>>107104391it was way more fun.
>>1071043912005 internet was pretty great. 1995 dial up BBS scene was better.
>>107104413>>107105236When did it get offically bad?
>>107105465beginning 2015-2016, by 2018 it was accelerating fast, and its been in full force since 2022
>>107105465true death started around 2014-15 I think, my memory is fuzzy and I was only 14 then.
>>107105517It was already grim by 2015. late 2000s was fun
>>107105465smartphones
>>107105535Yeah it's a shame I didn't get to see the early internet.
>>107105465I feel like 2012, something shifted, I think it was because social media started to become more widespread.
>>107105465It wasn't officially declared until 2012 but by 2009 it was obviously terminal.
2007 was the beginning of the end, 2012 was the final name in the coffin.
When I was a kid I was an user on like 10 different online forums. Shit was not centralized, if you wanted a niche community you had to host your own forums.
>>107105574>>107105589These guys are on the mark.
>>107104391Anybody else go back to a smaller monitor and find an increase in productivity?
So long as the internet and everything computer-related was socially considered to be the realm of geeks and nerds, we were unironically far better off as a species.
>>107104391Complaining about the "new generation" goes back to the beginning of humanity. The internet is better than ever before in many ways as long as you avoid normalfag trash. This has been the case since the beginning.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
>>107104391newgrounds was peak.
>>107106015EFF DEEE AYYYYY
>>107104391The mid 2000s were peak. Forums for any hobby you can think of, 4chan, niche websites, nobody asked you for your personal information unless you were buying something. Now everything is sanitised globohomo echochambers that spy on you and all discussion is on Discord, where it can't be indexed and can disappear at any time.
>>107106182>Forums for any hobbyThat's the big difference tee bee aych. Things started going downhill as things got siloed into centralized platforms: social media, reddit, Tumblr.
>>107104391Everyone called each other slurs, so very similar to today but across several thousand websites instead of 30.
>>107106284I still find useful information posted 20 years ago on obscure forums, I have no way to access information on Discord.I can't comprehend why people are okay with this arrangement and don't even see the problem.
The Web had become a little dull after ~2009 when the Web 2.0 hype died down and Facebook and the other centralized s-oy-cial faggot media had started eating up web forums.The functionally was still all OK till ~2015-2016 - search and find and pirate what you want with no effort, register everywhere you want without revealing who you are, say whatever, publish whatever edgy content.Then the heavy DMCA and little later blatantly political censorship of search engines, and removing their features became apparent. Around the same time they started asking for phone number for everything, including so-y-cial media profiles and email services. The cabal of only 3-4 major email providers had remained reachable (messages not ending up in spam folder). Mass nuking of YouTube channels.COVID shit took it to the extreme with search engines returning like 50 handpicked results on some subjects. Also your employer getting away with gaslighting you to take experimental, gene altering "absolutely safe, effective and necessary" medicine. Remember that?
>>107104391disregarding pajeets and bots, the biggest difference was that there weren't any algorithms feeding you shit - you had to search for things yourselfanother aspect that stuff was way more "home-made" and not staged and scripted "content" from "content creators"
Hey remember that time when multiple large pharma firms were asked to shit out out a new kind of medicine in 10 months with no legal accountability (while the ordinary solution takes 3-5 years of clinical testing), with associated adversities kept confidential, while the entire society was basically mandated to take it? (Take this medicine or we fire you so that you can't support yourself and your family)
>>107104391In the far past, man had to pass a little IQ test to get on the internet. The others were either men with standing, people from universities or computer hobby groups and a bunch of other freaks. Now every retard is on the internet and I fucking hate it.
Remember when every "public person" and "influencer" was being asked to advocate this experimental medication to their audience? Even people like Linux Torvalds - to techcucks.Even people who have absolutely nothing to do with fields of science and medicine, to their respective audience.Like knucklehead army officers of your country lecturing the young lads that their lungs will melt and they will fucking die.
>>107107362that shit sucked
>>107105465>>107105589This.
