# Old Internet Reminiscence



## Gender: Xenomorph (May 10, 2022)

It's bizarre how fast things changed. 10 years ago it was completely different.

It's like a generation of people just disappeared, and were replaced with the constantly online narcissists.

Now every community is an uptight Discord server with super tight rules, and the super admins control everything...


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## The Cunting Death (May 10, 2022)

I miss pre 2007 internet.


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## Astro Loafo (May 10, 2022)

I miss 2002 google where you could look up anything. No ads, no filter, it was like tor but better. You could easily bypass and get addresses and phone numbers of ppl online. There was so much dark places online. It was an adventure. 

Now I just miss deleted content like Resident Evil: A story of a girl Jill or Deepercutt gets butt fucked by a car

But atleast I still have Fake and Gay - Break.com


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## Breadbassket (May 10, 2022)

the modern internet needs more leetspeak.


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## Dom Cruise (May 10, 2022)

Politics aside the internet just used to be a lot more entertaining with a lot more creativity and ambition.

Classic YTMND was incredible, classic 4chan when the memes were actually funny was also incredible.

Where's the modern equivalent of classic AVGN? Even classic Channel Awesome is something I miss, so much shit has either dried up, become stale or slowed down to a trickle, like Red Letter Media, who have maintained consistent quality but upload far less than they used to. 

The internet just kind of sucks as entertainment now.


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## oldTireWater (May 10, 2022)

You can thank smart phones. Before that you needed a PC to get online, and that was a barrier to entry for the sort of people who destroyed the internet.


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## Radical Cadre (May 10, 2022)

Asuka is shit. Rei is best girl.


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## PFM (May 10, 2022)

Sometimes I search shit on https://wiby.me/ just to reminisce.

 I also miss when rotten.com was the most degenerate thing on the internet, now you can just go to twitter. The degeneracy has literally infested society.


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## Dom Cruise (May 10, 2022)

oldTireWater said:


> You can thank smart phones. Before that you needed a PC to get online, and that was a barrier to entry for the sort of people who destroyed the internet.


This is what it boils down to, having to sit your ass down in front of a PC or laptop was enough of a barrier of entry to keep a lot of retards out and ensure most internet users would lean towards a certain nerdy variety.

Then smartphones and tablets allowed literally any retard to go online, once everyone was online, a lot of evil people snooped each other out, networked together and set forth to wage war on goodness and decency.

Of course it's also the nature of how social media works that allowed this sort of networking to occur, but the impact would have been far lessened if not for smartphones.

It's an unmitigated disaster, thanks Steve Jobs.


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## Rome's rightful successor (May 10, 2022)

oldTireWater said:


> You can thank smart phones. Before that you needed a PC to get online, and that was a barrier to entry for the sort of people who destroyed the internet.


The Iphone and it's consequences has been a disaster for the world wide web....


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## WelfareNiggerQueen (May 11, 2022)

Internet died when every mouth breather gained access when Big phone invented 4G.


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## teriyakiburns (May 11, 2022)

oldTireWater said:


> You can thank smart phones. Before that you needed a PC to get online, and that was a barrier to entry for the sort of people who destroyed the internet.


you say this like eternal september was never a thing.


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## Persian Carpet Salesman (May 11, 2022)

Radical Cadre said:


> Asuka is shit. Rei is best girl.


They both shit compared to Mari, get some taste.


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## Land of Noz (May 11, 2022)

I blame "content-aggregator" sites moreso than smartphones. Smartphones suck, yes, but they really only ruined social media. Facebook, twitter, and assorted sites got fucked by the smartphone. Most normies only use smartphones to go on those handful of sites anyway, and that's how it was back in 2008 and 2009 when the iPhone and first smartphones came out. So yes, the inanity on social media, the proliferation of retarded videos, sure yes all of that can be attributed to the smartphone. 

But I don't think that explains why the old internet "died". People don't become retards just because they get a smartphone, and all the people that populated the "old internet" presumably would have kept making the same kind of posts over time, it's just that there would have been shit in addition to that. It doesn't explain the near total disappearance of old internet. No, I think what truly destroyed everything were content aggregator websites. First it was Digg in 2005, and then when Digg imploded, Reddit took it's place in 2008 or so. Then there were other smaller content aggregator sites like StumbleUpon and even iFunny and eventually 9gag. The aforementioned sites are what destroyed the internet. 

