What do you miss the most about "the internet of old"?

Its funny seeing the "kids are so open with personal info now" because while that is true, I also know that was absolutely true of the old internet. Kids/teens are just less likely to full grasp those boundaries unless they are set early, and I know as a kid who grew up on the internet and didn't have a ton of irl friends I was just as forthcoming about my personal life online as I was offline. It is definitely worse now, but I do not think it is at all a new phenomenon.

After all, there's always that all-too-relatable joke of kids who are friends with grown ass adults in MMOs where the adult is venting to them about their divorce or whatever.

Anyways to contribute to the thread. I'd say that another nice aspect of forums vs social media in particular is that forums are less inherently addicting due to a general dripfeed of response and relevant-to-you content (and no predatory algorithms and market incentives :p). On top of this posting on a forum is a far more intentional act. There has to be a space in the forum to discuss what you want to discuss and a thread either has to already exist or you have to make one with the intent for discussion. Social media tends to encourage and be built for stream-of-consciousness blog type posting where you are only posting because you want to, not with any real discussion or tools to organize healthy discussion.

I lowkey think tumblr is the only social media website to come close to getting it right. Tons of personalization for your blog which lets you treat it as a sort of personal website and with the tag system and posting-capabilities of forums (not locked to just 280 characters with no customization) you actually get a handful of the best parts of forums and a handful of the best parts of social media. Still has issues like any format does, but it is the closest to being a healthy environment overall.
 
weltanschauung123 said:
During the pandemic, I joined a manga reading club on Discord - literally downloaded the app for this reason alone - with a bunch of Gen Z kids and I was floored by how casual they were about revealing their identities, places of residence, etc. Back in the olden days, you'd hang out with people on message boards for years/decades and not know their names. It dawned on me how the internet really is real life for the young'uns.

Fan sites and forums were where I spent most of my time. Particularly for those of us into anime, the fact that video sharing online was a bit hard - even when torrents came round, most of us had broadband too shitty to fully enjoy it - and that you had to basically pay some dude in Hong Kong to mail you a VHS tape to watch, say, the End of Evangelion, guaranteed that whatever discussion could be had about the topic was bound to be interesting. Only the committed made it through.

YouTube (2006) & Facebook (2007) is when the old internet died.
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a close friend of mine still has not revealed her name; i only know her nation of residence due to conversation about a few things, and that she had to travel to the US for work. this is how things used to be, so it isn't strange to me, but children now... no, not even children. there are adults, 18, 19, 20... they aren't private either.
 
Discord, twitter, and other brainrot garbage social media didn't exist making it more difficult for people who are not passionate about their hobbies to invade and change thing's.
 
I miss how not only you had a site for each thing, but they most certainly had dozens upon dozens of personalized buttons from "partners" that would take you to different communities, each one unique and with that artisanal feel. My favorites bar used to be so much bigger...
This forum does have that comfy feel from the past, but it must be because I was never much of a forum guy + the ones I joined kept dying.
fake said:
Speaking of forum Let's Plays, I love reading and re-reading MMBN ones just because they're so funny.

This Let's Play for MMBN4 is my favorite.
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Oh man, LPs like this are great. This Riviera one is so silly, but actually placated my desire to replay it on two occasions.
 
Honestly I miss the variety. There used to be so many wild and weird websites for everything under the sun. I used to be part of a digimon forum that had it's own built in little RPG function with levels and digivolution lines. There was similar back then for FF tactics and megaman x. Heck, I remember one of the first rom websites I was on was a whole forum that doled out points for making posts, points you spent to download said roms.
 
I could echo almost everything said in this thread so far but I think what I've most grown to miss was that for a long time most of the people using the internet had pretty similar experiences and interests. There were definitely exceptions but for the most part people would be able to recognize homage or a parody of something - people would constantly slip little references to genre films, one-hit wonder songs or some obnoxious real world person or concept and it could be assumed that their audience would get it intuitively.