If you take the tripple booster lemon Pfizer shot voluntarily, the tuttyfrooty ocean themed toilet seat cover aeros handheld digital camera picture in mirror 2000s retro Web becomes real frfr
Old net had the pleasure of discovery and genuineness. The new net is all about subverting the human condition into corporate ends. Shit is mad whack.
>>107105465you know it
>>107106015I miss those days.
>>107104391The main thing I miss about the internet prior to the 2010s is that it was a separate entity from the real world. You had your online persona and who you were in real life. The internet was a place to escape the problems of the real world. Especially after a shitty day at work or school. My favorite period of time that I personally spent online was from 1998 to 2005. After 2005 people started to slightly blur that line with the rise of MySpace which was nowhere near as bad or problematic as the social media platforms that came after. Especially when Twitter and Facebook both started to really take off. Also I hated when Reddit killed forums. I used to hang out on SO many different forums, IRC channels, and could even tolerate MMORPGs still yet. Nobody was worried and discussing politics 24/7. We could enjoy our online personas and we were only judged based off our merit, hobbies, interests, and what we actually were saying. Rather than what we looked like, our wealth status, and/or any other petty bullshit narcissistic whoring of ourselves that social media brainwashed the masses into. That and the internet mostly only harbored those who actually cared about online culture. Instead of the infestation of normies ruining every corner of the web.
>>107109545This is real man talk
>>107105589>>1071055672012 was the age of Gamergate, internet feminism, and accelerating trannification
boring as crap
>>107105465AOL was wave one of bad.The iphone was wave two.Since then, the waves have never stopped.
>>107107353Most Indians haven't even touched the Internet yet. The ones who are online are "the best of the best". Let that sink in a little as more and more of them get access.
>>107105465Born 95, imo the 2016 election broke so many brains that it permanently shattered the internet. The years leading up to that is where we had gamergate, the grifters of gamergate, Trap becoming a slur, "girls r gamers too guise" movements, anti-SJW channels, internet debate culture, influencer culture on non-youtube platforms ramping up and probably a dozen other cancerous things I've memoryholed.
>>1071054652015
>>107104391I'm not sure if bots were around in the early 2000s or it was just dedicated shills, but early 4chan had plenty of shilling and bullshit. It also felt like there were more websites back then, like for cartoons and shit there would be dedicated sites where certain creators would post their stuff exclusively or sometimes creators would have their own dedicated website for their videos (Joe Cartoon being the one I remember the most).The difference between then and now is everything has become homogenized.
>>107105589I agree.t. Internet historian
>>107105556>>107105567this and this. smartphone was massive... and if i recall, google bought out YT in 2012.
>>107105567I think that was around when people started migrating from Facebook to Twitter, similar to how people migrated from Myspace to Facebook a few years earlier.
>>107105465After 2012, fully at 2015.
>>107104391Nice, free and full of midis and people's candidness (which is annihilated now)
>>107110718I would even vote democrat if they promised a great Indian firewall, on god.
>>1071054652012, after smartphones, social networks like facebook, twitter, tumblr, Reddit etc
>>107105236>1995 dial up BBS scene was better.it was pretty amazing>>107106015cringe
>>107105465>2012: a big shift starts taking place>2013: the Internet is sick: experience worsens>2014: hospital: you can feel the soul leaving most sites>2015: dead: the shift is irreversible now and the only way is down>2016 onwards: rottingI blame smartphones, agendas on everything, extreme politicisation and polarization, megacorps and a heavy influx of third worlders, not in this orderAnd we're still on a spiral down, get ready for shit like censorship
>>107104391nerds and geeksnormalfags didn't touch internet back then, they considered internet to be nerdy
>>107104391>What was the internet like before bots and Indians took over?you sometimes got viruses from downloading minecraft mods from mediafire
>>107104391Fucking garbage, but still better than it is now.
>>107104413fippy bippyfun is not allowed anymore since culture war brainrot took over, 2014 is when things started getting really bad for this
you wouldn't get it
>>107104391That wasn't long ago, so it was still garbage.Surveillence started creeping in with Prism and censorship started consolidating a few years later in 2009. Nothing has been good ever since, but it remained marginally usable for another 4 years or so.