It used to be when you logged on, you had a homepage, and your homepage was fairly important, because you'd navigate to the rest of the web from there. Most people have a news site as their homepage. In addition, most people would have large lists of bookmarks in their web browser that they would consult frequently. When you found a new website you liked, you added it to your bookmarks so you could easily find it again later. And so, browsing the web usually meant clicking on one of your bookmarks, reading whatever was new since your last visit, and then when you got bored you would click on another interesting bookmark and so on. 

If you spend a lot of time online in the early 2000s, chances are at least some of your bookmarks were for various web forums that were organized in a way similar to KF with various types of forums and sub-forums, with posters that had avatars and signatures in their posts, etc. There were tons of these forums, for every conceivable interest. My interests centered around Paranormal stuff and Drugs, so I went on paranormalnetwork.net, which got rebranded to paranormalis.com in like 2006 or 2007 (still around), shroomery.org (still around and active) and cannabis.com and the grasscity.com forums. Most of these forums were way bigger and more active than KiwiFarms is today, with some of them like cannabis.com or grasscity having hundreds of thousands of members, and thousands of unique daily posters. 

I suppose it goes without saying, but these forums were centered around discussions, like KF is today. People would post various topics, occasionally there'd be a link to a news article or there would be an embedded image, and people would discuss things. There was a lot of interesting content on these forums and a lot of pointless shit, but they were very active at the time. And the search engines worked better, so if you searched on google or yahoo for something related to those topics, you'd find forum posts. Even up until a couple years ago, if you searched something drug related on google you'd find forum posts from bluelight.ru (popular drug site) or drugs-forum.com, or shroomery.org. Since then, if you search for anything drug related that's harder than weed, you only get links to rehab sites. Seriously fuck google. The way they have changed their algorithms over the past 7 years or so has directly contributed to the death of the "old internet" by making it way more difficult to find relevant websites and search results, but that's another topic. 

The big change was the content aggregator sites. With Digg and Reddit, you would have these websites where you could go and scroll basically forever and never run out of content. Every single article posted had comments, and with reddit there was a subreddit for every possible niche interest. Reddit and subreddits destroyed a lot of old forums. Why bother posting a question on shroomery.org about how to grow shrooms when you can go to r/drugs on reddit and get more replies in a quicker amount of time because reddit is a massive site and more popular? This happened for all sorts of forums whether it was drug related, car related, video game related, and so forth. Reddit was just easier to use with a larger pool of people to draw from, and so it took over. And so began the migration from forums to content aggregator sites like reddit. 

Of course there is a bit more to it than this. A lot of forums themselves had begun to stagnate due to over-moderation and power hungry moderators and admins. That's why plenty of people were happy to leave the forums in the first place for reddit and other sites. And then there is the changing nature of the net brought about due to higher bandwidth. Forums made sense in the 90s and 2000s when most people had slow internet. Once broadband became popular by the early-mid 2000s, new possibilities developed. 4chan became a popular site because of memes and images. Most forums were primarily text based discussions with occasional images, but 4chan incorporated easy ways to post images in almost every reply. Some threads were just memes and no text. 

I think it was at that point that the internet changed from primarily being a text-based medium to being an image based medium. The variety of memes created on 4chan also helped drive traffic to reddit, which catalogued and organized the memes on subreddits like r/adviceanimals. Around this time youtube was rapildy gaining popularity as well, and then netflix. In the 2010s, the internet shifted from the image/meme based culture of the late 2000s, to a video-based culture, which is where we still are currently. The biggest sites now are still youtube, netflix, but also TikTok which is built around video sharing. I'll never be on TikTok, I don't really get it, but the video sharing is clearly extremely popular with youngsters. 

And so now we have a situation where the internet has started to become more like regular television, at least for the average normie user. There are people who go online and never read anything, they just look at image and video posts on instagram and tiktok. 

Anyway that's my rant. The old internet died due to a combination of content aggregator sites, switch from text based to image/video based content, and the manipulation of search engine algorithms for ideological and business reasons.


