nothing, and didn’t consider it a job.
Like, there was no real mechanism for stick figure martial arts animations to make any money at all. Newgrounds or Ebaum’s World must have made some money from ads, but I don’t think any of that was profit-shared with the creators back in those days. Some of the creators were straight up anonymous because they didn’t even think to put their names on their stuff.
Obviously celebrities and ads and stuff still existed on the earth at the time, but it didn’t spread to the internet in a big way until later.
At least that’s how I remember it…
We live in an internet.
Umm annon that was not the wild web. The wild web was in the 90’s and early 00’s. That was truly the wild web.
Nah I think they’re more or less right. I’d maybe pull it back 3 or 4 years, but not as far as 2004.
What killed off the old wild web was the popularity of centralised platforms. Facebook (open since 2006, really started taking off more around 2008/9), YouTube (first video 2005, really takes off from 2007/8), and Reddit (self posts first allowed in 2008), and other things like that which were admittedly great for allowing more people to share their creations with the world, but we’re disastrous for the open web, because they killed off independent blogs, forums, and other smaller websites.
So it sounds like the Internet died in 2008.
I would say it contracted a terminal illness at some point around 2006±1 and went into palliative care in 2008±1, but didn’t fully die for another 5ish years. The death of Google Reader seems a good landmark to use, since RSS was a really helpful tool that became less necessary as sites became more centralised.
MySpace was huge before Facebook, and it killed off a lot of blogs. Late 90s and early 2000s were truly the wild web IMO. I had a geocities page with its own forum before MySpace made me abandon it due to inactivity.
I remember watching saddam hussein hanging video when i was 12, good times
Ah the good old “korn_music_vide.wmv” that immediately cuts to someone in an orange jump suit on their knees.
Korn really getting intense with the new music videos
Ya, I remember the first time I went on rotten and my young mind was not prepared for it. Honestly I miss the good old days when the most shocking thing was lemonparty and tubgirl.
Don’t forget about the goatse man
Googling CD Keys, Torrents and Cracks was easy back then. DC++ was the way to go and Limewire was not yet Infested with CP and Viruses. There was a sweet spot but only for 2 years. After that, the golden age of Piracy with the File-Hosters came and Reddit wasn’t shit.
If I have to pinpoint the timeframe: When 4Chan got really unironic racist (and the Stromfront forum leaked to the rest)… oh and Facebook…
Oh man, we had DC++ semi-officially endorsed by the inter-college IT department at my university in 2013/14. It was fantastic, especially since in my first year we only got 5 GB of data per month (with a large number of unmetered sites, including anything from Google), so without the unmetered file intranet it’d have been really hard to manage. Unfortunately as they increased the data caps it killed the popularity of DC++, which ended up getting killed off not long after I left.
Too many beheadings in the wild web. But yeah, those years were really the wild web.
“I’m old” vs “I MOLD”
I like the latter more, said like Dr. Weird.
I knew it was “I’m old” just because I remsmber the old Fucki Mold joke…
I didn’t realize it was supposed to be “I’m old” until your comment
Same here - and i like “i mold” a lot.
i thought it was L mold, as in the way memes what have gone through a lot of “right click save” cycles have the jpeg artifacts described as mold, and that it was somehow lame
Yeah, if used to be people made a comfortable living and if they had the time, shit posted on YouTube. Now to have time to make YT content you have to try to make a profit from it.
We can make it anew! I feel like Activitypub and federation has given us the tools to revive the old internet, made by our own hands.
The internet is now just a bunch of segregated echo chambers.
I’m working on a decentralised sharing protocol, so that anyone can have their own website, I just have to find some people interested in testing it out 😊
That sounds super interesting! Can you link me/tell me how that works networking wise at a high level? I’ve been poking at a number of distributed compute and decentralized software lately just because every single one has its own unique solutions to the various chicken/egg problems that decrentalization pose
There’s plenty of new good stuff on youtube still. Just a lot more junk as well
Anyone has one of those lists? Can we move these memes to peertube or something?
The ancient legendary YT meme that Anon has as his profile pic is Leek Spin by Xyliex, created 18 years ago! I think it also popularized the Levan Polka as a meme song staple long before it’s revival with Bilal the street drummer/cat vibing video.
And luckily it’s already on archive.org so we’ve got one down!
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
Profile pic, good one.
I can hear that!
It’s the Ievan Polkka, “Ieva’s polka” where Ieva is a Finnish/Baltic variation of the name Eva.
Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja RÕÕM!!
Kinda sad that it’s almost never mentioned that this is just a scene with Inoue Orihime from Bleach.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano
AYBABTU is Lord!
Anyone remembers Z0R or P0WN ??? That was ART, killed by the discontinuation of Flash. I archived all of this and in 40 years I’m doing a Gallery in the Metaverse.
Used to love z0r. Oh man, nostalgia hits hard.
my knees hurt
Luckily for it’s just my right big toe knuckle.
Great now I have leekspin/levan polka stuck in my head. Thanks OP
Let’s see if it works the other way around too:
What do you see when I say:
‘You spin me right round, baby Right round like a record, baby’
That was
I miss the 2000s…
I miss the 90s. Browsing the web (we’ll, few sites) at 33kbps with Voyager browser on Amiga… 😀
HOURS just typing [randomword].com and seeing what came up.
Please, stop… I can only take so much
Playing Warcraft with a buddy by having the game call them on their phone line.
