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

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

incorrectly loading html frames on angelfire guestbooks

 

[Bloody bunny]

The Ranma 1/2 fanfic community,yes cringe but I still have warm memories of a Akana tendo hugging me in bed like p-Chan

 

[cactus]

There was a kinda Neopets knock off site called Chibi Friends. Used to play on there while listening to the only 2 Boa songs I had (the one who had the opening for Serial Experiments Lain). Also Fanfiction .net, but I had dial-up so would print the fics out and waste toner or save them as files so I could read them offline.

 

[Spergerella]

Drawingboard.org - Kisekae games - Creatures the game - Brutal Honesty and Fakeljdeaths

 

[taco freak]

I also miss pre-Russia LiveJournal and making actual friends across the world (t_shirt_surgery represent!) I miss one of the earlier forms of public social media - Audioscrobbler, which I used via a Winamp plugin, which became last.fm. I became friends with a guy who lived on the opposite coast but had literally identical taste in music to me, and hung out with him in various cities over the years. I weirdly miss dollmakers, and rudimentary WYSIWYG web publishing software (didn't Netscape make some?) I miss AIM sounds and detailed spergy websites about complex subjects with no ads, I even sometimes miss printing webpages to share them with others.

I miss Bastard Operator from Hell when he was fresh outta the gate - his website is old and terrible and very cozy. I think Null would have been a BOFH in another life even though he also kind of is in this one (I honestly love all the jokes he plays on us, like the logout button).

 

[lady stoneheart]

for the people complaining about Tumblr-style blogs, i agree with you. i miss the days where websites and blogs were organized chronologically, or had easily accessible archives so that i could start reading at the beginning. that’s one reason why i like the Farms so much- every thread starts on page one. good luck finding a Tumblr or Reddit or Twitter post from one year ago.

I'm embarrassed to say it in current year, but maddox.xmission.com

if it weren’t for Maddox, i would never have found the Farms.
- used to read Maddox in high school
- liked him on FB and forgot about it
-many years later, randomly get a post in my feed about him starting a podcast
- podcast is pretty funny, listen to it sometimes
- lolsuit happens and drama chronicled on the Farms
- now i’m here forever.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

I miss downloading music videos off file servers on irc channels. I would queue up 2-4 and leave my computer on overnight. Having to wait made getting them precious somehow.

 

[SailingtheSaltySeas]

Newgrounds before it got overrun by zoomers and fnfags

 

[Coelacanth]

Something that is deeply personal to me are old Mario sprite animations - I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Randy Solem, Bigfoot3290, araskin500, Alvin-Earthworm and so on and so forth. The early 2000's were the golden age for Mario flash animations. I'd spend so much of my allotted internet time just watching this stuff on Newgrounds - there was nothing quite like it - and the morbid, politically incorrect sense of humor every single parody seemed to share just made it that much more entertaining.

But of course as with everything else sprite animations have become watered down and clickbaity to reel in the juicy clicks from young kids. It's always entertaining when they find older animations like Arnie's Adventures or Mario and ADHD - they went from having near perfect ratings on Newgrounds to just above three stars for obvious reasons. It is inevitable and ultimately inescapable.

 

[Yankee Shogun]

I think it's mostly just the memes; back then they were alot more childish and innocent, simple and fun, people weren't trying to be sly, edgy, or controversial, it felt sort of like kids just having fun.

 

[DrNow]

We will fucking NEVER have another experience quite like gaming rumors spreading around the 'Net like wildfire. In a world where (for the most part) you can search up and see if something is true or false, back then if some dude even had the slightest knowithow on using photoshop and posting a shitty screencap of it on a forum claiming they managed to find hidden content within a game, people would go batshit INSANE and try their damndest to figure out how to get to said hidden content.
This is probably what some people would call "playground rumors," and let me tell you it was a special kind of feeling knowing that your favorite game might have something in it that you didn't even know about. Now with the Internet as big as it is, weeding out fakes is easier than ever and you could just search up anything about a game and you'll pretty much know almost everything about it.

Also I miss Yahoo Answers. Fuck Quora and Ask.com, they will never be as funny as people asking stupid shit like this
View attachment 3805352

There was that tomb raider 2 cheat code that was meant to make Lara Croft naked but actually just made her blow up. And the stories about ways to resurrect aeris.

