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

[Cowboy Kim]

Why can't we get an open source interface like this for Invidious and other alt tech? Instead, we get bloated JavaScript, heavy garbage, or painfully ugly user interfaces.

YT2009 is exactly what you want, although nobody has a public instance.

 

[rebel]

YT2009 is exactly what you want, although nobody has a public instance.

That looks promising, but I'm also extremely picky about video players. It has to be the same size as YouTube's current player without breaking the webpage. I'm not sure the exact size, but I'm sure someone more tech-savvy could say

 

[Chandelier]

One function I miss dearly was the private messaging system on YouTube, that ended in 2012. I chatted with a few friends there - of which only two remain - and it was personable and quaint and fun and I used to love ranting to friends about random shit as teenagers are wont to do. The corporatization of YouTube killed it. I miss the personalized channels, the classic Gmod videos, the general wild feel. It felt freeing to be in that environment.

missed when people realised you were fucking with them and saying off the wall shit for lulz. Now, you have people getting into comment chains with replies that number in the hundreds from people who can't understand that people can say whatever they want on the internet which includes lies.

Here's something I also miss/watched change into something a little more sinister: all the calls for you to "kill yourself faggot/insert slur here". Everyone used it but people knew it wasn't serious. If you were a legit suicide patient, you'd probably be on the suicide sanctioned forums. You didn't feel like you were baiting an emotional blackmailer.

Today, you do. Everyone has a flavour of "one step from the edge" and they'll tell YOU to off yourself while spamming Kpop gifs and doxxing you. It wasn't like that back then. You never took the emotional bait. Nowadays if you say anything you get swatted.

 

[glass_houses]

Today, you do. Everyone has a flavour of "one step from the edge" and they'll tell YOU to off yourself while spamming Kpop gifs and doxxing you. It wasn't like that back then. You never took the emotional bait. Nowadays if you say anything you get swatted.

I have to disagree with this. There's always been people who freak the fuck over the pettiest shit, long before the internet was a thing. I interacted with these types fairly often in my fandom days, and they sucked the joy from everything. The difference now is that these types have left their hugboxes and have infested pretty much everywhere. Places where shitposting was the culture have been invaded and colonised, or else condensed into Reddit or Discord where there's one culture and one culture only. People who are merely oversensitive have been conscripted by NPDs into becoming their personal army, and believe that they're making things better, while the NPDs pulling their strings share cheese pizza with their private Discord members.

 

[Elysian]

There's always been people who freak the fuck over the pettiest shit

Xbox Live was a goldmine for this sort of thing.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

The prelevance of multiple monitors makes every interaction on computers feel more like a phone, more distracted, watching things in the background, instead of watching things to watch them.

 

[Maskull]

One function I miss dearly was the private messaging system on YouTube, that ended in 2012. I chatted with a few friends there - of which only two remain - and it was personable and quaint and fun and I used to love ranting to friends about random shit as teenagers are wont to do. The corporatization of YouTube killed it. I miss the personalized channels, the classic Gmod videos, the general wild feel. It felt freeing to be in that environment.

Did they ever state why they rid their service of the private messaging system? I don't remember them ever giving a reason and have always assumed there to have been something sinister occurring in private that led to the change.

 

[Thé au lait]

Did they ever state why they rid their service of the private messaging system? I don't remember them ever giving a reason and have always assumed there to have been something sinister occurring in private that led to the change.

If memory serves they got rid of it to push Google Plus as the "alternative"

 

[Maskull]

If memory serves they got rid of it to push Google Plus as the "alternative"

That makes sense given the company's track record of bad decisions.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

I wonder why YouTube removed video responses when people commentating over each other's videos has become the norm now.

 

[Thé au lait]

I wonder why YouTube removed video responses when people commentating over each other's videos has become the norm now.

