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

[AmpleApricots]

The people from back then. People were different to each other. More open, more interested in actual dialog, less evil. People would also actually share information and not try to either weaponize it or profit off it. Bars of entry because of the technology meant less mouth breathers. People said what they think because of the lack of rules but at the same time weren't angry all the time as they're now.

What I mostly miss about these days is how apolitical they were outside select places. The politics mindvirus is everywhere now. You can go into the most random, dead imageboard/forum/social media thread/whatever and you'll find somebody screaming into the void, derailing what little genuine discussion there was by writing paragraphs about <insert political hot topic here>. Happens absolutely everywhere, even this very thread. Everyone acting like they're leader of a political movement and like I'm just dying to know what they think of the state of the (political) world. You are a nobody that's just regurgitating the talking points of somebody else. You get your vote every few years, same as me, and let me tell you in the grand scheme of things it means fuck all, so put it back in your pants, I literally do not care what you think, you're just some rando on the internet.

A whole lot of people with just very little to say. The internet is a lot bigger than it used to be but it sometimes feels very small because of how homogenic everything is. The early to mid 00s internet felt gigantic in comparison to now.

 

[AWizard]

Barriers of entry because of the technology meant less mouth breathers.

You mean normalfags? The barriers of entry also meant that people who actually gave a shit about their passion, be it an anime series or tractors, would put in the effort to get to post online. Once normalfags gained entry through their smartphones it was the end of (usually nerdy) civilised conversation.

 

[Dustlord]

I'm pretty sure these guys are still around in some form or another, but I get nostalgic over the "joyofsatan" organization. You could sparsely find a youtube video dealing with religion, history, or even certain genres of music without seeing them spamming their website.

Apparently they're a neo-nazi alien cult or something, but I mainly just remember their ugly geocities website.

 

[Martys_not_smarty]

Winamp has SHOUTcast that still works and you can access radio stations but it also had streaming video links as far back as the early 2000s I can remember going on those to watch family guy reruns or clips of jackass and you'd have people doing live radio streams for mmos such as city of heroes.

 

[Hinttitroniikka]

Does anyone else remember weebles-stuff.com? This was the guy who created Badger Badger Badger and a bunch of other hugely popular flash animations. Weirdly enough this British guy making silly, "lol so random XD" flash animation is directly responsible for me finding the Farms because back in the mid 2000's he had a small "random-link-of-the-day" section on the website where he or others would submit stuff they found interesting. It was there that I found ED, which in turn lead me to 4chan, and years later the CWCki and the Farms.

I learned so much electronic music from his videos, Boards of Canada, Mr Scruff, stuff like that. I guess everything is copyright strike hellscape nowadays, but I'd kill to hear some of the old videos with the music that was originally in them.

 

[Hepativore]

I miss the Amateur Surgeon series of Flash games. Unfortunately, Adult Swim pulled them from their website after Flash was discontinued, and I cannot find anywhere that has the full version of the first game that you can download and play offline. I cannot get Amateur Surgeon 2 to work properly in any Flash emulator as loading it just results in a black screen on the emulator.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Anyone else use VRML stuff?

(they've made VRML browser)

 

[Brabbit Narp]

Well hot damn, someone just posted one hell of a time capsule.

This dude out of nowhere posted two videos, both recordings of YouTube on the Wii Web Browser, dating all the way back to 2007.

These videos... I have seen some old YouTube archives before, but these are *fresh*. I hope that he has more. It always pays to remember when the site used to have certain features that they have now deprecated.

Also, something faintly reminiscent of the flash culture of the day, even if only in Flipnote. It might be cringe by modern standards, but there's a passion here you just don't find anymore out on either YouTube or elsewhere.

 

[Hinttitroniikka]

Is it just me, or were memes and jokes a little more light-hearted and silly before the mid-2010s? Demotivators, fsjal, original ragecomics...stuff that's now considered "boomer memes" not even because of their age, but because there's not the additional layer of irony to them. They're just straightforwardly silly and funny or otherwise catchy. 2012 or so I noticed more irony seeping into internet humour. I mean, I do still kinda laugh at the memes and jokes nowadays about stuff like drunk driving and divorce and ethnic slurs, but I'm also not so shocked by it anymore at my age nor emotionally detached or compartmentalised enough to find it quite as funny as just goofy faces or something. Am I remembering it like a boomer or was it really like that?

Btw, The Game (the one you just lost) is really fun to teach to children in person. Ages 8-10 have a lot of fun with it, and if you have like nieces or nephews you see every couple weeks or so, then seeing you will trigger them to remember The Game and they'll greet you by telling you they just lost.

 

[Doktor Grimm]

The Internet used to promise so much. I'm not that old -- maybe not even old enough to remember the true glory years of the World Wide Web, depending on how you define it -- but I was online from an early age (well before raising children on YouTube Kids was standard practice), so I do vaguely recall a time when it was something you could turn on and off, rather than a constant feature of everyday life. A good chunk of my childhood was spent dicking around on Newgrounds and various old-school forums when I was probably WAY too young to be doing that, yet by the time I grew up enough to participate in a meaningful way, all those things had vanished to be replaced with sterile social media platforms.

Maybe the thing that turns me off the most about being on the net nowadays is modern web design -- everything feels deliberately created to suck as much fun out of socialising online as possible, perfectly formulated to maximise dependency and minimise fulfillment. The old Internet looked objectively janky as hell but it was human! Logging into Twitter feels like clocking into work. (Not even the Farms is immune. Flat grey interfaces make everything seem so grim and serious.)

