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

[glass_houses]

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

I miss ED from when I didn't know that the people behind it were even more autistic than the lolcows they wrote about.

 

[Chandelier]

I miss OG YouTube when you had a custom, personalized channel and were allowed to send PMs. That was phased out around 2012, when Google was firmly entrenched. A fading memory, but one cherished. Met a few friends there.

Ages ago, back in 2008-2009, the lady vestiges of flash games led me to a Resident Evil Outbreak game. It was actually fun; your choices impacted the ending. It's long gone now.

There was also a game called Poptropica, which basically had your avatar go on adventures. You could talk to other users (only in type chat) and customize them with the stuff you found. No idea what it's up to now, if it even exists. I had a slow as fuck laptop so the framerate was insanely low.

Spoiler

I even know about the old Meet n Fuck games on Newgrounds. They are actually funny to think on it, and the original FunHaus used to parody them. Good times.

 

[FailurePersonifiedV2]

That rooms, especially the adult oriented chat rooms (where you would have a shitty php message app where you could talk to tittyFucker69dude and when I would try to bait pedos (to fuck with them) it was so fuckin funny. They didn’t fear getting caught and they weren’t smart about it so you could send them on wild goose chases.

Piracy, it was the best. Myspleen.org (before my account got terminated, don’t ask) was a massive treasure trove.

Old forums obviously… all my old friends are gone.

IRC, when most weren’t cucked.

Better to love and lost; then to never love at all.

 

[GR8 B8 M8 I R8 8/8]

I miss the days there were less people on the internet and it was less centralized. Big corporations and politicians hadn't infected it with their grimy hands yet.
Politics were less popular and there was little to no social media.
You were truly free to say whatever you wanted and joke about whatever and people were smart enough to understand that jokes were just jokes and if you didn't like something you went elsewhere.

Things were just more simple in general.

It wasn't perfect but still...

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

 

[Georgio Cocklord]

Nitrome, Miniclip, Cartoon Network flash games. trolling and saying stupid shit, tons of artists and animation, flash and user made stuff. There was a lot more stuff but this is all i remember now.

 

[Annoying Orange]

Flash room escape games. I used to love them when I was a kid.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Long long ago, before the towers fell, I would spend my Friday nights as a young child skulking around my house using the remote control to flip through late night TV. This was before men could laugh at retards on the internet because it was widely seen as a passing fancy by some and a scam by others. This was the night of cable TV and if cinemax wasn't poorly unscrambled so that you could maybe see a tit, an amped up kid would have to resort to other forms of entertainment. Mine was this... the glory of the 3 am knife collector show.

I don't know where Tom O'dell is these days but I wish him the best the drunk sword-wielding bastard.

Also his assistant gets fucked by not learning Tom's mystical techniques soon enough at some point. Shoulda drank more.

 

[Barbarella]

Anybody remember Dope Wars? Fun game.

I am from the very early days, so Usenet was my jam. Sci.med, alt.misc…Bulletin Boards. The excitement of hearing about this new thing coming out called Mosaic and the “Graphical World Wide Web” and not quite being sure about it. Using dos or unix command line to jump from one university library to another. Later geocities where they called your own page “home” and having neighborhoods and cities. Pine for email. Later IRC and A/S/L. Good times.

Yes, I’m an oldfag -my Dad also was in the computer business early on, so I started young and saw it all. Not much danger for kids back then, it was too slow for accidental porn. Still have an original Palm Pilot.

Actually, those early days were a lot like my experience with Tor and a phone, ha.

Crazy how fast it developed. AI is going to be the next leap and in 30 years the world will change as much as the Internet has made it change the previous 30.

 

[Dambusters' Dog II]

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.

Heh, OP, that HHGTTG game was one funny early memory. Playing it on an old Apple II

After Flash bit the dust, the BBC have now had the in-browser version remade in HTML5 (no TV licence required). It turns out it was "buffered analgesic", I knew acetaminophen had to be wrong because we call it paracetamol in Bongland. I think "buffered analgesic" is a BBC-ism like "sticky tape" used to avoid mentioning a specific brand (and thereby advertising).

 

[ditto]

Anybody remember Dope Wars? Fun game.

Used to play it on SDF.org over a shitty Telnet connection. Fun times!

 

[GloriousScarf]

I miss the availibility of BBS forums, it's probably why I love the farms so much. Winamp, napster, stickdeath, yahoo chat, stumbling across random chat rooms.

 

[cybertoaster]

That rooms, especially the adult oriented chat rooms

Back then we used to laugh at the guys thinking they were talking to a girl who was actually a guy messing with them.

Of course in retrospective those were likely trannies, but trans stuff wasn't well known back then and we were kids so we didn't even consider that scenario.

Politics were less popular

No, politics were contained. Even in the middle of the 9/11 aftermath and the dubya wars if you wanted to talk politics you had to go to the designated subforum if there was one at all since some sites didn't allow politics at all because everybody understood politics are cancer, so you had to go to a site that was for politics.

Long long ago, before the towers fell, I would spend my Friday nights as a young child skulking around my house using the remote control to flip through late night TV. This was before men could laugh at retards on the internet because it was widely seen as a passing fancy by some and a scam by others. This was the night of cable TV and if cinemax wasn't poorly unscrambled so that you could maybe see a tit, an amped up kid would have to resort to other forms of entertainment. Mine was this... the glory of the 3 am knife collector show.