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## LemonParty (May 11, 2022)




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## Radical Cadre (May 11, 2022)

Persian Carpet Salesman said:


> They both shit compared to Mari, get some taste.


NUH UH.


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## Mothra1988 (May 11, 2022)

Everyone hates social media, and then you have websites that have gotten worse like YouTube, but I think people are really over-exaggerating how great the old internet was versus now.  IMO, I don't think it really found its stride until 4chan.  Before that, you would have to sign up at god awful message boards and have to contend with adminstrators surrounded by a clique of fart sniffers constantly moderating everyone.  I have a lot of expereinces at places from that period that remind me of what Reset Era is today.  Anonymous posting actually helped save us from some of that stupidity.


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## Maurice Caine (May 12, 2022)

>Where did it all go?
You're literally here nigger


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## Land of Noz (May 12, 2022)

Mothra88 said:


> Everyone hates social media, and then you have websites that have gotten worse like YouTube, but I think people are really over-exaggerating how great the old internet was versus now.  IMO, I don't think it really found its stride until 4chan.  Before that, you would have to sign up at god awful message boards and have to contend with adminstrators surrounded by a clique of fart sniffers constantly moderating everyone.  I have a lot of expereinces at places from that period that remind me of what Reset Era is today.  Anonymous posting actually helped save us from some of that stupidity.



4chan was kind of the bridge between old and new internet, but I don't even really consider it old internet, especially since the format is still the same as it was.  Another big aspect of the change between "the old internet" and what came after, is what is called Web 2.0 which is just a series of changes and new web-based applications that came online in the latter half of the 2000s



			https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-web-20/
		


I think a big part of it is aesthetics. Prior to the late 2000s, most websites were HTML based and a website was usually just text with colored backgrounds and then hyperlink buttons to other parts of the website or to other websites. Forums that used software like vBulletin were considered fancy compared to the traditional HTML. Another way to look at it is to compare older social media with newer social media. Sites like Myspace and Xanga used HTML and were highly customizable while newer sites like facebook were quite static. In a way, Tumblr was actually more like the old internet in this regard in that you could customize your page. 

This is also when a lot of stuff moved to "the cloud" and web based applications became the norm. Prior to web 2.0, most people did not use webmail, they used outlook express or another email client and had their email setup through their ISP rather than a website like google or yahoo. I think it just boils down to that the internet was more personal back then. As it got more streamlined and easier to use, it became less personal.


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## SSj_Ness (May 12, 2022)

90's Internet was magical, but it should never have been invented or at least never relinquished into the hands of libtards.


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## Meriasek (May 12, 2022)

Frank D'arbo said:


> I miss pre 2007 internet.


God yes. If only because websites were less bloated and didn't require you to click away at least three things (usually cookie consent, desktop notifications, and newsletter) every damn time. 
People were also marginally smarter, and more importantly, people were not online 24/7.


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## Sweetpeaa (May 12, 2022)

Because the old internet belonged to gen x and 80's born Millennials who knew how to have fun on the internet. The old internet was outlandish and an absolute ball.

When the Boomers got online and then the over emotional Gen Z the fun was over.


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## LeroyJenkem (May 12, 2022)

Normalfags ruined the internet, then turned around and used the internet to ruin everything else.


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## Yuri_ (May 12, 2022)

boomers shit their pants laughing over this in the late 90s


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## Dom Cruise (May 12, 2022)

One of the more impressive things about the internet in the 2000s was the fact that there were so many dedicated fan sites, name any anime or video game and there was a pretty good chance there was a well done fan site dedicated to it, even stuff that is totally obscure and forgotten today had an entire fan site and fan forum back then.

Today at best you'll get a throw away wikia and the forums are either ghost towns or deactivated completely.


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## AnaphylacticShock (May 13, 2022)

The people who ruined the internet have always been on the internet. The coastal elite and corporate CEO types. Don't blame the people who got on the internet after smartphones became a thing. True, most don't have the curiosity to explore outside of social media, Amazon, bank website etc.  But it's not really their fault that TPTB have created this boxed in, small internet.  If you don't have a lot of experience with the internet before, it's hard to "break out" of.  And increasingly, less places to go.