>>107106015It sucks that now I need to login in order rewatch old content, because apparently everything we saw as kids is now considered "adults only".Really, fuck OFCOOM.
>>107111733Good. Any adult watching stupid garbage made for children is a rank creep retard and deserves to be ostracized and destroyed.
>>107104391there were no fucking ahills and discord n*g*er faggots, nuff said
>>107104391I could actually find interesting information on it and there were more websites to host it. Search engines weren't so useless. It was pretty decentralized.
it wasnt that stellar. the tech is way better now, its just websites are so enshittified. the only usable and readable websites now are the only viable social hubs like 4chan and reddit.
>>107105465Already been said but smartphones were really the final nail in the coffin imo. Before then there was at least a little bit of a barrier to entry with actually having to be at a computer, like the internet was more of a place to visit and explore rather than this ever present entity that every retard is hooked in to, spewing their bullshit in to the ether at any time and any place. I wish we could go back to like post dial up but pre smartphone internet and stay there forever pretty much.>>107109545>>107107491this
>>107105589100%
>>107107288>stuff was way more "home-made" and not staged and scripted "content" from "content creators"Aside from centralization in globohomo platforms killing off forums, this is probably the biggest issue. I fucking detest "content creators".
>>107104391https://www.cameronsworld.net/Like this.
>>107105465When MSN messenger merged with Skype.
>>107104391Literal nirvana. I was there. Also, there were a lot less gate keepers to deal with so there was a much more steady flow of information back then. Shit kinda sucks now.
>>107104391It was awesome.Men were men, women were men, and kids were fbi agents
>>107105465the identity politics cancer has been brewing for a long time (way before the internet was around), but there were multiple true inflection points that led to it destroying the internet.>2007: iphone was released. this introduced a shit-ton of normies to the internet.>2007: jeff gerstmann was fired from gamespot for giving a 6/10 review to a kane and lynch game. this essentially set the precedent that journalists/reviewers answer to their advertisers, not the readers. the implications went way beyond games journalism/reviews.>2012: the identity politics cancer left academia and reached stage II by infesting atheist circles. the "atheism plus" movement was the first real example of cancel culture in action. again, this turned out to just be a springboard.>2014: the cancer reached stage III with gaymergate. this was arguably the biggest inflection point that started a cultural shift at an internet-wide scale. tumblr also died around this point further exasperating the problem as it served as a containment vessel.>2016: trump got elected. virtually every major media outlet started milking the orange man bad cash cow 24/7 which naturally further fueled the online political shitflinging that's impossible to escape.>2018-2020: the cancer reached stage IV with metoo, george floyd. even the zoomers here know the downstream effects of this.
>>107106000>The internet is better than ever before in many ways as long as you avoid normalfag trashIf you avoid normalfag trash Internet is mostly the same as it always has been.
>>107104391a very barren experience. You'd get maybe a 15-30 mins max before you get hit with a phone bill that makes your parents fume. Troubleshooting connectivity became less and less fun as the DSL became a thing. Using a 56k modem was a hit or miss most of the time. The jokes about a jpeg of a hot chick taking 20 minutes to load are real though. Everything was a pain in the ass unless it was text. Websites definitely looked different. You can still access them using archive org and you'll notice how tiny they look, in terms of window size. Also, lots of them were centered and instead of getting hit with a wide ass page and an essay in it, you'd get a main panel and some side buttons. It all looked very vertical. But few remember why - because the standard resolutin was 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 - the holy Trinity of the late 1990s early 2000s PC displays. So what looks tiny today was a full screen experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-_rippKCgAIt was like this.
