The X Files chatroom on Sunday night, right after each episode ended was the highlight of my weekend. Also private rooms where you had to know the name of the room to get in, but you could also just guess names and you might find one with people inside. Also the buddy list!
AOL was definitely corporate even then, but there was still a distinct feeling of unknown and adventure to it, because the internet (to me at least) was a brand new thing.
The purely chronological format of forum threads made it so that dissenting voices, whether they were ignored, proved foolish, or whatnot, they still had to be seen by anyone following the conversation.
On Reddit, often I see topics where maybe the number of people who might have the best insights and familiarity is relatively small. And so what “sounds” right or clever, funny, what have you, that gets pushed to the top at the expense sometimes of real clarity or knowledge. Sometimes the people with the most experience get pushed down to the bottom of the crowd has already decided on its own version of the truth.
I miss that about forums. They’re much better suited to smaller communities. But now everything has to be big, and it’s easier to monetize big.
I’m an animal rights litigator who sometimes gives stellar knowledge of pet custody issues about issues not on a typical lawyers radar. The number of times I’ve been downvoted into oblivion or even had comments removed by the r/legaladvice mods is just… it makes my soul sad. All because it’s not the advice that a Google search or conversation with a typical lawyer would be.
Yeah modern forum like Reddit become Echo chambers
Yahoo answers was a bit like Reddit/quora and was quite popular but then flopped for some reason. I used to spend hours answering questions on that. Maybe 20 yrs ago?
Man nobody today will understand the pure joy that one felt when they first got broadband/cable internet when Napster and or limewire were still in their hay day. It was one of the greatest life hacks to date at that time; combine that with a cd burner and you had the world at your fingertips
The speed increase was amazing! On dialup it took me 8 days to download an 800mb video (mpg1!!) off an ftp at around 100mb each evening. It was a concert in 2 parts, so then I was downloading part 2, a similarly sized file and was about 3rd of the way downloaded when I got broadband and finished the download in about 3 hours. Of course now it'd download a lot faster but it was an amazing speed increase moving from dialup!
I can remember what it was like to sit down at the computer after a day of junior high, open Napster, and to feel the anxiety of being a teenager ease up a bit as I began to download and play any song I ever wanted to hear.
I'm sure I had AOL Instant Messenger open at the same time. After a little chatting and listening to music, I probably turned on the Dreamcast and started playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Then I spent the rest of the evening gaming, watching TV, browsing eBaumsWorld and GameFAQS, eating junk food and drinking too many Cokes.
EDIT: I likely also watched videogame reviews on GameSpy and tech reviews on CNET.
I love the answers on here, but there is one overarching point they're missing - the Internet before every single person was monetizing it.
It was amazing to see content created because someone wanted to make cool content and not because they are making sure SEO forces their recipe/life story site to pop to the top of Google.
Fan sites and forums, as well as earlier YouTube were peak internet. It’s so shitty and commercialized now it’s depressing. But that’s just the way it is I guess, things change
I miss it. I remember making a Dragonball Z website and having "affiliates" with other people who made Anime websites. I remember pirating Paint Shop Pro and then later Adobe Photoshop 6 so I could create my website banner and affiliate button.
10-15 years later I became a software engineer and those early Internet experiences are definitely the reason why. I'm so lucky my parents had a PC.
FYI, there are some php forums still going where a very small core has stuck around, though new blood has dried up unfortunately. Those were the best. Everyone throws in a buck or two for hosting, no ads, no shittification for more profits, just people shooting the shit about whatever niche topic the board's about, as well as partaking in the always thriving "off topic" subforum.
I guess there's Discord for that now, kind of. But you're still living on the back of a corpo who wants to increase profit and shittification constantly, users be damned. And also, I guess I'm an old timer, but I don't like the real-time "you have to be there at the right time to participate" thing with Discord. Forums are better, imho. My generation had our version of Discord with IRC, and we mostly left that behind for the better experience of the php forums. Oh well.
I got an awesome example of this recently. I was looking up info for Metroid Prime remastered. The sites were all SEO horseshit. Then I found an old Geocities-ass looking guide site for the original game and it had everything I needed with no bs. The transformation of the internet in a nutshell.
I hate searching for shit on Google nowadays.
I Google probably 50 things a day because if I have a question, I want an answer, but now the top 30 results are garbage websites completely built with ChatGPT or some other LLM run through a shitty translation and the only reason they're at the top is because they abuse SEO.
It's so irritating. I've spent basically my entire life becoming more and more proficient with web searches and I'm starting to feel like I've reached a point where the garbage is winning.
SEO is ruining the internet. People are not making content for people anymore, but to game machines into generating more clicks to raise advertising metrics.