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## Meat Target (May 13, 2022)

Remember old Facebook? There were groups dedicated to calling someone in your class a fatass or a faggot.


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## Sweetpeaa (May 13, 2022)

Does anyone remember that dutch girl with the absolutely amazing voice in the early days of youtube? I remember she amassed a ton of fans doing covers of songs and I believe she was signed to a record label. I loved the rising star element of youtube back in those days as the people who gained popularity back in those days did so on their talent.


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## Ronnie McNutt (May 13, 2022)

big corps ruined the internet by turning everything into a neverending competition

and your grandma has internet now, too many normalfags has interwebz now although i don't think most of them use it for alot other than honeypots like tiktok or faceberg


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## Land of Noz (May 13, 2022)

Sweetpeaa said:


> Does anyone remember that dutch girl with the absolutely amazing voice in the early days of youtube? I remember she amassed a ton of fans doing covers of songs and I believe she was signed to a record label. I loved the rising star element of youtube back in those days as the people who gained popularity back in those days did so on their talent.



Even Justin Bieber I believe got "discovered" on youtube in like 2007 or 2008 or something. Very weird to think of Bieber was the first "youtube star"


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## Lemmingwise (May 13, 2022)

Money ruins everything. I imagine early radio was just as magical. Now stations own waves in most countries.


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## teriyakiburns (May 13, 2022)

Lemmingwise said:


> Money ruins everything. I imagine early radio was just as magical. Now stations own waves in most countries.


_There goes the last v-logger_


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## Trigger Me Timbers (May 13, 2022)

I wonder if the classic woke blue haired tumblarinas will reminisce about 2014 internet the same way we think about pre-Facebook internet. 

_“oh it was a great time on the internet, all you had to do was call someone fascist or racist on Twitter and within a week they would have been banned and lost everything. ahh the good old days…”_


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## kainvnod (May 14, 2022)

oldTireWater said:


> You can thank smart phones. Before that you needed a PC to get online, and that was a barrier to entry for the sort of people who destroyed the internet.


Funny. Not that long ago I blamed native network support of mainboards and the PPPoE-protocol, that replaced the dial-up process of modems for that. Without having to open their computer to install a 56k-moden, configure it correctly and then dial the correct number to get online, the first great wave of stupidity could be already felt in the 2000s.
The setup also made you feel like a total nerd. Not everyone could do that, and back then you knew that.


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## whatever I feel like (May 14, 2022)

I miss competently run shock sites like Rotten.com/the Daily Rotten (and the Rotten Library!), Liveleak, the original goatse, etc. Even the "cesspit" of early gen Youtube and like others have said unfiltered Google search.

But the thing I miss most of all is the Blackface Kermit video of him and Mister Metokur prank calling tranny hookers and "jokingly" threatening to cut off their heads. "My poop is friendly." bwwahaha


And in all fairness, there was also a lot of shit to wade through, like fifty Dragonball Z "fan sites" that all stole the same content from each other (enjoy our Goku killing Pikachu gif collection!) and ran articles talking about how much more pure HK fansubs full of swearing were. I don't miss that early internet.


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## ToroidalBoat (May 14, 2022)

The internet was somewhat ruined by "smartphone culture" combined with "social media culture", which also led to Current Year.


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## Gender: Xenomorph (May 14, 2022)

Also YouTube enforcing strict copyright. Fuck YouTube.


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 14, 2022)

I didn't start using the internet till 2000 with my own computer and 56k dial-up modem. Back in the 90's  I never had a PC so I couldn't use the internet. Matter of fact the only time I used it was at a friends house who was lucky enough to own a computer and had internet access. I am talking about the late 90's like 1997-1999. The first time I saw the internet was in 97. I never used it I just watched my friend use it and it was only for a few minutes. 

The internet pre social media and smartphones was ok. But the internet didn't really get fun till you have sites like YouTube come along.  Till then it was all text and shitty websites. 56k dial-up was slow as hell. Also, the porn sucked. I mean it was still porn but there was no Pornhub or Xhamster. Sitting around with a shitty dial-up modem downloading like small clips of porn that took ages.  But people still managed to have fun on the internet back then. Before Myspace and the social media cancer came along there was chatrooms. I used to use Yahoo chat. It was the only place you could go and call someone a nigger or faggot and watch some 28 year old woman sitting in front of her webcam sipping a beer with her tits out. That was for free and not some internet whore shit. They were not ugly fat women either.  