I don't know where Tom O'dell is these days but I wish him the best the drunk sword-wielding bastard.

Also his assistant gets fucked by not learning Tom's mystical techniques soon enough at some point. Shoulda drank more.

Having to watch whatever is on TV because there was literally nothing else to do was shit and I have zero nostalgia for that.

-my Dad also was in the computer business early on, so I started young and saw it all

That's pretty cool, mine weren't and we didn't have a lot of money so I never got to be an early adopter for anything as a kid, tho still beats the kids who were so poor they were getting a PS1 when the PS2 was already out.

and in 30 years the world will change as much as the Internet has made it change the previous 30.

You know I don't feel the world has changed much, I don't know why maybe because I was born in a time when the future was still flying cars, holograms, all that stuff. What people are doing right now with the internet I think is the same that they used to do before with other things, take for example the daytime tv zapping (remember that term?) to normies just wasting time watching crap on youtube, isn't that the same thing?. Kids now use social media as an extension of the drama that always happens within schools, the videos they make are the same shit we used to make with the cameras from A/V, or our parents.

I think the only change AI will bring is that a lot and I mean a LOT of people are gonna be rendered obsolete or just irrelevant, the 1% are gonna be the .001%.

Anybody remember Dope Wars?

I played it on my m105 Palm, fun times back in school until my AAAs drained and I had to reinstall everything because the fucking thing had like a 1 minute volatile memory and eventually some capacitor failed or something because it would all erase the moment it ran out of power.

 

[CaptainRockall]

The site which part of my username is taken from: The Rockall Times.

Hands down, the funniest-as-fuck website out there in the early 2000s.

'Abi Titmuss declared as the UK's version of the Big Easy.'

It was like The Day Today and TV Offal meets Peter Cook - comedic brilliance.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

The internet as a whole feels less functional than when it did in the old pioneering days. Services like Like365 seemed interesting for online music streaming, and then you had things like the superior way to share music, AudioGalaxy... Remember when Last.fm was a thing? Now nobody uses it. Some things like Livejournal and alternatives eventually were rightfully pushed back upon, and to an lesser extent Tumblr, but to me it kind of just feels like a general regression. I don't really find it all that usable. Right now there seems to be some big shit going down with websites like youtube...

Neopets had forums (websites having general forums was a thing) and it was crawling with pedophiles.

 

[Anonitolia]

The internet as a whole feels less functional than when it did in the old pioneering days. Services like Like365 seemed interesting for online music streaming, and then you had things like the superior way to share music, AudioGalaxy... Remember when Last.fm was a thing? Now nobody uses it. Some things like Livejournal and alternatives eventually were rightfully pushed back upon, and to an lesser extent Tumblr, but to me it kind of just feels like a general regression. I don't really find it all that usable.

Neopets had forums (websites having general forums was a thing) and it was crawling with pedophiles.

i'm impressed you got through this entire post without mentioning the regression of search engines

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

i'm impressed you got through this entire post without mentioning the regression of search engines

Where could I stop? Subscription services with increasingly higher costs and less features, godshit playdoh UIs for toddler minds, the obvious issue of politically-slanted censorship. The walmartization of communication. Hell even the norms of the internet have changed. At one point to get on a forum online you had to know what you were doing in the first place, and by then you were aready part of the club. I'm out of touch on a lot of things like Tiktok trends because I had checked out of the Internet by then. (And I'm disgusted by seeing grown men with their eyes glued to that shit).
---
Remember those were complicated multiplayer browser MUD-style games like Stellar Crisis? I know it's technically still around, but there's even a void for something like that. Overall the internet just feels a whole lot less imaginative. It's all one big Walmart and no quirky little side stores. Even though Newgrounds was fucking gay as hell we all used it I'm sure, Hell, most people don't even remember ytmnd. There's just not very many sites worth it traffic.

 

[glass_houses]

I recently went back to a very, very old forum that I spent years on, and hadn't been around for many years more. It's been recently active again after a very long time. The first things I saw was the old webmaster bitching about Dumpf and a troon- I'm sorry, a "transgirl" telling everyone about "muh identity".

Fffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccck.

 

[I Love Huge Long Chode]

I recently went back to a very, very old forum that I spent years on, and hadn't been around for many years more. It's been recently active again after a very long time. The first things I saw was the old webmaster bitching about Dumpf and a troon- I'm sorry, a "transgirl" telling everyone about "muh identity".

Fffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccck.

An absolutely archaic forum I know of, dating to the early 2000s, not only moved to Discord, but also somehow promoted a bunch of underage trans DID-roleplayers to moderation positions who proceeded to ban the majority of the core members of the old userbase. They then invited a whole army of queers who do nothing but chat about fag issues and the original subject of the forum is largely forgotten.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

An absolutely archaic forum I know of, dating to the early 2000s, not only moved to Discord, but also somehow promoted a bunch of underage trans DID-roleplayers to moderation positions who proceeded to ban the majority of the core members of the old userbase. They then invited a whole army of queers who do nothing but chat about fag issues and the original subject of the forum is largely forgotten.

That's what happens when you don't gatekeep.