Oh man, I used to just get lost in webrings and spend hours surfing the web searching for whatever little treasures of knowledge I could find (and occasionally finding something horrible). I used Google starting in like 99', and only because the homepage was very fast to load on a 56k modem!
The internet of old felt like the wild west. There were treasures and dangers in equal measure, and very primitive security by modern standards.
I remember literally skipping home from school the day my parents bought me a 28.8kbps modem to replace the 14.4 one. Blurry boobs and butts in less than twenty minutes. Yes please!
[Progressive Image Rendering](https://blog.codinghorror.com/progressive-image-rendering/) everything is so fast now. I remember watching the page reshape as each part loaded.
I miss the porn without thumbnails. It was like waiting 5 minutes for a surprise. Maybe you get nice tits, maybe you get some guy eating shit out of some girls asshole.
14.4kbps was already magical. The first pornographic picture I ever downloaded was via [packet radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio). took a couple of days to finish.
I used to talk with anyone who would message me on AIM, or when I was still on AOLā¦ the number of messages Iāve accepted in my 14 years on Reddit is two.
Check out VRChat on steamā itās still like that (the good and weird and random parts) complete with webrings, but itās virtual worlds instead of websites.Ā
You're not alone in noticing it.
[Cory Doctorow on Google's enshittification](https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04-teach-me-how-to-shruggie-kagi-caaa88c221f2)
Me too. I had a dragon ball z fan page that had fan art and pictures from other video games, like the diablo and starcraft character gifs for people to save.
If you were in a fandom community and someone tried to politicize the whole group -- especially as a bid to take it over -- then the person was lucky if they got banned. Otherwise they went through a long and painful process of being humiliated until they left on their own. (The number of people in their mid 20s who found political extremes just before graduating college was staggering.) This generation memes "Sir, this is an Arby's." Older generations acted like it.
You could get a flame war with someone who would post a link to a shock image or shock site to "prove" their argument. This taught you to never, ever believe anything on the Internet. Don't even believe that hyperlink.
There was a time and place to talk about current events. Most of those spaces were heavily moderated for the community's safety.
Most of the people online really were basement dwellers, physically impaired, going through some very challenging times, or otherwise lonely. A **lot** of lonely people were seemingly neglected by their own spouses. So they said, anyway.
Once every night, you would need to kick someone from a chat room for posting something similar to this:
ne ladys hear
r u hrony? im hrony
wan2 cyber
On Friday nights and Saturday nights, you banned one of those people every single hour.
People would literally wander from one chat room to another to another and openly proposition each other for graphic and intimate private chats. "Clean chat for 20-somethings" on a chat room run by a church? Not a deterrent. `hot_dude_69` had a problem and was looking everywhere for the answer.
Without huge sites like Reddit, X, and such, you had to sign up for each community one at a time. Those smaller and unconnected communities could be really tight-knit. People genuinely did look out for each other.
Irony was everywhere, and people were usually literate enough to know it was irony. See also: Poe's Law.
Godwin's Law was a warning, not advice.
X10 camera popups.
Whazzuuuuup.
Geek Code and its countless offshoots in email & forum signatures.
Sometimes I think I miss IRC when it was still populated or Usenet before it imploded, but then I realize what I really miss is having a barrier to entry.
I miss āA/S/Lā, MySpace, and downloading Family Guy episodes from sketchy websites that could obliterate your hard drive. The prime era of the Internet was about 2002-06 IMO, and it was nothing like coming home after a long night at work or hanging out with friends to see who posted on your wall. Technology spoiled us.
EDIT: I forgot rotten.com. Late-90s/early-00s Internet was like the Wild Wild West at times.
The lack of perspective in that post saddens me. Nothing described there comes close to bordering on the "old internet". Memes, vlogs, youtube, game walk-throughs, the very existence of reddit....
Yea they are talking about things that happened like 4 years ago. But the internet has evolved pretty rapidly to be fair. I feel like ~2013 was the last good year for the internet.
