How would you best describe late 90s-early 2000s internet to someone who didn't experience it?
>>109188418>Interests: Eddie IzzardShe's lucky she never lived to see him become "Suzy"
>>109188418It was a mistake. We apologize. It was the wrong path.
>>109188418We didn’t have Ai therefore it was trans
>>109188418>the retards are flooding in (I'm one of them) to ruin it all foreveryou're in one of the last places that was always bad, so it's still as good as it was
>>109188418Man life used to be so good, trolls were few and actually funny, nobody knew what they were doing so there was no meta, almost no ads, fuck we had it so fucking good
>>109188418it was always bloatonce someone did something, everyone else would tooframes, animated backgrounds with poorly colored text foreground, gifs, music, java applets for mouseover buttons
>>109188487forum signatures were kino
>>109188418It wasn't a commercial hellhole yet. Direction was perhaps already there but things really ramped up after 2007+.
>>109188504To add: I remember the first cope statements about ads. It was so that we can afford this free website for you guys.Fast forward a decade and every single click is getting tracked and everything else there's massive amounts of data brokering, AI has polluted search engines... Internet has become like a literal dystopian slum.
>>109188418Imagine now, but everything's slow and looks like shit and everybody's obsessed with dinosaurs
>>109188418You know those comfy gifs with neon city lights at night and the window open with a warm breeze coming through to your room full of 90's shit. It was literally that vibe. The internet felt like a portal you could go in and out of, separate from real life. People didn't take their wepages too seriously either, so they looked a lot more homely like this one:http://sandy-travels.com/
>>109188532wow nothing has changed
>>109188539>http://sandy-travels.com/Holy Soul
>>109188418>56k no way!
>>109188481Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened
>>109188504I'm pretty sure this is only slightly early 2000s, mostly mid to late, but whatever lol>websites barely able to keep up with traffic>flashing ads, noisy ads, pop ups, ads that are automatically clicked after a delay>everyone had their own shitty forum>even every service had its own shitty forum: flash animation sites, singular video games would have multiple, the broader slice of a video game would have its own forum, every conceivable topic has a forum, every entertainment site, every flash game site, kid game sites had forums, minuscule indie companies had their own forums>incredibly autistic spats that would go on for years over tens of thousands of posts>everyone had an extreme personality that they hammed up tenfold>flash games, stolen flash games, flash ads>bewilderingly obscure mod websites that would last for maybe one to two years and if you didn't download that mod + all the documentation in time it'd be lost forever>fascinating new things every week>extreme enshittification of those fascinating things or outright disappearance, neopets and runescape were particularly egregious>the sheer ecstasy of finding a new, well populated forum that interests you and troving through 100+ page threads>websites that you found through a forum, through a forum, through a private message, through a video game mod>websites that you cannot prove exist, yet were burnt into memory, in my case, a website with java(?) games called nimrod and puggle, and also a website where you'd play little online adventure games with dice rolling>being amazed at what are now simple things, like being able to search up images of anythingIt's funny to think just how many god damn websites I froghopped across to end up in this hellhole. And to think it all started with the Happy Tree Friends forum and branched out from there.
>>109188474This. Christ is King, AI is the future, and I love Palantir.
>>109188418All you did was fetch files and web pages. No javascript programs that execute on your computer, except for maybe a few buttons and fields.It was more an educational asset and the joy of being able to connect to people a million miles away.
>>109188418Better.
>>109188579This aesthetic still holds up.
>>109188604Forums were great
it was fun to choose a handle (screen name) and troll your friends. trading handles at school then instant messaging your friends later at night after dinner. some of them had the same games so we could play online together after homework was done. early AOL chatrooms to get mp3s, sampler discs in magazines, burning CDs and making mixes, it was all new and exciting.
>>109188549>>109188539This guy is living the life (assuming he is still alive) complete with asian wife
>>109188418Liquid steaming dogshit, but it was comfy. A true digital frontier for a time.
>>109188418More laidback but we had forums back then, little cliques would forms, power tripping mods were a huge nuisance