>>107116589>It was like this.AOL was originally a walled garden service that pre-dated the public internet by a year or so. But it did transition itself into being a gateway service provider with a curated access point. It was almost its' own service. Still, I do remember the days when AOL discs (and the 3.5inch floppies) use to come bundled with just about everything. For example, buying a large box PC game; or a PC peripheral would come bundled with an AOL disc. Buying a rando magazine off of a newstand might come with an AOL disc bundled with it. Even cereal boxes would have AOL discs inside of them. At the time, it was annoying, because I use to have a stack of AOL discs. But I kind of miss it. But I was never an AOL user. The only product that I ever used from AOL was AIM.
>>1071054652009 was the beginning of the end. That's when social media started to take over and everything started to become sterile, consolidated, and saturated with monetization. The iPhone ruined the culture of the internet too.
>>107111788>anyone going back and rewatching stuff they watched as a kid should be ostracized and destroyedWow ur so cool and edgy haha I bet you're tough in real life!
>>107106515>find useful information posted 20 years ago on obscure forumsthis is being rapidly destroyed. between search engines hiding non payers and anything older than 2 years and so many forums being bought up and faggotized by a couple companies. generations of knowledge are currently being walled into inaccessible repositories and it will not come back. the internet went from an encyclopedia of greatness beyond anyones wildest dreams to less than a supermarket tabloid in under 10 years
were you born yesterday anon?
>>107104391>You could actually find cute single girls to talk to, and have normal converstions with them because they weren't all getting groomed and hounded by 2 billion Indian Hindu rape rats>no spammy search results, people made personal websites and poured their soul into it...if you find their site, you find it, if you don't that's also ok>software "just works" and was super efficient>could land a 6 figure tech job right out of high school and it was full of other nerds, geeks, and autists like yourself>you could spend 24/7 on the internet and never come across a single Indian Hindu rape rat or jewish larper trying to subvert our forums or chats>people were genuinely nice to each other on the internet because it was only humans allowed, you could make deep lifelong friendships with randoms you met in a chat roomThe jews and Indian Hindu rape rats have stolen more than our internet, they have stolen a very tech futuristic utopia we almost had.
>>107105465>>107105499>>107105517You can actually see the exact moment on this graph. Also notice how despite having so many Africans, they don't bother us and invade our spaces like the Indian Hindu invaders do? There is no one worse or more subhuman, they are a human extinction level threat.
>>107105465when they put ads in java applets and you needed to disable java to browsethen when they put ads in flash and you needed to block flash to browseit's always been advertisers
>>107117429>it's always been advertisersand we all know (((who))) that ibut this gives a pass to the coders that made the manifestation of shit possible and the dollartree discount saars werent the majority of the keyboarders behind (((the machine))) back then
Is it possible things became awful when the internet became an always on utility? Before you'd need to actively dial, and then log off. Now it's always on, ever present. Maybe that's what ruined it?
if someone said something particularly stupid then they were most likely trying to troll people for their own amusement. nowadays there's no shortage of genuine drooling morons.
>tfw your XxXDarkNaruto420 tier 2000s youtube account name is now tied to your main gmail account
>>107117760a lifelong buddy still uses his seriously email from back in our jr high days in the aughts>RE: Lockheed RFQ #123 >from: milfmuffslayer69@hotmaildotcom
>>107105517When Youtube got sold to google. Deviant Art/RPG Net/Tumblr etc went all coocoo leftist. Huh, it all happened around the same time in 2010-2012.
>>107119062Based dude. Hotmail accounts are Original Gangster territory. If you didn't have one you aren't an old head by any means and didn't experience real internet.
>>107105236just get on a gemini:// bbs. Normgroids can't intohttps://gmi.skyjake.fi/bubble/
>>107119102Isn't this just modern neocities tier?
>>107104391very fun.the internet was supposed to be a paradise
>>107119211It was until blacks and later jeets invaded then it was over.
>>107119229We need to get jeets out from the internet
>>107119062people like this then act all surprised when one day they discover how glowniggers have read every one of their emails for 20 years or how one account links back to an internet full of cringe services registered to that account, probably all using the same password too. geniuses.
>>107119313that seems pretty tame compared to nowadays where you have every splittail poasting their gaped asshole to the entire planet