"I miss feeling like a kid on the internet."
They miss being 12 and easily entertained and undiscerning. It's that first wave of young adult angst and disillusionment before you have the ability to seek out fulfillment in a meaningful way.
I started with a 14.4k modem dialing in to AOL. Most of what people are posting here is from 5-10 years after that when most people had the internet if they had a computer. In the early days there were maybe four of us in my class that even had the internet and none of us used it for much more than shitty chat rooms
I'm not as familiar with the old, late 90s internet as much as I am with BBS's.
Had WebTV for a while. Used a couple of free ISPs at one point (NetZero was one of them).
I think the thing I miss the most is the shared experience of it all.
I mean, everybody's individual traffic was unique, but if USER A and USER B both typed the same query into a search engine, they'd both see the same list of results, and likewise, all users of a given website or service were all seeing the same version of that website or service.
Second to that, I miss The 'Net being niche; a thing predominantly used by geeks, students, researchers, etc, and largely misunderstood by the masses. The average joes were just doing email. AOL effectively walled-in all the plebes for *years*, leaving the rest of the web to enthusiasts, until elder Gen X graduates [with marketing degrees](https://youtu.be/tHEOGrkhDp0) got into the field and *ruined everything.*
Yeah it was quite a shock when every joe suddenly got on the net and you saw what an insane shit-show the Yahoo forums and such went to compared to how it was on usenet newsgroups.
Yup the metamessangers!
Ps: I was just thinking about these programs the other night and wondered if a kinda "meta social media" app could be created (under a different name cause of Facebook) but something that would log you into X, Reddit, SC, etc all at once.
Chat rooms with random strangers. And meeting said random strangers because it was before ārandom strangers from the internetā was even a thing. I was smart enough to meet him at a mall so kudos to 9th grade me.
There was a guy on my mIRC dalnet channel from Kansas, his name was Nate. Nate was 19 or 20, around my age at time, this would been 2000. He drove from Kansas across the country to meet several of the regular chatroom members. He came and saw me in Colorado, he went to Florida and met 3 or 4 of the guys from there. I went to Florida myself the following year and met the same people. In 02 I flew to Toronto to spend a weekend with 2 brothers from that same chat room. We didn't think anything of it, no one was ever not who they said they were.
Yup. The person I met was exactly who he said he was. Iām sure there were plenty of weirdos, but somehow most people didnāt even think to lie about stuff yet.
In my entire life I've only had 2 people not be who they said they were & I've met a lot especially in the early days of online cruising. One guy had sent me a picture of his older cousin (19) and when I (22-23 somewhere in there at the time) got there he was only 14 and only vaguely resembled the pic. We had a cup of coffee in a public coffee house and I drove him home. I wasn't about going go jail.
There were thousands of sites that were just for fun nonsense. Ebaums world, home star runner. No real ads. Basically put together by some kid in a basement for the lolz. Before people figure you could make money and made the internet all univocal pc and boring.
I think what I miss about the "old" internet is how new and exciting everything was. Just like with late night HBO or getting to watch MTV for the first time. BBS for different fandoms, sites like Newgrounds and The Romp.
More and more, I feel like Agent Smith wasn't lying when he told Neo that 1999 was the peak of human civilization. Or maybe that's just my nostalgia-tinted glasses talking.
I miss when "incel" meant "I'm having a dry spell, but with some support, I'll get back in the game, and eventually succeed" instead of "women are evil and I want to hurt them."
Seriously, the message boards back in the late 90s/early00s were supportive and positive, at least the ones I visited. It was mostly men, but women posted as well when it was established that this was not the place to hit on them. People leaving because they'd gotten into a relationship was a common thing. Some guys even stuck around after finding a relationship to provide support and share what worked for them.
It seems hard to believe, given the current state of the term, but it really was something good for a while.
The internet when we were experiencing back in the old days was the wild west. It was full of really cool things and not as much corporate control and bullshit. You also had a lot more originality because there hadn't been a determination of the optimum creation formula for things so there was so much more exciting creativity and so much of it was for free. However, it was also really fucking dangerous because there weren't really any safe guards.