A lot of things kind of killed the internet or made it worse. Smartphones, tablets and social media played a role of course. But so did the user friendliness of computers. Older computers and I mean even ones from the early 2000's were not that normie friendly. Like they took some level of intelligence to operate and not screw up. But that's kind of how things progress. They steadily get easier to use. Smartphones and tablets just made it happen much faster. 

I think the one thing people miss the most about the old internet was the freedom of speech platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter used to have.  I remember using forums in the mid 2000's and I don't ever remember being able to say whatever I wanted. I know because I got banned on a lot of forums for saying certain things. But it kind of varied from forum to forum. Like some forums would let you use some vulgar language as long as it wasn't too excessive. Then some wouldn't allow it at all and even some wouldn't allow the discussion of religion or politics. Most forums didn't allow any racism or homophobic slurs. You could say them but most people would report you and you would be banned,  Usually it was a temporary ban and it was 24 hours then after that 2-3 days a week or month then a permanent ban.  I got a few permanent bans back then. 

People who like to talk about the "golden age" of the internet always talk about all the freedom of speech it had but I don't remember it that way. People only had the freedom of speech that they had on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter because those sites had huge numbers of users and it's hard to moderate such large user bases. On a small forum with maybe 150-200 users, it's much easier to moderate than a site with millions and millions of users. They didn't have a good way to moderate every post and so on. They didn't have the AI tech that they have now. AI combing through every post to make sure you don't say anything wrong. AI looking over your videos to make sure you don't post inappropriate content that will violate the TOS or copyrighted material. If they could have had the AI tech back then though in the late 2000's and early 2010's they would have used it. But they didn't so there was more freedom. 

The internet used to be like the old Wild West and like the Wild West it got tamed. But instead of civilization and law enforcement it was AI.


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 15, 2022)

I forgot the biggest internet killer of all.

Reddit. 

Reddit killed the forums. There used to be a bunch of video game forums on the internet. Now they are all mostly dead or nearly dead. Like the activity is so slow a thread can stay somewhere near the top for days. 

I hate Reddit and only use when I have to and it's not often. I avoid using it as much as I can. I remember in the mid and late 2000's there were forums all over the place and they were pretty active. But by the early 2010's they all started to die. It's not like the forums offered any level of free speech. Going over to Reddit wasn't that much of a change.


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 15, 2022)

Member spamming fake links with meatspin in them? 

I member. 

It was fantastic.


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## mario if smoke weed (May 15, 2022)

Yuri_ said:


> boomers shit their pants laughing over this in the late 90s
> View attachment 3275678


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## Tinfoil (May 15, 2022)

Once the normalfags got on the net, the companies noticed, and started pandering to them.  You with your 9600 Baud modem hooked to the desktop is no match for millions and millions of normalfags with smartphones.


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## ToroidalBoat (May 16, 2022)

Tacitus Kilgore said:


> Till then it was all text and shitty websites. 56k dial-up was slow as hell.


Like I said in another thread, Current Year internet does allow one to see the world and beyond through stuff like Google Earth or downloading stuff like SpaceEngine and Celestia. Stuff that was technologically not exactly feasible in the '90s. And the speed and memory of current systems allows stuff to be done online that wasn't possible then. 360 degree HD stuff, 3D simulations, HD streaming video, etc. So at least there's that going for the Current Year internet, despite the censorship and woke BS.

Also '90s internet searching could be crap, with advertising and porn paysite crap clogging up search results. And early '00s internet had the cancer of excessive popups.


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## lichen (May 16, 2022)

Many of us probably remember when the internet could not be trusted with your identity. If you were a kid pre-MySpace, you were told to never tell anyone your real name. Pre-Amazon, giving your credit card to place an order online involved some hand wringing. You could do, discuss, and discover real things online, but if the internet world became real in your life, it's because you'd made the decision to invite it in and most people didn't really approve. Now a large portion of internet users intentionally connect their employer and family to their online activity, and many people shop exclusively online. 

