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

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When I finally aged out of 4chan, Trollface was still going strong. That was the last time I saw him in the wild. I don't miss him, but I sometimes find myself feeling nostalgic for old memes. Nowadays, I have to search knowyourmeme to know what the new ones are. I'd probably have more idea if I used Reddit regularly, but fuck Web 3.0
 
....sovl.....
I feel like you should be taken out back and shot in the head.

Nowadays, I have to search knowyourmeme to know what the new ones are.
Is there such a "new" meme? The vast majority seem to be the nth iteration of wojak and pepe or a movie clip with a title stuck on it. Modern internet culture is stagnant and has been for over a decade.
 
charon's boat. being there for the 4chan/7chan split and migrating to the better one. and everything that followed that
 
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Happy to see that this old site is still online:

http://bumwine.com/

When the test subject drank the whole bottle of "White Ace," in Las Vegas, the effects were severe. He got kicked out of 4 Queens casino for washing his hands in a urinal, then fell asleep for 3 hours and woke up soaked in his own urine (see picture to the right). He woke up and got into a 6 year old's pirate costume, ran around slapping gamblers in the gut, got kicked out of The Imperial Palace, and became so obnoxious that his friends put him on a plane and sent him home early.
 
As others have put it, I miss when the Internet was a place you visited rather than one that you brought with you. Nothing killed the Internet of old like smartphones. Social media, however, gets to be an accessory in the murder. Or maybe social media was the instrument and smart phones the culprit.

Think about it. Think about what the Internet used to be. If you were hopping on the Internet, you were hopping on for a reason. To visit a particular forum, to try and catch your crush on MSN, to play a Newgrounds flash game. The Internet used to be a vast place where every single person on it might be having a different experience. These days, the Internet is about half a dozen places: Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit. I mean, it's maybe not even that. It might only be Twitter and Reddit, if we're being honest (who cares about Facebook anymore?)

Now, the Internet is just background noise. You don't visit the Internet anymore, you use the Internet to dull your morning commute or something. Sure, the Internet used to be restricted to a particular room of a house, but that was what made it special. Back in the day, if you were chatting with someone on MSN or AIM, you might very well have had their undivided attention. Or, at the very least, they probably weren't bouncing between half a dozen different things. You were having conversations back then. Now, you're just sending messages back and forth.

I remember how novel the Internet was. How you'd chat with people you'd never meet on the other side of the world because you shared hobbies or interests, and you'd come to know about them and care about them as friends. I remember, no shit, sending and receiving birthday gifts to and from the other side of the world. I remember how genuine people could be on the Internet, because the Internet was generally made up of people who had the inclination and ability to get on it. Everyone online was probably some variety of nerd or loner or geek or outcast. Like, it's why the Internet had such a distinct culture, because it was made up of counter-cultural people. It feels like a paradox, but people were more open with their feelings and thoughts before the age of social media. Everything feels fake and insincere these days, and you need to be way more careful with your identity than you ever needed to be back then. But you could find your people, you could find your place. Geography didn't matter (so much.)

It's very odd. I have a good life. I don't regret much of what I've done. But I really mourn the loss of the old Internet. I've always liked this animation as it sums up the nostalgia on a broader scale than just World of Warcraft. I've watched every online community I've ever been a part of just fall apart and decay. Smartphones meant you could hop in and out of the Internet at will, and so began the fall toward rewarding that brief opportunity with the quickest dopamine hits possible. Social media suddenly made the Internet feel like it had to be a continuation of your "regular" life, not a wholly different place. The internet, I think, used to be a place of creation. But now it's just another place to consume. How quickly websites like Patreon made the rich, creative ecosystem of the Internet something that you had to pay for. Anyone who was on the Internet in the 00s can recall some of the startlingly good content that was created on communities like 4Chan and Something Awful for the fun of it.

And what's the with the porn? It feels like I'm the only one who remembers when things like "hornyposting" weren't seen as cutesy ways to interact on Twitter. It's funny remember how people used to freak out about the possibility of kids seeing porn on the Internet, when sexual content has become so normalized that it's almost the background radiation of social media.

Anyway, the Emily is Away series is an interesting simulation of the old Internet vibe. They're a nice walk down Memory Lane, watching old Youtube and old websites and everything. But even then, they lose something when the creator hits the early Facebook-era in the timeline...
 
I don't know if this was a widely known site, but I used to go on AndkonArcade.com like everyday in school cuz it was one of the only flash game sites I knew of that wasn't blocked on the school computers
Andkon was the first Flash game website I visited with regularity. Newgrounds, Coolmath, and Kongregate for Run 3 came later.
When I finally aged out of 4chan, Trollface was still going strong. That was the last time I saw him in the wild. I don't miss him, but I sometimes find myself feeling nostalgic for old memes. Nowadays, I have to search knowyourmeme to know what the new ones are. I'd probably have more idea if I used Reddit regularly, but fuck Web 3.0
Trollface still seems to see decent usage within Discord servers as a custom emoji

Also how the fuck do you age out of 4chan
 
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When I finally aged out of 4chan, Trollface was still going strong. That was the last time I saw him in the wild. I don't miss him, but I sometimes find myself feeling nostalgic for old memes. Nowadays, I have to search knowyourmeme to know what the new ones are. I'd probably have more idea if I used Reddit regularly, but fuck Web 3.0
Here, have this.
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I used to read the original SurvivorSucks board back in 2000, which later became PlanetSucks. What's funny is that I have only seen a handful of Survivor episodes, but I liked visiting that site anyway because a lot of the users in it were hilarious and the show was popular enough that co-workers and family members would tell me about the episodes all the time. As PlanetSucks, they made fun of other reality TV crap like The Real World and Big Brother.