They wanted to mop up the site's image. People figure out very quickly that they just had to make their thumbnail cleavage to get easy attention, so video replies were filled with videos that had cleavage taking up the whole thumbnail and 0 content in the video. They were able to clean that up for recommended videos (mostly), but you could always set a video to private and put it in the video replies where it was less likely to get reported.
By the time they went away, there were a lot of people who were perfectly happy with that.

 

[Big Nasty]

Yeah, removing video responses was solely because they wanted to get rid of Reply Girls.

 

[Day of the Cope]

They wanted to mop up the site's image. People figure out very quickly that they just had to make their thumbnail cleavage to get easy attention, so video replies were filled with videos that had cleavage taking up the whole thumbnail and 0 content in the video. They were able to clean that up for recommended videos (mostly), but you could always set a video to private and put it in the video replies where it was less likely to get reported.
By the time they went away, there were a lot of people who were perfectly happy with that.

Reminder that Philip DeFranco got his start with thumbnailing his videos with cleavage.

 

[Neodanthril]

I remember this guy had a website that had several flash games he made on it. There was one I particularly enjoyed that was a medieval fantasy game. It wasn't anything amazing it was more the novelty of being able to play it for free. It even has a rudimentary multiplayer system that I never bothered with. Years go by and I have long since forgotten about the game, I struggle to remember the name and eventually find it. The guy no longer maintains the game and has a post that says something to the effect of" I don't have time to deal with this shit anymore I have a family and kids please stop messaging me about it," but not in a rude way, more like a guy who was just kind of sad about the whole thing. He puts a bunch of files up for the game. I download one of the songs for some reason. I have since forgotten the name of the game again but I still have that file. I will attach it to this post when I get back to my computer

 

[Cave Fisher]

Speaking of Youtube, I miss annotations, there was such a community vibe to a shitton of them suddenly popping up in the middle of some machinima or something, before they joined the eternally growing list of pointlessly removed Youtube features.

If memory serves they got rid of it to push Google Plus as the "alternative"

Mann I VIVIDLY remember the entire website despising Google Plus to the point that they'd take over entire comment sections for weeks with copypastas complaining about it.

(It's almost surreal posting and/or seeing old pictures of Youtube's UI, because the site is so unrecognizable from what it once was.)

 

[Thé au lait]

Speaking of Youtube, I miss annotations, there was such a community vibe to a shitton of them suddenly popping up in the middle of some machinima or something, before they joined the eternally growing list of pointlessly removed Youtube features.

Mann I VIVIDLY remember the entire website despising Google Plus to the point that they'd take over entire comment sections for weeks with copypastas complaining about it.
View attachment 6348368
(It's almost surreal posting and/or seeing old pictures of Youtube's UI, because the site is so unrecognizable from what it once was.)

I remember downvoting every single one of these idiots and telling them to go spam the YouTube head's inbox with this shit instead of making it unusable for the actual users, telling them they were inflicting the same shit on us that YouTube was.
God I miss those days.

 

[cybertoaster]

also so many multiplayer games are obsessed with this ranked competitive garbage like, everybody is super serious and if you try to communicate, even in a text chat everyone looks at you like you are insane for trying to have a good time and for not trying your hardest to win like your life depends on it, even co op games like helldivers 2 are so obsessed with this garbage, did nobody learn anything from left 4 dead 2 at all? is a 10+ year old game seriously more fun?

We used to make fun of people on WoW for being like that and even they weren't as autistic as helldivers/valorant players are now. Anyway, don't think for a moment this is accidental, the system was built like this to increase engagement, those no-lifers spend all day on that shit, they are the ones buying useless skins and funny money.

i just dont get it at all, it makes me sad, maybe the weirdos did a better job at hiding themselves or something

They were less weird because being weird was still not cool so they had to tone it down, keep themselves it line, not look into the abyss. Now being mental its encouraged...

or parodies like Egoraptor's Awesome series.

He literally started the slopification of newgrounds, his animations were shit compared to the rest but lol fast talking random humor!

