Imagine using the internet for anything other than pirating.
Have you ever used Silk Road to get a prostitute?
Things that were better in 2006 than they are today:
- Politics, okay there was Bush Derangement Syndrome but it wasn't the autismal mess of shrieking and idpol and coordinated harassment that it is today, and SJWery was in its infancy and roundly mocked by all
Not exactly. I was on some message boards then and they didn't allow even one dissent on a very liberal community oriented thinking to put up a Bush/Cheney digital button in support for POTUS. There were crazies putting out echoes the world will end if the Repubs/Dems win Prez or House. An online store of political signage that was really cool existed and I remember this one sticker with the message "liberals are so opened minded their brains fell out" as a bumper with good cartoonist illustration.
- Scientific literacy, back then flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were unheard of and roundly mocked from all sides rather than allowed to metastasize into a glut of "warrior moms" called Karen.
Listing of traditional religious sites were kinda numerous and could be found on Yahoo! directory. Graphics on their pages were as flashy like Westboro Baptist picketing signs. Most of the time, they didn't get loads of traffic from the whole web.
- There was no Me Too movement
I used to be a big reader of political blogs of the mid 2000s period. One still exists (
https://nicedoggie.net/) Their attitudes were going to be about as bad as a SJW's but it was all tightly confined in cyberspace as like some alternative imaginary quadrant. <----- On Anti-Idiotarian's blog to the right column there used to be a loooooooooonnnnggggg list of politically same blog links were you'd have to hold down your cursor on the down scroll button for like 30 seconds to see all of them. Now the count is just under 25. RSS feeds were huge before the debut of Reddit. They'd be pinging each other back forth every damn hour and it would've crashed a news room's servers in under a minute.
- We still had some civil liberties and human rights
The internet was a federal gov't project from the very beginning. It was just letting the citizenry think they were free while it sat back, listening, and only choosing to not touch the vulnerabilities.
- 14% was not a pass mark in a maths exam
In 2005 on the 'Bob and Tom' show, a morning radio skit, they put out news that teachers were now using purple colored ink pens when grading a test going against the expected red so as to not hurt the kids feelings.
These days I hear about how first graders are bringing tablets home. Giving a child something that causes a distraction over learning will more than likely cause problems. Blanketing the internet over so many things-making it a generation with the most amount of information ever accessible oddly hasn't made people smarter.
The first rules of 1990s internet was that children could not join an online community until age 13 legally. It was also an expectation that you don't use it until you were a teen.
Smartphones were a mistake.
I liked the Personal Data Assistants of early 2000s. They were to exist for only their specific purpose and nobody would expect it to go into all other areas of life. The smartphone has bloated everyone's narcissism.
My thoughts...
It is with a little difficulty to now believe that DeviantART was a respectable art community that you'd want to be a part of in its early days if you were an emerging teen artist as I was. I think that is because the average age of the typical user in 2003 was a Gen Xer born in the 1960s years because their Silent parents beat enough sense into them and they had some physical struggle with life. They were just beginning to have babies under 3 years old which is when today's SJWs began to exist. You couldn't make a dumb art group in their Groups category on the dumbest idea possible. But there was the same level of PC level censorship in their chat rooms. I got banned from one when I said that gorillas were just Schwarzenegger-build bamboo eating hippies.
There wasn't much info about autism or a whole political cause for it. You did have info on gov't owned sites like NIH and university dept.s, but I don't remember anybody going out and putting up a personal website to draw in Macy's day parade level traffic to pay attention to someone like Chris Chan.
I loved the directories. I used Yahoo!'s the longest, then I discovered Google had one too in 2007 itself. The Google one helped me find the most reliable weather forecaster ever, UNISYS. (
https://www.unisys.com/industries/government/unisys-federal/unisys-weather) With personal webpages, I used Yahoo!s to read the sites of those who'd actually use a small portion of their paycheck to build an 'Anti' spoof thingy wherein they hated something so much it was considered a 'rant' and it deserved some time of their day like video games. Here is gem example. (
https://web.archive.org/web/2001012...sts/By_Genre/Rock_and_Pop/Hanson/Anti_Hanson/ and
https://web.archive.org/web/20001206203100/http://xoutmbop.tripod.com/hanson.html) There were some cool names like '
Usenet - alt.fan.hanson.die.die.die', 'We Hate Hanson Girls', 'Totally Assassinate Hanson', 'Things That Go Bop In The Night', 'Raven's Hanson Hate Page', '
People For A Hanson-Less America (PHLA)', '
Humans against Hanson [HaH!]', '
Hanson Haters Fan Club Newsletter', '
Citizens for a Hanson Free America', and '
Anti-Hansonite Paradise'. Yes, these really were full time running and daily updated websites and it was not too good to be true. (I'll add in these: Anti-Britney Spears: '
Britney Spears Ate My Balls' (
https://web.archive.org/web/2000101...ocities.com/Hollywood/Video/6887/britney.html), '
Alex's Britney Spears Bashing Page', '
Can We Hit Her One More Time?', '
Mr. T vs. Britney Spears', and '
Piss on Bitchney One More Time'
I put off chat rooms and IM software for a long time until 2003 because I was only age 9 when I first went online in 1995 and in 1998 I heard news of someone having a close encounter with a live axe murderer who claimed to be someone else. I was a good little puppy in not publishing personal info into cybespace and still much the same today (well I did make a bunch of fake accounts in 2009 on forums for trolling but I've forgotten all those email addys) I never thought YouTube would
tempt people to create their own MTV Real World series on a rented timeshare digital channel and NORMAL people have done so in droves. Oh my.