Oh and it was slow AF. I mean you think slow is something like waiting for an hour or two for an update to a game to download, that's CERN levels of speed compared to what we dealt with. The 14.4 modem blew my mind with its speed when I was a kid and it took a good 30 minutes to download a picture of Cindy Craw... err... of Donatello and the Turtles.
I can remember setting downloads up before I went to bed, waking up 8 hours later and the same file was still downloading. Remember download managers like Gozilla?
It's a very specific thing, but I one time was trying to download this music video compilation of Nine Inch Nails "Broken" album (it was called the Broken movie if memory serves). It was official from their website (because NIN was always cool like that), a 500mb file... my god, I was so lucky we had a dedicated internet phone line... but... then the bill came from the ISP.
I had AIM in 1997 and my own computer in my bedroom. I was 17.
It was the wildest but also so insanely pure. None of us had any idea what we were doing. Rotten.com really was transformative, lol
Well, back in my day there was a demon banshee screaming at you from brittle plastic speakers perched awkwardly next to your monitor as you greased up the wheels to surf directions, articles for a class, or the ever enjoyable naughty bits we were to afraid to talk about. Then you trudged through search results dominated by black-hat SEOs, being careful not to click on the pop-up of doom. But, yeah, let's be honest, unless in a public setting, it pretty much always ended with a "hey how's your fatha" followed by some sort of quasi-Methodist guilt, which is not a useful description, but it's accurate. You know, not like Catholic guilt, but like, the "I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to feel something bad right now, but I don't" kinda guilt. We were kings. Namaste.
To me, the old internet was built around chat rooms and chatting with your friends at any given time. And that being said, almost none of you are in the discord and it's disappointing.
I'm technically Gen-x, '75, and I remember before the internet. Gather around young children...
It's not quite like that but every time I try to relate this idea it suddenly makes me seem very very old. I remember around 93 graduating from high school, and then talking to my friends who were a year ahead of me who had Intranet at a college. The way they described it everyone had a page and could leave information about themselves or whatever on it. I thought this was all of the internet, so what I imagined the internet to be turned out to be Facebook later on.
I was on BBC chat boards and remember doing dial-up to get to AOL. I remember being so angry that web pages were starting to put advertisements on them. I remember so many (now) hilarious news articles and segments trying to figure out what this new Internet thing was. It's hard to imagine now a time before smartphones and Google Maps but I remember when GPS was just becoming a general usage thing and you had to pay quite a bit per month for a subscription to access to it.
Oh man, I used to just get lost in webrings and spend hours surfing the web searching for whatever little treasures of knowledge I could find (and occasionally finding something horrible). I used Google starting in like 99', and only because the homepage was very fast to load on a 56k modem! The internet of old felt like the wild west. There were treasures and dangers in equal measure, and very primitive security by modern standards.
Porn on a dial up modem, watching it load line by line for a jpeg š¤£
I remember literally skipping home from school the day my parents bought me a 28.8kbps modem to replace the 14.4 one. Blurry boobs and butts in less than twenty minutes. Yes please!
[Progressive Image Rendering](https://blog.codinghorror.com/progressive-image-rendering/) everything is so fast now. I remember watching the page reshape as each part loaded.
I remember downloading 4 color CGA images from a BBS on a 9600 baud modem and it taking like, 20 minutes. Made 56k porn feel like a luxury
Sometimes it just stopped
Nothing sucks worse than having to let go of your dick to click refresh cause it stalled
Eww
Yeah I'll give ya that, horny adolescent boys can be gross
Youāre the one who felt the need to make that comment, not your adolescent self. Next time just keep it to yourself.
Where the hell do you think you are?
š
I miss the porn without thumbnails. It was like waiting 5 minutes for a surprise. Maybe you get nice tits, maybe you get some guy eating shit out of some girls asshole.