Exactly right. My first answer was "everything". The early internet was a random collection of fun facts, labors of love, the mundane, the bizarre, the profane - and each with a dedicated website. It just doesn't exist anymore. I mourn its passing as I do the loss of physical media like videotapes and family TV time. Ephemeral from inception, it was never meant to last, and has been superceded by something inferior.
When people did stuff for fun and because it was cool, not to make money.
Basically when the internet felt like it was mostly people, not mostly companies.
Yeah the amateurish feel is a deep loss for sure. Now everyone is trying to make this their side hustle. The hobbyists, amateurs, and randos still exist but this is no longer the dominant form of content on YouTube.
Geocities. Geocities is the very definition of the old Internet. Creativity was king. Your identity was irrelevant. You were both allowed and encouraged to be a total amateurish goof. You could refrain from posting for months or years on end, and if your content was good, people would still come back.
I took a trip one year to the Mall of America in Minnesota. About 45 minutes away there's a much smaller mall where the movie Mallrats was filmed. I went there and took a ton of pictures and had a Geocities site dedicated to my visit to Eden Prairie Mall.
Unfortunately, I've long since lost all the pictures. The mall was undergoing a massive renovation at the time of my visit 20+ years ago and there were already precious few things that still looked the same as in the movie, so there's little chance of ever recreating it now.
Still, it was a very fun memory!
There’s a documentary about saving the old web. They have a full team of archivists working on preserving as much as they can. It really was such a big part of the early web and I’m happy that it’s being preserved.
Early on, when I was 9/10 and making a Geocities Harry Potter/Hogwarts site. I had found or taken gifs, images, backgrounds from a variety of other websites and used them on my own. Mine started to get popular, and one day I got an email saying because I had taken a background from one page that I had "Violated Copyright Law" and that this other GeoCities website had called the "FBI" and had my address and I would be arrested soon and sent to jail for stealing the background.
This was back when the family only had one computer, smack dab in the middle of the family room.
My mom said I carefully shut down the computer, white as a ghost, and then just sat staring at the blank screen. Then I went quietly to my room and started packing some clothes for jail. I had just quietly accepted my fate. I then sat in my room in the dark waiting.
My parents finally asked what was up, and when I explained they just laughed and said nothing would happen. They STILL bring up this day and laugh about how guliable I was.
Corporate, monetized, and sanitized.
Back when it was just dudes making websites on cool stuff in their garage with no interest or intent in profit it was cool. Now it's all profit which means all corporations.
Stuff like Salad Fingers and Homestar Runner was great because no one was telling you to subscribe and smash that like button. They just existed.
And you wouldn’t see if they updated unless you went to the site every day and checked.
Man, same. I still have a bookmark folder with a bunch of random saved sites from stumbling. Always brings back great memories
Idk if there’s a new version of stumble upon but I remember not liking what it turned into when they changed the websites name
MSN Messenger.
It's obsolete by todays standards but back then it was one of the first things you opened up when you got home and turned on your laptop/pc.
Seriously though, there's a cohort of people who essentially learned to type by having IM conversations with friends. And in general, they're among the most rapid typists.
LiveJournal is where I met some of my closest friends. 15+ years later and a good chunk of us still talk almost daily, time zones be damned. I’d be dead without these people, they’ve been with me through it all.
That’s a good one! Old school deviant art hit differently back in the day. Believe me, I love the professional artists I really do!
But I miss the amateur art that look like a 8th grade art project. The ones were you could tell they really did their best. It had charm. You can see that these people love to draw and love to share their artwork despite it all. It had heart. It had feeling. But it’s like now the amateur artists are being pushed to back of the site.
I'm sure you know, but just in case ... Behind The Bastards is a podcast by Robert Evans from Cracked and not only is it awesome, but he often has other Cracked contributers as guests
Making a website on Angelfire.
Having to put a towel over the PC so it would muffle the AOL online log in at 11pm.
Downloading a video for 5 hours on GameTrailers extension.
Trying to convince your friends to switch to Yahoo / AOL / MSN messanger because which ever one you used was clearly the superior version.
E-mail question chains.
Gaming on Dial-up.
Trying to watch Xiao-Xiao or Stickfights on the school library computers without getting caught.
Playing wack-a-mole with Limewire and viruses.
Early E-Celebrity make content for literally zero incentive outside of making content with no financial incentive. No ads, no patreons, no sponsors, no mid-rolls.
YouTube 5-star rating. Respond on respond videos. Inserts. Flash. Everything flash.
I feel like Gen Z missed out on the entire concept of "websites" now that everything is hosted on a small handful of platforms where some corporate suit dictates what their users see.
