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

[Boo Man]

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…

CAPS LOCK CREW!

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.

thankfully we now have the grammar police
and spell check

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

CAPS LOCK CREW!


thankfully we now have the grammar police
and spell check

 

[newageretrohippie]

I CAN"T CONTROL THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!!!

 

[Boo Man]

I CAN"T CONTROL THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!!!

 

[OWG]

things i miss from the internet of old would be the aforementioned blog culture but also just everything smaller back then and there was just better content back then as a result because for example if you wanted to look up on how the "rear poop extractor" developed by "Bangooley Corp" for their Bangerian Stock Car program worked you would usually find a decently researched and fun to read article about it on an enthusiast's blog, today on the other hand you might find that but you are also more likely to be bombarded with suspiciously high view count videos titled "How Bangooley Corp came to Bangerian Stock Cars... AND WON" with some utterly obnoxious thumbnail and then you watch it only to realize its HORRIBLY researched and somehow he isnt being made fun of in the comments(which is to do with how YT's comment system essentially just facilitates echo chambers) and is in fact being CELEBRATED
you can find ENDLESS examples of what i just described and i want to say that every little thing involved in this is vile

 

[miguk]

For the record, ® and ™ can be typed rather than created with an image.

There are sites out there with detailed info on obscure things still. Wikipedia is still alive, and various other sites continue on. It's just that more people are doing it through monetizable platforms like YouTube now. That's a double edge sword, of course; on the one hand, if visuals help more for the specific task than just text, it's better. On the other hand, YouTube is an asinine algo-hell, so you're just as likely to be led away from what you want as you are to be led to it.

 

[OWG]

For the record, ® and ™ can be typed rather than created with an image.

There are sites out there with detailed info on obscure things still. Wikipedia is still alive, and various other sites continue on. It's just that more people are doing it through monetizable platforms like YouTube now. That's a double edge sword, of course; on the one hand, if visuals help more for the specific task than just text, it's better. On the other hand, YouTube is an asinine algo-hell, so you're just as likely to be led away from what you want as you are to be led to it.

i know and i did mention you can still find that sort of stuff but the fact that it exists and i have to deal with so much misinfo coming from these things when i talk to people about things makes me a bit pissed, i also just really hate the echo-chamber nature of youtube it's frankly a strange state

 

[Another Iori]

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.

The forums are virtual projections of uninhabited islands devoid of any form of life, which Instead of floating on real water, they are suspended above this vast synthetic ocean called the internet.

Therefore, being places without a soul, it is only the state in which they were created; their administrative management and the people who frequent them through their avatars, which give the forums a certain type of environment and personality.

These variables are highly diverse and make each place very unique and not perfectly identical to any other.

Given what has just been said, it is easy to acknowledge that even in the past, there were forums that were very strict and intransigent, like the ones you mentioned.

However, that does not reflect a unique reality of how things were back then, because during the same time period, there were also gathering places where almost no rules whatsoever applied.

This led to words and actions that today would not even be conceivable on certain image boards named with numbers and suffixes, which seem almost honorific.

Let me give you some practical examples.

When I was in high school, there was this 'classmate' of mine who looking back probably exhibited psychopathic traits, because he had an obsessive fascination with looking at photos and videos of people who had been victims of car accidents.

At the time, these were easily visible in the first row of Google Images (there was no blur filter), while today on WhatsApp, I'm not even able send a video of myself eating a chocolate during the summer, because since it was slightly melted, the algorithm apparently has thought that it was that other similar thing, which usually comes from an intermediate area, which is located between the back and the legs...

 

[demons-souls]

480p AMVs

I mean, today we have tiktok/shorts/reels edits, but those absolutely do not hit the same as AMVs did

 

[Husky]

I made a few Geocities sites that have been lost in time. In 1999 I made my own Resident Evil fan site. I even made a few pages where I shared some NES ROMs and reviewed the games I uploaded.

I mostly miss how the internet didn't make so many people insane like it does now. Yeesh.

 

[AnonymousCookieMonster]

Kinda miss the 90's look of HTML 1.1, of gifs littering pages with Diablo and Doom fonts.

Miss the overt simplicity of it all.

And NOT SEEING CAPTCHA EVERY OTHER SCREEN!

