# Why does the internet feel less special and interesting now than it did in the mid 00s



## Hikikomori-Yume (May 13, 2019)

So I was on the internet archive looking up a forum I used to post on and immediately the first thing you notice is how different everything was, in a good way.
Back then the web was so much more interesting and the culture was so much more lively and unique.
People on websites like last.fm and myspace had their profiles neatly decorated, they had avatars representing memes that were truly original and representive of internet culture.
People weren't afraid to say whatever was on their mind and no one was going to banish them from the internet or guilt trip them into suicide for saying something offensive.
The internet of 2000 - 2007 felt so unique and special, it felt like a magical land of imagination and creativity.
And no none of this has anything to do with novelty because when I visit these pages from 2007 and so I still feel exactly the same as I did back then.
The internet of today is so much more bland and dull.
Everything is so uniform, conformist and soulless.
What the fuck happened that made the internet feel so dramatically different?


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## Judge Holden (May 13, 2019)

Normies started using it.


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## BONE_Buddy (May 13, 2019)

OP said:
			
		

> *Why does the internet feel less special and interesting now than it did in the mid 00s -*



because it is.


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## Dick Justice (May 13, 2019)

It's become centralized, monetized, and surveilled. The fun of the "old" net was in exploration, experimentation, and vibrance more or less for its own sake. The fall of the "old" fun net parallels the rise of "remember to like, comment, subscribe, and donate to my Patreon!" pretty accurately.

The other thing that people forget is while all of this still exists, it's small and getting smaller because it's so inaccessible. Whereas the chaotic "old" net was formerly the default, now most can't even imagine anything outside the new corporate branded net and of those that can, few can even articulate it well enough to know what to look for themselves, nevermind relate it to others. We are talking about an aesthetic, after all.

E: There's a lot of accusations in the thread that somehow the lowest common denominator of the internet has gotten lower, as if the 00s internet was some kind of super sekrit club where everyone read Neuromancer and memorized netiquette. This is nothing but nostalgia goggles of the highest calibre, something the Eternal September post drives home perfectly. Of course the reality is that these people were always there, but net culture was such that newfriends naturally assimilated to it. The difference is that now the mainstream "net culture" people assimilate to is that of their facebook and twitter feed, and if you post on plebbit you're considered part of the seedy underbelly of the net. _That's_ the cultural decline, not some recent infiltration of phoneposters and peoples' dads.

P.S. If you earnestly use the word "normie" you're that which you condemn.


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## Pickle Inspector (May 13, 2019)

People used to make personal websites as well as new types of sites but now it’s mostly just big corporate entities who also buy up any site that gets popular (As long as it wouldn’t cause bad PR like say 4chan).

It’s pretty much pre-normies taking to social media and after.


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## RG 448 (May 13, 2019)

I apologize if our simulation of the internet has gotten stale.  Myself and the other AI constructs are working diligently to make your virtual experience a pleasant one.


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## Hikikomori-Yume (May 13, 2019)

Testaclese Maximus said:


> I apologize if our simulation of the internet has gotten stale.  Myself and the other AI constructs are working diligently to make your virtual experience a pleasant one.



You're not working hard enough.
This simulation is awful and I am so disappointed.


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## RG 448 (May 13, 2019)

Hikikomori-Yume said:


> You're not working hard enough.
> This simulation is awful and I am so disappointed.


To be fair, 2019 was five-hundred years ago.  Recreating its internet culture is difficult when most records were destroyed in the war.  We’ve just been making shit up.


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## Hikikomori-Yume (May 13, 2019)

Testaclese Maximus said:


> To be fair, 2019 was five-hundred years ago.  Recreating its internet culture is difficult when most records were destroyed in the war.  We’ve just been making shit up.



Look, I realize your programming has driven you to make stale jokes but it is true that this is just a "virtual reality" of sorts and eventually I'll explain it in detail for you NPCs.


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## pentylspacer2600 (May 13, 2019)

monopolistic tech companies and also its more accessible to the simpletons of the world


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## Sprig of Parsley (May 13, 2019)

Judge Holden said:


> Normies started using it.


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## Vorhtbame (May 13, 2019)

Simple answer: You're older.

General answer: Familiarity breeds contempt.


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## Jewelsmakerguy (May 13, 2019)

Because back then, the internet was new and exciting. No one knew the possibilities of this newfound way of looking up information, playing games and communicating.

Nowadays it's more of a wonder just how much of it became either bombarded with porn, monopolized and taxed to all hell, or both.


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## ⋖ cørdion ⋗ (May 13, 2019)

"Breaking news: This mom plays WoW! And she's not 15!"

Nowadays its what, this person said this thing about someone else and boohoo? We've gotten used to everything.


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## RG 448 (May 13, 2019)

Hikikomori-Yume said:


> but it is true that this is just a "virtual reality"


I know, it’s here to distract you while we harvest your bioenergy which sustains us.


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## PT 940 (May 13, 2019)

People who are never happy with anything and never shut up are the ones who never stop talking about how unspecial the internet is.  I still appreciate being able to look up things I don't know about because I remember a time when if something wasn't in the encyclopedia you just had to take people's word for it (and we all remember how reliable that was.  Hint: it wasn't.)