That shift has opened the door to a lot of wonderful practical developments, but I suppose the invitation to blur the line between a person's identity and their online persona has been a bit alienating at times. This is why KF is a refuge, even to people who didn't care to use slurs. An internet community that expects individuals to remain pseudonymous, with the implied (but mostly imagined, for normal users) risk of consequences for saying too much, recaptures a bit of that escapism that web 1.0 offered. You can't be 13 again (there's too much politics here), but this is kind of what 13 year old me could have imagined instead of what they got.

All that said - I was always in a bubble, and what I remember as late 90s/early 00s internet culture was just the corner of the internet that was only one or two steps removed from 4chan. If you were some completely different sort of nerd whose interests didn't intersect with Japanese media at all, maybe the internet and its culture was another universe entirely. I'm sure people were going online to talk about car parts and the like, and maybe their life then looks a lot like their life now.


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## Oglooger (May 16, 2022)

it's not old, but I remember when kiwi farms was originally just an obscure forum for a wiki about a weird manchild. 
How far things have gotten now.


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## John Titor (May 16, 2022)

2010 was probably the best. Everything was hands off. Everything before is kind of overrated. You think we didn't have Twitter back then? We did, they were called personal webpages like geocities where you can broadcast your worthless opinions and maybe 1 or 2 people will see it. I'd argue nothing really changed other than speed.


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## Professor G. Raff (May 16, 2022)

Nothing says really old internet memories to me like Newgrounds in it's prime. Just popping on after middle school to catch the newest episode of _Retarded Animal Babies _and laughing my ass off because of the crude humor or playing some random flash game on the school computer... ah, good stuff. It's hard to imagine a to when all these videos being inherently high effort due to being animation coming out with no financial incentive... just for passion/artistry/laughs, big change from it's descendant YouTube. I also just thought things would always be the anything goes free speech style of NG and it never occurred to me the internet would be a super regulated authoritarian hellhole in the future and I was experiencing something special and fleeting.

Lots of other random things... YTMND glory years, going into AOL gay chat room because lol gays, making a crappy Yoshi fan site on freewebz, getting hit on by a "cute Asian girl" who was 100% a fat pedo guy on AIM, being astonished by fake Pokemon, checking Encyclopedia Dramatica ever day for the latest insanity, a "100 things that happen when you play too much Super Mario RPG" website that will not leave my brain after over 20 years. My first day of college in the bathroom stall someone has scribed "\b\tards report in" on the wall with 3 or 4 messages below from other channers... , they were really out there in real life before becoming epic fail guys not too much later!

For me it's somewhat astounding how as late as 2014 still had some of that old internet feel... it was that last year a small forum I had fucked around on trolling long term existed before being shuttered. 2014 was no 90's or 00's, but difference between them and then, to then and now was a total fast collapse. I really appreciate Kiwifarms because it maintains the old feel in many ways... ways the soulless nature of YouTube or Reddit seek to snuff out. I truly miss when the internet was individualistic rather than corporate...


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## Ebonic Tutor (May 16, 2022)

For the first few years of Something Awful you didn't even have to pay to register, then it got too popular and so many idiots kept showing up that lowtax made the paywall around '04?  Early SA was basically KF x Reddit but with weird rules to keep people from posting like idiots, unless it was funny.

By around '05 or '06 the catladies had set in and that's when you all of a sudden couldn't say nigger any more from what I recall, well you could but you had to basically be in FYAD to get away with it.

By '09 the commie tranny types set up shop and started trying to get things they like driven out of the forums. Popular target was GBS which was basically A&N mixed with General, cause it was "right wing idiots"... Most of the complainers lurked in what was pretty much the forum meant for complaining about the forums and the politics discussion area where the only politics allowed after Obama were left leaning and eventually only commie ideals.

*whistles*


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## Land of Noz (May 17, 2022)

Tacitus Kilgore said:


> I forgot the biggest internet killer of all.
> 
> Reddit.
> 
> ...