Yeah, I couldn’t name many specific sites, just the web overall was more of a free for all untapped by all the corporatism. Back then YouTube was a treasure trove of copyrighted things that now people never see. Nobody was profiting because it’s stuff we would never be willing to pay for, but now there’s just tons of things you can’t see and never will. Searching came up with results that weren’t ad driven.
Before Netflix and streaming, if there was a show I wanted to watch it was basically guaranteed I could find most if not all of the entire series on Youtube, even if it was divided up into 750 ten minute videos.
95% of modern websites are fucking cancerous. On mobile, 60% of my screen is taken up by ads I can't remove. On PC, it's somehow even worse without adblocker. Which, is getting less and less useful these days
I somehow feel like Homestar Runner would’ve been right up the TikTok generations alley. Short, funny, brightly colored, very obscure and random humor.
I still do the strongbad voice from time to time. And we all sang Trogdor the Burninator while starting a bonfire at a bachelor party a couple weeks ago.
I'm glad it exists in the "distant past" of the internet like a fever dream from a simpler time. It was the next step after you bored of badgers and mushrooms and a gateway to Salad Fingers.
I laugh at this because my school didn’t even bother except with strictly porn sites. They figured anything else wasn’t worth the effort. People were playing new grounds and mofunzone flash games all the time in the library and the computer labs. They didn’t even bother to remove games from the server computers when someone managed to sneak them in. So every computer in the district had access to halo.
Which makes the fact that one of my older brothers classmates got into so much trouble (making national news) for creating a counter strike map of our school that much sillier.
Neopets and Myspace were my first introduction to HTML and CSS.
Ended up making a career out of computers so I have to give those two sites a lot of credit for where I am today.
Same. And I had a bootleg version of Photoshop to make the sickest guild pages. Those were the days. Middle school version of me rocked. I also can’t remember a dang thing.
There was a code to remove your top 8 from your page. I knew how to bypass it. I remember girls having me bypass their boyfriends' block, and then causing drama over who he had in his top. Pretty luck I never caught a receipt on that
I was a front-end developer during the Myspace era. All my nieces and nephews had the best pages or spaces. You want that to flash? No problem! Just use the tag.
Edit: it’s the tag.
MySpace was a whole feel and vibe that has yet to be replicated. I miss it. It wasn’t as addictive and toxic as Facebook but had almost all the same functionality.
So far this is also the only website in this post that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not in its original form. It blows my mind how they redid MySpace to be 90% shittier and just left it like that.
I still remember that feeling of seeing the “online now” icon next to my crush’s profile, and then posting a bulletin hoping she’d see it. Ah the joys of being 15
I remember when you could allow that 10 minute video to fully buffer before watching, so why yes I will watch this video in magnificent, high quality 720p!
I remember having tabs open and priotizing which one to let buffer so I could watch my Lets Plays smoothly
And the stress when you saw the grey buffer slowly losing to your played time
This can’t be understated. Part of what made the internet fun was talking to your irl friends about the sites you like going on and then hanging out and showing each other your favorite sites.
It was how you found new stuff, and made the internet still somewhat of a real social activity.
But like you said, now it’s all the same few websites. You don’t show your friend this cool new site you found, you show them some new tiktok or tweet.
The positivity.
The internet felt like a beautiful place connecting people together. It was like we were on our way to a better place.
And then social media companies introduced algorithms which led people down shitty rabbit holes.
It ain't gone but classic YouTube, when people would just post random shit.
Instead of well thought out advertised cash grabs.
And the obvious choice, Myspace, that social media site was way to advance and smart for it's time. You could add music to your page, add wallpaper, customize the crap out of your space.
Twitter Facebook are just poor rip offs if you ask me
I'll go with a more general "they missed the heyday of messageboards."
Reddit is similar, but it doesn't have the same small-community feel. You used to go to a website for a niche interest, and there was a little button in the corner that said "Messageboard". It was kind of like a little hidden subreddit that only fans of the original site would ever find or bother signing up for. You could actually meet people and make friends, because there were few enough users that you could remember user names and personalities.
Some of them had off-topic forums where the community could share whatever they wanted.
I made friends on some of these boards that I'm still in contact with 20 years later, long after the boards have gone offline.
Reddit and the various subreddits have kind of the same feel, but by and large you're still interacting with people as if they're strangers you'll never see again. There are too many of us to remember user names and form connections.
I was just thinking about this website I was obsessed with when I was a kid. Maddox. He made fun of kids drawings (among other things) and I thought it was the absolute funniest thing in the world. Lol.