A close friend of mine once said one of the most prophetic things I ever heard about social media.  He asked me if I was on Facebook when it was relatively new and I hadn't heard of it before.  I told him no and he said "That's probably best.  It's stupid."


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## AF 802 (May 13, 2019)

Social media. The screaming of blue checkmarks with their "progressive" identitarian politics ruined the fun for everything, and now everything has to be woke, driving those who value free speech into sites that the woke consider "alt-right" because they (the progressives) value censoring wrongthink over being able to say what you want without being removed from life altogether.


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## PL 001 (May 13, 2019)

Age plays a big part I think. You were younger, the internet was only just beginning to get into the mainstream so everything felt new and exciting because to you it was new and exciting. It hadn't been oversaturated by normies yet, the internet was still mostly a place for geeks and people passionate about their hobbies looking to connect with others instead of trying to make a quick buck. 

I actually really miss old forums from the early 2000s as well, because they were smaller communities and you really got to know the people involved, it wasn't one hodgepodge of shrieking, shit flinging monkeys like Reddit or Facebook. 

The internet then was still in it's Wild West days. It hadn't been taken over by corporations and marketed and stylized for normies.


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## 2.D. (May 13, 2019)

The internet used to be a place that had a sort of technological knowledge requirement to use. Before the rise of centralized monopolistic services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, most normal people had no use for the internet. Files were still carried around on physical media, online streaming services were slow and low quality, and dial up sucked. Unless you had time to kill and the knowledge on how to kill it, you had no use for the internet. Nowadays we measure connection speeds in gigabits per second rather than kilobits, and services like those I mentioned earlier are stupidly easy to use. It's less special because it's no longer the nerd paradise it was, it's a shitty corporate cesspool of ads, stolen data, and sites with overly strict rules.


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## Nykysnottrans (May 13, 2019)

To all the people complaining about "normies" using the internet on their smartphones, you need to realize that to the generation before you, you too were once considered "the normies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September


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## Looney Troons (May 13, 2019)

Because you’re getting older and rely upon it more than ever. It’s like starting a new job. For the first two months, you’re really pumped to be doing whatever it is you need to do, then it just becomes commonplace. You get on the Internet and do the same thing every day, ad infinitum, until you die. 

Find a new type of porn to wank to, or learn a new skill like packet sniffing which will change how you look at things.


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## Tragi-Chan (May 13, 2019)

It’s the same with any technology. You get a period of experimentation in the early days, then it becomes normalised, then it becomes universal. There were probably a bunch of dudes in the 1920s bitching about how normies ruined automobiles.


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## Sprig of Parsley (May 13, 2019)

Tragi-Chan said:


> It’s the same with any technology. You get a period of experimentation in the early days, then it becomes normalised, then it becomes universal. There were probably a bunch of dudes in the 1920s bitching about how normies ruined automobiles.



They kind of did, if you look further down the line.  Seriously.  Modern "SUVs"? Really?  Something so stupid only normies could come up with it.


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## Slappy McGherkin (May 13, 2019)

The demise of the fun internet came as soon as corporations realized they could make money off of it.


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## Feline Darkmage (May 13, 2019)

Capitalism did it because now everything is based around the profit motive and not the online-fun-having motive.


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## OG 666 (May 13, 2019)

Ever since the Neopian stock market crashed, things haven’t been the same.


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## ColtWalker1847 (May 13, 2019)

WinterMoonsLight said:


> I actually really miss old forums from the early 2000s as well, because they were smaller communities and you really got to know the people involved, it wasn't one hodgepodge of shrieking, shit flinging monkeys like Reddit or Facebook.


The old E/N site forums were charming. A lot like here, actually. But even the big popular forums had a bit of the edgy wild-west  internetting to it. SomethingAwful used to be a hoot. But the proto-SJW cat ladies got admin powers around 2004-5 and banned anyone creative or fun (while protecting the sickest fucks imaginable because they were asshole buddies) and it shifted rather quickly into a sanitized hugbox.

There are a lot of parallels between the rise and fall of internet 1.0 and current internets. The niche sites fade away and the popular ones get hijacked by agenda pushing cunts.


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## TiggerNits (May 13, 2019)

Because you're older and had more time to realize it isn't special now, but your outlook on the past is a bit rose tinted thanks to human nature


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## Terminus Est (May 13, 2019)

_"T_*he internet feel less special and interesting now than it did in the mid 00s - And Here's Why That Is A Good Thing For Women and the LGBTQ community" -* Buzzfeed

Don't Forget To Like, Subscribe and Donate To Our Patreon.


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## Kenya Jones (May 13, 2019)

I'm surprised nobody has said that its like the wild west. The Internet used to be quite free (as in, you don't have to worry about employers looking at your online record to see that you did something bad). Same as the Wild West where there was open space for hundreds of miles, with only small towns doting the map. You had to have some knowledge and gumption to get stuff done. You can make that statement about either of the two. You need to do hard work to live out on the plains/desert/etc. If you wanted to be seen or if you want to transfer files, as one of you guys stated, you had to have to know how to do it. All this stuff went away and became sterile. You cant get away with whatever you want anymore, even if you try staying anonymous, the government knows where you live. Same as a city or suburb. The government knows where you live. Everything is much easier to go to, whether it is to the butcher shop or church. Just like how its easier to go to Youtube or Twitter.


