Anyone Miss The Old Internet and Tech?

[DICKPICSRUS]

I miss when memes were fun little things to share and not to push an agenda.

I also miss some kid games sites I used to play. Don't remember there names though

 

[UncleFezziesPantsPuppet]

I do miss getting on AOL, only to have to get offline cuz mother had to use the phone.

Good times.

 

[Tragi-Chan]

I miss the days when people would just get a website for the novelty of it. Just a few pages of a person pretty much saying "look at me," with grainy photos and tinny music and maybe a couple of unrelated articles or something.

 

[TwinkleSnort]

I miss win.ini and system.ini files. At least they're in a sorta human language; the Windows registry that superseded them from Windows 95 onwards is completely opaque.

I used to love playing with the registry and making my machine do exactly what I wanted it to do, the way I wanted it to. Much more difficult now.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Flip phones or hell, dumb phones have an appeal being less distracting machines. Even feature phones today are getting LTE modems so when Big Telecommunication corporations discontinue 3G bands we're not forced to mainline smartphones.

You can buy a Kyocera flip phone with LTE and military grade design.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

it was just as shit as it is now, things only seemed better because you had lower standards. if you tell me 03 newgrounds was good youre a god damn liar.

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

it was just as shit as it is now, things only seemed better because you had lower standards

I'd go with fewer people myself. There's a reason they called it Eternal September.

 

[OneMillionRPM]

I kinda miss phones with physical keypads. Turn on T9 and you could type like hell, with just one hand and without even having to look at the phone. QWERTY keypads were nice as well, too bad everyone thought it would be better to ape the iPhone and only provide a touchscreen.

 

[The Great Citracett]

I remember all the different "under construction" gifs that were everywhere.

Being asked "Frames" or "No Frames" before a site would load. (Apparently frames was the cooler option).

Getting my cheat codes from Secrets of the Sega Sages. Which became GameSages. Then IGNSages. Then just IGN.

Also dumb flash game sites. I remember about 1996 a friend showed me blip.com and a game where you could type in something and it would be dropped on a cityscape like bombs. He typed in "people having sex" and cartoon planes flew over and dropped crates labeled "people having sex" on it until it was rubble. We laughed our asses off. Also the sound effects were some guy saying KA-THORP! and other Batman style sounds.

And we'd always find weird games like Perambulator GP, BarneySplat, and The Legend of Lezda, the Adventure of Jinx. Sure wish I could find any sort of info on that last one. I remember it being pretty fun.

 

[c-no]

As @Guardian G.I. and @Sonicsis have said: flash games.

For me specifically, it's the mid to late 2000 Newgrounds. Granted, some of the games I enjoyed were crappy and/or edgy shit. Things like some of the assassin games on there and a few others I can't name off the top of my head. Older Youtube was another one I sort of missed due to having some things there. If it counts as well, the earlier years of CWC being a lolcow.

 

[melty]

Being asked "Frames" or "No Frames" before a site would load. (Apparently frames was the cooler option).

This, and also splash pages when they weren't really needed or properly utilized, the site owner just wanted to put a big picture of something you had to click on to get to the actual content.

My dad was sort of an old tech junkie and really loved garage sales, and hated spending money on new stuff, so we had a lot of old tech and I grew up with things like a dot-matrix printer, and playing games on Commodore 64, when I am not actually that old. In retrospect it was kind of cool. I am a little nostalgic for the dot matrix printer noise

I liked neopets a lot and even then I wouldn't play the flash games much because I was more interested in the trading post and shop wizard, and learning CSS so I could make my profile look as little like a neopets profile as possible. I still put CSS on my resume sometimes, too bad most employers probably don't need code that makes images on someone elses website upside-down, greyscale, and have a 30px glow when you hover over them. One of the things facebook and newer websites have done right is limiting peoples customization of their profiles.

I sort of miss top google sites being sometimes really weird if that makes sense. Like if you searched a subject top results would often be poorly designed websites written by people passionate about that subject, possibly with a bit of a screw loose. Now the top search results on a topic of interest are usually wikipedia and actual, legitimate organizations.
I picked a subject at random and actually the top result ended up looking like it could be one of those 00s websites. https://www.bfro.net/ however it is lacking pixelly bigfoot gifs and links that go to under construction pages.

<Insomniak`> Stupid fucking Google
<Insomniak`> "The" is a common word, and was not included in your search
<Insomniak`> "Who" is a common word, and was not included in your search

 

[Karl der Grosse]

I liked back when most business sites were usually much more poorly made then fun sites. For a few years you could pretty much tell with a glance. Now everything's a mix and it sucks. We're seeing the most perfect union between media and corporatism ever. At least for high-level stuff. I dread the day corporations manage to create perfect advertising.

 

[escapegoat]

I miss the pre-"social media" internet.

I also miss the glorious window when feed readers were a thing. I know RSS still exists, and I still have my dinosaur-era feed reading to do, but I mean the mindset, the possibility it represented, more than just the technical capability. You subscribed to a sequential stream of content, because you trusted a particular source; you did not have some shit algorithm decide what you need to see, newsletters full of marketing pitches were not involved, and you didn't miss stuff because it didn't get "enough" clicks.

 

[Dysnomia]

I miss back when you could say something even mildly offensive without triggering half the internet into having a meltdown over how racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic you are.

And I liked things better before social media. I miss insular communities that actually kept the garbage out by banning them. Now everyone is on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram fighting back and forth all the time. Everyone keeps spilling embarrassing details about themselves and mouthing off about subjects they have no real understanding of then getting all upset when they are called out. No one understands what privacy means anymore. There are a bunch of people who actually think that they can publicaly post something and people just won't read it because it's tagged #personal or #don't reblog. How retarded can you get? If you don't want people seeing it in the first place don't post it. It's just a ploy for attention and luring white nights to your aid to feel special anyway.

Also, celebrities that run their own social media and get into wars with trolls (Leslie Jones for example) have just ruined the mystique of celebrities in general. I now see them as just as exceptional as most people glued to Twitter and Facebook 24/7. There's a good reason to distance yourself from the fans most of the time. Your image gets tarnished very easily by this type of behavior. Let your PR people just spam your feed with promotions and use an anonymous name to converse with the internet.

In fact, I miss the whole screen name era. So many people using their real names online. That's gonna come back to haunt you. Why do you want people to know your name unless it's a business thing?

 

[Sergeant Politeness]

In fact, I miss the whole screen name era. So many people using their real names online. That's gonna come back to haunt you. Why do you want people to know your name unless it's a business thing?

My real name isn't linked with any screen name I've ever used. With my old usernames, I was still being taught stranger danger, and by the time I got old enough to realize that was (somewhat) bullshit, I still valued my privacy enough not to link it.

I kinda hope it sticks out. Everyone is so open and honest on the internet, it's boring. Pseudonyms are way more fun, too.

 

[Tubular Monkey]

The internet is like air travel. Introducing it to the masses turned it into Wal-Mart.

 

[vertexwindi]

I feel like I'm the only one who used MSN back in the day in this thread. Doo doo doo.

I used to go to a chatroom and get the MSN addresses of girls twice my age. Fun times.

 

[SpessCaptain]

I miss making geocities accounts and answering questions in my guestbook, how mad I got when someone hacked my Runescape account (I got it back pretty easily years later.) I miss the amount of fansites and forums I used to go into. I miss playing a MUD for kids and then being banned by 13 year olds who thought I was the worst.

I don't miss going into Yahoo Chat and talking to blokes twice my age, that was a stupid idea.

 

[cuddle striker]

hey get off the phone, I have to use the internet.