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the old timey pre 2008 internet
Topic Started: Jan 2 2017, 12:48 AM (726 Views)
clawx
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Let's discuss the beauty of the internet from say 1997 to 2007. When it was about weird websites and insane shit and was honestly a lot more fun to be on then the new internet of twitters and facebooks.
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calgone
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calcron
I'd argue with the experience from like 97-02 was the most exciting. Non-homogenized ideas, anything goes mentality and yeah a lot of weird but fun stuff. It's just a little too bloated nowadays.

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Bratwurst
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BIG JERK
My major issue with the internet of today is that it has become too consolidated. It's also too accessible.

calgone
 
I'd argue with the experience from like 97-02 was the most exciting. Non-homogenized ideas, anything goes mentality and yeah a lot of weird but fun stuff. It's just a little too bloated nowadays.


My teenage self would have been dismayed with the reality of the internet becoming too homo yet not the funny kind. I also think it's biased to place so much relevance on the late nineties to early aughts but I agree with you anyway because those were our formative years.
LOOK Posted Image LOOK AT HOW AMAZING THE FORUMS ARE NOW
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calgone
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calcron
We also make this thread a lot
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DamienC
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Shitposter
I hate how vanity websites are no longer a thing. That's kind of how the scene started if you think about it but there were also some great off the wall places. I remember seeing them as late as 2003 or 2004, just pre-Myspace. That was the beginning of the end for me.
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portnoyd
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WET NOSE
DamienC,Jan 2 2017
11:37 AM
I hate how vanity websites are no longer a thing. That's kind of how the scene started if you think about it but there were also some great off the wall places. I remember seeing them as late as 2003 or 2004, just pre-Myspace. That was the beginning of the end for me.

Oh man, the days of the true novelty of animated gifs (you know, JIFS. Damn kids with their inaccurate pronunciation). Back in my day, we had GIF89a's and we LIKED 'EM.

Uh, where was I?

When everyone had a little fart of space on their ISP's server and popped up a shitball site with awful backgrounds and no design skill whatsoever. Good days? Best days.

I mark the rise and slow fall of YTMND as the end of the Old Timey Pre-2008 Internet we're talking about.
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FlowingMindspin
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BIG BUTT BABY
Yeah, this was a fun time. I remember when I got 5 MB of space on bolt.com when I signed up when I was like 14 and just got the Internet at home (Bolt was like a precursor to today's social networking). I'd never even been on the Internet before, but they had tutorials and things that made it easy to use actual HTML to make your website. You could also use their site-builder thing, but after seeing how lame that made things look I buckled down and learned basic HTML. It was fun.

Then it was a matter of how much stuff I could fit in under 5 MB. I remember I had a page dedicated to each of my favorite bands, pics of me and my friends doing ridiculous shit (my parents bought a SCANNER with our computer back in the day, haha), and a guide I made on how to get every ending variation on the SNES version of Chrono Trigger. Man, what a fun time.

Unfortunately, my skills never really evolved past that. I remember trying to learn to do frames (remember when those were a thing? FRAMES VERSION & NO FRAMES VERSION) and getting pissed off at it.

Oh, the Internet Archive has my old Bolt page backed up from a time when Bolt took it down because I was hosting a single MP3 on my 5 MB of space...

ROFL

Good times, gents.
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FlowingMindspin
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BIG BUTT BABY
Wow I went down a rabbit hole that ended with me finding a chat log or two between me and smb3fanatic. He apparently asked for help making his website better on RR's boards, and I was offering to help him fix typos and stuff... I even tried to help him use the 50megs.com file manager since he was having trouble with it.

This is where the infamous "IT'S MARIO, NOT SCHOOL!" line came from. Holy moly this is magnificent.

EDIT:

BadassBassist311: are you washing your ass pablo?
smb3fanatic: FAGGOT!
smb3fanatic: I DONT LIVE IN FUCKIN FLORIDA
BadassBassist311: pablo
BadassBassist311: pablo honey
smb3fanatic: AND IM NOT WASHIN MY DAMN ASS IM NOT IN THE SHOWER DUMBASS
smb3fanatic: SHUT UP
smb3fanatic: STOP HARASSING ME


rofl rofl rofl

EDIT 2:

smb3fanatic: YOU CALLED ME A FAG WHEn I SAID I WAS GETTIN OFF
smb3fanatic: dumbass
smb3fanatic: so hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: hah
smb3fanatic: haha

lololololololol
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FlowingMindspin
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BIG BUTT BABY
Sorry triple post but there are so many good sections from this I may just make a separate thread, sorry for kinda highjacking this.

