Old Internet Reminiscence - Where did it all go?

[mario if smoke weed]

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

 

[Tinfoil]

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.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

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.

 

[lichen]

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.

 

[Linako 2.0]

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.

 

[John Titor]

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.

 

[Professor G. Raff]

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... wow, 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...

 

[Ebonic Tutor]

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*

 

[Land of Noz]

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.

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

 

[Tacitus Kilgore]

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.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

How far things have gotten now.

I still remember CWCki Forums.

Also it seems lolcows are less of a thing now.

 

[Tacitus Kilgore]

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.

 

[Mega Man II Intro - GB]

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.

 

[ditto]

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.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

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

(also space backgrounds)

I never got into Myspace.

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

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

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...

 

[Tacitus Kilgore]

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

(also space backgrounds)


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

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.

 

[Squirrelcop]

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.

 

[NoonmanR]

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.

 

[Under Arrest]

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