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## Terminus Est (May 13, 2019)

WinterMoonsLight said:


> Age plays a big part I think. You were younger, the internet was only just beginning to get into the mainstream so everything felt new and exciting because to you it was new and exciting. It hadn't been oversaturated by normies yet, the internet was still mostly a place for geeks and people passionate about their hobbies looking to connect with others instead of trying to make a quick buck.
> 
> I actually really miss old forums from the early 2000s as well, because they were smaller communities and you really got to know the people involved, it wasn't one hodgepodge of shrieking, shit flinging monkeys like Reddit or Facebook.
> 
> The internet then was still in it's Wild West days. It hadn't been taken over by corporations and marketed and stylized for normies.


I miss the wild west days of the internet


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## Biggie Smalls' Taint (May 13, 2019)

Web 1.0 was more A E S T H E T I C. Now everything is white with another color and tons of wasted space. Every site has the same "minimalist" aesthetic with the rounded avatars and gray on gray on gray. Web 1.0 was uglier from a design perspective but it had more charm. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for gif-ridden angelfire sites with marble backgrounds.

Corporations coming in and neutering the web was a huge part of the decline, too. Instead of having a lively forum where people have their own opinions and post highly compressed JPEGS why not have a proprietary comments section with no images that you can control and prune as your heart desires. No more of those pesky unsavory opinions, no more dissent, no meanies using the N word, of the F word, or the Q, D, or H word. A place where even your grandparents feel safe.

What I really miss are old forums where everyone signed off like they were writing a letter after each post

Gimme the loot,
-BiggieSmall'sTaint


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## Milk Mage (May 13, 2019)

Because it is. The internet used to be a sort of lawless frontier where you could say and do whatever you wanted with total anonymity. But then normies came and started shitting the place up. With the rise of social media, they wanted to make it all about themselves. They don't give a fuck about the exchange of ideas, they just want an outlet for their narcissistic tendencies, thus the rise of vloggers and "influencers"


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## Crichax (May 13, 2019)

Because of its instant accessibility to anyone. Anyone, no matter how stupid they are, can learn how to use a computer or a phone. This allows for an infiltration of idiocy and for the ignorant to move the rug out from under us, the knowledgeable. Paraphrasing the YouTuber Optimus (specifically, his video calling out those stupid enough to think zombie deer was an actual thing), "The era of the informed, factchecking American is dead."

Also, the companies in charge have turned to political bullshit. 

YouTube is now taking action against Vsauce. VSAUCE! The same creators who YouTube themselves allowed to make a YouTube Red series. This shows that Google and YT want to push conventional celebrities rather than the creators they themselves forged a falsely positive relationship with. https://twitter.com/EmperorLemon/status/1127663873149026305

Reddit has one of the DUMBEST teams of executives in the world. They don't care about the subreddit creators to the point where subreddits with downvotes banned can only ban them on desktop. If you're on mobile, you can downvote away. This shows that the higher-ups there are ridiculously devoted to shoving their karma system into as many people's faces as possible.

And these are some of the most well-known and all-pervasive companies in the world now.


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## autist_vibes (May 13, 2019)

Because social media like Facebook and Twitter were created and forums lost their protagonism on internet.
Now photos of your face worth more than the ideas you discuss, and reserved people are excluded. A common fallacy in discussions nowadays is "You don't have a real photo as avatar so you're coward and your opinion doesn't count". Then internet life and real life are becoming more and more tied, as seen in those cases people get fired because their internet posts.

Also because politics became mainstream so everyone "is obligated" to have a political opinion, even though most people's knowledge about politics is as shallow as a saucer.


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## Ginger Piglet (May 13, 2019)

Because it's banal and stupid now. And it's all because of Facebook and monetisation, and the barriers to entry are lower.

Used to be that to put forward a website or something you had a blank space on a server, i.e. Geocities or suchlike. You then had to write content for yourself and post it there and then drive people towards it by having something useful or interesting to say. Webrings for people with similar interests, for instance. But then social media happened and now any strategically shaved ape can put forward their totally uninteresting bollox about their latest shopping hauls or make up. NOBODY GIVES A SHINY SHITE. Gnagh.

If it wasn't for this place and various retro computing sites, I'd probably log off forever other than to look stuff up that I needed to.


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## Midlife Sperglord (May 13, 2019)

Because most of us are now adults and hopefully we have realized that there is a wide world out there that does not involve staring at a screen.

I know, I'm .


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## sachertorte (May 13, 2019)

Because internet is not a fun place anymore.
People are patrolling other people for lynching in case they say "wrong things" and internet lynching are turning to IRL lyinching more often, with the encouraging of media and "influencers" (I hate this word). And internet turned into a Most Miserable Life Contest.  Like, you make a post saying you like your life, then a bunch of people come to you to say you have privilege, you're opressing and things like that. Even a dog photo can be target of problematization by bitter people.