Once the online space 'opened up' to mainstream culture this entire vibe was annihilated and none of the younger people who were brought up on the 'new' internet feel any attachment to this old culture and have no interest in learning about it. Some of it is just irrelevance, console wars don't matter because nothing is exclusive, dubs vs. subs is a moot issue because new fans just get fed whatever the streaming service offers. Forum etiquette, basic trolling and general internet opsec are now these antiquated ideas and these new users just seem lazy and dull by comparison. I hate feeling like an old man online but there's no escaping it now.

There's a quote from the historian Edward Gibbon about the post Roman society that I keep thinking about - And while it's definitely a bit melodramatic, it's starting to really sink in for me that the old days are over and we won't have it that good again.
"In the last stage of their decline, the cities of the empire were still adorned with libraries, with schools, and with porticoes; and in the conduct of the magistrates, and the intercourse of private life, the image of science and civility was faintly reflected. But the genius of the Romans was no longer capable of producing works which might excite the admiration of posterity... ignorant of the art, the barbarians neglected the wonders of their predecessors."
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I just remembered something:

a couple of years ago, some people who think like this about the "old internet" have created a new version of "gopher" (which was the thing directly before the WWW, evidently the WWW was even announced first on gopher)

anyway, wikipedia tells more:

Gemini (protocol) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

maybe it's useful or fun for somebody. i checked it out briefly before... it seemed like there were a lot of people who liked collaborative writing projects on there.
 
susuel said:
In my opinion the humor and stickman fight animations of this era were unbeatable.

I believe that flash animation and games are sorely missed nowadays too.
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oh yeah Stick Death was awesome XD
 
susuel said:
In my opinion the humor and stickman fight animations of this era were unbeatable.

I believe that flash animation and games are sorely missed nowadays too.
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Absolutely.

I didn't know anyone who wasn't a huge Alejo & Valentina fan:


I also spent way too much time playing on MiniJuegos XD
 
ThirdEidolon said:
lack of corporate propaganda. or at least how it was a lot more subtle and control was still limited.
Post automatically merged:


wow that takes me back. newgrounds. damn.
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I still laugh at who killed tupac (even tho i know i shouldnt)

look atCHYO HANDS, tupac! they ORANGE!
 
I'm 20 years old and pretty soon to be 21, but I spent more time than I'd like to admit on the Internet as a kid (I think you can gleam my experiences in school from that...). What I miss is you could actually 'surf' the Web. Nowadays it's the same 3 or 4 sites, but even 10 years ago, not too far into the past, there was so much to see.

The Internet and old Web 1.0 sites were what made me fall in love with linguistics and languages, a field I still really love today and plan on pursuing in my Master's if the Lord sees fit. I know what I want to do, I have something I'm truly passionate about, and it's thanks in no small part to the Web.

www.omniglot.com

Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages

A guide to writing systems and languages, with useful phrases, tips on learning languages, multilingual texts, and much more.
www.omniglot.com www.omniglot.com
I loved this site as a kid. I still go on it because it really is a beautiful resource for languages. You could spend hours like I did looking at writing systems, obscure languages, and all sorts of stuff like that. There's a few more sites but that's the main one for me.
 
Sandteufel said:
I'm 20 years old and pretty soon to be 21, but I spent more time than I'd like to admit on the Internet as a kid (I think you can gleam my experiences in school from that...). What I miss is you could actually 'surf' the Web. Nowadays it's the same 3 or 4 sites, but even 10 years ago, not too far into the past, there was so much to see.

The Internet and old Web 1.0 sites were what made me fall in love with linguistics and languages, a field I still really love today and plan on pursuing in my Master's if the Lord sees fit. I know what I want to do, I have something I'm truly passionate about, and it's thanks in no small part to the Web.

www.omniglot.com

Omniglot - the online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages

A guide to writing systems and languages, with useful phrases, tips on learning languages, multilingual texts, and much more.
www.omniglot.com www.omniglot.com
I loved this site as a kid. I still go on it because it really is a beautiful resource for languages. You could spend hours like I did looking at writing systems, obscure languages, and all sorts of stuff like that. There's a few more sites but that's the main one for me.
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There really is a lot to see, still, you just have to force yourself to get out there and explore the various niches.

try using things like https://yandex.com to search the web or try using https://f-droid.org/ to get apps.

try getting a gemini browser (see my previous post).

check out the https://www.fediverse.to/
or https://joinmastodon.org/


try searching for videos using https://miru.watch or https://bilibili.com

the thing about it is, nobody is advertising these waves, so you have to seek the surf!
 
