how was 2004 internet, before facebook and youtube? how different was society? were people less lonely and did you live through it?
>>106539470myspace, AOL search, chatrooms, and forums piracy of video games was just as rampant, but it took forever to download games on my pathetic 56kbps connectionI was a dumb kid who heard of Knoppix but couldn't figure out how to install it, if only I kept trying
>>106539470I remember a lot of hacking forums, and download forums of pirated software, it was seen as normal, as normal as buying a steam game nowadays. I am pretty sure this place was shitty as always, but forums had people with real knowledge who shared valuable information.I remember php was the standard, and no one cared about security, nor cookies, javascript was used for widgets, visit counters, toolbars, menus, as intended.I remember a lot of free hosting websites where people made their own forums with a couple of clicks, there was a thing called wap, the mobile version of internet, used for the same intent, sharing pirated software.I used irc for a little while, it had it's own bots, similar to how discord has gambling and moderation ones.and yes, google was great you actually had millions of results with random websites, but I think It's not the fault of google since modern internet is so dead, there's only like 20 websites to index anyways.
It was honestly pretty shit and only the most vile of autists could stomach it and thrive within it. It was very boring and talking to actual people was more fun.
>>106539788kind of a strange question but besides IRC, do you think all those things were used by normal people as well? i think i sometimes saw photos of fucking women using forums which i don't know, i guess it's kind of strange today i guess. were those the websites used by average people as well?also given that the percentage of internet users was lower, if you would take the users of a lively and famous 2003 forum and the users of a modern forum (that would be considered almost dead given reddit and everything else) would they have the same number of users? not sure if i made myself clear.
>>106539788
>>106539470the magic of broadband internet was new and exciting. society felt slower back then. things didn't feel as rushed as today. idk if people were less lonely. i think that's subjective. i was in an IRC channel and later met the people in it at LAN parties. there are more internet users today, though i would argue the number of quality posts and content as it was then. with exceptions of course.
>>106539896if youre interested id say this is a good representation of how a forum wasintpforum.comits going to be leaning towards nerds but i imagine a lot of these people are millennials and genxs who grew up with those kinds of forums.but back then, just imagine it that, you mightve had a really small forum around a particular niche and it got as much daily activity as a discord server today.
>>106539988yeah i know the forum, so you're saying pretty much geeks used them.i never used discord but i guess that means pretty active like dozens of daily posts.
>>106540185>so you're saying pretty much geeks used them.now yes but back then no, it was the same people you would find in a normie discord server. girls use them, women use them, kids use them, old people use them. variety. the only real difference was that the forum was superior for a community because of the better features. better community management software means better content (reward effort posting, allow long form back and forth communication, long lasting targeted threads)discord has just been coping trying to add these features but the userbase is retarded at the root and they've made them that way, not themselves but they encourage it. also the best feature was the public indexing aspect of the content, so randoms can find your community and join in the first place from search engines.
>>106539896>do you think all those things were used by normal people as well?nope, normies were either watching tv or using messenger/fotolog. maybe habbo hotel or some shit.. but since smartphones were non existent and they didn't really know how to use wap, they used it for a limited time then went back to their normal outside lives.Grandmas, moms and boomers in general were watching tv instead of being brainwhased in facebook or making dumb tiktok videos, the modern world is crazy if you think about it. I never imagined my grandma drooling at a phone, but here we are.>would they have the same number of users? A big popular forum around that time would be something like a busy thread in a busy board here, most popular ones I knew were software sharing websites. Normal forums were small, but with fresh blood since google was actually useful to find them.
>>106540224>it was the same people you would find in a normie discord server. girls use them, women use them, kids use them, old people use them. variety.lurking the "non commercial" internet for something like two years made me realize how everyone is literally a 40+ year old geek. unix forums, cooking forums, movie forums, game forums, sdf.org. nothing against that but it's getting tiring.i made this thread just as a way to rent about the fact that as a 20 something year old that does not use any kind of spyware like discord i will just be forever alone. i guess i was right then and someday i'll just be forced to keep my paranoia at bay and install windows + discord if i don't want to kill myself out of loneliness at 30. i just wish i was born in the 90s or something.i guess honesty is a rare thing in this website, but there you go.