That was my main assertion as well. Reddit really did a number on a lot of the smaller forums. The sad thing is that reddit is (or at least was) a pretty good site for finding quality content. Stuff that got upvoted was generally deemed to be interesting by a majority of the userbase, and if you were on a specific subreddit, it's likely that you would enjoy the front page of most highly upvoted content whether memes, videos, music, etc. It was basically an inverse forum. On a forum, if someone posts content beyond text, you have to be interested in the title of the thread enough to click on it, and then click on the content, etc. And even so, the point of the thread isn't really to share the content, the point of the thread is to discuss the content. 

And that's where Reddit fails. It's pretty good for finding quality content (or at least it was) but it's really poor at discussion. Not even just because of the overzealous moderation, but that's a big part of it. The reason it sucks is that while the upvote system works for interesting content, it's the exact opposite for ideas. Only the most widely accepted, boring, mainstream view get upvoted, whereas more controversial views are downvoted to oblivion. And I'm not even necessarily talking about political stuff. If you go on to the Star Wars subreddit I imagine, and you post something highly critical of the new Disney sequels, you'll be downvoted heavily for not expressing the agreed upon opinion, whereas if you praise them, you'll get upvotes. This is the exact opposite of a traditional forum, or even something more anonymous like 4chan, where the more controversial and shocking opinions will get the most quotes and responses


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 17, 2022)

Land of Noz said:


> That was my main assertion as well. Reddit really did a number on a lot of the smaller forums. The sad thing is that reddit is (or at least was) a pretty good site for finding quality content. Stuff that got upvoted was generally deemed to be interesting by a majority of the userbase, and if you were on a specific subreddit, it's likely that you would enjoy the front page of most highly upvoted content whether memes, videos, music, etc. It was basically an inverse forum. On a forum, if someone posts content beyond text, you have to be interested in the title of the thread enough to click on it, and then click on the content, etc. And even so, the point of the thread isn't really to share the content, the point of the thread is to discuss the content.
> 
> And that's where Reddit fails. It's pretty good for finding quality content (or at least it was) but it's really poor at discussion. Not even just because of the overzealous moderation, but that's a big part of it. The reason it sucks is that while the upvote system works for interesting content, it's the exact opposite for ideas. Only the most widely accepted, boring, mainstream view get upvoted, whereas more controversial views are downvoted to oblivion. And I'm not even necessarily talking about political stuff. If you go on to the Star Wars subreddit I imagine, and you post something highly critical of the new Disney sequels, you'll be downvoted heavily for not expressing the agreed upon opinion, whereas if you praise them, you'll get upvotes. This is the exact opposite of a traditional forum, or even something more anonymous like 4chan, where the more controversial and shocking opinions will get the most quotes and responses



This is how I describe Reddit to people. 

Remember all the whiny faggotry that used to be all over forums in the early, mid and late 2000's? It all got concentrated into one site called Reddit.


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## ToroidalBoat (May 17, 2022)

Oglooger said:


> How far things have gotten now.


I still remember CWCki Forums.

Also it seems lolcows are less of a thing now.


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 17, 2022)

I never got into Myspace. I think Myspace came out in 2003. People were always telling me to get a Myspace, but I never did. I have 3 Facebook accounts so I could get around those temp bans that people called Facebook jail. None of my personal information is online anywhere. There are no pictures of me on Facebook and no real name. I am not the kind of person that likes to draw attention. I am used to the old way of the internet where everyone was anonymous. I actually prefer it that way. No one needs to know who I am or see me. 

I haven't used Facebook since 2016 and even then, my usage kind dropped quite a bit. These days if I use it, it's to contact family members I can't reach by phone. I might check in like 2-3 times a month then leave. If I want to talk to someone I either text them or call them. 

From what I seen Millennials and Gen X call Facebook Boomer book because a lot of older people use it. Younger people were leaving Facebook in the early 2010's. 

Also, the recent news about the possibility of 90% of Twitters active users being fake accounts isn't helping Twitter. Elon Musk is either going to try and get Twitter cheaper or backout of the deal I imagine. But that would totally destroy Twitter if it's true since actual living people is its only commodity. Even if it's just 20% that would still be a huge blow.