 

[Vittum_Vancourt]

Things I miss about the old internet:
-Decentralization
-That they were not very politicized as they are today
-A greater variety of forums or blogs on specific topics

 

[RanmyakuIchi's iconRanmyakuIchi]

It's hard to explain, but I suppose I miss the "Amateur" nature of content on the old internet. Like folks would make flash videos with mediocre art or sprites and still get a lot of attention. A lot of it aged like milk admittedly, but I just find something so deeply charming and human about such things.

That old Akuma vs Chameleon flash video still lives rent free in my head lol.

 

[Jeff]

- Flash games, fan made videos from 2004 Newgrounds
-Anime Fan sites before Wiki
-Youtube before the deadly algorithm arrived with its advertising, copyright laws and having everything to be PG for children

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I really, really miss the old "Music" pages on sites, which showed you what was popular amongst your peers. It was a great way to get introduced to amazing new bands!

 

[Lazerith]

I don't know how old any of you are.
But I have been on the internet since the 14.4 days of dial-up.
Yes, kiddies, at one point in time, a small 100 KB .GIF would have taken anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute to load.

I do NOT miss that.

I do, however, miss the lack of pop-up ads. Yes, there were some ads, very few and far between.
not 5 per page you scroll to now, like many sites have

 

[CaesariusMagnum]

There was a community for nearly everything. I think I might miss that the most. A second thing is old youtube.

 

[MegaHiro91]

I get it, man.

I'm from the last generation to enjoy the internet as something you had to chain yourself to twenty kilograms of computer in order to enjoy. I miss that divide.

Same. Though I do use social media less now I miss when our phones weren't miniature super computer, which meant, as you guys said, that if you wanted to check messages on facebook, myspace, or arto, you had to wait till you were at a computer. The fact that our phones can do anything now means we are chained to them 24/7. We don't see what's around us.

Post automatically merged: Feb 3, 2025

I miss YouTube before censorship. Now a days where people who don't wanna go outside to get a real job have realised they can stay at home and make money on daily clickbait, they have to adhere to YouTube's stricter and stricter guidelines, meaning certain things can't be shown and certain words can't be uttered. I see content creators all the time jokingly say "...unfortunately I can say/show you this or I'll get demonitized..." again, because YouTube is their "job" now. On that note, I miss when YouTube was 240p homemade videos shot on a 3 megapixel camera.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I miss being able to talk more freely, even if it wasn't a particularly great idea.

I remember reading topics asking for (and giving) relationship advice, complaining about school and social life, even a thread deliciously named "B*** about your parents". Not sure that would fly today, and that's really sad.

 

[jiyuuboyetsvi]

This one might surprise most people; forum lets plays.
Let’s plays begun as a forum thing, people started a thread, they’d discuss a game they’re playing for the first time and share thoughts and images about the game and everyone discusses OP’s experience and reactions.

This is how I found out about DanganRonpa was by reading Slowbeef's forum lets play on the somethingawful forums.

A thing I really miss is old Youtube. Having to watch anime episodes in 3 separate parts, the annotations, friends lists, the Private Message system. Youtube felt a lot more cool back then.

Ever since corpos invaded and started forcing monetization into everything to suck every last drop of cash from us, the internet hasn't been the same.

 

[miguk]

I miss being able to talk more freely, even if it wasn't a particularly great idea.

I remember reading topics asking for (and giving) relationship advice, complaining about school and social life, even a thread deliciously named "B*** about your parents". Not sure that would fly today, and that's really sad.

I remember the IGN forums had a section for tips for life skills with a ton of threads that were just "how to do sexual stuff correctly." It was quite helpful, to say the least. You wouldn't see something like that on a commercial video game website today.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I remember the IGN forums had a section for tips for life skills with a ton of threads that were just "how to do sexual stuff correctly." It was quite helpful, to say the least. You wouldn't see something like that on a commercial video game website today.

12GraceStreet was the same, although they really should have had moderators in there...

 

[demons-souls]

Old Last.fm, which had its own forums and such. A way more social site back in the day

 

[RetroCasual]

Hummm... As long as we still have most of the stuff we got then, I don't really miss anything, except for the MSN Messenger, which was my main way to keep connected with friends while I was at home.

 

[MistHunter]

I'm missing MSN, for Emoticon's sake.
Wanted to create my own stuff, years ago.

Maybe I can find that old program I wanted years ago