I miss when I was too young to realise just how fucked up and weird the relationship between myself and an adult ten years older and on the other side of the world to myself was

Relationship? just what the hell were you doing with him?

 

[glass_houses]

Relationship? just what the hell were you doing with him?

Her, my friend. It was her. Let's just say I was fortunate that we were the same age mentally/maturity wise, that the gender cult was some years away, and that she wasn't deliberately predatory.

 

[glitterglue]

I want the dollz palace to come back.

 

[Brabbit Narp]

Believe it or not, there was a time when deviantART wasn't shit. Well, less shit than it is now.

Despite its well deserved infamy, the site was home to certain gems and communities that cannot be fostered elsewhere now. I remember back in the day browsing countless pieces of fan art for stuff like Pokemon, and then being led into to some truly amazing original art work with an active community that actually responded worth a damn. More importantly, something worth wasting my time to comment on to express my joy. The site was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a far cry from what hideous abomination the site has become now.

While I cannot comment much upon the site as a creator, seeing as I only ever posted a few shitty fanfics to it, I truly cannot express how much I hate deviantART from a user end perspective. Eclipse UI was what killed my major usage of the site, a hideous abomination of black and green that just makes it a miserable experience to browse. Group function and favorite sorting was more or less gutted, hidden behind one too many layers of UI obfuscation just to sort and organize your work. Not to mention, the endless scrolling when it first came on.

And you want to know the funny part about that? I would be perfectly fine with endless scrolling it if worked on mobile. But for some goddamn reason, the site has it so you have to login in order to access it on mobile or desktop now. What you get as the end user when not logged in... Well, enjoy having max of 24 images you have to click through.

Besides all that, the hobbyist portion of the site more or less perished. It was dying long before Eclipse became a thing, but its implementation killed those communities and send them scurrying to other pastures. Which would be fine, except those pastures count for Twitter, or "professional" port folio websites like Art Station that are geared toward the more commercial side of things. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a real replacement for the homey "community" aspect of dA. Another casualty of the endless march to Web 3.0 or whatever consolidation abomination that those in the tech world wishes to corral us into.

Being one example, I can cite other websites from my early days of browsing the web such as Smack Jeeves, a delightful home for amatuerish works of all sort. You name it, they probably had it. The Good, the Bad, the Cringe, take your pick. Despite that, there was a certain community fostered over the years that allowed a collection of works to flourish. It was a good repository for at least a couple decent web comics, but like with dA, it too became a victim of its own UI redesign thanks to being sold off and bought off by osme Mahwa Korean company that turned it into a glorified commercial portal for its own ends.

To put it simply, the site redesign incorporated inconvenience as a core factor, favoring mobile over the old desktop interface in trying to ape places like Webtoons and Tapas. The only problem with that was they their implementation of the features of those sites were even worse than was already had on those sites to begin with. Needless to say, the site was torpedoed to the extent that it suffered a mass exodus, and was dead within a year of its redesign.

To date, I have found no decent alternative to the site that had once been home to a good choice of comics, including one 40k one that had excellent art work and story that I have been unable to locate elsewhere. Closest I have been able to find is Comic Fury, but... I really don't need to explain their community, do I? It's okay enough for the stuff that was reuploaded, but everything else leaves much to be desired.

That's pretty much the story for a lot of my old haunts. Old management moves out for one reason or another, sells to some entity that revamps it into an abomination, the site withers and dies, and no replacement comes as those from that website consolidate even further into the abominations that are YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and who knows what else. I can count on one hand the sites from that period when I first got online that are still around in their original forms, and even then they too are slowly withering away to the sands of time. What once was a life away from your "real" one has now been cooped into whatever hellscape that is the modern internet, and it is only going to get worse.

If there's one thing I regret, it was not having the foresight to archive even screenshots of the old stuff from those before times. I still have my favorites, but they are riddles with dead links that lead to nowhere. Only the fact their titles exist hint of what once existed. I've tried to archive what is left, but there's just so little that remains.

