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

[Halo]

I don't know if anyone remembers this meme fossil or websites similar. It's fun to see how much humor has evolved online over time:

Horse Head Huffer

 

[Big Nasty]

Rotten.com

An excellent way to ruin a lunch break

 

[Sperghetti]

I'm wondering what it'd take to return the internet to those days. Obviously we need it to be much less a part of mainstream normie life and vice-versa. But can it actually happen? I keep thinking maybe AI-everything, twitter dying, other things, or some combination thereof can finally make the social media aspect of the net collapse and much of the corporate centralizing of it go down as well. Not entirely, sadly - you can't unmake concepts once they've been made, like bots or conglomerated social sites in general - but it'd be nice to have a lot more sites dedicated to specific communities or hobbies around so everyone has their preferred niche safe and sound from being invaded or spilled into.

I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately. The funny thing is, the actual practical structures to have this kind of environment are all still there*, like the ability to host your own website, set up a foum, etc. The main hurdles are all social/cultural things:

- Walmartification. I believe the main reason the internet has become so centralized is because most people want to have a big “everything” platform where they make one account where they talk about anything, and mash every interest into one big, endless feed. People will bitch and moan about social media, but then wrinkle up their nose at the idea of having to visit more than one website to pursue their interests.
- You’d also have to have a way to actively prevent or inhibit any means of monetization. Another reason is that people won’t leave big, centralized platforms is that they’ve become predisposed to thinking of the internet as a sort of get-rich-quick scheme -- why do anything online if it's not amassing an audience to donate to your Ko-fi/Patreon/OnlyFans, subscribe to your YouTube channel, or watch your Twitch streams?

IMO, the only way to increase the amount of internet niches is if more people are willing to reject these two concepts wholesale. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if any of the current big social media sites go down in a big fiery ball visible from space, another one will just pop up and take it's place.

* Search engines are absolutely borked, though.

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

This:

The internet was so fucking creative back then.

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

I miss old Pewds.

 

[Coelacanth]

I miss old Pewds.

 

[You're MDNWU]

From about 2002-2010ish was amazing internet and what we have now is just shit that's been neutered for advertisers and dumbed down for everyone else.

Neopets (and moving your mouse all over the place to find some hidden egg), forums whenever you needed answers to something (until Photobucket fucked everyone over; the plug in fix doesn't always work), chatrooms on early social media (that you could also use mIRC to get in to and be a script kiddie or just fuck with old guys by giving fake asl's), Skype actually being popular and useful, and previously mentioned Newgrounds, Maddox, Cartoon network, etc. All great and made the Internet enjoyable. Even in regular PC games, you and everyone else could talk shit without having to worry about your life being cancelled.

 

[Toilet Grenade]

For me, I'd say it would have to be digital art and internet animations from roughly 2003-2009ish.

I don't know how to describe it, but there's just something about it that just evokes a feeling of nostalgia.

Oh, and let's not forget the fanmade music videos with songs from punk/rock bands.

 

[Mister Mint]

Maybe not a favorite memory, but a funny one in retrospect is when I was a young teen in AOL chat rooms you could go to one of their pre-made rooms or go to a private room by just typing in the name of the room. No password, just a unique name.
So being an edgy kid I would type in "SEX" or "ORGY" and go see what was almost certainly all similar-aged edgy kids telling each other "Yeah, man, I'm a big sex haver. I love putting my dick in the clit and stuff and I do it all the time."

 

[glass_houses]

Remember Steve, Don't Eat It! ? It's been over a decade since Steve last ate it. I still hold out hope that one day he will return to tell us more about his bizarre snacking habits.

 

[haglover]

Anybody here remember NetDisaster? You’d type a URL in and it would let you destroy a screenshot of the website in various amusing ways:
View attachment 4736114

I remember once when I was a kid my mom caught me on it and got really mad at me because she thought I was destroying the actual BBC home page with my small child l33t hacker skillz. It was very funny.

Reminds me of desktopdestroyer. I'm pretty sure I installed that from some shady reupload site and got adware and shit.

 

[Fagette]

Reminds me of desktopdestroyer. I'm pretty sure I installed that from some shady reupload site and got adware and shit.

I remember watching and getting angry about videos of people using Desktop Destroyer on Webkinz.

 

[Monkey Pink]

PsilocybeFanaticus.com. Any mycologists may recognize the “PF Tek” for growing mushrooms and Psilocybe Fanaticus was the guy who invented it. I bought spores from him in college only about 6 months before he got raided by the feds. It was fun growing them but I got paranoid so I stopped after two flushes but DAMN did those “lab grown” mushrooms hit hard!

If you're still into that kind of thing, the laws are waaaaaay more relaxed than they used to be and places like MYCCO still sell spore & culture syringes.

Anyone remember drugs-forum.com? That shitty forum that invented and popularized using "SWIM" ("someone who isn't me") when talking about drugs? Lol.

 

[Big Nasty]

YOU HAVE BEEN TROLLED BY THE GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

YOU HAVE LOST

 

[Nick Obre]

Like a brainfart, a memory just came to me

There was a game called Poulaga challenge I used to play with my friends
It's gone now

But it was like this

Those were the days

 

[Hummingbird]

I miss Kisekae dolls. Sure the person behind the Otakuworld Kiss system was a massive lolcow, but in my younger and more innocent days I enjoyed playing with these interactive paper dolls. In it's prime, there were some really talented artists, but they eventually left for greener pastures and the thing fell.

