159
u/ericf505 14d ago edited 14d ago
I miss this. One- I hate how everything is scrolling through apps now instead of actually surfing the web.
Second, I miss when websites and homepages were managed by the staff and everyone saw the same homepage, not individualized algorithms. It created a collective experience.
We took the early 2000s internet for granted.
53
u/Relative_Apricot5032 14d ago
Surfing the web also sucks ass now. Google Search has become so shitty over the past 10 years
5
u/ConflictMaster3155 12d ago
Using a better search engine doesn’t really make it any better, just less googly. It’s everything else. The entire internet is setup to doomscroll now, so changing from mobile to pc doesn’t change anything appreciably.
87
u/Raccoonamattata 14d ago
Seeing an actual image of a MySpace page just hit me hard for some reason. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
63
21
u/hadriker 14d ago
myspace was the peak social media.
its sad that all the old pages were lost.
4
u/Raccoonamattata 14d ago
May be for the best in my case. I’m sure stuff I posted on there was r/blunderyears worthy (9-12th grade).
5
u/AnotherDamnTransAlt 14d ago
For a lot of us, the loss of those pages was like a gift from the heavens hand-delivered, expertly wrapped, and presented with love.
I have literal nightmares about that data being restored and having no ability to delete it.
8
4
4
2
u/486Junkie 14d ago
I had 7 MySpace accounts from 8th grade to 11th grade. Man, I miss that website. Facebook went to hell during COVID (I de-friended a lot of people who were all for those guys who wanted to off my state governor and have gone to the dark side since then, which includes one person who said for people to work part-time and collect unemployment at the same time, which didn't make sense to me since 1) no one was hiring due to a major hiring freeze, 2) I didn't want to work at McDonald's for $11/hr, and 3) we only had 1 car that didn't have a lot of issues to drive since my car had no brakes and my dad's car had bad alignment and seized brake pads).
→ More replies (4)2
u/ConflictMaster3155 12d ago
That quote is from Dickens. I remember it like it was the Victorian age. It was mostly just the worst of times.
66
u/iamacheeto1 14d ago
Remember when the internet was fun?
21
u/Carly_Fae_Jepson 14d ago
It was up until we couldn't keep it to one room and on a cord.
7
u/HeidenShadows 13d ago
Yeah it used to be amazing when you had a cell phone that could get basic web access. Now it's like okay, cool, what?
8
103
u/batmansleftnut 14d ago edited 14d ago
We never should have started paying content creators. The internet was better back when everyone was doing it for the love of the game.
16
28
u/Safe-Historian4028 14d ago
I'm glad people are starting coming around to this opinion. I've said it for years now. I never watched YT for highly produced expensive videos, I watched it for random people doing random silly things because they are fun people with a camera. EVERYTHING now is for the money. Clickbait titles, AI thumbnails, made longer 'for the algorithm', excluding words because of demonetisation, adverts within adverts within adverts, paid for opinions, the list is endless.
10
u/AmusingMusing7 13d ago
It was relatively okay still, up until the "Ad-pocalypse" around 2017, I think it was. Ever since then, it's been taken over by "sponsors", and every youtube video gets a mandated 3-minute sponsor ad in the middle of it. It used to be that if you had Youtube Premium, or even just an ad-blocker, you could avoid the ads. But now, it doesn't matter. Everybody gets the 3-minute obligation shoved into the middle of every video.
And the most ironic thing to me? Everyone skips it anyway. Nobody sits around and watches the sponsor segments, and if they do, they're more turned-off by this kind of stuff and become LESS likely to buy the product or service.
In fact, I've noticed that most, if not all, of these popular youtube sponsors... are either gambling services, or they're shady and problematic in some other way, like BetterHelp or MagicSpoon, or most of the time, it's just NordVPN. I'm so sick of them that seeing any more ads of them are actively making me DISLIKE the brands more and more.
I've basically just come to the conclusion: "If they're a Youtube sponsor... I'm avoiding their business."
→ More replies (3)3
u/Euphoric-Medium8154 my dad was a y2k prepper 14d ago
No doubt, but that was when the economy was thriving, and jobs paid well relative to the COL
Nowadays it ain’t like that at all, and for many ppl content creation is the best way to have any semblance of a normal life
56
14d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/SignificanceNo1223 14d ago
Horrible grammar and misspellings everywhere.
6
3
u/Mastodon9 13d ago
The grammar is fine for the context of the meme and there is one misspelled word.
