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

[A_right_horrorshow]

Steakandcheese, Saw my first set of boobies and one of the best suicide bomber fails I've never seen anywhere else, The one where some mongaloid put the vest on inside out, only imploded himself, head went flying off like a champagne cork and the intended targets are completely unharmed, all just stood around bewildered at the sight they just witnessed.

1998-2009 was fun internet!

 

[Big Nasty]

Youtube pre-2008 contained the weirdest shit you could think of.

I remember when the top search result for "fart" was a very obvious fetish video of a hairy dude in a speedo just blasting ass.

 

[Eydallur]

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.

Instead of thousands of little distinct sites, blogs, forums and fan communities everything today is pretty much congealed into a few hegemonic blobs like reddit where all discussion is closely filtered for wrongthink by tranny freaks driven by lust for power almost as strong as their lust for cock.

It's a good thing those old forums are dead though because good lord did I post some cringe.

 

[Miriam Margoyles]

MySpace was the best social media site and I'm tired of pretending it wasn't.

For sheer customisation, no other site came close. Everyone's MySpace was unique and different, compared to the stark, sterile, soulless navy blue and white 'professional' aesthetic that Facebook has, which I remember thinking at the time and to this day was a step backwards for everyone, another means of making us all docile, conformist little consumers. We used to have so many options, but it seems like as every year goes by, they take a little bit more of that customisation away from us. Here it is, web 2.0, all laid on for you. You want to change it to your own personal tastes? No, fuck you. Zuck says navy blue and white.

On MySpace, you could change your background, you could have as many spinning skull gifs as you wanted and you could make it so that just opening your profile would inflict whatever garbage music you were currently obsessed with on anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot, blaring out at max volume. Especially if they had the misfortune of wearing headphones at the time of clicking on it.

I genuinely learned most of what I know about HTML from making new MySpace layouts.

Facebook has Zuck the cuck, meanwhile MySpace had the Chad Tom. Tom who was everybody's friend. Whether you wanted him to be or not, he was always there, looking over his shoulder at you with a cheeky grin.

Mark Zuckerberg is a creepy reptilian incel fuck looking to flog you the Metaverse. Tom wouldn't pull that shit. Tom was a fucking cool guy, capiche?

 

[D.Angus]

I remember someone finding this on albinoblacksheep when I was in 7th grade and it spread in the computer lab like wildfire.

@Irrational Exuberance's avatar comes from this video/flash. Thank you for reminding me about animutations, back when making shitposts took actual time and effort.

One of my favorites is "French Erotic Film"

Spoiler: French Erotic Film - Seizure warning

They always involve Colin Mochrie, and it's kinda sad now knowing where his son ended up.

 

[Eydallur]

Here it is, web 2.0, all laid on for you. You want to change it to your own personal tastes? No, fuck you. Zuck says navy blue and white.

I'm amazed zuck hasn't caught on to the fact he could make a few billion a year just off selling clipart gifs for pennies each to the terminally online to decorate their pages with.

 

[admiral]

As a very young teenager the only way I watched anime was mirrored and split into segments on youtube. Very common to get 3/5 of the way through an episode of Naruto or whatever only to find that part 4 had been taken down. There was this creator I followed who had this ongoing series- it was a flash animated slice of life sitcom about the akatsuki from naruto, and even though it was so shittily animated and poorly written I still remember it because the episodes were constantly being taken down and she was constantly reuploading, or making new accounts just to reupload, and making new episodes despite it all. If she's out there somewhere, I wish I could tell her that I was a big fan.

There was something very earnest and fun about Youtube from around 2007-2011. AMVs, poorly produced flash animation, low budget skit comedy, parody songs, pirated episodes of Vampire Knight with crappy fansubs. It really felt like it was content that was being made by normal people in their bedrooms or backyards. These days the top videos are either corporate accounts, music videos, or mega-producers like Mr Beast. Sometimes when i'm looking for a song i'll intentionally watch the shitty windows movie maker lyric video version from 2009 just for a hit of nostalgia. I really miss the old youtube.

It just feels so hard to stumble organically upon interesting niche communities these days. Back in the day you could follow some links and wind up almost anywhere, but now everything just bounces around between the major sites and everyone is doxable because everything requires an account. It used to be easy to go online and be anon and shoot the shit and find what you like, but now you either have to wade through a tonne of garbage to get anywhere, or jump through a bunch of hoops to find a place that caters to your interests.

 

[Big Nasty]

This is a very good example of how a typical homepage would look like in the old internet days.