If I could tell my younger self one thing regarding the old stuff, it would be to get a 500gb external drive and start archiving anything and everything, no matter how inconsequential. It'd probably even last me a good while too, considering the file sizes for even YouTube videos back in the day weren't that much. At most, it woud have been around 480p. Though how to download those videos in the days before YouTube-Dl, I have no idea. Probably FRAPS if it came down to it.

Well, I can at least save I have begun the process on my end to grabbing the shit from my old account. Just a word of warning to you guys, but YouTube seems to have started purging even the reference to deleted videos within your playlists. You can still access them through "Your Data in YouTube" and download your playlists history from there, but it's probably a prelude that they will probably go further in the times to come.

Also, if you have an old YouTube account dating before the YouTube forced in Google accounts with its old history, you can still see the old thumbnails and title for deleted videos in you history. I've archived the screenshots for those, and I suggest anyone in this thread to do the same if they still have those old accounts they have not logged into for a while. If nothing else, they at least record the existence of who deleted those videos so you have some form of paper trail to try and locate copies or other archives.

Anyway, here's my thread tax for the day.

And of course, CrappyCaptureDevice.

Now this channel is a classic. He introduced me to a lot of old games from the 8 bit to the 32/64 bit era, a time before mine that seemed whimsical. Before the utter deluge of retro stuff we have in the gaming scene right now, videos like this was how I learned about those old systems.

Now the formula for a CrappyCaptureDevice video is simple. You show the history of a given character, their movesets, and then you show the games that they actually came from with accompanying gameplay with some text to explain it all. It's dead simple, but wonderfully effective and to the damned point. While there have been other similar videos explaining such history on bigger channels since then, they haven't been able to match the charm that CCD has with his execution. I watch his stuff from time to time, if only to marvel at how much effort it must have taken back then to capture the footage, edit it, and get it all in order. Those were some different times.

In any case, he's been gone from YouTube for over a decade and a half now. Wherever he is, I hope they're doing well. You made some wonderful days to entertain me getting back from school CCD.

Vomitsaw does not do much these days, but stumbling upon his work back in the day was a treat. It was my introduction to console modding, and boy did these videos light up the imagination. While there may have been other progenitors producing such similar stuff, Vomitsaw was the most well known of these creator. While I don't remember how I found him, I imagine it was probably through those fake PlayboxWiiStation360 videos that populated the site at the time. Regardless, it led me down a fascinating rabbithole of console modding which has led to its modern iteration today. I can't imagine the complexity involved, seeing as there wasn't much in terms of examples to follow. While his projects aren't too special today, being glorified reshellings of the original console inside a new box, they paved the way for others to follow to create their own console mods that we see today.

I can't imagine anyone doing it today with today's generation of consoles. Or even the future ones. They're just boring PC boxes at this point with inferior hardware. At least the Switch has some useful novelties to it, but I can't imagine you'd be able to do much for the console in terms of modding beyond the standard.

AMVs, a dead genre on YouTube on account for its draconian copyright system. You so much as even show a screesnhot, and you are liable to get a takedown or even a strike on your channel.

Now I did not get to see many AMVs back in the day, but I did have a few choice ones similar to this AMV. It was mostly centered around a few properties I was a fan of at the time, most of which has since been purged from the website with no backup archive I am aware of. Technically, they do exist as a screenshot on the WayBackMachine, but the videos themselves weren't archived. Amatuerish they may have been, they were a delight for a young dweller of stuff like this back in the day. Dare I say it, even wholesome in a way. Just plain fun being shared with what limits that Windows Movie Maker could muster.

I'm Blue.

My Sanctuary.

Crawling.

Just a few choice songs that served as the anthem for these videos. It was a different, freer time. A time for experimentation, of sharing ones own creative work without the stifling wall of TV to hold you back. A small sample in the new frontier of video entertainment, education, vlogging, journalism, and so much more.

If only it were the same these days, but times have changed. At least I still have those old memories.