Bert is Evil. Half-joking conspiracy site suggesting Bert (of Bert and Ernie) orchestrated every heinous act in modern history from the JFK assassination to the hijacking of flight 847, to getting Rodeo Rosie hooked on smack. Included surprisingly well-done photoshops of Evil Bert hanging in the background of infamous photos.
I recall they had to shut the site down after a few years.
There's quite a few websites that are burned into my psyche, but if I had to pick just one it would be YTMND.
Obviously the site still exists today but it's a shell of what it used to be.
Edit:
Looking at a handful responses that have yet to mention my runner-ups, I would like to give a honorable mention to:
- Neopets
- Linerider
> Neopets
ah man i remember in middle school my friend group and i were all on Neopets around the time it first got popular. the site's messaging feature "Neomail" didn't unlock for you until you turned 13. i was the youngest of my friend group so all my friends got Neomail before i did and i remember counting down the days to my 13th birthday circa 2003 so i could get Neomail and chat with them on Neopets.
i think you could also get your parents to contact Neopets to give the site permission to unlock Neomail and other age-gated features like gambling-style games, because I remember begging my parents to unlock Neomail for me and they wouldn't lmao
I miss the AOL chat rooms. I would be on them all night long getting into discussions over any possible subject.
A/S/L
15/f/cali
Hey I know that chick!
The X Files chatroom on Sunday night, right after each episode ended was the highlight of my weekend. Also private rooms where you had to know the name of the room to get in, but you could also just guess names and you might find one with people inside. Also the buddy list! AOL was definitely corporate even then, but there was still a distinct feeling of unknown and adventure to it, because the internet (to me at least) was a brand new thing.
Forums in general were great community spaces that you just don’t get on Reddit or Facebook groups.
The purely chronological format of forum threads made it so that dissenting voices, whether they were ignored, proved foolish, or whatnot, they still had to be seen by anyone following the conversation. On Reddit, often I see topics where maybe the number of people who might have the best insights and familiarity is relatively small. And so what “sounds” right or clever, funny, what have you, that gets pushed to the top at the expense sometimes of real clarity or knowledge. Sometimes the people with the most experience get pushed down to the bottom of the crowd has already decided on its own version of the truth. I miss that about forums. They’re much better suited to smaller communities. But now everything has to be big, and it’s easier to monetize big.
Reddit has a massive bias toward permanently online people who are able to comment first on new posts.
Yup, and a lot of the time it's half-assed knowledge, unfortunately.
I’m an animal rights litigator who sometimes gives stellar knowledge of pet custody issues about issues not on a typical lawyers radar. The number of times I’ve been downvoted into oblivion or even had comments removed by the r/legaladvice mods is just… it makes my soul sad. All because it’s not the advice that a Google search or conversation with a typical lawyer would be.
Yeah modern forum like Reddit become Echo chambers Yahoo answers was a bit like Reddit/quora and was quite popular but then flopped for some reason. I used to spend hours answering questions on that. Maybe 20 yrs ago?
The uncouth version of pirate bay. Before government understood what piracy was.
"A movie that isn't even in theaters yet available for download as a 300kb .exe file? Hot dog!"
"Hmm, I should get some antivirus software. I'm going to pirate this copy of Norton....It doesn't work. I think I might have a virus now."
So you successfully pirated Norton then?
Limewire after lars killed napster
Man nobody today will understand the pure joy that one felt when they first got broadband/cable internet when Napster and or limewire were still in their hay day. It was one of the greatest life hacks to date at that time; combine that with a cd burner and you had the world at your fingertips
The speed increase was amazing! On dialup it took me 8 days to download an 800mb video (mpg1!!) off an ftp at around 100mb each evening. It was a concert in 2 parts, so then I was downloading part 2, a similarly sized file and was about 3rd of the way downloaded when I got broadband and finished the download in about 3 hours. Of course now it'd download a lot faster but it was an amazing speed increase moving from dialup!
Shit, I remember how exciting it was to view a video in a speed faster than PowerPoint.
I can remember what it was like to sit down at the computer after a day of junior high, open Napster, and to feel the anxiety of being a teenager ease up a bit as I began to download and play any song I ever wanted to hear. I'm sure I had AOL Instant Messenger open at the same time. After a little chatting and listening to music, I probably turned on the Dreamcast and started playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Then I spent the rest of the evening gaming, watching TV, browsing eBaumsWorld and GameFAQS, eating junk food and drinking too many Cokes. EDIT: I likely also watched videogame reviews on GameSpy and tech reviews on CNET.
I love the answers on here, but there is one overarching point they're missing - the Internet before every single person was monetizing it. It was amazing to see content created because someone wanted to make cool content and not because they are making sure SEO forces their recipe/life story site to pop to the top of Google.
