Favourite "Old Internet" stuff - Let's reminisce about the Wild West days

[Sneaky khajiit]

I was thinking the other day about long-gone websites from my youth, and it made me wonder what others have nostalgia for, particularly sites that have disappeared into the ether. What kinds of weird shit were you into when you were young and cringy?

Here's my example: I was  super into Conversatron when I was a small Khajiit. One of my posts even got responded to by a couple characters once, which was amazingly exciting at the time and made me feel very clever indeed. Did I peak in 99??

I also remember there used to (maybe still is?) be a page where you could play the old text-based Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game in your browser. It was HARD.

 

[Fartokulon]

When i was a super small lad, Animutation and early 2000s newgrounds flash used to be my fucking entire life. I still reminisce on those days now.

 

[TokyoMeatballs]

The old GameFaqs message boards, late 90s early 2000s. I was super active in the LUE community as a kid, and from there I kinda springboarded into the other bad neighborhoods of the internet. I guess I've just always been a mega hardcore badass.

The early 2000s internet in general will always be peak internet to me. We had enough of the modern accessibility of today to make the internet like pulling teeth, but it was still a small enough group of people that no one really gave a shit about people getting trolled. Now you make some tranny janny cry and NBC writes a puff piece, back then it was just to be expected that if you were a weirdo you got made fun of.


A simpler, better time.

 

[El Goblina]

adequacy.org

 

[Glossy Paper]

It's not ancient internet old but I miss the info heavy style of Let's Plays. These were done by people who already played the game, who walk the viewer through acting as an outsider's commentary track. They go straight to the point, no reaction nonsense, blunders are edited out, they sprinkle in the history of the game and its development, and often all the easter eggs plus weird references too. The best known example is probably the Jurassic Park Trespasser one.
There are a lot fewer who do this today and their vids are drowned out by the thousands of low effort reaction playthroughs and pseudo intellectual gaming "video essays".

 

[nym]

Heh, OP, that HHGTTG game was one funny early memory. Playing it on an old Apple II, quite familiar with Zork games, discovered another like that, I'm maybe 7 or 8, and I find myself stuck right at the fricking start, probably well-emulating your character Arthur Dent and his delirium of a horrible hangover, I have no idea what's going on, before suddenly I think I might have figured out why I can't figure anything out at all, "hey mom, what's acetominephen?"
she was a little like "wait WHAT?!" probably figuring the kid is messing with random pill bottles he found, when in reality, nah, he just needed something to help with the fucking hangover... jeez, mom...
but similar to that, all those MUDs in the 90s, and yeah, they too peaked ~99 and the few years after, until World of Warcraft came along and ended that entire genre. I miss MUDs.

Although not long after, I miss the first days of internet videos, playing Counter-Strike and such at the time, and Pure Pwnage came along... it's so weird to try to watch that now, but it was such a fucking delight back then.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Fan shrines on Geocities, Angelfire or Tripod or whatnot. They were just freaking everywhere, and a lot were low effort, but they were just made out of love for a character or series. Although some would take it a bit too far in being open about wanting to fuck those characters as part of the "worship", but that was something I didn't really notice when I was younger.

I think they still exist somewhat in terms of character-centric blogs on Tumblr or whatnot, but it's just not the same.

 

[Stabmaster Arson II]

I loved when back in the day, on IRC you could tell who in the channel was using Norton because if you posted "startkeylogger" in the channel, Norton flagged it as some string from malware and just straight up disconnected everyone using Norton from the channel. Was fucking hilarious, just join a channel and type "startkeylogger" and see a bunch of people immediately get their connections dropped, kek.

 

[hotcheetospuffs]

WBS chat and Neopets

 

[Zoobles]

I'm embarrassed to say it in current year, but maddox.xmission.com

 

[Stabmaster Arson II]

I'm embarrassed to say it in current year, but maddox.xmission.com

What a fall from grace. Can't believe I used to like that guy.

 

[biozeminadae1]

I miss Internet forums, man.

 

[.iota.]

dying of dysentery.

 

[NoonmanR]

Crazy Monkey Games. Always remember playing games like Thing Thing, or Raiden X during lunch in the classroom.

 

[Suburban Bastard]

I appreciate how newgrounds still has many great animators and artists to this day, but there was something special about when their animators also ruled youtube before it became biased for lets players.

 

[glass_houses]

I miss the variety of old fashioned forums like this one. There's barely any left and just about all of them are nearly dead.

I also miss my cringe days in various fandoms; there was something about the participation in the community surrounding something I loved that really struck a cord with me. I loved reading other people's take on fandom lore and characters, and the intense speculation that used to arise when everyone was waiting for the next installment of insert-geekdom-here, all the debate and anticipation was delicious. Now every fucking character is a tranny, and fandom discussion is largely controlled by the media owner.

I miss the heyday of LiveJournal; not just for geek shit, but for the friends I had there who've since moved on, and the odd communities of interesting shit.

Like @Kari Kamiya said, I miss character shrines; a few of them are still around but they haven't been updated for literal decades, and the entire fandom has moved onto Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and ad-infested wikis.

