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

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I love those old political reupload channels. Thankfully, many are still available on YouTube, but it's so sad that many of them got taken down without archives. For example, one time I went on the Wayback Machine and saw so much Ron Paul content was uploaded to a channel called RonPaul2008 or something like that. The videos had millions of views, and even Ray William Johnson made a reply video to them, but their channel got taken down because of the DMCA, and I'm not sure how much of the content is archived.
 
Was reading through this thread at work and it felt like a nice trip down memory lane. A lot of mine have already been mentioned but I have a few I don't think I've seen already mentioned to contribute.

I also recently remembered something and I've been having a hard time finding it. Perhaps someone more savvy than me can locate it, but it was a YouTube channel from OLD YouTube and they did these live action/cosplay parodies of Kingdom Hearts. I don't remember much about it except for there was multiple episodes and one specific episode where they went to Aladdin's world and the one guy says "Welcome to Baghdad!...I mean Agrabah!". I think this same channel also did some other parodies or tied in multiple things because I also remember one where people were dressed up as Kakashi and Sakura from Naruto and someone was beating up Sakura and Kakashi said something like "Yes I see you I'll feed you some Pocky later".

Anyone else remember Postopia? There were so many good flash games there. Waffle Boy's Mountain Adventure, Big Mouth Life, and Big Barney Chase are the ones I remember most vividly.


Neature Walks:

All the people mentioning KidPix also reminded me of some other nostalgic childhood games I played in school like Bugdom and Mavis Beacon


I also fucking loved ToonTown when I was a kid. They would send you trading cards in the mail of the different cogs and stuff from the game. ToonTown Rewritten was a pretty faithful adaptation but it felt like it was missing that old internet feeling.


And who could forget WildTangent games that loaded your PC with bloatware?

 
I used to enter this java chatroom on this random anime wallpaper website. It was fairly active from what I remember. During times of it being slow, I used to open up the chat in multiple windows and roleplay as Goku and some cereal mascot like Tony the Tiger and have them fight each other. Just weird innocent fun.
 
As a Gen Z the Old Internet was before my time, though I did get to experience YouTube, Tumblr, KF and lolcow.farm in their primes. The Internet feels very different post-Covid. It was already massively sanitised and commercialised by 2020, but I have some good memories before everything hit peak Current Year.

Tumblr had some really funny and zany blogs back in the mid 2010s, fandoms were huge and there was a lot of diversity, with a healthy ecosystem of anti-SJW blogs to balance out the site's worst aspects. Now nobody uses it besides degenerates.

Before the advent of short-form video content YouTube was actually usuable. There were fewer users which meant content could be found easier, and dramas like the Leafy/Keemstar betrayals or James Charles and Tati Westbrook were huge events that every corner of the website discussed. Now the site is so huge and infested with Jeets/AI slop/short form videos there's no longer any cohesive YouTube culture. I spent a lot of my childhood watching long-form let's plays and laughing at lolcows like Onision, but now YouTube is more of a consumer product that a unique website with its own history.

I think even lolcows are past their prime. Cows have become more uniform; nearly all are some flavour of culture warrior/OF whore/gooner/gender sperger, and the cows of old have either become irrelevant or have gone that way (like ALR). Some cows like Clavicular avoid all of these and are more "pure" as a result, but lolcows lose their fun when they go mainstream or get wrapped up in Current Year BS. KF as a site is also very different from what it was ten years ago. I even miss the primes of sites like Guru Gossiper and PULL (rip).

The Internet felt more harmless pre-Covid. Now it's obvious that the web wasn't what is was promised and has been actively corrosive to our culture.
 
AOL fan "mailing lists."

You become a fan of something, you make a literal mailing list that randos join, and everyone just shares their geekiness. There would even be categories in a lot of those mailing lists, like sharing fanart, sharing music, trivia, quotes, character spotlights, etc. Some would even edit music videos and share them ... And of course they would take hours to download back then. lol.

I ran a few Sailor Moon fan mailing lists back in the day until I lost interest in doing it and "retired" once I started high school. While I was doing it though, I had a great time. lol.

Keep in mind that these mailing lists were a big deal among anime fandoms because these took place during a time where accessibility of anime was still quite limited (especially if you were a Sailor Moon fan). It blew my mind discovering that there were other Sailor Guardians (Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, and Saturn) on the internet because those episodes took several years to come to the United States.
 
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