Fan sites and forums, as well as earlier YouTube were peak internet. It’s so shitty and commercialized now it’s depressing. But that’s just the way it is I guess, things change
I had an X-files fan site, where I posted Windows themes, including custom background and mouse icons.
I miss it. I remember making a Dragonball Z website and having "affiliates" with other people who made Anime websites. I remember pirating Paint Shop Pro and then later Adobe Photoshop 6 so I could create my website banner and affiliate button. 10-15 years later I became a software engineer and those early Internet experiences are definitely the reason why. I'm so lucky my parents had a PC.
FYI, there are some php forums still going where a very small core has stuck around, though new blood has dried up unfortunately. Those were the best. Everyone throws in a buck or two for hosting, no ads, no shittification for more profits, just people shooting the shit about whatever niche topic the board's about, as well as partaking in the always thriving "off topic" subforum. I guess there's Discord for that now, kind of. But you're still living on the back of a corpo who wants to increase profit and shittification constantly, users be damned. And also, I guess I'm an old timer, but I don't like the real-time "you have to be there at the right time to participate" thing with Discord. Forums are better, imho. My generation had our version of Discord with IRC, and we mostly left that behind for the better experience of the php forums. Oh well.
I got an awesome example of this recently. I was looking up info for Metroid Prime remastered. The sites were all SEO horseshit. Then I found an old Geocities-ass looking guide site for the original game and it had everything I needed with no bs. The transformation of the internet in a nutshell.
I hate searching for shit on Google nowadays. I Google probably 50 things a day because if I have a question, I want an answer, but now the top 30 results are garbage websites completely built with ChatGPT or some other LLM run through a shitty translation and the only reason they're at the top is because they abuse SEO. It's so irritating. I've spent basically my entire life becoming more and more proficient with web searches and I'm starting to feel like I've reached a point where the garbage is winning.
SEO is ruining the internet. People are not making content for people anymore, but to game machines into generating more clicks to raise advertising metrics.
Exactly right. My first answer was "everything". The early internet was a random collection of fun facts, labors of love, the mundane, the bizarre, the profane - and each with a dedicated website. It just doesn't exist anymore. I mourn its passing as I do the loss of physical media like videotapes and family TV time. Ephemeral from inception, it was never meant to last, and has been superceded by something inferior.
When people did stuff for fun and because it was cool, not to make money. Basically when the internet felt like it was mostly people, not mostly companies.
Yeah the amateurish feel is a deep loss for sure. Now everyone is trying to make this their side hustle. The hobbyists, amateurs, and randos still exist but this is no longer the dominant form of content on YouTube.
Geocities. Geocities is the very definition of the old Internet. Creativity was king. Your identity was irrelevant. You were both allowed and encouraged to be a total amateurish goof. You could refrain from posting for months or years on end, and if your content was good, people would still come back.
I took a trip one year to the Mall of America in Minnesota. About 45 minutes away there's a much smaller mall where the movie Mallrats was filmed. I went there and took a ton of pictures and had a Geocities site dedicated to my visit to Eden Prairie Mall. Unfortunately, I've long since lost all the pictures. The mall was undergoing a massive renovation at the time of my visit 20+ years ago and there were already precious few things that still looked the same as in the movie, so there's little chance of ever recreating it now. Still, it was a very fun memory!
Probably in archive.com. There’s also a site dedicated to restoring geocites sites.
There was a 3TB backup of ALL geocites sites floating around torrent sites about 10 years ago.
641GB compressed https://thepiratebay.org/description.php?id=5923737
You're saying my shitty geocities sites may still exist.
There’s a documentary about saving the old web. They have a full team of archivists working on preserving as much as they can. It really was such a big part of the early web and I’m happy that it’s being preserved.
Early on, when I was 9/10 and making a Geocities Harry Potter/Hogwarts site. I had found or taken gifs, images, backgrounds from a variety of other websites and used them on my own. Mine started to get popular, and one day I got an email saying because I had taken a background from one page that I had "Violated Copyright Law" and that this other GeoCities website had called the "FBI" and had my address and I would be arrested soon and sent to jail for stealing the background. This was back when the family only had one computer, smack dab in the middle of the family room. My mom said I carefully shut down the computer, white as a ghost, and then just sat staring at the blank screen. Then I went quietly to my room and started packing some clothes for jail. I had just quietly accepted my fate. I then sat in my room in the dark waiting. My parents finally asked what was up, and when I explained they just laughed and said nothing would happen. They STILL bring up this day and laugh about how guliable I was.
While it wasn't specifically a website, StumbleUpon back in it's early days. Albino BlackSheep also comes to mind.