 

[ReVeRaNd DoCtOr]

I really miss all those miss-heard lyric songs on you tube. The ones that were hand drawn on past were the best.

 

[Smar Mijou]

It shows just how much of a cancer modern social media truly is. It makes me wonder if maybe public access to the internet should have stayed as dialup access, which would have prevented a large part of the shit that happened since greater speed allowed far more advanced sites to be developed that allowed for modern social media

It's really humbling, mind-warping, and profound, all wrapped up into one, that we're essentially the "Old man yells at cloud" and "Back in my day" of the new generation. The things we're sperging and reminiscing about now are ~20 years old, give or take. As a small kid, listening to "old people" talk about the 60's seemed like far and away ancient history. That talk with today's kids would be us reminiscing about AOL dial-up, web rings, Winamp, ICQ (I still remember my number!) and Windows 95.

The soulless crush of corporate and sanitized internet where everyone is online and everything is a cash grab makes me think about how anything else that becomes popular is ruined in short order. That popular little beach that nobody knows about will be "discovered" by some Instagram "influencer" and ruined by copycats and the onslaught of humanity thaoverwhelms s and destroys it. Tranny faggots making identity politics and their mental delusions their entire personality are in power and will ruin and/or ban you from whatever they can for "pRoBlEmAtIc" opinions. The even older pioneers of the internet are correct, we really are in an Eternal September.

Real Networks are still around but they're making creepy facial recognition software nowdays.

Cindy Margolis was the Guinness Book of World Records "most downloaded" person of 1999.

View attachment 4062135
And for peak 90s was in a movie with Carrot Top (*not* a favorite old internet thing)
View attachment 4062132

Is that spelled Chairman Of The BORED? - Norm

This video, and the others like it, are just plain wholesome. Again, you don't get these sorts of vids much anymore. At least, not without all the sponsorship, modern YouTube infested bullshit trying to appeal to whatever algorithmic monster is in vogue at the time. Early Youtube was something else.

One of the other magical things of the time was the music scene for video games at the time.

I.E: Like so from this deleted video. Thank God someone managed to archive this one. Bask in it, that old YouTube aesthetic. Behold, how those related videos are actually relevant.

(Coincidentally, I did managed to find the channel is still active, with an "updated" video for the theremin-... Holy shit, he actually brought it back.)


(Well, that's bloody wonderful. Just wait till you see his excuse for originally purging it.)

(I honestly have no idea why people do this. No earthly idea. Even with his excuse, I still do not understand.)

Holy goddamn man... That video is a direct hit to my feels. I remember seeing the original video featured on YT and being amazed by it. Much like other "pre-viral" viral personalities like Numa-Numa guy, Tourettes Guy, Tay Zonday, AVGN, etc, there is a certain quaintness and innocence to pre-corporatized Youtube/internet. To see someone come back like that 15+ years later, with the same passion and hobby, while showing the progression of skills and experience that only time can provide, is truly remarkable and tweaks all of my nostalgic feelings.

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.

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.

How were you able to get these operating systems to run? Are you using virtual machines or did you buy old computers to run them? I’ve been wanting to have a computer run Windows XP for ages but the only way I’ve figured out how to do it is with VM’s, which isn’t the same.

Also I know the feeling, Linux is too sophisticated for my programming-illiterate ass to use. Might just end up dropping the ball in frustration and make the switch though. Fuck Windows, GoogleOS, and iOS with a thousand blazing suns.

(Sperg/PL warning)
Aside from the ever-increasing spyware and always online, corporate cucking of modern Microsoft, this is exactly why I refuse to "upgrade" to the Newest Thing and will keep my old 32 bit Win7 and WinXP computers chugging along until the heat-death of the universe, and cautiously disconnected from the internet unless absolutely necessary. Despite VMWare, Wine, DOSbox, etc for "compatibility", the simple fact remains that there are just some things that cannot be replicated in software. And most of the Linux distros are fragile houses of cards gatekept by literal autistic trannys that will break with a version update, so no fuckin way that I'm dealing with that. I'm something of a digital hoarder, and save/archive many things that simply don't exist anywhere online anymore. Software that has long been abandoned by its creators, obscure drivers that were later broken by a later update, or even things like Photoshop or Office/Excel/Word/Outlook that YOU USED TO OWN, that have been corporate cucked into perpetually online, perpetual pay "Software as a Service". I save all of that shit, because I was I guess you could say "smart enough" to quickly realize after seeing the downfall of places like Geocities, or EMUParadise, that if you don't save something yourself, you are at the mercy of the companies that control the servers, who can and will shut down or change/add/remove things on a whim if it'll save them a dollar, nostalgia, ownership, and legacies be damned. Streaming services are great for convenience and ease of accessibility, but you won't ever see the dick on the cover of the original Little Mermaid VHS cover, or that topless lady in the background of the original The Rescuers movie in modern-day Disney. TOR, KF, and some obscure dusty corners of the internet with websites ran by "boomers" who don't suck tranny dick are the real last bastions of web 1.0 that is increasingly relegated to the dustbins of history and gaslighted or forgotten about as if they never existed.

 

[Ursus Alternatum]

This one isn't as old.

I remember when I was younger I used to watch this Youtube gaming group called TheCreatureHub/The Creatures/Creature Hub they were fucking awesome they had road trip to E3 series and shit where they would camp and go sight-seeing...

Then some eGirl got introduced to the group and they all started fighting and it just kinda died.

Rip

 

[Crimson Fucker Ţepeş]

I miss encyclopedia dramatica back when it still had all its content.