Despite not being updated for over 15 years, it is still online for some reason.

https://www.clockworksky.net/

 

[888Flux]

This is a very good example of how a typical homepage would look like in the old internet days.

Despite not being updated for over 15 years, it is still online for some reason.

https://www.clockworksky.net/

Some other interesting sites if you want to look at the history and evolution of web design:

Wiby.me - Search engine for Web 1.0 sites

Wiby - Search Engine for the Classic Web

Wiby is a search engine for older style pages, lightweight and based on a subject of interest. Building a web more reminiscent of the early internet.

wiby.me

"Wayback Machine" by Archive.org - Website archive collection that allows you to view a snapshot of most sites all the way back to 2005
https://web.archive.org/

Ten Years ago - lets you view how popular pages looked like 10 years ago

Ten Years Ago

What did the internet look like ten years ago?

neal.fun

Web Design Museum

Web Design Museum 1991 – 2006

Web Design Museum exhibits over 2,000 unique designs from the years 1991 to 2006. Discover forgotten trends in web design.

www.webdesignmuseum.org

Web Design History Timeline 1990-2023 | Web Design Museum

Take a look at the timeline of web design history and remember the milestones that took place since the first website was launched in October 1991.

www.webdesignmuseum.org

 

[Coelacanth]

@Irrational Exuberance's avatar comes from this video/flash. Thank you for reminding me about animutations, back when making shitposts took actual time and effort.

One of my favorites is "French Erotic Film"

Spoiler: French Erotic Film - Seizure warning

They always involve Colin Mochrie, and it's kinda sad now knowing where his son ended up.

I miss Animutations. When you watched one of these it wasn't just a shitpost - it was a trippy, nonsensical experience.

 

[Elysian]

 

[Vril-Dame vom Aldebaran]

MySpace was the best social media site and I'm tired of pretending it wasn't.

For sheer customisation, no other site came close. Everyone's MySpace was unique and different, compared to the stark, sterile, soulless navy blue and white 'professional' aesthetic that Facebook has, which I remember thinking at the time and to this day was a step backwards for everyone, another means of making us all docile, conformist little consumers. We used to have so many options, but it seems like as every year goes by, they take a little bit more of that customisation away from us. Here it is, web 2.0, all laid on for you. You want to change it to your own personal tastes? No, fuck you. Zuck says navy blue and white.

On MySpace, you could change your background, you could have as many spinning skull gifs as you wanted and you could make it so that just opening your profile would inflict whatever garbage music you were currently obsessed with on anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot, blaring out at max volume. Especially if they had the misfortune of wearing headphones at the time of clicking on it.

I genuinely learned most of what I know about HTML from making new MySpace layouts.

Facebook has Zuck the cuck, meanwhile MySpace had the Chad Tom. Tom who was everybody's friend. Whether you wanted him to be or not, he was always there, looking over his shoulder at you with a cheeky grin.

Mark Zuckerberg is a creepy reptilian incel fuck looking to flog you the Metaverse. Tom wouldn't pull that shit. Tom was a fucking cool guy, capiche?

I keep telling people that when we talk about social media and why I don't use it anymore.

MySpace was cool. Really, really cool. I customized my page to have a dark background, play gothic metal, and have a medieval font for most texts. I don't understand programming languages but I learned how to script all those little custom things on my MySpace page, it was super easy (ok I asked a nerdy friend to help me but it was easy after he showed me).

All of my friends had MySpace and many didn't make the switch to Facebook, because our MySpace pages were so much cooler. Exactly the kind of social media you would want as an angsty teenage goth girl who wants to show the world her weirdness. Pictures! Music! Color! Custom fonts! MySpace truly was your space. I could never get into Fagbook, Twitter, etc because of how inferior they were to the glorious MySpace experience.

Instant messengers have become worse, too. Remember MSN Messenger? I always put my chat window background to a pleasant image of a green forest. Nowadays the best you can hope for is a choice between light and dark mode with apps like Discord. Custom backgrounds? Ha, nope! And we also got animated smileys out of the box. Nowadays you have to pay for Discord Nitro to get that.

Web 2.0 was a lie. They tried to sell it to us as an internet where the content is determined by the user, the social media paradise where it's all about YOU! But the old internet offered more genuine ways of expressing yourself than Web 2.0. We had MySpace, customizable messengers, specialized hobbyist internet forums (I joined several communities focused on specific games like The Sims, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex... none of these forums exist anymore), Newgrounds, early YouTube...

The Web 2.0 narrative is a lie to make us forget what we have lost.