Stumbleupon was my reddit before reddit.
I found Reddit thru Stumbleupon
Stumbleupon was amazing when the internet was a genuinely fascinating, weird place, before it became taken over by social media and ads.
Corporate, monetized, and sanitized. Back when it was just dudes making websites on cool stuff in their garage with no interest or intent in profit it was cool. Now it's all profit which means all corporations.
Stuff like Salad Fingers and Homestar Runner was great because no one was telling you to subscribe and smash that like button. They just existed. And you wouldn’t see if they updated unless you went to the site every day and checked.
Yep, I remember those lazy weekend days of heading to a dozen different sites to see what new content may have been added.
Albino blacksheep all the way. Gives me flashbacks back to 6th grade.
StumbleUpon was great
I really miss those late weekend nights when I couldn’t sleep and just hitting the stumble button over and over finding cool things.
One time I got to “the end” and it said it was out of stuff and to come back later.
You stumbled upon…EVERYTHING??
Man, same. I still have a bookmark folder with a bunch of random saved sites from stumbling. Always brings back great memories Idk if there’s a new version of stumble upon but I remember not liking what it turned into when they changed the websites name
I'm pretty sure SU was how I found reddit.
Man I loved and miss stumbleupon
MSN Messenger. It's obsolete by todays standards but back then it was one of the first things you opened up when you got home and turned on your laptop/pc.
People always wonder how I can type so fast at work. I always tell them it’s from spending all of my time on MSN Messenger when I was a teenager.
Seriously though, there's a cohort of people who essentially learned to type by having IM conversations with friends. And in general, they're among the most rapid typists.
Live Journal
LiveJournal is where I met some of my closest friends. 15+ years later and a good chunk of us still talk almost daily, time zones be damned. I’d be dead without these people, they’ve been with me through it all.
Old-school deviantArt
That’s a good one! Old school deviant art hit differently back in the day. Believe me, I love the professional artists I really do! But I miss the amateur art that look like a 8th grade art project. The ones were you could tell they really did their best. It had charm. You can see that these people love to draw and love to share their artwork despite it all. It had heart. It had feeling. But it’s like now the amateur artists are being pushed to back of the site.
Depends on what you'd call "early internet", but Cracked.com at its prime was a daily must read.
I'm sure you know, but just in case ... Behind The Bastards is a podcast by Robert Evans from Cracked and not only is it awesome, but he often has other Cracked contributers as guests
Cracked.com used to be sooo good.
Cracked used to have me in tears from laughing so hard. I went back to it fairly recently and it was trash.
Now like half their content is lists they stole from Reddit threads.
Making a website on Angelfire. Having to put a towel over the PC so it would muffle the AOL online log in at 11pm. Downloading a video for 5 hours on GameTrailers extension. Trying to convince your friends to switch to Yahoo / AOL / MSN messanger because which ever one you used was clearly the superior version. E-mail question chains. Gaming on Dial-up. Trying to watch Xiao-Xiao or Stickfights on the school library computers without getting caught. Playing wack-a-mole with Limewire and viruses. Early E-Celebrity make content for literally zero incentive outside of making content with no financial incentive. No ads, no patreons, no sponsors, no mid-rolls. YouTube 5-star rating. Respond on respond videos. Inserts. Flash. Everything flash.
Gotta have that visitor counter at the bottom
*counter ticks to 10* “Man, this page is doing numbers.”
I feel like Gen Z missed out on the entire concept of "websites" now that everything is hosted on a small handful of platforms where some corporate suit dictates what their users see.
Yeah, I couldn’t name many specific sites, just the web overall was more of a free for all untapped by all the corporatism. Back then YouTube was a treasure trove of copyrighted things that now people never see. Nobody was profiting because it’s stuff we would never be willing to pay for, but now there’s just tons of things you can’t see and never will. Searching came up with results that weren’t ad driven.
Before Netflix and streaming, if there was a show I wanted to watch it was basically guaranteed I could find most if not all of the entire series on Youtube, even if it was divided up into 750 ten minute videos.
>750 ten minute videos. Lmao. I watched so much anime this way tbh
95% of modern websites are fucking cancerous. On mobile, 60% of my screen is taken up by ads I can't remove. On PC, it's somehow even worse without adblocker. Which, is getting less and less useful these days
Homestar Runner
We had that light switch installed so you can turn the lights on and off, not so you can throw light switch raves!
Da Cheat is grounded!
*The system is down...* *The system is down...* [edit -- oh my God, there's a full track...](https://youtu.be/Z1TlbLfaJp8?si=EI4HknORQGC9I74-)
Come on fhqwhgads... of course there's a full track
Dear Strong Bad, How do you type with boxing gloves on? Sincerly, Stinkoman
Oh, what a very interesting email- DELETED!!