I miss the anything-goes approach to the internet. Now everything has the absolute fuck moderated out of it. It's not that I miss saying 'nigger', because I never actually said the word before people told me I couldn't. In the wild days of the internet, places that enforced a code of conduct did so because it was good manners and made for a harmonious community. Now, absolutely every single letter, numeral and punctuation mark is rigorously scanned for the vague scent of insert-phobia-here. Mere mild statements of a different point of view will get you kicked off multiple sites because invariably, some snowflake will feel 'unsafe' because you questioned their cherished reality. I miss being able to tell people that they were full of shit and need to toughen the fuck up. I miss being able to have a mild debate without being called an "-ist", or even being able to say, "I still disagree, but I respect the way you defend your position." In so many places now silence is a crime, because if you don't loudly support the current thing, well, "silence is violence."

I miss lesbian communities that aren't filled with troons or straight girls calling themselves 'queer'.

I miss not tripping over some underemployed wanker proclaiming themselves to be some kind of 'activist' every second paragraph.

I miss little random websites of... well, random.

I miss 4chan when it was good (but then 4chan was never good.)

 

[AbduluCthuluZulu]

For me it was mainly old flash games I used to play during school (Addictinggames, Kongregate, Armorgames, NinjaKiwi, ect.) and game servers/forums from back when people could host their own shit without having to worry about getting Ddosed or swatted. (I remember wanting to build my own server machine when I was younger, such an innocent child I was.)

 

[Load Bearing Drywall]

I miss the variety of old fashioned forums like this one. There's barely any left and just about all of them are nearly dead.

I also miss my cringe days in various fandoms; there was something about the participation in the community surrounding something I loved that really struck a cord with me. I loved reading other people's take on fandom lore and characters, and the intense speculation that used to arise when everyone was waiting for the next installment of insert-geekdom-here, all the debate and anticipation was delicious. Now every fucking character is a tranny, and fandom discussion is largely controlled by the media owner.

I miss the heyday of LiveJournal; not just for geek shit, but for the friends I had there who've since moved on, and the odd communities of interesting shit.

Like @Kari Kamiya said, I miss character shrines; a few of them are still around but they haven't been updated for literal decades, and the entire fandom has moved onto Facebook and Tumblr and Reddit and ad-infested wikis.

It sounds like we're from the same corner of the internet, and yes I also miss all those things. I miss the EFFORT people put into decoding things and creating stupid livejournal icons/layouts and fanart/forum icons for each other and actually caring about each other's lives. I miss fandom_wank, MST3King terrible fics, and the ridiculous fandom communities you had to fill in a huge questionnaire to get into and the members would vote on whether you were "cool" enough to get in. Is it cringe? Sure. Do I still have friends from those communities after almost 20 years? Yes.

I also hate that every fucking character has a trans head cannon, and every female creator is now a she/they at minimum, and you have to be the right kind of political with your sperging to have friends.

I miss the anything-goes approach to the internet. Now everything has the absolute fuck moderated out of it. It's not that I miss saying 'nigger', because I never actually said the word before people told me I couldn't. In the wild days of the internet, places that enforced a code of conduct did so because it was good manners and made for a harmonious community. Now, absolutely every single letter, numeral and punctuation mark is rigorously scanned for the vague scent of insert-phobia-here. Mere mild statements of a different point of view will get you kicked off multiple sites because invariably, some snowflake will feel 'unsafe' because you questioned their cherished reality. I miss being able to tell people that they were full of shit and need to toughen the fuck up. I miss being able to have a mild debate without being called an "-ist", or even being able to say, "I still disagree, but I respect the way you defend your position." In so many places now silence is a crime, because if you don't loudly support the current thing, well, "silence is violence."

I miss moderating for quality most of all. Now it's exactly what you said: moderating for having the Correct Opinions and not using no no words (omg you can't say st*p*d, that's ableist!) and people we would have banned for being low effort retards get to play stasi agent and feel important instead of contributing quality content.

I would love to have a BP fandom board. I know we have the media boards in Off Topic, but the Star Trek fans who hang out there aren't the kind of fans who would appreciate my sperging about gay fanfiction and NuTrek.

I also miss the golden era of Something Awful. Leftists weren't always such fucking pathetic retards. LF was great political shitposting mixed with amazing serious effort posts on all sorts of things you wouldn't learn about in school in the US. There was an amazing thread with ex cons who had reformed themselves and would really candidly talk about prison life and why the American prison system is completely fucked, next to DEATH TO AMERICA shitposts and copypasta from the mod VileRat being a racist piece of shit. I will never stop laughing that one mod was a Benghazi victim and another (McCaine) is a kinky twink who was blase about his porn being posted and now is a well-respected writer and theorist for Jacobin.

 

[The Last Stand]

I remember when FunBrain was a thing for middle schoolers.

 

[Toolbox]

Old webtoy stuff like this, when small games on the internet weren't ad hell or only multiplayer.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051227041718/http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/

A realm slightly outside the purview of aggregators like newgrounds, not that they didn't have this stuff, but it was meant to be embedded into personal webpages or simply shared around.

Note that actually viewing the game on that archive might require some finagling, I've found that pale moon browser works with old flash/java junk provided you have the right old dependencies for it. Also this game changed quite a bit later with different versions on that page in 2011 ish.