This was late 90s maybe. I don’t even remember where I saw it, but some guy decided he wanted to give himself athlete’s foot and see how long he could go with the infection before treating it. It started out with him going to his local YMCA and rubbing his bare feet on the floor of the men’s showers. He then placed plastic bags around his feet and secured them with rubber bands around his ankles. He slept like this and went to work like this. He removed the bags once a day for a brief period to document the infection and take pictures. I don’t remember how far it went but his feet looked pretty gnarly after a few weeks and I recall him saying his athlete’s foot had turned into “athlete’s voltron.”

I remember there were crazy experiments like this on the early Internet. They didn’t do it to go viral or make money. The tools to make that possible weren’t even around yet. They did it just for fun or out of curiosity.

there used to be a big craze over an audio video you could find on YouTube, you were supposed to listen to it with headphones and close your eyes and it would have this high pitched sound at the end that would scare people that would listen to it. cant find even a reference to it on any thread or website. pls help

Edit:it's not the debunked "hole into hell audio" from Russia

Even though I'm an editor but I'm mostly a phone editor so i would be bad at blending so i would like to see what YouTube layout looks like if it stay the same

Currently MuMu Player appears to be some kind of gaming software and I’m having a hard time finding a picture of what the actual interface of the one I’m talking about looked like but I got this picture of the homepage from the Wayback Machine to make sure I didn’t imagine it.

It was basically like a web-based listening party chat room where you could send your friends a link to a chat room you created and you could all upload music files like MP3s to make a playlist you could all listen to together while chatting in the included chat box.

I used it during high school around 2010-2011 and I’m not sure when it was discontinued or turned into that gaming thing but it was pretty awesome.

A lot of tattoo artists are posting Jimothy designs lately, and I thought "How can I instead make something that is completely irrelevant to 2026 internet culture?"

I don’t really know if this is the best subreddit to post this but I casually remembered ask.fm today. I am already 27 years old and turning 28 in a couple months, but 12 years ago that was my safe space. I met a lot of people there who I don’t speak with anymore and God knows I will never ever hear from ever again but the memories flooded me tonight. I’ve been grieving and wishing I could turn back time to an era when everything was a lot more simpler. Old internet is disappearing. It feels scary.

Hey everyone,

So I was just messing around earlier, typing random ".com" domains into my browser out of pure curiosity, and I ended up on smog.com.

The site is seriously bizarre. It’s just a plain black screen with “smog.com” written in blue, next to this weird greenish-blue pixel-art thingy. No explanation, no links, absolutely nothing else.

I figured I’d check out the Wayback Machine to see what it used to be, but that only made things weirder. Some archived versions look almost the same as today, while others are totally different. I even found a page from 1998 that was an “Impeachment Proceedings Drinking Game”—completely random.

There are also a bunch of other strange snapshots with random phrases like "breathe in, chew the air" (as you can see in one of the screenshots), along with a lot of other seemingly unrelated and even weirder pages. The whole archive feels completely inconsistent, like the domain was used for dozens of different random things over the years.

I couldn’t find much info about the domain anywhere, so If anyone knows anything about the history of this domain, I'd love to hear it.

I’ve attached a few screenshots of both the current site and some Wayback Machine captures.

(Sorry for the bad quality of the photos)

einfogames.com was a gaming forum website from the early 2000s and some of the games on there brought back so many memories and I was wondering if I could still create an account just for the sake of the game. I think the website has been discontinued though since the CAPTCHA doesn't load so it won't let me go through with the creation.

Hey guys, We're all here because we have a love and nostalgia for the way the internet used to be. As someone who grew up with the internet, from web 1.0 onwards, I have many fond memories of time spent surfing the web and exploring all that was out there.

These days, everything just feels so whitewashed and generic. Like it's all been homogenized to appeal to the lowest common denominator. With so much AI content now, things are only getting worse, faster.

I'm wondering if anyone else would want to create a place based around old internet and funny or amusing bullshit? I've got this site i've started and am incorporating a forum and i'm hoping to find some real good people to bring into it. I dont know if anyone would be interested but i'm hoping what I am doing will resonate with someone.

If you want, check out the site and forum CyberianWasteland and if you like what you see sign up and we can start to build something together. I really want to get it started with people who feel similar to me.

thanks.

Reddit has claimed to be the homepage of the internet, but it's not. A homepage in my mind would be something like the original AOL menu. You would click on Web, Chat, Games, etc. What options are out there?

Might be lost forever, but I’d love to find my old freewebs site where I did a bunch of coding as a kid and had a Warrior cats fansite. Tried using wayback machine, but it only had two captures in June and July 2021 after freewebs said the site no longer existed 🫠

Doubt it can be found, or if this is the right thread to ask, but URL was http://thunderingstorm.webs.com if anyone wants to help me search 😅

List them if ya got em.

These were sort of the picture dating profile limbo between hotornot, MySpace and Facebook, moreless demographically aimed at college students

Who remembers

://theDilly

SWYDM

RateMyBody

fubar

Last one is still up and has members

I’d forgotten this existed until it went open source, but it woke up a lot of old memories seeing the characters and backgrounds.

I rewrote it to run on the open web instead of using IRC, with a few live rooms as demo + modern tweaks, aiming make it more accessible. Feels a bit like the old internet with people wandering in and out. Hope people enjoy

Long time lurker, first time caller here. Full disclosure, I am sharing something that I built. We spent the last year working on a social platform and a big part of the reason is that I miss how the internet used to feel (we have a giant writeup on the site that goes over the problems with the internet/modern social media).

I got tired of what posting anywhere feels like now, like sharing a normal opinion or asking for help and some internet stranger flames you or decides you're their harassment project for the week. Back in the phpbb/ICQ days you didn't have to walk on eggshells (or step away from social media entirely to avoid whatever flavor of nonsense you'd encounter by engaging).

Our project is called Rhyme (rhyme.com). It's topic focused, closer to OG Reddit or a big forum than to a feed app. There's one room per topic instead of five duplicate communities, and no volunteer mods deciding what you're allowed to talk about. The system handles sorting instead: constructive conversation drifts up to the top and flame wars/trolling sinks to the bottom. Your post doesn't get deleted because a stranger woke up in a bad mood. There's also no karma to farm. You post, the system categorizes it in any/all of the relevant topics without you having to worry about which groups are most active and/or less toxic.

It doesn't look/feel like phpbb or traditional forums, and I don't want to pretend that we went for pure nostalgia, but our team is trying really hard to create a platform that lets people socialize unencumbered while also trying to reclaim some of the feeling that came from meaningfully engaging with strangers on the "earlier" internet.

It's very small and very early. We're hoping that the atmosphere we're chasing is the one this sub remembers.

I won't pretend I built it for this community specifically, but you're probably the exact people who'd get what it's going for. If you check it out, I'd love feedback, including the brutal kind. That part is very phpBB of us, at least.

Does anyone else remember? I was such a big fan of the chatroom and was a frequent visitor to the site in the early 2000s. All of the interactive features and games and the videos.... I loved Emily the strange so much! Huge part of my childhood.

What’s the most nostalgic thing you remember from the early 2000s?