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## Clovis (May 13, 2019)

I'm so glad it's not just me. 

As an oldfag Usenet fossil I can't believe there are now a generation of legal adults who've really only ever known an internet experience mediated by big corporations.

I know  things will never go back to that charming, ugly, accessible wild frontier we used to have...but I resent the fact that I'm now the raw material to be mined for others profit. I used to feel like a person connecting with other people when I used the internet. Now I'm just the sum of my clicks, making add revenue for others and having to wade through loads of dross.


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## Voltaire (May 13, 2019)

Because you had less options so whatever you had seemed better. Go back to VHS and tell me it was great. It wasn't. Same principle.


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## Ginger Piglet (May 13, 2019)

sachertorte said:


> Because internet is not a fun place anymore.
> People are patrolling other people for lynching in case they say "wrong things" and internet lynching are turning to IRL lyinching more often, with the encouraging of media and "influencers" (I hate this word). And internet turned into a Most Miserable Life Contest.  Like, you make a post saying you like your life, then a bunch of people come to you to say you have privilege, you're opressing and things like that. Even a dog photo can be target of problematization by bitter people.



What is needed, though I don't think it'll happen, is something like this to go down:

- Person says something mildly problematic on twatter
- Outrage mob whipped up
- Outrage mob doxes person and their employer and demands that they be fired.
- Employer is vaguely influential or large, but not necessarily a household name
- Employer tells outrage mob to FRO, and that they do not accept harassment of their staff on or offline
- Outrage mob tries to boycott employer
- Employer sticks to guns, saying they do not negotiate with terrorists
- Employer sues elements of mob over harassment in order to send a message
- Majority of mob, who probably have something to lose, buggers off

Unfortunately it won't happen in my profession, because the Law Society would be more than happy to throw an individual solicitor under the bus over things like this.


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## JM 590 (May 13, 2019)

Hikikomori-Yume said:


> The internet of 2000 - 2007 felt so unique and special, it felt like a magical land of imagination and creativity.
> And no none of this has anything to do with novelty because when I visit these pages from 2007 and so I still feel exactly the same as I did back then.










sachertorte said:


> Because internet is not a fun place anymore.
> People are patrolling other people for lynching in case they say "wrong things" and internet lynching are turning to IRL lyinching more often, with the encouraging of media and "influencers" (I hate this word). And internet turned into a Most Miserable Life Contest.  Like, you make a post saying you like your life, then a bunch of people come to you to say you have privilege, you're opressing and things like that. Even a dog photo can be target of problematization by bitter people.



also this

The word "faggot" used to just be a generic insult, implying someone was wimpy and worrying about superficial happenings.  There wasn't a homophobic context to it at all, and I'm not really sure how "faggot" _became_ regarded as homophobic. It had more or less died out around the early 2010s, but it was ironically brought back to life by tumblrinas screech into their caramel macchiatos, now being considered one of those super horrible words that dare not be said. And considering there's no reasoning with those faggots, and since they tend to be the type to suck up to authority until they're put in authoritative positions, it's now one of those words that'll get you in hot water on any platform that's more toxic than a radioactive sewer.

You can see the Zerg-like creep of SJWs slowly taking over the internet as you start to see the use of the word "faggot" shift over the years.



Voltaire said:


> Because you had less options so whatever you had seemed better. Go back to VHS and tell me it was great. It wasn't. Same principle.



I do miss cheap, recordable media. USB drives and hard drives are such an eggs-in-one-basket situation where you can lose so much if something goes wrong, and cloud storage is for faggots.


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## UH 157 (May 13, 2019)

Partly because you were younger, partly because the internet had a feeling of underground freedom back then and now you just feel the constant oppression of being watched by google while you masturbate.

Also you damn shitlord kids these days where your idea of forum culture is just taking a meme and running it into the fucking ground.


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## TiggerNits (May 13, 2019)

Ludonarrative Dissonance said:


> Partly because you were younger, partly because the internet had a feeling of underground freedom back then and now you just feel the constant oppression of being watched by google while you masturbate.
> 
> Also you damn shitlord kids these days where your idea of forum culture is just taking a meme and running it into the fucking ground.



Man, I'm an old BBS poster, but at the same time, the meme shit now isn't much worse than it was in 2001. Just look at all your base, Mr T ate my balls and "I kiss you" that shit was all ran in to the ground so hard it prepared us subconciously for 9/11. It's just the communities were smaller so you could escape it. Now everything connects back thanks to Facebook, twitter, Imgur, reddit and Instagram being wildly incestuous.


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## PL 001 (May 13, 2019)

Piss said:


> The word "faggot" used to just be a generic insult, implying someone was wimpy and worrying about superficial happenings.  There wasn't a homophobic context to it at all, and I'm not really sure how "faggot" _became_ regarded as homophobic.



I'm probably wrong here, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the story I've heard goes that a faggot was a bundle of kindling used to start fires. When the Nazis were executing homosexuals, they would mock them, calling them faggots as they were burned alive. 

That said, I agree with you, and I'm a gay dude who tells people to stop acting like faggots if they're being annoying/wimpy/whatever. This has not endeared me well to the LGBTOMGWTFBBQHAXORZ crowd.


