What old internet trends do you miss?

[RussianBlonde]

I miss free speech.

There were major forums where what we discuss on KF was normal or even tame then. Sensitive people clutched their pearls and went back to their megachurch, the rest of us rolled with it and had fun.

Unfortunately the pearl clutchers were teachers and taught everyone to be super sensitive about "microaggressions" so RIP free speech.

Some of these forums weirdly still exist, unaffected, they are just harder to find. I have recently came across bodybuilding.com website and they have a forum: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/ which is totally uncensored and has plenty of anti trans (and other politically incorrect) posts as you can see below:



Also forums.mixedmartialarts.com

 

[DoomsdayElite]

When there weren't quite so many fucktarded idiots using it. The smartphone was a terrible blunder.

 

[Desu Mountain]

I miss Megaupload. It had everything.

I also miss every even vaguely comedic song supposedly being made by Weird Al except for that one Zelda song that was supposedly made by System of a Down.

 

[anliteralidiot]

I miss Megaupload. It had everything.

I also miss every even vaguely comedic song supposedly being made by Weird Al except for that one Zelda song that was supposedly made by System of a Down.

I miss limewire...

 

[4506-C]

It’s not quite old internet but I miss StumbleUpon.

I miss being able to hear when I was getting a text message because the speakers would produce feedback, too.

 

[dvnc]

Angelfire.

 

[skunt]

stumbleupon.

not specifically stumbleupon, but what it enabled. was cool to waste an hour or two hopping from site to site and just seeing the most whack and silly stuff imaginable. things like reddit/tumbr/facebook killed a lot of it off

 

[Anasa Tristis]

I miss small single interest forums that self moderated. (No surprises there.) I miss independent blogs and their blog rolls that led to other blogs and other blogrolls. "After the jump" (LOL) you ended up in some wild and wooly places. And aggregate blogs like Kuro5hin. I miss Kuro5hin a lot. And early Zerohedge.

The early Internoodle was more about ideas than money. And it was pretty exciting to fire it up and see what was going on online. Now you don't even need an internet connection to know.

FB and other mega social media sites are just Too Big CAFOs. Livestock are herded in, get corralled and fed shit. And then led to the slaughter. Fed shit or more increasingly these days, each other's brains. Leading to a worldwide breakout of BSE. And/or zombification.

Too funny: I just did a quick search on BSE and the Bombay Stock Exchange dominated the first page of results. I rest my case.

 

[skykiii]

Sorry if I've already said this but.... Personal Websites.

Was there occasionally a cringe one? Sure.

But I miss the days of going thru a Yahoo list and finding an entire category of sites dedicated to, say, Warcraft II, or Sailor Moon, or Final Fantasy... all would be different, all would have different contents and sometimes different subject matters entirely. There are some I wish I could find again (anyone but me remember "The Final Fantasy Parody Page"?)

Nowadays, there's usually only ONE site dedicated to anything, and its usually a wiki, which sure are good at giving you factual information (sometimes) but are absolutely flavorless. Worse is that these can astroturf an opinion that never actually existed since, well, if there's only one resource and its saying this one thing.... whereas in the past you could see disagreement and different takes.

Naturally if you ever say this on lefty sites like TV Tropes they will bring up the worst possible examples and say "isn't it great that we took away freedom?"

 

[WitchfyndeGeneral]

Whenever some leftists were to shit up on some communities, they were bullied endlessly until they quit the Internet or killed themselves in my communities. Whenever you didn’t like a forum and got banned from it, you get to recruit a army of users from other platforms or great tons of alts to destroy the forum and get it to close down.
There was also a quality over quantity. I had to make the effort to find communities that had similar interests. Back then, the internet was very unmoderated many people saw it as a toxic cesspool.
This internet trend of unmoderation is never coming back ever again, the Christian Nationalists will replace the woke and enforce ChristNat morality instead of woke morality.

 

[The Connected Nose]

squeaky squirrel animations (name evades me)

Foamy The Squirrel from Neurotically Yours. Still going, IIRC.

except for that one Zelda song that was supposedly made by System of a Down.

Ahh good ol' Rabbit Joint.


Anyone 'member "Gonads & Strife"?

 

[innocent jogger]

I Remember that time period too when you would sign up on XYZ email provider or even yahoo cause they didnt even track cookies and now you need social security,phone number, photo id, ballsack shot its rediculous.

I've always provided my ballsack shot regardless.

 

[PointOfNoReturnPoint]

I've always provided my ballsack shot regardless.

My nigga is straight from the oldskool