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

[Santa Klaus]

Those old tribute videos hit different. The channel is nostalgic.

 

[Norstein Bekkler]

Back in the late 90's/early 2000's when online gaming was kind of first taking off, I used to scour the internet for F2P MMOs because no matter how much money I personally had, there was no way in hell my mother was letting me use her credit card on the internet. Runescape was fun for a while. There were a few Chinese freemium trash games that were fun until you hit the F2P wall that could only be overcome by no-lifing the grind and multiboxing the market. Pickings were slim unless you could shell out for a subscription.
There was like only one other kid I knew at school that was into PC gaming, and one night he sent me a message on IRC telling me he found a sweet game to play. I'd never heard of it before, but screenshots looked okay. I downloaded it, logged in. Character creation was kind of weird. You could only pick a bunch of like beastman races, but that was kind of unique for the time. Walked around for a bit. There weren't any monsters to fight or any tutorials. Had no fucking clue what to do. I sent him a message asking him where he was, and he gave me directions where to meet him. I walk in to the building, and there's a shit ton of people standing around. The chat is moving at hyperspeed. It's a fucking furry orgy. The game was Furcadia and apparently it's still online. Lost a friend and learned what furries were in one go, but it's oddly nostalgic.

 

[lego racers]

angels online was one of my first forays into mmo's and i still miss it's isometric charm. one of my favorite things about it is that you could choose to be a cook as your class. you would gather ingredients in the maps with mobs on them and make food and learn recipes as you leveled up, or by finding them, or buying them from a trainer. you could give the food you made to other players for stat boosts or eat it yourself to boost your own stats since you couldn't equip weapons. which is funny, because although you couldn't equip weapons, cooks got these weird mech things that they rode around in that gave them their only combat stats. i remember i always used this low level one because it was a mech that looked like a cat's head and i thought it was really cute. i'm rambling now, but it was really fun for young me, even if i never really found out what i was supposed to be doing and never got that far.

 

[Kiwisee]

Please tell me there’s someone in this thread who remembers Arcane-The Stone Circle:

It was a really charming puzzle game that takes place in the Edwardian period with a Tim Burton type art style. I remember that it was suddenly taken down in the late 2000s, despite the cliffhanger ending.

 

[Required Username]

Those old Internet Explorer ads are pure fucking A E S T H E T I C.

 

[Rap Scallion]

There was a browser fantasy game I used to play called Legend of the Green Leupak like 20 years ago, I guess it was a rip on another similar game called Legend of the Green Dragon I vaguely remember playing also. It had periods of being very active and then totally dead until eventually it died entirely and people moved onto new things.

It wasn't special or remarkable or anything, but it was fun. I always wonder what happened to that little friend group who developed it and all the people who played at some point or another.

I think the spontaneous internet friendships you'd find with others out of the blue were fun. Randomly emailing a fanfic author or having some rando message you about something insignificant and then talking and finding out you have stuff in common because online chat was just so new and different back then.

The internet just felt smaller. Slower.

I like this thread even if reading it makes me feel sad.

 

[EllenDrawsRapeOfHerHaters]

I'm very happy this site has a fall theme. I miss that kind of thing from the old web. I don't know if we'll have a winter theme, but at least this one is around. Some imageboards let you change the color too. Now you're lucky if you can choose between light or dark mode.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

https://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

 

[PhoBingas]

View attachment 5926595

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

I saw a trollface shirt at a thrift store last month and felt old.

Did anyone else lose their edit button? I wanted to edit my post. Since I can't, here goes.

I think it's time based, and after a certain amount of time, you just can't edit the post any more, but I could be wrong.

Was thinking about the old Yahoo Fight rooms back in the day. People just getting on shitty mics screaming at each other in front of people while I played pool on the side.

Holy fuck, I thought I had imagined those yahoo rooms back in the late 90's / early 2000's! It was like the OG internet bloodsports, and my friend used to listen to people sperg at each other back in the day.

Other people mentioned it already, but even if the internet was "smaller", as in less users, it felt a lot more vast in the early 2000s. Discussion between left and right was a lot more civil, but the left was a lot less rabid than it is now. I miss old forums, as other people have said. Now everything is a Discord, facebook group or some other social media thing. Forums had soul, and a little more permanence than say discords that could get banned at any minute for any obscure rule violation or mass flagging. I miss old ED. I was never really on the ED forums, but the site itself gave me hours of entertainment. The Internet has got a lot more hateful in the last 20 years and that's honestly really depressing.

 

[Dickhorn Magnetbutter]

Since we're on the topic of Yahoo, I just remembered that Yahoo's Japan page hasn't changed like at all because they're stubborn like that. I can't read moonrunes but it's a breath of fresh air to see.

https://www.yahoo.co.jp/

 

[cybertoaster]

See, I couldn't disagree more. I actually think it's awesome that kids are still watching Gmod SFM stuff,

They aren't watching SFM just skibidi, they call the Gman "skibidi guy".

 

[Doomer_Incarnate]

A point probably already brought up, but something I really miss nowadays is how so many sites used to have a "links" page -- in particular for personal sites. This is a big part of what made the internet of old so fun yet mysterious, and it was half the fun when you had a sense of adventure leading the way. I remember I'd spend hours just clicking from link to link, and experiencing everything from arousal to disgust.

This experience definitely needs to be brought back, along with bringing back personal sites in general.

 

[Big Fish]

A point probably already brought up, but something I really miss nowadays is how so many sites used to have a "links" page -- in particular for personal sites. This is a big part of what made the internet of old so fun yet mysterious, and it was half the fun when you had a sense of adventure leading the way. I remember I'd spend hours just clicking from link to link, and experiencing everything from arousal to disgust.

This experience definitely needs to be brought back, along with bringing back personal sites in general.

The personal sites are being kind of revived with hosts such as Neocities, but the userbase... is far from perfect. Makes it hard to browse for sites that aren't tagged as "queer" or "trans" in any way, but it makes you appreciate sites that aren't filled with gender crazy.

 

[Elysian]

Remembered this piece of S-tier vintage weeb cringe.

 

[555777555]

 

[Elysian]

 

[Elysian]

 

[Rubatán]

I miss the insane smilies of the old forum days. I have many of the ones I've encountered saved to my computer, such as:

 

[Yukako]

I miss it when websites felt more personalized (for example, old DeviantArt pages) and everyone had a blog. I'm sick of having to create social media accounts just to see people's posts.

Edit: I also miss Flash animations and games.

 

[AbyssStarer]

I prefer threaded topics over following users, the only better thing is if strict info/updates are separate from discussion when the discussion gets too abundant to thumb through. Twitter, Discord, and the Farms force you to wade through people's blogposts and room-temp opinion pieces to get to information/updates and the ephemeral nature of it all makes it hard to go back and remember. Sometimes the people running the info accounts are bitch babies who block you if you say negative things in reaction to the stories they post or their off-topic whining about Elon Musk. At least now you can see posts from people who blocked you without needing to log out or pop over to incognito.

Otherwise I miss when google images let you pop out an image in a new tab or had a working reverse image search.

Anybody here remember when Twitter let you have a background image on your timeline?