>>106540286yeah i getcha, you can just make your own thing. you have to be pragmatic about it though.like, use every social media you can for whats it for, not socializing, posting shit. youre not going to get good traffic to your thing because those social media websites dont want to encourage traffic leaving their platform.but you will inevitably, catch the interest of similar people, people who you want to know, and they will find you, and take the effort to go through using whatever you made
>>106539470It was great, you could meet people from forums, or IRC irl without very little chance that they'd be insane and/or arseholes. No way I'd do that shit these days.
It's fucking wild that I used to be way more online than normies but now normies are all way more online than me. It happened so fast too.
>>106539470It fucking sucked there were worms and Trojans everywhere. Stop romanticizing this retarded shit and make something better.
>>106539788>>106539738>>106539470THere was a lot more interesting places to go because there wasn't a lot of centralization.At the same time speeds sucked and downloading shit was incredibly sketch 99% of the time.The biggest difference is you needed to have a basic idea of how to read and process information because going somewhere online wasn't braindead or prebuilt. It kept a lot of tards off the web(but not hte autists)
>>106540237>never imagined my grandma drooling at a phone, but here we are.So glad my folks realize that shit is awful and avoid it
>>106539470>how was 2004 internet
>>106539470The internet was much more decentralized. Large variety of websites for many different interests. Lots of different online forums. Lots of different chat rooms and pretty much everything else you can imagine. Today there's like 8 non-commerce websites that everyone uses.
the worst part is that internet used to be its own thing separate from real life. everyone I knew used MSN yet we met up at least once a week. going from PCs to phones made it increasingly harder to separate the two.
>>106539470I was a kid in 2004. I remember mostly playing games on Cartoon Network's website, crazybone.com, Yahooligans, Candystand, neopets, runescape. I also remember watching American Idol and looking up clips of William Hung's audition.
>>106539470in 2004 i mostly used internet for mIRC to chat about hobbies and get south park episodes the moment they finished airing. I also used it for MSN to msg my friends cuz no one had a cellphone etc.Downloaded music to burn on CDsviewed random sites for funny shit but those sites took forever to get new content that just browsing it once a week for 1h was enough like eubaumsworld.com that was it....
>>106543222>I remember mostly playing games on Cartoon Network's websiteforgot about that. but yeah bionicle game online was cool too
(Respectful) forum culture is something that's increasingly getting lost over time. Discord is being seen as a replacement but it's barely searchable. Information density seemed a lot higher back then. Hobbyists shared forums with other hobbyists. The last huge hit in my personal experience was the closure of stilmagazin.de, Germanys biggest forum on classic menswear. An incredible treasure trove now lost. What remains for the average user are less in-depth "magazine"-like general information, oftentimes wrong, risky or downright false.I miss the old internet, just like I miss my old country.
>>106539470>were people less lonelyFuck no.>and did you live through it?No, I died.
>>106539470>how was 2004 internet, before facebook and youtube?Way better. There were no normies on the internet back then, and no third worlders. That alone accounted for the pre-smartphone internet being 100x better than the one we have today.
>>106543548i get the feeling that the good thing about those times was exactly that there were normies, but the internet was not as stupid and centralized as today. good luck finding a 20 year old in a niche forum or xmpp / discord alternatives today that has other interests other than linux and paranoid schizophrenia and isn't a biological man.
>>106539470significantly less retards, that is the primary difference. made most content on the internet fairly well written and not 35 iq regurgitated brain damaged opinionsyou could email microsoft about a bug and they would get back to you and actually fix it search was not context based yet and thus not tuned to answer normie questions, it was index based, and much less censored, you could find some wild and interesting stuff if you knew what to search for.there were many more independent websites and many were entirely uniquenow everything is centralized to just a few social networks and services, and its heavily filtered and controlled, its honestly so fake and gay , i cant even stand to look at it for more than a few minutes at a time.
>>106539470>how was 2004 internetIt was great. At that time I was PKing in the wildy.
>>106539470Yes. Working, dated girls and had penpals via ms messenger and some email exchanges. These days I wouldn't do anything because it's so different and commercial.
>>106541260Same thing as CSS Tables and CSS Flex and CSS Grid and...