If I were slightly less sensible and had a little more time to waste, I'd launch my own message board to try and recapture that genuine sense of community and culture. I just know any attempt to do such a thing would be immediately overrun by trannies, 'cause that's where a solid chunk of those sorts of people who used to frequent online forums went. The metaphorical ship has sailed.

Is it just me, or were memes and jokes a little more light-hearted and silly before the mid-2010s? Demotivators, fsjal, original ragecomics...stuff that's now considered "boomer memes" not even because of their age, but because there's not the additional layer of irony to them. They're just straightforwardly silly and funny or otherwise catchy. 2012 or so I noticed more irony seeping into internet humour. I mean, I do still kinda laugh at the memes and jokes nowadays about stuff like drunk driving and divorce and ethnic slurs, but I'm also not so shocked by it anymore at my age nor emotionally detached or compartmentalised enough to find it quite as funny as just goofy faces or something. Am I remembering it like a boomer or was it really like that?

It's not just you. I grew up (more or less) in the modern culture of irony and those old image macroes seem downright wholesome compared to what we have now. IMO social media is to blame, as always.

I might be terribly off the mark here (see: not that old) but it seems like memes used to serve as signifiers of group membership back when the Internet was less populated and more insular, like having an in-joke with your friends. Now that the normies and the weird nerds and the technologically illiterate old people are all sharing the same four platforms, any new joke is going to be exposed to millions of people outside the intended target audience and instantly run into the ground, so everything has to be wrapped in multiple layers of irony and abstraction in order to make the content of the joke itself less accessible (and therefore remain fresh for longer). Even the concept of "memes" is considered dated now -- unless you use it ironically, of course. I imagine it's all very tiresome to anyone who isn't Gen Z and terminally online. And that's kind of the point. If we were to just go back to making straightforward jokes, there'd be no way to differentiate between the in-group and the out-group.

 

[Hepativore]

I miss the glory days of 4chan, as now it is overrun with glowies and a lot of the userbase has since left or moved on.

I also miss the days when Newgrounds was relevant, before Google blew a hole in Flash and left it to die. When I was in high school, Newgrounds had a reputation for being subversive because of early Flash games such as the Bear in the Big House that Blew and Pico's School, so naturally, everybody flocked to the website at the time.

Newgrounds is still up, but it is not nearly as active as it used to be, and I miss the humor of its early Flash movies.

 

[eatler]

I miss microsoft 3d movie maker. Gmods obviously superior but theres something so loveably jankey about 2000s style. and it led to some pretty funny videos. Its still being used today but its not as popular. but mabey that was for the best.

before I die, I would like to give my regards to the Internet. lol the Internet- big stupid baby

I also miss the goofy ways people had to film and how awkward they were like vhs movies that were put onto youtube

 

[AWizard]

Is it just me, or were memes and jokes a little more light-hearted and silly before the mid-2010s? Demotivators, fsjal, original ragecomics...stuff that's now considered "boomer memes" not even because of their age, but because there's not the additional layer of irony to them. They're just straightforwardly silly and funny or otherwise catchy. 2012 or so I noticed more irony seeping into internet humour. I mean, I do still kinda laugh at the memes and jokes nowadays about stuff like drunk driving and divorce and ethnic slurs, but I'm also not so shocked by it anymore at my age nor emotionally detached or compartmentalised enough to find it quite as funny as just goofy faces or something. Am I remembering it like a boomer or was it really like that?

"Geeks"/"nerds" today aren't cut from the same cloth as millennial geeks/nerds.

 

[Mourning_Cloak]

Not solely internet based...did anyone else here collect Bella Sara cards? I still have all mine, and the cards had an online component in which you could care for the horses. I think the website is officially down now, but for a long time it was still up and I still knew my login.

 

[GettrGriftr]

A couple of things I haven't seen mentioned:

JibJab.com (pre-modern era -- I know it still exists, but like that old grey mule, she ain't what she used to be). Their Bush v. Kerry flash animations from 2004 were great. Example: "This Land is My Land"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8Q-sRdV7SY

Also, for everyone that mentioned the old Cartoon Network games, I can still hear the Caribbean music, and wails and exaltations of my first-born as he struggled to complete the "Summer Resort" Pool Problems game featuring Uncle Gus.

https://mattbruv.github.io/ccsr/

 

[geppeto's woodclock]

ratemypoo

 

[geppeto's woodclock]

I miss microsoft 3d movie maker. Gmods obviously superior but theres something so loveably jankey about 2000s style. and it led to some pretty funny videos. Its still being used today but its not as popular. but mabey that was for the best.

before I die, I would like to give my regards to the Internet. lol the Internet- big stupid baby

I also miss the goofy ways people had to film and how awkward they were like vhs movies that were put onto youtube

I wonder if anyone remembers Fine Artist

 

[GettrGriftr]

Engrish.com

It's still around, but damn was that shit funny when it first became a thing

 

[Tequila Jong]

Engrish.com

It's still around, but damn was that shit funny when it first became a thing

Engrish was the fucking shit. A friend and I discovered it in High School when we supposed to be studying for exams.

Spoiler: Some favourites

 

[Coelacanth]

How many of you out there remember Cake Wrecks? I discovered it back in college thanks to another internet relic, Hyperbole and a Half, and checked it almost daily to see just how badly someone could fuck up a cake. Of course it eventually fell to Trump Derangement Syndrome and has lost most of its edge but it's one of the few places I remember extremely fondly. For example:

This cake made me laugh so damn hard my Mom actually came over to ask me what was so funny. The moment her eyes fell on this thing and figured out it was supposed to spell "spooky" she collapsed into laughter herself. To this day we still describe some things as "spooy".