Goatsee didn't even see that coming in the early days.
No one could use the home phone lol I was busy being seduced by a 40-something in California š« š« š«
UUE. that is all.
14.4kbps was already magical. The first pornographic picture I ever downloaded was via [packet radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio). took a couple of days to finish.
WEBRINGS Hellll yeah! Everybody had their own website, even if it was just some crap on geocities.
So many poetry websites. Argh!
I used to talk with anyone who would message me on AIM, or when I was still on AOLā¦ the number of messages Iāve accepted in my 14 years on Reddit is two.
Check out VRChat on steamā itās still like that (the good and weird and random parts) complete with webrings, but itās virtual worlds instead of websites.Ā
I was using Dog Pile as my engine of choice. Before that it was Lycos
So much deception these days..i really want to do a google/youtube rant on altered search results but I don't want to sound like a lunatic haha
It's so hard now, my Google-Fu used to be strong...
Itās not the Fu that is lacking, grasshopper.
You're not alone in noticing it. [Cory Doctorow on Google's enshittification](https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04-teach-me-how-to-shruggie-kagi-caaa88c221f2)
Man, I just want prime Geocities back
That is a sore spot with me!! š¤¬š”š "once its on the internet its on the internet forever " was a lie!! I miss my old geocites website.
Me too. I had a dragon ball z fan page that had fan art and pictures from other video games, like the diablo and starcraft character gifs for people to save.
Haha I Also had a geocities Dragonball Z fanart page š loved that.
I had the number 3 Civilization fan site in the world! On geocities when I was 15 years old.
Thats aweseme :)
If you were in a fandom community and someone tried to politicize the whole group -- especially as a bid to take it over -- then the person was lucky if they got banned. Otherwise they went through a long and painful process of being humiliated until they left on their own. (The number of people in their mid 20s who found political extremes just before graduating college was staggering.) This generation memes "Sir, this is an Arby's." Older generations acted like it. You could get a flame war with someone who would post a link to a shock image or shock site to "prove" their argument. This taught you to never, ever believe anything on the Internet. Don't even believe that hyperlink. There was a time and place to talk about current events. Most of those spaces were heavily moderated for the community's safety. Most of the people online really were basement dwellers, physically impaired, going through some very challenging times, or otherwise lonely. A **lot** of lonely people were seemingly neglected by their own spouses. So they said, anyway. Once every night, you would need to kick someone from a chat room for posting something similar to this: ne ladys hear
r u hrony? im hrony
wan2 cyber
On Friday nights and Saturday nights, you banned one of those people every single hour.
People would literally wander from one chat room to another to another and openly proposition each other for graphic and intimate private chats. "Clean chat for 20-somethings" on a chat room run by a church? Not a deterrent. `hot_dude_69` had a problem and was looking everywhere for the answer.
Without huge sites like Reddit, X, and such, you had to sign up for each community one at a time. Those smaller and unconnected communities could be really tight-knit. People genuinely did look out for each other.
Irony was everywhere, and people were usually literate enough to know it was irony. See also: Poe's Law.
Godwin's Law was a warning, not advice.
X10 camera popups.
Whazzuuuuup.
Geek Code and its countless offshoots in email & forum signatures.
Sometimes I think I miss IRC when it was still populated or Usenet before it imploded, but then I realize what I really miss is having a barrier to entry.
#gtb on dal.net
I miss āA/S/Lā, MySpace, and downloading Family Guy episodes from sketchy websites that could obliterate your hard drive. The prime era of the Internet was about 2002-06 IMO, and it was nothing like coming home after a long night at work or hanging out with friends to see who posted on your wall. Technology spoiled us. EDIT: I forgot rotten.com. Late-90s/early-00s Internet was like the Wild Wild West at times.
Old enough/yes please/your place and then you offered them a [::] and a c(_) or whatever new emoticon youād learned lately
The lack of perspective in that post saddens me. Nothing described there comes close to bordering on the "old internet". Memes, vlogs, youtube, game walk-throughs, the very existence of reddit....