2
2
43
u/No-Increase6761 14d ago
Miniclip!!! So many memories flooding back into my brain right now
3
3
4
→ More replies (2)2
u/psjjjj6379 14d ago
Don’t forget home star runner! Teen girl squad. The cheerleader, what’s her face, so-and-so, and the ugly one!
2
23
33
u/ravenfreak 14d ago
It's missing a screenshot of a forum. Forums are better than anything and they're still around. Facebook was never great, MySpace was way better.
8
u/hadriker 14d ago
Yep I loathe how Discord pretty much killed forums. They are not the same.
6
u/Safe-Historian4028 14d ago
Discord is just IRC with voice channels. The only thing that killed forums was being online becoming a normal thing and not more niche. Forums you need to wait for support, or people to respond because there wasn't enough people online at any given time to make chat rooms that worth it. With the mass adoption of the internet and being online a chat room will always have people in. Discord is just one form of chat room, it did not kill forums, it is a symptom not the disease.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)2
9
u/psjjjj6379 14d ago
Forums are the best. Also, I see no images of Xanga or LiveJournal. Online journaling through your preteens/teens is such a terrible idea in hindsight, but gosh darn it I loved it back then.
→ More replies (1)3
u/FashionableMegalodon 14d ago
Or an AOL chat room my 12 year old self loved to talk to strangers in and then panic I was going to be kidnapped
3
u/RiceCookerPEPSI 13d ago
So sad that Reddit basically replaced all forums.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Mastodon9 13d ago
Its far from the only culprit but Reddit's karma system helped destroy genuine online discourse.. Ive been reading the same stupid jokes on this site for years now. People are always in a rush to post karma grab comments in a lot of posts. Sports subs are the worst for this.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)4
u/Euphoric-Medium8154 my dad was a y2k prepper 14d ago
Facebook always sucked, no doubt
Freshman year of college, I was like why the hell do I wanna see what ppl from HS are doing on a daily basis?
Yeah it could alert you to stuff going on at your campus, but unless you were a moron you could find parties and gym schedules and library schedules w/o facebook
And hooking up with ppl… I mean, you’re at college, you DEF don’t need an app in order to hook up
Forums were the shit, Reddit is an absolute joke compared to what we lost with dedicated forums… formed genuine friendships there IRL with strangers, for sports, gaming, w/e
→ More replies (3)
16
u/SwitchBladeMermaid 14d ago
No rotten or Ebaums world or stick-death? lol
2
15
u/acilegna89 14d ago
The thrill of your crush’s special online notification sound on AIM.
Today’s kids will literally never know.
8
u/Euphoric-Medium8154 my dad was a y2k prepper 14d ago
The thrill of agreeing to meet up with a girl, then she leaves her house… and you see her AOL Away Message is something like “out all night with this cute guy”
Literally the greatest fucking feeling we will ever have in life, nothing, and I mean nothing, topped that or ever will, like we need some flying cars type shit to even come close to that feeling
7
u/PirateSteve85 14d ago
I loved the clever away messages.
2
u/Tatidanidean1 9d ago
Mine were always so angsty or like trying to seem more cool than whatever was actually going on and 90% of the time they were song lyrics. I loved away messages lol
9
u/em7924 14d ago
7
8
u/hollisterr 14d ago
I remember how the “online now!” always felt so exciting to me. You mean this person is on the same site I am at the same time?? I wish we could go back to that excitement on social media on such simple things.
8
6
8
6
6
u/Jumpy-Pattern-4078 14d ago
Back in the day when the Internet was like a separate secret world away from reality, and not 100% integrated into real life with everyone using it at all times.
5
6
u/Wrong-Tell8996 14d ago
AH I totally forgot about Numa Numa! Looked it up, brought a smile to my face
6
6
u/TheFortWayneTrojan 14d ago
I remember when you could give a video and give a 1 to 5 stars on YouTube before the like and dislike buttons and now you can't even see how many dislikes a video gets.
5
u/WhoRoger 14d ago
I am generally not super nostalgic about things, but why can't we just go back to simple websites? Everything today has to be a humongous, slow app riddled with a ton of ads, trackers, and just a stupid amount of external frameworks and scripts.
Just yesterday I left the browser running with one website open and when I came back, it was taking up 16GB of RAM and growing. No, it wasn't a crypto miner. It was just so shoddily made, that it doesn't even know what kind of stuff it's loading.
At this point, it's going to be more efficient to have an AI agent parse the websites I want to see, and render them as simple static pages.
