Happy tree friends, burning CD's, ares galaxy, kazaa, screensavers, MSN Messenger, emoticon stealers, spyware bundled browser plugins, Smiley Central, GNAA, Mygot, Totse, back when Maddox was funny, habbo hotel raids, geocities, the golden age of flash animation, shock sites, screamers, tekzoned (look it up, it's mostly broken due to lack of flash support),
I still have a folder full of happy tree friends .swf files somewhere, from the dialup days when downloading 1mb took ages, thats one thing of the old internet I certainly dont miss.
Totse I wish I had found it earlier, lots of shit content, the best contributors were leaving and then it collapsed. Never tried the shit there tho, specially not the "how to make C4" tutorials. I remember the credit card scam thing but there werent any abandoned houses nearby to get the card delivered to so I didn't even try, if only to have a card that said "Niggel Niggard" or something.
Ares was a cesspit of malware, edonkey never worked, there were a few napster clones that had better quality files but download speeds were atrocious and users left. Really filesharing only got really good when torrents got traction and there was a short golden age with megaupload and mediafire when you could find literally anything, even corporate software worth more than a used car. Plus back then most games were under 1GB or a few GB, you could fit several into one DVDR, only a couple links to download. You couldn't do that shit with current bloated 100GB+ games, I tried a UE4 indie demo the other day and just that thing was 20GB, insane.
Habbo hotel was what got me into coding, when I first saw the hacks and clones others were making it was like finding arcane knowledge or something. Same with game mods, funny how they tried to get kids into coding back then with LOGO and that turtle, but most of my generation got into this because of web stuff like habbo and wanting to make games.
Flash was so magical.
Animation finally became accessible to the (at least somewhat computer literate) everyman, and there was so much cool and weird shit out there.
I miss it so much that I still refuse to have the now inactive flash player on my desktop uninstalled so I get that annoying notification every time I restart my computer.
Also RIP funny Maddox. As much as I loved TBPITU podcasts tend to show more of a creator than is wise.
If it weren't for that podcast his audience might still be as big. Even allowing for his Twitch and YT channel.
Flash was great but good god there was a ton of shit, tons of people who shouldnt been allowed to make content doing it, but its the same everywhere right? there are always shitty bands, shitty indie movies, shitty games, we just forget about those and only remember the few good ones. Idk what amateur animation tools are used now but I guess its not that easy to use since theres way less content now, most of the good animators you see on youtube now are the best people who honed their skills on newgrounds back in the day. Seems most new kids go with SFM instead, tho again tons of shit content there, dare I saw more shit than the one from the flash era? or maybe I've nostalgia glasses on.
As for maddox he should've quit a decade ago or more, the point of no return was when he sperged out about the cuck meme showing he was too old to get the joke and was the old man yelling at the kids on his lawn.
I miss MSN Messanger but I really miss the old chatrooms. Hell, I kinda miss Yahoo Chat. That shitshow was entertaining.
I do not miss ICQ.
Microsoft really fucked up by letting messenger die, its by far the most popular web service they ever made.
Anyway, what's wrong with ICQ?
It's been (rightfully) mentioned several times, but it cannot be understated how much early Newgrounds was influential and amazing. Finding it for the first time opened the door to a type of content that was unheard of before and sadly mostly now with the BS sanitation if the internet.
We're "back to normal" when you think about it, those years and 90's culture came after decades of bullshit mass-produced generic entertainment being the norm, and now we're back to that.
The old wild west internet was just truly an amazing time... and it sucks it's been basically robbed from us. I am happy I experienced it and hearing zoomers talk with reverence and\or disgust about 2015 "wild west Youtube"
Ha! they really think like that? 2015 was the end of the road, its when the guys upstairs began to sanitize everything because
gamergate! misogyny! and other content that scared the aposematic broads and scrawny soys was cropping up, can't have wrongthink! no sir! and pathetic as they were they mostly came from the upper class meaning they had connections.
not to mention the real wild west of web 1.0. Maybe it's a blessing the don't know what they missed and are mentally used to being censored niggercattle and commonly loving it.
They would freak out at the old web if only because of how hard it was to use. Current web content its digital crack, consumption for the sake of consumption, using tiktok is about watching 10sec videos one after another, it all becomes the same because theres no differentiation, its all cheap highs like crack cocaine, and much like it your brain gets fried.