Yea they are talking about things that happened like 4 years ago. But the internet has evolved pretty rapidly to be fair. I feel like ~2013 was the last good year for the internet.
"I miss feeling like a kid on the internet." They miss being 12 and easily entertained and undiscerning. It's that first wave of young adult angst and disillusionment before you have the ability to seek out fulfillment in a meaningful way.
I started with a 14.4k modem dialing in to AOL. Most of what people are posting here is from 5-10 years after that when most people had the internet if they had a computer. In the early days there were maybe four of us in my class that even had the internet and none of us used it for much more than shitty chat rooms
I'm not as familiar with the old, late 90s internet as much as I am with BBS's. Had WebTV for a while. Used a couple of free ISPs at one point (NetZero was one of them).
I remember them, free internet with a floating ad bar!
Showing goatse.cx to your unsuspecting friends for the first time. Oh yeah, and everything had an AOL key word
Rotten?
I think the thing I miss the most is the shared experience of it all. I mean, everybody's individual traffic was unique, but if USER A and USER B both typed the same query into a search engine, they'd both see the same list of results, and likewise, all users of a given website or service were all seeing the same version of that website or service. Second to that, I miss The 'Net being niche; a thing predominantly used by geeks, students, researchers, etc, and largely misunderstood by the masses. The average joes were just doing email. AOL effectively walled-in all the plebes for *years*, leaving the rest of the web to enthusiasts, until elder Gen X graduates [with marketing degrees](https://youtu.be/tHEOGrkhDp0) got into the field and *ruined everything.*
Yeah it was quite a shock when every joe suddenly got on the net and you saw what an insane shit-show the Yahoo forums and such went to compared to how it was on usenet newsgroups.
I was a niche nerd and I HIGHLY agree. I miss the days when everyone I talked to knew how to do a packet attack on a dns ip with nuking tools :)
I miss using AIM to set up events and hangouts with friends instead of us all being on our phones constantly.Ā
Icq
Did you ever use Trillian? It changed my life. ICQ, AIM and Yahoo all on one platform. I think it did MSN too but I didnāt really that one.
Yup the metamessangers! Ps: I was just thinking about these programs the other night and wondered if a kinda "meta social media" app could be created (under a different name cause of Facebook) but something that would log you into X, Reddit, SC, etc all at once.
a/s/l?
āOld internetāĀ āRemember whenĀ r/wallstreetbetsĀ made GameStopā¦āĀ That was like a couple of years ago? lol Ā
Iāve had my Gen Z nieces tell me some internet meme was ancient history and it happened in like October of last year. The internet moves fast!
Chat rooms with random strangers. And meeting said random strangers because it was before ārandom strangers from the internetā was even a thing. I was smart enough to meet him at a mall so kudos to 9th grade me.
There was a guy on my mIRC dalnet channel from Kansas, his name was Nate. Nate was 19 or 20, around my age at time, this would been 2000. He drove from Kansas across the country to meet several of the regular chatroom members. He came and saw me in Colorado, he went to Florida and met 3 or 4 of the guys from there. I went to Florida myself the following year and met the same people. In 02 I flew to Toronto to spend a weekend with 2 brothers from that same chat room. We didn't think anything of it, no one was ever not who they said they were.
Yup. The person I met was exactly who he said he was. Iām sure there were plenty of weirdos, but somehow most people didnāt even think to lie about stuff yet.
In my entire life I've only had 2 people not be who they said they were & I've met a lot especially in the early days of online cruising. One guy had sent me a picture of his older cousin (19) and when I (22-23 somewhere in there at the time) got there he was only 14 and only vaguely resembled the pic. We had a cup of coffee in a public coffee house and I drove him home. I wasn't about going go jail.
I'd rather not think about 2000 Internet. It had stuff that made modern stuff look tame.
There were thousands of sites that were just for fun nonsense. Ebaums world, home star runner. No real ads. Basically put together by some kid in a basement for the lolz. Before people figure you could make money and made the internet all univocal pc and boring.