I see that there is currently a Survivor board now but it's not the same kind and it appears to be garbage. I remember at one point they became less picky about post quality and I stopped visiting that place as a result. Of course redditards think the site was a horribly toxic place and that their mediocre garbage subreddits are much better.
 
I know I'm not the only one that misses Flash, but god DAMN.
I think it shutting down is as close of a definitive end to the old internet as one could possibly get, the internet as a whole felt much larger when it was still around and it felt like almost anyone could make their own little flash animations and games of highly varying quality, virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Poptropica still existed where children actually had fun and played games instead of being groomed on Discord inbetween having their brains rotting and dripping out their ears from Tiktok (Poptropica does still exist, last time I checked, but they got rid of pretty much half of their old islands after flash went down the drain) and it was all a click away.

And yeah, sure, archives exist, but things always slip through the cracks, I can just download a flash player and run some swf files on it, but no kid today knows how to do anything more complicated, computer-wise than running an exe file, the days of playing Fireboy and Watergirl with your friend in the computer lab while the teacher isn't looking are long gone. Half the reason I hang out here is because it's the only forum website I see these days that regularly has more than 30 people actually using the place.

I've also recently been looking over these two flash series' named "Endzone" and "Law of Talos" (mainly UnknownPerson's entries, since they're the easiest to find on Youtube or Deviantart) where people animated and drew their deviantart OCs fighting each other, and I just kinda had to stop and marvel at what a time capsule it is.. I had never even discovered it until very recently, but its whole style felt so intimately familiar.

And don't even get me STARTED on how Discord's been worryingly increasingly used as a replacement for forums, wikis, and filehosting and all that stuff despite just being a chat program meant for quick and instant communication that you can't even look at without making an account and jumping through all the hoops to actually get access since every discord server these days has tighter security theater than a fucking airport.
Nothing killed the Internet of old like smartphones.
I could go on a whole separate rant about the one-two punch that social media and mobile shit had in fucking up the internet, like how it forces sites to dumb themselves down to fit in the "mobile-friendly" format and constantly output instant, readilly consumable dopamine slop to numb your boredom like a hard drug, with all the addictive properties that entail, but I'll just leave it at this pic which I take a look at every time I run into discussions like these.
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Discord's been worryingly increasingly used as a replacement for forums, wikis, and filehosting and all that stuff despite just being a chat program meant for quick and instant communication
Discord could literally shutdown tomorrow and all of that data could be lost in an instant. Consolidating everything into one place seems like a bad idea. Sorta like how we're headed for a streaming-only future in regards to films and music, and now games, where shit only exists as long as the streaming company provides access to it.

Edit: I bought a tape drive and a bunch of M-Discs so my pirated movies and videogames can survive the apocalypse.
 
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Discord's been worryingly increasingly used as a replacement for forums, wikis, and filehosting and all that stuff despite just being a chat program meant for quick and instant communication that you can't even look at without making an account and jumping through all the hoops to actually get access since every discord server these days has tighter security theater than a fucking airport.
The security isn't the problem. It's the losers that are unable to think that someone else can have a different opinion than someone else then just ban them because they have no power in life anywhere else. Time and time again it's the same story, "Im autistic and transgender and I am womyn hear me roar" but then you find out their parents just abused them and thats why they are like that. You have no real "quick access" to any of the information like you did on gameFAQS because you have to do all this that and the other to "protect the community".
 
I could go on a whole separate rant about the one-two punch that social media and mobile shit had in fucking up the internet, like how it forces sites to dumb themselves down to fit in the "mobile-friendly" format and constantly output instant, readilly consumable dopamine slop to numb your boredom like a hard drug, with all the addictive properties that entail, but I'll just leave it at this pic which I take a look at every time I run into discussions like these.
Most websites these days are built off of churning out content as quickly as possible. Gaming the algorithm so that they can have more traffic to show ads to is the goal. Quality isn't secondary or even tertiary; it's a byproduct at best. The internet has been over-monetized for quiet some time and its extremely hard to find anything non mainstream these days because search engines have been gimped.
Old internet directory styled sites and webrings may be the best way to go but, modern politics may prevent them from working. Having your website kicked off of the directory because some tranny saw somethign vaguely offensive is a likely scenario!
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Most websites these days are built off of churning out content as quickly as possible. Gaming the algorithm so that they can have more traffic to show ads to is the goal. Quality isn't secondary or even tertiary; it's a byproduct at best. The internet has been over-monetized for quiet some time and its extremely hard to find anything non mainstream these days because search engines have been gimped.
Old internet directory styled sites and webrings may be the best way to go but, modern politics may prevent them from working. Having your website kicked off of the directory because some tranny saw somethign vaguely offensive is a likely scenario!
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That's Neocities webrings for ya, unfortunately.
 
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