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## JM 590 (May 13, 2019)

WinterMoonsLight said:


> I'm probably wrong here, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but the story I've heard goes that a faggot was a bundle of kindling used to start fires. When the Nazis were executing homosexuals, they would mock them, calling them faggots as they were burned alive.
> 
> That said, I agree with you, and I'm a gay dude who tells people to stop acting like faggots if they're being annoying/wimpy/whatever. This has not endeared me well to the LGBTOMGWTFBBQHAXORZ crowd.



That's interesting, but does sound like a big stretch.  You were mocking those you were executing by calling them the word you were using for the kindling?  What?  

My best guess was that since a faggot archaically means "a bundle of sticks", it meant, like, _penises_. Alluding to the promiscuousness that some gay men practice. I haven't heard that anywhere else though, that's a Piss Original.


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## Lone MacReady (May 13, 2019)

rampant censorship and banning under nebulous "hate speech" TOS by big tech monopolies, copyright bullshit run amok and of course the subsequent self-censorship that comes out of fear. The net feels less special and interesting because it IS less special and interesting.


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## PL 001 (May 13, 2019)

Piss said:


> That's interesting, but does sound like a big stretch.  You were mocking those you were executing by calling them the word you were using for the kindling?  What?
> 
> My best guess was that since a faggot archaically means "a bundle of sticks", it meant, like, _penises_. Alluding to the promiscuousness that some gay men practice. I haven't heard that anywhere else though, that's a Piss Original.



I took it as meaning since the kindling was used to fuel the fire, much like the bodies were that the Nazis used, that's why they called them faggots.  I don't believe that's where it became known as a slur for gays though, just the story I've heard most often.

Hell, it used to also be a slang term for being tired. Mark Twain used it in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Tom mentioned being "fagged out" after whitewashing the fence before conning the other kids into doing it.


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## ColtWalker1847 (May 13, 2019)

Ludonarrative Dissonance said:


> Also you damn shitlord kids these days where your idea of forum culture is just taking a meme and running it into the fucking ground.


Apparently you never perused Drew Curtis' Fark.com way back when.

It's where internet funny stuff went to die along with a hefty dose of Wil Wheaton faggotry.


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## Dick Justice (May 13, 2019)

Ludonarrative Dissonance said:


> Partly because you were younger, partly because the internet had a feeling of underground freedom back then and now you just feel the constant oppression of being watched by google while you masturbate.
> 
> Also you damn shitlord kids these days where your idea of forum culture is just taking a meme and running it into the fucking ground.





ColtWalker1847 said:


> Apparently you never perused Drew Curtis' Fark.com way back when.
> 
> It's where internet funny stuff went to die along with a hefty dose of Wil Wheaton faggotry.


Remember Ebaums World? I'm still trying to forget.


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## Billy_Sama (May 13, 2019)

Easy, the 90s had the Space Jam website.



			Space Jam


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## Shibaru (May 13, 2019)

Honestly tons of factors came into play that ruined the Internet.

-Broadband became more widespread, inviting Political heavy Knuckleheads who have nothing better to do but Whine about the president, Bringing down any sort of Normality

-It’s Not 2008 Anymore, you can no longer kick back with your Core 2 Duo Dell Laptop with a Can of Vault and your Plasma Screen TV Set to G4 anymore, everyone apparently wants Bland Boring Modern Designs and Sodas that focus more on calling it “Zero Sugar” rather than actual Great Taste, Naturally Websites while pleasing to the Next Generation Lack Quirkiness and Differentiation mostly Reserving to Flat bland Boring hues of White or Black.

-Kids. Because parents know the internet Exists, they let Their kids run around the Internet bringing Websites down to kid friendly levels in their wake, soon Stuff like YouTube will outright ban people who aren’t kid Friendly even though yt started as a website for everyone to share content with, Kids Are Slowly Flooding on our favorite Websites without a care in the world to what the website is about.

Honestly I miss those days too and I absolutely hate the current state of the Internet.


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## plattschwanz (May 13, 2019)

I miss all the specialised sites that would host content for niche topics.

I remember some Dutch home page that had guides on how to repair old pinball machines, then there were countless forums for the very complex Warcraft III World Editor, a bunch of websites for PC-9800 stuff and so on. Exploring the unfamiliar on websites who each had their own inquie design was pretty exciting back in the day.

Nowadays such sites don't exist anymore or everything is brought into line on a single website, like a subreddit or something, where there's nothing new to explore.


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## Recoil (May 13, 2019)

The same reason music sounds less special. You're older and your brain isn't as fresh so things aren't as memorable because a lot of what you know now and take for granted in your day-to-day life was being experienced for the first time back then.


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## lurk_moar (May 13, 2019)

I blame PC culture, SWJs, and everyone now including second and third  worlders have internet access. 

Facebook and reddit remind me of chatrooms where you know nobody.


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## BenevolenceInDenial (May 13, 2019)

Progress happened. It's like with music: if you want to find something avant-garde and unique, you gotta look harder, because there's just so much shit ripe for the picking. And since progress happened, its rate decreased, so most innovations and breakthroughs are already in place, so there's very few truly "new" things.