Fuck, I was like 15 or 16 when this happened. Some of what I said was pretty terrible. But he was a massive cunt so I excuse myself.
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clawx
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WASHIN YER ASS PABLO
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clawx
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also there weren't so many 'sjws' (i hate this term) and alt-right losers on the pre 2008 internet. thats a huge plus right there.
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strx10
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Sexy Beast
What was better is the lack of on the go availability of the internet much as what Brat said. I think Smart phones really were the beginning of the end here. You add in the exploding popularity of social media being made available on smart phones and this gives Joe Everyman 'something to do' online which snowballed into everything being tailored to them much like TV and other media due to corporate interest. Then said corporations buy out one another and you have companies like Google nearly running everything so it all bleeds over. Before that you had misfits like us making our own sites, our own jokes, and being creative to occupy our time. Now it feels as if the internet is another trendy hub that we have to be involved in to stay relevant with whatever culture (Reddit, the chans, Facebook, Twitter etc...) you'd want to be associated with. Combine this with how social media is so easily accessible and all the inside jokes/content from each respective community bleed over and spread on the internet in a fast and very convenient manner which in turn makes everything feel rather stale and forced due to lack of context.

Also does anyone remember LiveJournal? It seems like we all had one at one point or another
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shunshun
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JERK
Two things.

Big Bang Theory

and

Facebook

I sure do miss watching old stupid flash cartoons, that was what took up most of my internet time, now I just read about how the world is balancing on a knifes edge and trying to get various people to play pnp games with me.

Isn't it a shame that there isn't really anyone making stupid flash cartoons anymore? I still go to new grounds and stuff some times, but it seems like no one gives a damn anymore; some people make flash games but unless you're japanese it seems like no one cares for flash anymore.

the only people I can think of that still do flash from back then are Homestar runner and Zone, and they both only put something out once a year it seems.

Edit: Eventually as things become more decentralized the internet will split into two, and guys like us will have our old style of internet back, and everyone else can have google-net
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Danihel
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I'm gonna say it like it is, you guys are looking at this like people look back at the 90s: with rose colored glasses jerking off at 1000 miles an hour with no lube.

Internet back then was slow as fuck, google was pretty shitty back in the day, everyone had to use internet explorer, and web design was utter garbage and the popups were actually obnoxious as fuck instead of mildly annoying like they are these days.

Have you guys visited an older designed website recently? It's fucking terrible, navigating it is a pain in the ass, it has these weird bars on the side that you forget existed and the color schemes are idiotic, like a black backgroudn with blue hyperlinks and beige text. If we somehow were able to make our current internet and retrograde it back to how it was at like 2005, we would be pissed. No one wants to browse geocities and look at some 15 year old's shitty webpage about nothing. It maybe was quaint back in the day when you had nothing to do all day and had already jerked off 30 times to some blurry gif.

I think most people also forget or don't want to acknowledge that tons of shit from 4chan and especially YTMND was terrible. 4chan was like a sewer that you sort through cubic meters of shit and used heroin syringes in order to find a soggy french fry that you triumphantly hold above your head when you find it; and everyone claps and celebrates this discovery, because it validates their experience of sorting through shit and heroin needles for french fries.

YTMND was like a Norm Macdonald joke turned into a website with thousands of users. Norm Macdonald jokes aren't funny, but people laugh solely because the person next to them is laughing. They celebrate the joke because they don't want to look like the 1 dumbass who doesn't get the joke. Much like that, YTMND spawned a bunch of self masturbatory "jokes" that are just shitty inside memes that have been recycled into some weird fucked up end product that someone proudly slaps a "joke" sticker on it, then proceeds to laugh with their friends at it while no one really knows why they are laughing. The process is repeated.

The reason people really miss old internet, and shit like that is simply because it's nostalgia. We remember a time when the internet was new and exciting and there was so much shit to explore. And that one french fry we found felt like we found a diamond, that we could share with our friends and laugh our asses off about. To contrast, the internet culture now is not catered to a bunch of people who played pokemon versions that consisted of colors that you could find in the rainbow, nor is it geared towards a time when first person shooters all had different equally terrible control schemes. Our experiences and memories that we cherish become less relevant as time goes on, and that sucks, but it doesn't mean I would like shitty ass post 2000 internet back.

Also big bang theory fucking sucks holy shit.
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shunshun
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JERK
I get what you're saying and appreciate it; but I find the type of person who claims nostalgia is bad, or the only reason, is insufferable.

I'll just summarize it by saying this; tech has marched forward and is better than ever, but as a whole we have degraded socially which is probably where the real root of our topic stems.

The same could be said for our culture as a whole, but really a lot of what we loved as a kids was objectively better in a lot of respects even if it was clumsily made.
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