First post here, this thread inspired me to create an account. I don't really come on to kiwifarms often, but have been checking it out lately since it's in the news. This thread makes me feel old, and I guess I am, I turned 30 this year. I've been on the internet since I was pretty young. First internet hookup we had was probably in 97 or 98. This was before I understood how web browsers worked and I mainly accessed the internet through the America Online portal where you would type in keywords that would bring you to a website. As a kid I was primarily interested in typing the Nickelodeon keyword. The ads on Nickelodeon were my main introduction to the internet (in hindsight after all the Dan Schneider stuff this alone is kind of creepy, trying to get kids online). I don't really remember doing much else on the internet. I don't think I really used the internet much after that until the Napster craze of 1999 and 2000. That is the time period when I really started going online more. My friend's dad was pretty tech savvy and showed us how to download music from napster. Even played Age of Empires II online that time, first online gaming experience, very cool at the time. I didn't play any online games again until Halo 2 and xbox live
Anyway, I started going on the internet a lot from 2001-2002 onwards. That's when I discovered message boards. The first one I went to was paranormal-network.net. I am pretty sure that was the name but that may have been the second name. Eventually it changed to paranormalis.com. I just checked and it's still up and running, but if I recall when they changed domain names a lot of the original threads from the early 2000s were lost for good. The site mainly focused on paranormal subjects like ghosts and UFOs, but also Time Travel. If you ever saw Napoleon Dynamite and wondered what the device was where they had to put the crystals in, that was the hyper-dimensional time resonator, created by Steven Gibbs, which purports to be a working time machine (apparently only in the astral realm, but will work for REAL if you're standing above a "vortex" lol). Obviously there was never any actual proof of this, but it's fun weird shit to read about on the internet. Apparently the dude is still alive and selling them lol. Cool forum though, that was where I first saw 9/11-truth theories, in very long form posts, as early as late 2004 early 2005.
This is my purview into the old internet. To be honest, calling anything from the youtube era (2006) onward the "old internet" seems strange to me. But, I would mainly use the internet back then for paranormal research, funny videos, and of course porn, which I now realize was bad and detrimental but that's just how it was. Downloading files in general was a much bigger part of the old internet than the current internet. Streaming and super-fast internet kind of fucked people over in a way. Every teenager in the mid-2000s had their own personal music library of thousands of songs downloaded for free off the internet, mainly LimeWire, which spread many viruses. Anyway, point being, the early video-streaming sites were incredibly for spreading conspiracy-theory related videos.
Maybe I am just myopic based on my interests in these subjects, but I really think conspiracy-theory type videos boosted youtube's popularity more than most genres of videos. A lot of these were uploaded on google video before google bought youtube, and at the time the main distinction was you could have longer videos on google video whereas youtube had the upload limits. Youtube was actually fucking awesome up until mid 2007, I remember you used to be able to go on yt and watch videos of The Daily Show from the night before, for free, and it was great, but then Viacom but the kibosh on that, and that's when a lot of the content censorship began. Still, youtube was great for me up until about 2015 or 2016. I do think it started to go downhill a few years earlier, around 2013. That's when they changed the algorithm. At one point, the youtube algorithm was designed to show you related videos that you would be interested in based on your viewing habits. These were actually usually great videos and that algo would help you discover stuff you otherwise might not have seen, but that you enjoyed. From what I recall they got rid of that feature specifically because of people getting sucked into political stuff and conspiracy theory type videos. Especially for normies who are too lazy to read forum posts, a lot of information (or disinformation depending on your perspective) was spread through youtube videos.
This was also around the time that the meaning of the word "woke" was repurposed by SJWs to refer to, in their perspective, intrinsic knowledge about racism and our racist history or whatever. Prior to this time period, the word "Woke" was mainly used by conspiracy theory videos talking about 9/11 truth, or The Illuminati or the Bildergerg group, Freemasons, the moon landing, JFK assasination, OKC bombings and on and on. David Icke, popularizer of Repitilian ET theory, as well as Alex Jones to a lesser extent, frequently called on people to "Wake Up!" or "Awaken" to the truth etc. In meme form this is most recognizable as the classic "WAKE UP SHEEPLE" phrasing of these types. At some point, I think after Hotep black nationalists who believe they are egyptians types started making videos, they just started saying "Woke" instead of Awake or Awakened. And in many ways it is fitting, because what the SJWs or, in the parlance of our times, the "critical race theorists" want people to believe is that there has been a centuries long conspiracy by rich white people to govern the world and control society on the basis of race and skin color. To be "woke" regarding racism is a similar concept as when Icke or others would tell people to "wake up" to illuminati control or [insert conspiracy theory here].
Anyway this has turned into a rant. Props to the poster earlier in the thread talking how Cracked.com used to be funny and also mentioning Break.com. These sites were huge in the 2000s, and until I read this thread I completely forgot it used to be big-boys.com. There was some seriously funny shit on that site, a lot of stuff that would be cringe nowadays, but it was super popular. Hopefully there's an archive somewhere out there.
Also for younger people on here wanting to know what the old internet was like, check out Shroomery.org. It's been a magic mushrooms/drug based website since like 1998 or 1999 I think. Basically has had the exact same format and layout the whole time, which is ancient by modern standards, but it works. It had a very lively forum at one time, still does, but shroomery.org also popularized Pepe as a meme back in the days when it was just the frog saying Feels Good Man. They had pepe as a postable gif image as early as 2006 or so I believe. The shroomery is a good time capsule because it is a forum that has existed continuously since the late 90s or early 2000s, so you can go on there and search the forum and read posts from 2002 and see what people are saying. There are also other music based forums out there where you can do the same, go look up what the live threads were like on 9/11 and stuff.
Could be wishful thinking, but I think we might start to see a resurgence of old school forums as the big tech platforms start to become more censorious. I normally don't come on this site as I don't care about lolcows or whatever, but it's clear KiwiFarms is important and has earned it's place in internet history
Here's the oldest youtube video I could find in my favorites that hasn't been deleted. I created my youtube account in 2006. Anti-Marijuana PSA uploaded to youtube march of 2006. Also fuck youtube, not only can I not see all the videos they've deleted, it also says "unavailable videos hidden" so I can't even see how many of my old favorited videos have been deleted