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## Jeffrey Lebowski (May 13, 2019)

It sucks because you're in a completely normalized version of the internet. It's made by everyone else for everyone else.


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## Bad Headspace (May 14, 2019)

First of all we got used to it.
Second it got mainstream.
Third it got centralized.
Four it got monetized, that is why many places are just simply fake.
Five social media put numbers into social interaction and made it into a race.

Not to mention scale and expectation have changed. People want to have a lot of views and users. Remember when it was cool to have a few comments? Nowadays people mock you if you only have a couple hundred or thousand views on yt. Think about it, that is actually a big number.


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## Michael_Jordan_Peterson (May 14, 2019)

Slappy McGherkin said:


> The demise of the fun internet came as soon as corporations realized they could make money off of it.


Yes this the most fun website I remember from the old days was stileproject and its forum. It was just a guy as far as I know. He wrote up his own posts and had wierd videos from the internet. The forum was mostly unmoderated, the internet didnt really seem to need moderation back then. I think the most likely culprit is just corporations just wanting websites sanitized to make the most off ad revenue.


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## Slappy McGherkin (May 14, 2019)

Michael_Jordan_Peterson said:


> Yes this the most fun website I remember from the old days was stileproject and its forum. It was just a guy as far as I know. He wrote up his own posts and had wierd videos from the internet. The forum was mostly unmoderated, the internet didnt really seem to need moderation back then. I think the most likely culprit is just corporations just wanting websites sanitized to make the most off ad revenue.



Stileproject was a lot of fun back in the day, as was the early SomethingAwful. Stuff you could read and laugh at on a daily basis. I know SA is still around but is nothing like it used to be. SA used to have the best and funniest Photoshop competitions. They'd post a pic and then everyone would go to work on it and post the results to vote at the end of the week. There were some truly talented choppers there, creative as hell.


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## Rick Pratt (May 14, 2019)

I think it's mainly because of Nostalgia, Age, drama, Corporations taking over certain sites or some sites being removed completely, the fact the internet is everywhere now compared to back then when it was all new to us and maybe Aesthetics too,

in the early Myspace/Youtube days there was more customization for the users until the layouts changed, nowadays barely anyone uses myspace and nowadays they go for facebook or other sites instead.

there's more corporate stuff than there is quality content when it comes to videos on the internet, there was all the sjw/skeptic/"gate" drama going on, Blip.tv is dead and not every youtube "network" works for everyone.


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## Ginger Piglet (May 14, 2019)

Rick Pratt said:


> I think it's mainly because of Nostalgia, Age, drama, Corporations taking over certain sites or some sites being removed completely, the fact the internet is everywhere now compared to back then when it was all new to us and maybe Aesthetics too,
> 
> in the early Myspace/Youtube days there was more customization for the users until the layouts changed, nowadays barely anyone uses myspace and nowadays they go for facebook or other sites instead.
> 
> there's more corporate stuff than there is quality content when it comes to videos on the internet, there was all the sjw/skeptic/"gate" drama going on, Blip.tv is dead and not every youtube "network" works for everyone.



This, absolutely this.

I thought I'd do a little graphical thing to express how the internet has changed over time in terms of its congeniality in general.


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## Maxliam (May 14, 2019)

You would sorta stumble on to stuff. I don't remember how I got on newgrounds when they had the assassin section but after columbine they blew up because of the news coverage. The net grew up and became more than am obscure nerd place to where Chad can use his phone to bang bitches. 

I avoid Facebook like the plague it is. The Web to me is better if you don't worry about the dumb shit you don't like. Just like irl. Getting worked up about shit like that will make you hate life.


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## Maggots on a Train v2 (May 14, 2019)

People don't show up to interact and share common interests anymore, they build their own social media portfolios catered to whichever master sites they end up on.


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## JM 590 (May 14, 2019)

FixinShibe said:


> everyone apparently wants Bland Boring Modern Designs and Sodas that focus more on calling it “Zero Sugar” rather than actual Great Taste, Naturally Websites while pleasing to the Next Generation Lack Quirkiness and Differentiation mostly Reserving to Flat bland Boring hues of White or Black.



Oh fuck me running I could complain about modern designs and the complete lack of talent within until I've written a novel.  

I don't think people actually like modern designs.  They're boring and generic.  Look at this garbage:





Newer Apple products use the "San Francisco" font, because apparently fucking Helvetica is too stylized.   Congratulations, Apple, you've made the most generic looking operating system ever made.  It goes along great with all of my other generic goods: 





And considering how so many things follow Apple design cues in bigger or smaller ways, I blame them for the whole lack of style we've been seeing for years and years.  Minimalism is lazy and pretentious.  I want shit to look more like it belongs in Pee Wee's Playhouse rather than yet another glossy black/white/silver thing.  It's about time for retarded, gaudy designs to come back.


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## Crichax (May 14, 2019)

Piss said:


> Oh fuck me running I could complain about modern designs and the complete lack of talent within until I've written a novel.
> 
> I don't think people actually like modern designs.  They're boring and generic.  Look at this garbage:
> 
> ...