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

 

[Beebo]

Back in 2001-2003, the boys of our class would go to Stickdeath.com on our teacher's PC during recess to giggle at stick figures killing/fucking each other. During that 15minute time window we had the time to load like one flash with the school's shitty modem.

Some of those animations have been uploaded to YT, but most of them, especially the older, shorter ones still are very difficult to find.
Site went down sometime in 2008 or so, and i wasn't able to dig out more about the creator other than that his name is Rob Lewis, and that he really fucking hated ragheads. Peak post 9/11.
In the lostmediawiki there's some guy talking about how he archived 98% of the stuff, but the link he provides is dead.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

I think the sites I miss the most from the Wild West days of the internet were actual, good quality Torrent/ROM/ISO sites like emuparadise, before game corporations took to the internet and started shutting them all down en masse. Nowadays most ROM sites are either:

1. Completely pozzed and don’t even supply links to the games because they were forced to remove them.
2. Have a download link for the game, but don’t supply instructions on how to boot it on the emulator.
3. Is a 64-bit shitfest of viruses and pop-up links that repeatedly spam your screen. Multiple download buttons that you can’t differentiate between. Often accompanies 1 or 2.

Search engines are so completely fucked now that whenever I try figuring out how to run a ROM/ISO for an obscure game made before Windows XP, I get redirected to threads for emulators that have long lost their support, or I get sent to Amazon to buy a physical copy of the game that ALSO doesn’t run on modern systems because Windows 10/11 are so absolutely, completely fucked in terms of Compatability for running older titles.

This is all intentional. I’ve had friends with no experience on older operating systems or the Wild West internet tell me that despite the loopholes, it’s easier now than ever to emulate games. They are so, so wrong. It’s an absolute goddamn Herculean feat.

 

[Vicinaux]

This is a very good example of how a typical homepage would look like in the old internet days.

Despite not being updated for over 15 years, it is still online for some reason.

https://www.clockworksky.net/

This reminds me of a blog I stumbled upon years ago. It was essentially a page where a guy neatly documented almost all aspects of his life & current interests over a long period of time (Me/Friends even contains pics of himself from when he was a kid!). It's actually really endearing when you don't think of the huge privacy risk this could pose. He ran the site from 1998 to 2014. I think he's in his 40's now and you can see his name being mentioned on articles when you look it up on Google.

www.ninomiya.org - Main

Notice how there's significantly less links on the 2014 front page than on the 2006 version's front page

 

[Toolbox]

This is all intentional. I’ve had friends with no experience on older operating systems or the Wild West internet tell me that despite the loopholes, it’s easier now than ever to emulate games. They are so, so wrong. It’s an absolute goddamn Herculean feat.

They'd be correct that we technically have better emulators (mostly for console games) as for one's ability to acquire the games to run on the emulators that is a different issue, as you see. And for old PC games it is a whole different nightmare unless they ran on DOS. The loss of forums to communicate with those that have deep knowledge on how to get this shit working and that being replaced with Discords you have to dig around for has killed a lot of the old culture that made it at least reasonable to figure these things out.

 

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

They'd be correct that we technically have better emulators (mostly for console games) as for one's ability to acquire the games to run on the emulators that is a different issue, as you see. And for old PC games it is a whole different nightmare unless they ran on DOS. The loss of forums to communicate with those that have deep knowledge on how to get this shit working and that being replaced with Discords you have to dig around for has killed a lot of the old culture that made it at least reasonable to figure these things out.

Discord has been a bane on the forum communities fr. Old-school knowledge and patience has been lost and drowned out by the hypersperging and spamming of terminally Adderall-popping teenagers who don’t know a single fucking thing about opsec and basic internet etiquette.

 

[Vril-Dame vom Aldebaran]

They'd be correct that we technically have better emulators (mostly for console games) as for one's ability to acquire the games to run on the emulators that is a different issue, as you see. And for old PC games it is a whole different nightmare unless they ran on DOS. The loss of forums to communicate with those that have deep knowledge on how to get this shit working and that being replaced with Discords you have to dig around for has killed a lot of the old culture that made it at least reasonable to figure these things out.

I still have two older PCs - one Win XP and one Win 7 - to play older games on. The Windows 7 PC for older games I have on Steam, the XP PC for games I have on disc (or pirated disc images). There are ways to get Win 98 games to run on modern systems, but it takes a lot of fiddling and usually they have a lot of issues.

I hate modern Windows with a passion and would switch to Linux for my everyday usage if I wasn't such a tech-illiterate basic bitch. Linux sounds way too complicated for me.

 

[Ferdinand Bardamu]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq0_ApTwNH4