 

[Nigger Racism]

More than anything i miss how decentralized it was. I miss when you didn't have to get your information, social interaction and entertainment just out of those 5 websites that monopolized the internet and all look the same and have the same gay rules. It's not really just a matter of how neat it is to see people take the time to create fansites, personal blogs and forums dedicated to oscure subjects for the sake of it, but i also liked how there was no set in stone ruleset on how they worked, if you didn't like the way a site was you could always go to another one that would discuss the same topics but in a way you were more cool with and a community big enough where you didn't feel like you were screaming at the void.
It's been said already but i'll take a niche forum with cringy power angry moderators over any of this automated unrevokable ban bullshit when you can get your account shut down for good in an instant over nothing.
While complaining about social media and how badly it sanitized the internet as a whole is low hanging fruit i'm particularly Mad at The Internet that Reddit right now could be a mainstream throwback to that early 2000's period if they allowed more freedom to each subreddit and changed a few things here and there, but as it stands, it feels like the worst parts of early internet forums combined with the worst parts of social media dopamine based design.

 

[Jeff_the_Thriller]

I haven't been to efukt in awhile. I had to check to make sure it was still around. It was ground zero back in the day for Internet shock videos. That's where I saw one guy one jar, two girls one cup, and a variety of anal prolapse videos. There some really funny stuff there if you like laughing at weird deranged shit. I'll have to check it sometime whem I'm not at work to revisit some old classics.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Fatchicksinpartyhats.com was hilarious. It was just some Mexican teenager who find pictures of fat people and make fun of them in broken English. Sometimes fat people would threaten him if he didn't take his pictures down and he'd just tell them to fuck off. It's on the wayback machine.

Fat Chicks in Party Hats

Fat. Chicks. In. Party. Hats.

web.archive.org

I also remember downloading emulators on the school computers and playing video games during typing class, then actually learning how to type on AIM.

 

[Coelacanth]

Fatchicksinpartyhats.com was hilarious. It was just some Mexican teenager who find pictures of fat people and make fun of them in broken English. Sometimes fat people would threaten him if he didn't take his pictures down and he'd just tell them to fuck off. It's on the wayback machine.

Fat Chicks in Party Hats

Fat. Chicks. In. Party. Hats.

web.archive.org

I also remember downloading emulators on the school computers and playing video games during typing class, then actually learning how to type on AIM.

Remember when it was perfectly sane and reasonable to tell these landwhales to go and cry about it when they came after you for making fun of fatties? Good times. Goooood times. At least one or two of these could've been great meme pictures:



And some of them are... strangely prophetic.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

Remember when it was perfectly sane and reasonable to tell these landwhales to go and cry about it when they came after you for making fun of fatties? Good times. Goooood times. At least one or two of these could've been great meme pictures:

View attachment 3840828View attachment 3840840View attachment 3840849

And some of them are... strangely prophetic.

View attachment 3840822

Prophetic indeed.


Also this whole page still makes me laugh. I really should start using the term EAT CRIMINAL.

 

[cuddle striker]

E/N forums. Usenet. rotten, ogrish, all of those. the old forum world. things like soulseek, napster when it first showed up. 4chan before the Nazi cosplay got taken seriously. early SA. watching drama on LJ from a distance.

forums mostly. I miss forums.

 

[jertzog]

When websites loaded up pretty quickly because they weren't burdened with javascript cancer. Media obviously took a while to download but you could access everything up to it so readily that we took it for granted. The internet is definitely slower now than it was in the late 90s with 14.4 to 56k dial-up modems.

 

[Colon capital V]

Another thing I miss about pre-normified internet was that it truly felt like a divider between the real world and the digital one. Like you could tell just the whole landscape and culture felt so much different than going about interacting in real life. If there was some weirdo who was into similar interests that you had, it felt like something special. It felt small, niche and unique to be around compared to the hustling and bustling largeness of real life.
Now the Internet is just real life 2 except even shittier because of how mainstream, weaponized, centralized and corporate it all is. Nothing you see or do on there really feels all that special or unique anymore because of how big the 'Net is now. It's places like the Farms and a few other areas on the 'Net that give a glimpse into a world of niche and "small" communities to be around.

 

[frap]

Another thing I miss about pre-normified internet was that it truly felt like a divider between the real world and the digital one. Like you could tell just the whole landscape and culture felt so much different than going about interacting in real life. If there was some weirdo who was into similar interests that you had, it felt like something special. It felt small, niche and unique to be around compared to the hustling and bustling largeness of real life.
Now the Internet is just real life 2 except even shittier because of how mainstream, weaponized, centralized and corporate it all is. Nothing you see or do on there really feels all that special or unique anymore because of how big the 'Net is now. It's places like the Farms and a few other areas on the 'Net that give a glimpse into a world of niche and "small" communities to be around.

Not just similar interests but also similar sense of humour. Early memes were a real “this anon from fuck knows where finds the same things funny as I do” moment for me. I felt like I had found my place.

For anyone who wasn’t around to see turn-of-the-century websites btw, the Heaven’s Gate website is like a weird frozen in time slice of old Internet.