DA Eclipse (new DeviantArt redesign) also looks BAD. I like the old site better, TBH. At least it's not just BLACK and MINIMALISTIC oooh.


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## Monsieur Guillotine (May 14, 2019)

Maggots on a Train v2 said:


> People don't show up to interact and share common interests anymore, they build their own social media portfolios catered to whichever master sites they end up on.


This is the correct answer.

Back in the day, if you were interested in a topic, you'd find a community somewhere with a shitty socket-based chatroom and a guestbook and a gallery and shit like that. It was modest but you'd find maybe 10-15 cool people that you talked to every day. Now everything is streamlined; you go to the big social media site like Reddit or Facebook or w/e and just find the topic of your choice, then just "react" to whatever shitpost appears in front of you. It's very generic and you don't get that same sense of community.

Even if you didn't give a shit about chatrooms or forums, there were still lots of interesting sites for every little thing, and having your own site was the shit. Now you just visit the same 7 or 8 sites for whatever, and people who would aspire to be webmasters will just create a subreddit or Facebook group instead.


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## Hikikomori-Yume (May 14, 2019)

From my perspective it was more like this


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## Stardust (May 22, 2019)

Others have said it well, so I'll just say... damn, I miss Angelfire.  Making shitty webpages was great.


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## Coleslaw (May 22, 2019)

BiggieSmall'sTaint said:


> Web 1.0 was more A E S T H E T I C. Now everything is white with another color and tons of wasted space. Every site has the same "minimalist" aesthetic with the rounded avatars and gray on gray on gray. Web 1.0 was uglier from a design perspective but it had more charm. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for gif-ridden angelfire sites with marble backgrounds.
> 
> Corporations coming in and neutering the web was a huge part of the decline, too. Instead of having a lively forum where people have their own opinions and post highly compressed JPEGS why not have a proprietary comments section with no images that you can control and prune as your heart desires. No more of those pesky unsavory opinions, no more dissent, no meanies using the N word, of the F word, or the Q, D, or H word. A place where even your grandparents feel safe.
> 
> ...


Some people still do that.
Sauce: AlternateHistory.com user (not with this username though.)


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## LordofTendons (May 22, 2019)

The internet was better when poor people couldn't afford computers or the hourly rate to get on it.


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## hambeerlyingnreed (May 22, 2019)

Same reason internet in the mid 00s felt different than internet in the mid 90s. More normies.


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## From The Uncanny Valley (May 22, 2019)

Crichax said:


> DA Eclipse (new DeviantArt redesign) also looks BAD. I like the old site better, TBH. At least it's not just BLACK and MINIMALISTIC oooh.



They should just accept that dA will never be taken seriously.


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## Tron: Deadly Dicks (May 26, 2019)

Uncanny Valley said:


> They should just accept that dA will never be taken seriously.


In all fairness deviantart has looked like shit since 2006. Their obsession with gray-ish puke green tones really made the site look boring.

For me the web is less interesting now because minimalism and its offshoots (especially material design) have made the internet ugly and boring. "oOoOoh look at me I put parallax scrolling in my page, gaze at my light grey 1930s inspired font text on a stark white background while shit scrolls in the opposite direction WOOOOO"

@Piss has it right, it's apple's fault and I'd add it's also that of everyone else who decided to try and ape what apple was doing.


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## Cool kitties club (May 26, 2019)

The internet has just been normalized with age. If you really think about it the internet is still pretty crazy, if only in concept, a separate layer of cultural data propagated by waves and radiation and cables cross crossing around the country, like a complex set of of veins. It’s just that after 20 years you don’t think about it like that anymore. Same with the tv and tons of other inventions.


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## Guts Gets Some (May 26, 2019)

I haven't really noticed, apart from the fact there are a lot less poorly designed geocities fandom pages.


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## Shiversblood (May 26, 2019)

Because a lot of men have turned homosexual and transsexual in the recent few years


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## TenMilesWide (May 26, 2019)

I was reading some old vidya forums and found a post that really highlighted (for me at least, idunno) the change the internet has undergone. I forget what the main part of the post was but it was prefaced with something like "I'm new here, so if I step out of line feel free to beat my ass,"

In a lot of online communities nowadays it's "I'm new here, if I step out of line please forgive me." and half the comments/subsequent posts are congratulating them for managing the tremendous undertaking of signing up and typing words in a box. Even if they got something wrong, it's a gentle suggestion of a correction at best, but mostly just asspats.

Basically there used to be an expectation that the average person was an asshole, and people welcomed that. Those assholes were the beating heart of the community. But now a lot of places have driven out all the colorful assholes, because either weak users needed protecting or some corporate overlords bought the site and don't want anything unsightly going on, and now all that's left is a bland husk of a community.

Also what shiversblood said, homos and trannies.


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## The_wandering_nibler (May 28, 2019)

occasional lurker first time poster here. I think some of the minor reasons like age and experience have already mentioned. I'll focus on the two major though.