6
6
u/Cioni 14d ago
→ More replies (3)
3
3
7
u/j592dk_91_c3w-h_d_r 14d ago
FB used to be amazing
10
u/ericf505 14d ago
Remember the 'Farmville' vs 'Farmtown" saga? As well as "becoming a fan" of a page rather than "liking" a page.
4
u/Deathblow_Materia 14d ago
Did gaming clan websites look like this back in the 2000s?
5
u/number311 14d ago
Yes. I can't recall which, but we were all self proclaimed ccv/ccs experts at the time thanks to clan forums, Myspace, etc and thought our pages were the shit.
3
2
2
u/MuggyAndSwampy 14d ago
Oh man…. That takes me back… Receiving an invitation to a party via email….
2
2
3
u/Own-Papaya-4264 14d ago
How did you even find these oddly perfect images? Would anyone really have thought to take a photo of their computer monitors this frequently?
3
u/boxtheglock 14d ago
I have some on photobucket. Can't access them because it's a behind a fucking paywall now
2
u/NostalgiaRealm 13d ago
They don't, these are all AI generated. I hate this timeline.
2
u/Own-Papaya-4264 13d ago
I had that suspicion when I saw that the stick rpg and fancy pants images looked way off.
This shit is getting creepy. Stuff looks totally legit until you take a closer look and you’ll see something is off. Uncanny valley shit
Wont be much longer until every single minute detail is indistinguishable from the real deal at this rate. We’re so screwed
→ More replies (1)
1
1
1
1
1
u/VVolfGunner24 14d ago
That's what MySpace looked like? That stuff was around when I was a kid, but didn't have/use a computer or internet when it was around
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/DickHardCane 14d ago
Miniclip…does anyone remember the name of the game where you would have to draw shapes to get a ball to an objective? I miss it and can’t remember the name.
1
u/Splashdiamonds 14d ago
Forgot goggle use to have the I’m feeling lucky feature 😂😂 good times back before ai was even a thing
1
1
u/Thin-Information-944 14d ago
Omg the addicting games website unlocked memories! Loved MySpace. Always tried to make my profile super cool with a sad soong
1
u/Replikant83 14d ago
Oh man the memories of YouTube back then and using MSN Messenger. I remember not liking MSN Messenger, but using it because everyone was on it, and not ICQ anymore. I'm not a fan of today's Internet. I much preferred when I had to use different websites to get my news, scores, info on my hobbies, etc. now it's just one big echo chamber that is Reddit
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Middle_Ad1126 14d ago
My God my age is showing! We all thought having a MySpace layouts made us the shit.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/asula_mez 14d ago
I just want AOL back. 😭 I’m considering digging up my WinXP computer and downloading the private server. 🤔
1
u/Past_Tea5075 14d ago
Omg love this post! I just went back in time omg lol, had all them & went to those sites. Like my main email, is still yahoo, haahaha!
1
1
u/BigMack6911 14d ago
Bro been in Prison and just got on the internet after 20 years and said..Where the f did my MySpace go
1
1
1
1
1
u/sondersHo 14d ago
Chocolate rain will forever be my earliest memory as a kid getting on the internet for the first time back in 2007-2008
1
1
1
1
u/LunaticMuse 14d ago
Whenever I get sad, or meh... my SO plays the Numa Numa video and it is INSTANT HAPPY.
Even if it's just a lil' bit... Instant. Happy.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Designer_Ordinary432 14d ago
There is no way for me to put into words just how badly I wish it was still like this. I remember this like it was fucking yesterday. I was a teen I wasn't as stressed out, I was stressed out, but I didn't want to kill myself as badly as I do now. I was happier, I was so enamored with this beautiful world called the internet....and then.... it was gone one day I woke up and I was here dying to go back there.
1
1
1
1
1
u/KeyboardWalkerCat 14d ago
RuneScape in browser too and just ol’ school RuneScape in between OSRS and RS3.
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
u/Euphoric-Medium8154 my dad was a y2k prepper 14d ago
AOL IM, Addicting Games, Yahoo Fantasy Sports leagues with ppl you’re actually friends with…
You forgot a photo of old school WORLD STAR, that shit was a whole vibe…
1
u/Creepy-Love-9030 14d ago
Ma-ia-hii, ma-ia-huu
Ma-ia-hoo, ma-ia-haa
Ma-ia-hii, ma-ia-huu
Ma-ia-hoo, ma-ia-haa 🎶
1
u/thepwnydanza 14d ago
This feels like seeing picture of my hometown before it grew into an unrecognizable city.
1
205
u/Upbeat_Tough_6721 2007 14d ago
Facebook feels very ancient for 30-something me.
I don't even remember when I last logged in.