Does anyone else genuinely miss the 2000s?

[MrJokerRager]

 

[King Daddy Telomerase]

(It sounds kinda autistic, but as I've gotten older, I've learned that having a passion is so much better than asking "why not just be a boring 'normal' person"). I was an active poster for a game forum that had a monthly community newsletter, various forum "clubs", competitions, off topic threads, etc. No one at school or at home was interested in those kind of things so it was the first community I got to be a part of. Nowadays the forum is long dead and the people, while they still exist on discord and steam, have gone on to do their own things. This site is my only "serious" continuation into forum culture.

This is how I feel. In the early 2000s, there were numerous communities like this in varying topics that I could join at any time and easily get hooked into. People were much more welcoming. The Internet was a wild, unexplored place where if you wanted to learn and really get lost in something, it was right there.

That's long gone now. Sure, there's probably Reddit communities with many of the same topics... where you'll eventually get ostracized due to downvotes and banned for not respecting womyn. Or, discords where you'll get banned for not sucking some mod's dick. And social media in general, forget it.

Fuck everyone. I feel sad now.

 

[awoo]

There's still a lot of creativity out there, but a lot more of the public is on huge conglomerate sanitized (nothing offensive!) mega tech company websites.
It warms my heart that minecraftforum.net managed to come back from the dead and is still running. I've been on that site for 8 years and there is a lot of history on there. KF is apparently way more active of a site than I would imagine (810 members online now) but minecraftforum.net has some ridiculous numbers:

• Members: 5,994,671
• Threads: 2,009,118
• Posts: 23,377,641
• Views: 4,067,874,792

It goes to show how if a game gets big enough and continues to be updated it can sustain a large community for years.

 

[Pissmaster]

I miss the humongous leaps in technology. Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998 and was pretty much unmatched in terms of cinematic presentation, yet the player models didn't even have eyes. MGS4 was released ten years later and had photorealistic faces and animations that still hold up.

2000 people had those brick Nokia phones with greenscreens, by the end of the decade a high end smartphone could do 95% of the basic tasks one needed a conventional computer for.

What do we have left to really look forward to in terms of tech toys? It's basically just Virtual Reality. Truly hope I'm wrong on this.

So much of technology innovation today is intangible or inaccessible for most people. Cloud computing, blockchains, and AI are huge, but for the most part, just background stuff for the layman. I'd love a self-driving Tesla, but I can't afford it, and neither can anyone I know. VR headsets are still expensive enough to price the majority of buyers out of the market, even considering how they've come down in price. And the tech that is accessible is mundane in practice. Yeah, 4K is a hell of a lot sharper than 1080p on paper, but you really have to look hard to really notice the difference. OLED displays are the true leap in quality, though they're still very expensive and much more subject to burn-in. Still, I've never seen such a leap in video quality in my life that was the leap from VHS to DVD, and DVDs still look fine to me, even on a giant 4K TV.

And I really don't need a resolution of 2960x1440 on my cellphone, yet, here we are. I remember reading about how the human eye can't even see pixels sharper than 300 PPI, but my phone's well into 500 PPI because pissing contests, I guess.

 

[Dark Emporer Dood]

And I really don't need a resolution of 2960x1440 on my cellphone, yet, here we are. I remember reading about how the human eye can't even see pixels sharper than 300 PPI, but my phone's well into 500 PPI because pissing contests, I guess.

Thats basically the PS5/Xbox XXX for yah, we still havent fully utilized the current round of systems but they need to sell yet more black Chinese boxes (or in the case of the PS5 a radio made by Dyson). On a side tangent, I really, really wish that videogame devs would focus on making their games run quicker AND packing the assets more efficiently, games dont need to take up 150GB+.

 

[Pissmaster]

On a side tangent, I really, really wish that videogame devs would focus on making their games run quicker AND packing the assets more efficiently, games dont need to take up 150GB+.

That too. A 500GB HDD in a PS3 could hold everything and the kitchen sink, while a 500GB HDD in a PS4 is sparse and makes the system a pain to use if you don't have good internet.

 

[awoo]

That's why I'd love to do some research on cutting edge

So much of technology innovation today is intangible or inaccessible for most people. Cloud computing, blockchains, and AI are huge, but for the most part, just background stuff for the layman.

I'd love to be able to work on some AI stuff as a career. Some of it will trickle down to consumers eventually, ex. a lot of phone camera tech to make photos look better is computational and self-driving car tech is getting there.

Phone tech is interesting. In my humble opinion recently phone manufacturers have been giving consumers what they've desired (bigger batteries, brighter screens, good performance on budget which actually does matter) but also manufacturers *cough Apple* have been forcing things consumers largely don't want (no headphone jack).

There are still plenty of creative people out there. Tech being more accessible makes it easier to have a hobbyist community if you can find the right community and ignore the morons on social media.

 

[Dark Emporer Dood]

That too. A 500GB HDD in a PS3 could hold everything and the kitchen sink, while a 500GB HDD in a PS4 is sparse and makes the system a pain to use if you don't have good internet.

Can you even play a modern game without internet? With how often they need patches and junk?

 

[awoo]

Can you even play a modern game without internet? With how often they need patches and junk?

Yes from experience, because I pirated a bunch of single-player games. In fact, most crack groups are nice enough to provide occasional updates (such as every excruciating Sims 4 DLC)
It turns out if you like single player games then everything works out fine.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Still, I've never seen such a leap in video quality in my life that was the leap from VHS to DVD,

Yes, I still vividly recall the first time I started watching movies on DVD and the leap over VHS was unreal.

 

[The Last Stand]

Yes, I still vividly recall the first time I started watching movies on DVD and the leap over VHS was unreal.