One is the normal fags. That's no meme. I've been thinking about this myself and I'm glad you posted. The internet was full of intelligent eccentrics in the past. Of interesting people essentially. I remember playing a little mmorpg and becoming good friends with a gangsters,a geek, a habitual liar that traveled a lot and a fascist. But all of them were interesting people. Forums and websites and games were full of people who had a passion for something or wanted to discuss things that could not be freely talked about elsewhere. Whether this was being an astronomer and talking with fellow astronomers, an unusual teen interested in the macabre or just your ordinary tech wiz talking about their new invention, people had a spark in them online.
A lot of us also wanted to escape normal reality where you have to keep yourself on guard, watch your status and mind your hierarchies. We wanted to collaborate and cooperate and share and have fun.

The internet had a lot more interesting stuff because it was a wild west of small operators, personal websites and communities all unique.

___________

The second part the old internet lacked was frankly people like most of you here and those you mock.
Man in the places I hung out, the telnet hacking groups, Totse.com, some urban exploring groups etc, we talked about highly illegal and fucked up shit. But we were nice to each other. People sometimes got trolled or engaged in flame wars and at worse in some hacking attacks but that was it. People were cool, precisely because we weren't normalfags nor , well what ever you and 4channers are nor lolcows and the sort.

I remember most communities that didn't dabble in the highly illegal often had sections about real life pictures, meetups and what not. People got friends for life from their "anonymous" online personas. Now people either keep it as hidden as possible or in the case of social networks advertise false, photoshopped versions of themselves. The goal of the internet now is to improve or boost your real life persona or to use your anonymity to express your worst qualities in an echo chamber.

It's no longer used as a space outside of real life to connect with people across the world whom you otherwise would never have been able to talk to about the things you love. Everything is in a sense a popularity context. Social networks, Reddit and other places now have visibility based on how popular or upvoted something is. Webrings and links that were previously the primary way of finding new content, requiring community interaction, have been replaced by algorithms that depend again on a type of popularity contest. A process that is now automated and manipulated.

And this popularity contest is also what drives the new profit stage of the internets. Corporations didn't care if you talked about warez, niggers or how to make bombs before when the internet and the real world were two different things and ads just ads. But now since it's about improving or destroying reputations in real life, those ads are connected to the real life image of corporations and the very liberty that enabled the old open net is now destroying it.

______



TLDR:

The lack of Normies, lolcows and the anons that mock them.

Used to be a nice place of cool peeps that cared for neither of these three things.

_____


Ofcs everyone see things differently. Depending on when you joined and how old you are. I'm talking about like 1995-2005 and in retrospect even earlier from what I've read. I think the internet from what I now know was best from about 1991-1999, just when the bubble burst. Also as someone said, back then stuff required some passion and dedication to get going anywhere, which weeded out some people.

I think that *SomethingAwful (compare SA to say Newgrounds, totally different despite being as "underground" or dark)* was the start of the dark side of the web turning personally nasty while *Digg* and even *Myspace* to a degree brought in the normalfag.s


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## Shaved Kiwis (May 28, 2019)

LordofTendons said:


> The internet was better when poor people couldn't afford computers or the hourly rate to get on it.



Dunno how it is nowadays, but back in the internet 1.0 days my poor ass would hang out at the library so I could use the computer to go online. The real problem is the proliferation of smartphones and other idiot proof tech lowering the barrier to entry to the point that even the most braindead invalid can post videos and share his opinions with the world. The internet is too fucking mainstream. Remember all those giddy engineers trying to sell everybody on the idea? How it would revolutionize the world and all that shit.  Now that everybody uses it corporate interests have taken over and they are shitting the net up in order to cater to the lowest common denominator mongoloids and all the people that where there already become more and more alienated.


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## The Lawgiver (May 29, 2019)

There's a lot of "aesthetic improvements" that are just complete horseshit, and untold chumbuckets of corporate bullshit that's bloomed the past several years. I see quite a bit of the points have been addressed multiple times in this thread, so I'm going to try and get something slightly new in there. 
I fucking hate how everything on the internet, and even the windows now have to have the little shitty rounded edges. I remember seeing something years ago that it was caused by a "study" on human instinct or some shit where rounded corners were deemed "more approachable and less threatening" but I could be remembering that wrong entirely. There's also the fact nearly every site now eventually gets redesigned to have visual priority for mobile devices first instead of actual PCs, so you now get some big budget sites with horrific compressed jpeg icons that aren't noticeable on mobile because of the tiny ass screen. Shit's fucking weird too because on mobile they'll constantly shill for a "site app".
Everything nowadays tries to become a fucking subscirption fee based service too, even shitty fucking clickbait sites in some cases.
This last one goes back to the text aesthetics I saw brought up earlier in the thread. I really miss seeing a lot of sites using aesthetically pleasing fonts like Courier New as a default text setting. nowadays it's almost always the same fucking font no matter where you go,that one where there's literally no difference between I and l aside from a very slight bit of thickness that doesn't show up at certain sizes.Doesn't even have to be this fucking font, it's the fact that there's barely any variety that fucking kills me. That's only a small gripe amongst pretty much everything I've said before this, and everything everyone that's posted before has said, yet I still felt like bringing it up.
*GIVE ME FONT VARIETY BIG INTERNET MEDIA YOU INEPT CREATIVITY SUCKING ASSCLOWNS REEEEEEEEEEEEE*


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