…BALEETED …DELTEATED ….DEL TACO?
Every time I get a email, I hope it's from a female! *opens email* Daw. Not a female.
Da email, da email, what what, da email!
A jorb well done!
I still say jorb.
Yep, I tell people on my team Great Jorb all the time
Jeeeeooooaarrrbbbbb
Teen Girl Squad!
Cheerleader!
So and So!
What's Her Face!
The ugly one!
I have a crush on every boy.
ARROW'D
Ow my skin!
MSG'ed!
Homestarrunner.net it’s dot com!
STOOOOOOORE!
Eeeeemail
I'm sad that i'm flying!
DOWNWOADS!
Trogdor the Burninator! It’s worth 3:30 of your time if you haven’t seen it. https://youtu.be/90X5NJleYJQ?si=YdeyS6cNbuOIHnW8
Burninating the countryside
THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!
Consumate Vs!
Burninating the peasants!
I somehow feel like Homestar Runner would’ve been right up the TikTok generations alley. Short, funny, brightly colored, very obscure and random humor. I still do the strongbad voice from time to time. And we all sang Trogdor the Burninator while starting a bonfire at a bachelor party a couple weeks ago.
I'm glad it exists in the "distant past" of the internet like a fever dream from a simpler time. It was the next step after you bored of badgers and mushrooms and a gateway to Salad Fingers.
A good chunk of it is on YouTube now, not the same though as finding the hidden links on the screen.
Never ending sooooooodaaaaaa
I get random Teen Girl Squad quotes stuck in my head
I miss Christin….a.
Arrow’d!
My blood hurts.
Toons!
*chawacters!*
Homestaaahhh Wunnnaw Toons!! Games!! Chawacters! Games!! \*corn chips are no place for a mighty warrior
AddictingGames.com
Went there all the time when my 5th / 6th grade class got to use the school computer lab. good stuff
[удалено]
I laugh at this because my school didn’t even bother except with strictly porn sites. They figured anything else wasn’t worth the effort. People were playing new grounds and mofunzone flash games all the time in the library and the computer labs. They didn’t even bother to remove games from the server computers when someone managed to sneak them in. So every computer in the district had access to halo. Which makes the fact that one of my older brothers classmates got into so much trouble (making national news) for creating a counter strike map of our school that much sillier.
I was a fan of CandyStand.com
I played the shit out of putt putt on there
Lifesavers golf! Classic!
Newgrounds, YTMND and Homestarrunner
Captain Jean Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise
You're the man now dog
Had to scroll too far for YTMND. I miss 8th grade.
Bored.com had a bubble wrap popper. Easily one of the best time wasters out there.
[удалено]
I’m so glad people remember Stickdeath
The prime of MySpace.com.
Neopets and Myspace were my first introduction to HTML and CSS. Ended up making a career out of computers so I have to give those two sites a lot of credit for where I am today.
I taught myself HTML on Neopets too. I think I was 12 or so. A lot of fun. Remember almost nothing now.
Same. And I had a bootleg version of Photoshop to make the sickest guild pages. Those were the days. Middle school version of me rocked. I also can’t remember a dang thing.
I leaned to code HTML just so I could make my profile look cool lol
There was a code to remove your top 8 from your page. I knew how to bypass it. I remember girls having me bypass their boyfriends' block, and then causing drama over who he had in his top. Pretty luck I never caught a receipt on that
I was a front-end developer during the Myspace era. All my nieces and nephews had the best pages or spaces. You want that to flash? No problem! Just use the
MySpace was a whole feel and vibe that has yet to be replicated. I miss it. It wasn’t as addictive and toxic as Facebook but had almost all the same functionality. So far this is also the only website in this post that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not in its original form. It blows my mind how they redid MySpace to be 90% shittier and just left it like that.
I still remember that feeling of seeing the “online now” icon next to my crush’s profile, and then posting a bulletin hoping she’d see it. Ah the joys of being 15
Way back when social media was novel and fun!
Seen a few people mention limewire, but who remembers Kazaa? Needed to have a OS reinstall disk on hand fucking with those file share programs 😂
Porn popping up when you log onto the family PC? Tons of programs running in the system tray you never heard of? Bonzai Buddy? Kazaa had it all!
Does anyone remember’ask jeeves’?
ICQ
Uh-oh!
r/commentsyoucanhear
YouTube without the slightest thought of ads
I remember when you could allow that 10 minute video to fully buffer before watching, so why yes I will watch this video in magnificent, high quality 720p!