I remember being able to download music at will with an MP3 player was groundbreaking.

 

[eeeeeeeeeeeee diot]

A friend and I have been discussing this on-and-off about whether the 2000s and 2010s were good and all that crap before I saw this thread. Here are my two cents, because nostalgia is my trigger word and that just brings a bunch of feelings out like some kind of waterfall.

Was but a wee lad in the 2000s, but I know that I really did enjoy the late 2000s to early 2010s. Memes were good, vidya, anime and all the fan content that was being made were actually pretty fun to watch, and the internet cared much less about everything at the time. Friends were different too, I think? The friendships I cultivated in 2009 and so on had a much different feeling and cultured tied to it as to the friends I keep in contact with now. Staying up late at night seemed so special too, though that may just attribute to me being a kid.

Early 2010s weren't so bad, 2010-2012 still seemed like the 2000s in my eyes. Flashgames and Newgrounds were still pretty well known, Youtube was actually funny and interesting. Games on the Wii and Xbox 360, were so goddamn fun, even if the graphics looked bad. Just Dance, Okami, and like, all the Wii games, quite frankly. And technology was improving from the iPhone 3, though that just laid the seeds for a tech race that will cause us to care less for how advanced technology seems to be becoming (Remembered being so excited for the iPhone 3GS, and now I hardly blink at eye at the Android 6000, or something) as well as the PC beliefs that eventually exploded outward in a shit tornad in 2014.

Frankly, I miss the times where there was a variety of opinions and beliefs. Now it all seems like a goddamn hivemind; you have to be 'unproblematic' and accept any bullshit as long as it's tied up neatly in a 'progressive' bow. I miss the fun games that weren't just remakes or unoriginal homages, I miss the interesting fan content that people make, I miss the simpler times, as a boomer would put it. I think I just miss the culture of the old web, where people just seemed like people and not pseudo-celebrities or saints that overreact to everything. Web 2.0 has become a corporate, sterilized shit hole, and everything just seems to be overexposed nowadays. People act less genuine, companies are getting shadier by the minute, sites and franchises are losing their novelty quicker than the last hip thing. The world seems to be blanketed in this constant state of worry and dread and constant, glazed-over eyes consumption.

At least I know that people I know have woken up from this fake wokeness shit. 2020s may be a shit year, but I'll take my optimistic ratings and say that it'll get better.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

I remember being able to download music at will with an MP3 player was groundbreaking.

i remember finding my first MP3 player on a bus on the way to school. could only hold like 10-12 song but i was happy. most of those songs were either linkin park or sum 41.

 

[MrJokerRager]

Nostalgia for the old days is strong.

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

I believe this phrase resonates with this thread as well, considering all the crap that has happened since then:

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

I miss when I had somewhere to go. I may have been unpopular in real life but at least I could always find a place online to go to. Now chatrooms are hardly even a thing, everything is so drenched in being advertiser-friendly and all the individuality is gone. Going from myspace to facebook I think was the first step--Myspace had the "old web" mentality of individuality and customizability, while facebook was the new Web 2.0 shit where it was less janky and more boilerplate and we gave up freedom for a sanitary-looking sheen. Now I barely even talk to people online. There's nobody to talk to anymore really. Where did everyone go?

 

[Sneak 'n' Snore]

It really might be nostalgia bias or just the teen memories but the internet around the late 2000s had this feeling of adventure and novelty to it with so many things to explore. Nowadays its condensed into the same pool of options that nearly everyone else uses and thats not even accounting for how safe and bland everything has gotten and how many people will screech at the slightest disturbance.
And thats just online stuff.
Media in general now feels so devoid of ideas. Movies, video games or even just TV shows regurgitate remakes of older more iconic things.

 

[oldcassettes]

I remember being on DeviantArt forums in the early to mid 2000s. Those died out for me as soon as Facebook got big. I definitely miss the old days of different forums and shit. Kiwifarms reminds me of the good ol' Internet 1.0 days. I still think there are burgeoning communities out there, they're just not as visible anymore.

 

[Ligoskj]

The 2010s didn't make all people to genuinely miss the 2000s, but I'm 100% confident the 2020s are gonna succeed in that very soon.

 

[Syaoran Li]

The 2010s didn't make all people to genuinely miss the 2000s, but Im 100% confident the 2020s are gonna succeed in that very soon.

At the very least 2020 sure as hell will.

At the same time, I get this eerie feeling that the 2020's as a whole will be like a reverse echo of the 2010's.

2010 itself was a largely uneventful but chill year and there was a palpable sense of optimism in the wider culture, with a new decade seen as a fresh start and the worst of the recession finally winding down. The only major disaster that made American headlines was Deepwater Horizon.

But the 2010's as a whole is a decade of polarization, pretentiousness, and a wider sense of sheer dread and woke malaise that has culminated into the shitshow that is 2020.

The first big steps began in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street in the United States and the Arab Spring on the international scale. Then slowly but steadily, it got more tense.

By 2013, the sense of optimism that was present throughout 2010 was officially gone and by the summer of 2014, "Current Year" began in full effect with the one-two punch of Ferguson and the internet tantrums over GamerGate.

Lemme put it this way, 2020 is going to be a make or break year for the United States and if we can survive it without a complete leftist takeover, things will get better or at least quieter.

Trump getting reelected and the student debt bubble bursting might just be the chemo that kills the cancer of social justice.

If this backfires on the Left, then expect the 2020's to become a reverse echo of the 2010's. I do think we will have a better idea of how the rest of the decade will look after November, at least in the United States.


I can't remember which Kiwi said this, but someone discussed this in another thread and said that history may not always repeat, but it does always rhyme.