I miss the old warez sites. I remember everyone saying "you'll always be able to find anything and everything on the Internet". Not so, I can spend hours searching for an old song, obscure DOS tool or game and it's simply not to be found. These things don't generate ad revenue and have no place on The New Internet (C)
 
I don't get why some people here are saying that you used to be free to say anything online without risk. I'm guessing either the rose-tinted glasses are on or memories are fading. Either way, it was never that way either online or offline.

Small forums had mods who policed hard and made rules their clique followers obeyed and enforced. Getting banned was a common occurrence for the slightest out of line comment. Bigger forums had a TOS you were expected to read through and follow, and they were stricter than the rules we have these days. Swearing could get you banned from GameFAQs, for instance. The only "anything goes" forums were the ones run by the guys everyone else was trying to keep out because they were filled with seriously messed up people. (Keep in mind, we had a domestic terrorism problem in the 90s, and people were afraid of those guys joining forums, as they were known to have their own and to try infiltrating others.)

Today, we have social media corporations that are completely amoral, not concerned about little things like swearing, and not concerned about the big problems either. Some of the stuff people post on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Pixiv, and other big sites would have got them permabanned from 95% of all forums back in the day.

Yes, you can get "cancelled" now, but cancelling actually does less now than ever before. Celebrities who got cancelled often make more money and get more opportunities after being cancelled. (Notice Mr Beast got a TV show, and the Paul brothers are swimming in post-dead body desecration money.) This is a far cry from the 90s, when Dave Sim's career went from "darling author of Cerebus the Aardvark" to "lunatic who will never succeed in the field again" after he went on his notorious rants. Granted, people got away with a lot back then too, but when the public was aware of it, they got truly cancelled; they only got away with the things not widely printed in the media or ignored by TV.

Fact of the matter is, social media doesn't care what you say as long as you make them money. When money wasn't a part of it, people insisted on having decent communities, for better or for worse. And there's a mix of that now: we're better in that it's easier to avoid being censored over basic social faux pas, but we're worse in that every idiot is allowed to cry "freeze peach" to get away with everything from harmful behavior to illegal behavior.
 
miguk said:
Getting banned was a common occurrence for the slightest out of line comment. Bigger forums had a TOS you were expected to read through and follow, and they were stricter than the rules we have these days.
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I completely agree.

I was once banned for posting a clearly ironic message in all caps. Some forums still have the same rule set they had 20 years ago and are dead as a result, basically open archives.
 
To this day, I still feel a sense of unease if I write anything other than an acronym in all caps. Even if I haven't checked the rules or don't even remember why, I get the feeling that I'm doing something that could somehow get me in trouble.
 
miguk said:
To this day, I still feel a sense of unease if I write anything other than an acronym in all caps.
Click to expand...
WELL AREN’T YOU SPECIAL

I used to get flack for doing this in the early 2010s, but I think people have generally chilled out about it. Don’t ask me why all-lowercase no-punctuation typing is OK, but all-uppercase isn’t…
 
Gorse said:
WELL AREN’T YOU SPECIAL

I used to get flack for doing this in the early 2010s, but I think people have generally chilled out about it. Don’t ask me why all-lowercase no-punctuation typing is OK, but all-uppercase isn’t…
Click to expand...
Because the generation using forums at the time was the same one bred on cellphones, a lawless place in which complete sentences, grammar and spelling were a capital offense. Reading archived versions of tween and teen-centered forums makes me feel like an explorer coming across a long-forgotten, secret language.
 

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