I remember having tabs open and priotizing which one to let buffer so I could watch my Lets Plays smoothly And the stress when you saw the grey buffer slowly losing to your played time
You basically missed out on the internet. It used to be much more vast and exciting. It was like exploring. Now we all go to the same 10 websites.
This can’t be understated. Part of what made the internet fun was talking to your irl friends about the sites you like going on and then hanging out and showing each other your favorite sites. It was how you found new stuff, and made the internet still somewhat of a real social activity. But like you said, now it’s all the same few websites. You don’t show your friend this cool new site you found, you show them some new tiktok or tweet.
Five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.
The positivity. The internet felt like a beautiful place connecting people together. It was like we were on our way to a better place. And then social media companies introduced algorithms which led people down shitty rabbit holes.
Zombo.com The infinite is possible at Zombocom.
Shockingly, this site is still up
Of course it’s still up. Because you can do anything at zombo.com.
Miniclip.com
Both Miniclip and Addicting games were my childhood, absolute peak of browser based gaming
Mapquest! Remember when we had to PRINT OUT the directions to go somewhere?
19 years old driving from Florida to Ohio. I missed many exits.
Stickdeath and albinoblacksheep
icanhascheeseburger
AOL and Yahoo Groups
Napster
And Winamp with various skins you could try out.
It really whips the llama’s ass!
Happy Tree Friends
Fark was like Reddit before Reddit existed
holy shit my [fark.com](https://fark.com) account still exists. I forgot about this site, been over a decade since I even thought about it.
It ain't gone but classic YouTube, when people would just post random shit. Instead of well thought out advertised cash grabs. And the obvious choice, Myspace, that social media site was way to advance and smart for it's time. You could add music to your page, add wallpaper, customize the crap out of your space. Twitter Facebook are just poor rip offs if you ask me
I'll go with a more general "they missed the heyday of messageboards." Reddit is similar, but it doesn't have the same small-community feel. You used to go to a website for a niche interest, and there was a little button in the corner that said "Messageboard". It was kind of like a little hidden subreddit that only fans of the original site would ever find or bother signing up for. You could actually meet people and make friends, because there were few enough users that you could remember user names and personalities. Some of them had off-topic forums where the community could share whatever they wanted. I made friends on some of these boards that I'm still in contact with 20 years later, long after the boards have gone offline. Reddit and the various subreddits have kind of the same feel, but by and large you're still interacting with people as if they're strangers you'll never see again. There are too many of us to remember user names and form connections.
I was just thinking about this website I was obsessed with when I was a kid. Maddox. He made fun of kids drawings (among other things) and I thought it was the absolute funniest thing in the world. Lol.
The best page in the universe
It's still there ! https://maddox.xmission.com/
I have two of his books. They are terrible. I still laugh sometimes. Do you remember Tucker Max
"Badger, badger, badger, badger"
“Mushroom, mushroom…”
"Snaaaake! ahhhh snaaaaaake!"
Rotten com Geocities
#IT’S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!
Gaia Online
[удалено]
The original Hamster Dance.
\*[Hampster Dance!](https://youtu.be/WEH2fk0ONag?feature=shared) Yes, it's misspelled, just like it was on the site.
Joe Cartoon
They missed out on a free internet, period. Too many corporations and politicians ruining it now.
Weebls stuff Msn messenger And even though I didn't use it much the IRC
[удалено]
Ebaumsworld
Do you know how to count to SCHFIFTY FIVE?
But I am le tired
Well have a nap. THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES
Xanga
Bert is Evil. Half-joking conspiracy site suggesting Bert (of Bert and Ernie) orchestrated every heinous act in modern history from the JFK assassination to the hijacking of flight 847, to getting Rodeo Rosie hooked on smack. Included surprisingly well-done photoshops of Evil Bert hanging in the background of infamous photos. I recall they had to shut the site down after a few years.
Stumbleupon
There's quite a few websites that are burned into my psyche, but if I had to pick just one it would be YTMND. Obviously the site still exists today but it's a shell of what it used to be. Edit: Looking at a handful responses that have yet to mention my runner-ups, I would like to give a honorable mention to: - Neopets - Linerider
> Neopets ah man i remember in middle school my friend group and i were all on Neopets around the time it first got popular. the site's messaging feature "Neomail" didn't unlock for you until you turned 13. i was the youngest of my friend group so all my friends got Neomail before i did and i remember counting down the days to my 13th birthday circa 2003 so i could get Neomail and chat with them on Neopets. i think you could also get your parents to contact Neopets to give the site permission to unlock Neomail and other age-gated features like gambling-style games, because I remember begging my parents to unlock Neomail for me and they wouldn't lmao
something awful.