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## Mega Man II Intro - GB (May 17, 2022)

When the internet was young people would make their own content and put it up as their own website. Forums and chat rooms would have their own lore. I was the 90's equivalent of a teenage lolcow in one community. It was great.

Now everyone is trained to do shit for views and if you don't get a million people looking at your stuff you feel like a failure. People still make it, but of course you can't _find_ it.


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## ditto (May 17, 2022)

Just remember that a decade from now some folks in an obscure corner of the metaverse will be remembering the halcyon days of 2020s Kiwi Farms.


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## ToroidalBoat (May 17, 2022)

Remember when guestbooks, webrings, access counters, and "email me" GIFs were a thing?

(also space backgrounds)



Tacitus Kilgore said:


> I never got into Myspace.


Same here. I also remember when "Facebook" started taking off. Glad I never hopped on the "social media" bandwagon.


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## Gender: Xenomorph (May 17, 2022)

I really hate the trend of Powermods that Reddit (and Discord) have started.

The idea is that you can start your own remote community, but some holier-than-though mod can just come and be like "nope, you can't talk about this, shut it down". It's really retarded and it's going to be the norm.

You can't have your remote community discussing about whatever and having your own rules. There always has to be a superior authority dictating what you can and can't talk about. There always have to be a bot to observe that you don't talk about something that's not allowed...


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## Tacitus Kilgore (May 17, 2022)

ToroidalBoat said:


> Remember when guestbooks, webrings, access counters, and "email me" GIFs were a thing?
> 
> (also space backgrounds)
> 
> ...



I used to use Facebook back in 2011 till around 2015-2016 is when I stopped using it much. That's the issue with all these alternative social media sites like Gab and the others that aren't doing well. No one is looking for an alternative they are moving away from social media. It's a dying fad really. Myspace is still around but hardly anyone uses it. You can still access the site but there isn't much reason to do so these days. Gab only has about 100,000 active users.


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## Squirrelcop (May 17, 2022)

I miss eMule, Kazaa and Limewire. Even if the shit you wanted turned out to be something else, it at least was something like Gayniggers from Outer Space. Nowadays you get a call from lawyers.


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## NoonmanR (May 17, 2022)

Well i don't think the people themselves are gone, this site is a testament to that, but it really feels like the internet from even a decade ago was systematically isolated and removed bit by bit and then replaced by countless herds of cattle.


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## Quest 4 Truth (May 17, 2022)

SSj_Ness said:


> 90's Internet was magical, but it should never have been invented or at least never relinquished into the hands of libtards.


Here's a website from the early 1990's that's still up and running, virtually unchanged for almost 30 years:  *LINK*


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## Ronnie McNutt (May 17, 2022)

Quest 4 Truth said:


> Here's a website from the early 1990's that's still up and running, virtually unchanged for almost 30 years:  *LINK*


the images load so slow, they must have never touched this at all since then


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## Jonah Hill poster (May 18, 2022)

Old Internet used to have the best internet web comics and chat rooms that had many different and unique looking characters that made you wonder how and why they were short lived.

Fast forward to today, you now see Twitch and corporatized cartoons made by Google and Amazon being made to give the illusion that they are unique and interesting to look at.


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## Weed Eater (May 18, 2022)

Good times.


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## Yuri_ (May 18, 2022)

mario if smoke weed said:


> View attachment 3286637



i-is that a baby playing a guitar?!?

*wheeze*


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## Poppavalyim Andropoff (May 18, 2022)

ASL?


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## Wormy (May 18, 2022)

The internet will never be the same. The big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like a retarded Six Flags. While the kids watch Elsa dental videos and play Minecraft, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college fund on buying property in Cryptoland. In the old days, file sharers knew your handle, knew what anime you were wanting to watch or what Doom mods were worth playing. Today it's like signing something a the fucking DMV. Today it's all gone. You got some old Quake vet grognard with years of kills to his name showing up in a Fortnite game and a 9 year old calls him a cuckold. After the old 4channers finally got knocked out of the box, the internet providers tore down just about every one of the old boards. And where did the money come from to rebuild the net? Junk bonds. 

In the end, I wound up back where I started, writing homebrew RPG settings for curious randos and playing Blood. And why mess with a good thing?


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