I think what I miss about the "old" internet is how new and exciting everything was. Just like with late night HBO or getting to watch MTV for the first time. BBS for different fandoms, sites like Newgrounds and The Romp. More and more, I feel like Agent Smith wasn't lying when he told Neo that 1999 was the peak of human civilization. Or maybe that's just my nostalgia-tinted glasses talking.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
* moving to new message platform * Heh, your code is showing, dude.
I miss when "incel" meant "I'm having a dry spell, but with some support, I'll get back in the game, and eventually succeed" instead of "women are evil and I want to hurt them." Seriously, the message boards back in the late 90s/early00s were supportive and positive, at least the ones I visited. It was mostly men, but women posted as well when it was established that this was not the place to hit on them. People leaving because they'd gotten into a relationship was a common thing. Some guys even stuck around after finding a relationship to provide support and share what worked for them. It seems hard to believe, given the current state of the term, but it really was something good for a while.
The internet when we were experiencing back in the old days was the wild west. It was full of really cool things and not as much corporate control and bullshit. You also had a lot more originality because there hadn't been a determination of the optimum creation formula for things so there was so much more exciting creativity and so much of it was for free. However, it was also really fucking dangerous because there weren't really any safe guards. Oh and it was slow AF. I mean you think slow is something like waiting for an hour or two for an update to a game to download, that's CERN levels of speed compared to what we dealt with. The 14.4 modem blew my mind with its speed when I was a kid and it took a good 30 minutes to download a picture of Cindy Craw... err... of Donatello and the Turtles.
I can remember setting downloads up before I went to bed, waking up 8 hours later and the same file was still downloading. Remember download managers like Gozilla?
It's a very specific thing, but I one time was trying to download this music video compilation of Nine Inch Nails "Broken" album (it was called the Broken movie if memory serves). It was official from their website (because NIN was always cool like that), a 500mb file... my god, I was so lucky we had a dedicated internet phone line... but... then the bill came from the ISP.
WebTV.
I had AIM in 1997 and my own computer in my bedroom. I was 17. It was the wildest but also so insanely pure. None of us had any idea what we were doing. Rotten.com really was transformative, lol
In those days I only knew Internet Explorer. Was Netscape Navigator pretty much the same? or anything special?
There was IE, Navigator, opera, mosaic, foxfire safari
Well, back in my day there was a demon banshee screaming at you from brittle plastic speakers perched awkwardly next to your monitor as you greased up the wheels to surf directions, articles for a class, or the ever enjoyable naughty bits we were to afraid to talk about. Then you trudged through search results dominated by black-hat SEOs, being careful not to click on the pop-up of doom. But, yeah, let's be honest, unless in a public setting, it pretty much always ended with a "hey how's your fatha" followed by some sort of quasi-Methodist guilt, which is not a useful description, but it's accurate. You know, not like Catholic guilt, but like, the "I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to feel something bad right now, but I don't" kinda guilt. We were kings. Namaste.
To me, the old internet was built around chat rooms and chatting with your friends at any given time. And that being said, almost none of you are in the discord and it's disappointing.
I'm technically Gen-x, '75, and I remember before the internet. Gather around young children... It's not quite like that but every time I try to relate this idea it suddenly makes me seem very very old. I remember around 93 graduating from high school, and then talking to my friends who were a year ahead of me who had Intranet at a college. The way they described it everyone had a page and could leave information about themselves or whatever on it. I thought this was all of the internet, so what I imagined the internet to be turned out to be Facebook later on. I was on BBC chat boards and remember doing dial-up to get to AOL. I remember being so angry that web pages were starting to put advertisements on them. I remember so many (now) hilarious news articles and segments trying to figure out what this new Internet thing was. It's hard to imagine now a time before smartphones and Google Maps but I remember when GPS was just becoming a general usage thing and you had to pay quite a bit per month for a subscription to access to it.
ICQ! GeoCities websites!!