The Internet was…Weird. it was way more anonymous and way less centralized. You didn’t just check Reddit or Lemmy or YouTube, you had a favorites bar. You would go down the list and check 4 different flash websites, 3 forums, and some news/entertainment article sites.

And friends would constantly tell you new sites you had to check out. And webcomics. You would find a webcomic and read it from the start, then add it to your weekly update list.

It was also peak gross Internet. You would always be wary of links friends would send. Goatse and lemon party were guaranteed to be hiding in one.

Everyone had their favorite flash game site. Simple, one player games that you did just for fun. No achievements or social element besides sharing the link with a friend.

I was on the younger side so it was mostly flash game and animation sites. Homestar runner, albinoblacksheep, miniclip, addicting games, runescape.

Google could actually find you things.

The first page of searches was almost never brimming with corporate shit, but very Web 1.0 looking niche websites.

Browser based games were all the rage.

Oh God, flash animations. Albino Blacksheep. Our sense of humor was… primitive.

Fuck, webcomics too. They were big back then. And mostly shit, lmao.

Everyone had a blog. Not like modern cookie-cutter blogs, but slapdash HTML pages with unintuitive layouts and garish backgrounds and graphics. 9/10 times that’s where super obscure information was. Midi files - god, do kids even know what midi files are anymore?

There were a million fansites for every fandom. No centralization.

There was a much stronger sense of the internet being a unique place, apart from meatspace. Maybe it was just the aftermath of the dotcom bubble busting, but everything was very… open. Communal. People just… freely sharing themselves and their work.

Dial up, mostly. Cable showed up pretty quick. Slower. More open. More egalitarian. Not SEO’d. Simpler. Anyone could make a webpage and find a free place to host it or spend just a few dollars a month for a better site host. Lots of phpbb forums or similar, basically Reddit except each sub is its own independent forum with its own, independent mods. Bots weren’t a concern. Trolls weren’t really formalized, though they certainly existed. Assholes gotta be assholes. Ads were barely a thing. The gnashing of teeth as banner ads first started to make inroads was real. There were lots of search engines.

It was a bit more dangerous though. You could relatively easily download or open a virus, email spam with malware was definitely a thing and not filtered by ISPs. You could find some really dark corners and see some pretty awful things, ogrish was the precursor to live leak. Newsgroups were popular and a great place to find warez (nobody calls it warez anymore).

There were a lot of people that made free software to fill in the gaps where big software needed help. Everything from photoshop filters to windows tweak tools to things like Gimp got some of their starts early on as dedicated programmers did it because they could. Plenty of niche hobby forums, help forums, weird shit, and almost none of it was monetized. There was no real social media. We just had newsgroups, AIM, MIRC, ICQ and the like.

It was like MTV when they actually just played music and didn’t start all the tv show BS.

I do miss that internet. I think it was easier to actually connect with people, content wasn’t shoved in your face, ads weren’t shoved in your face, you weren’t constantly tracked. You weren’t monetized. You were part of the internet, not the object to have money extracted from.

I don’t know, I was too busy playing Starcraft.

edit: Wait, hold on, just remembered something. I’ll just leave this here. Not a rickroll or anything, while that’s tempting, I promise.

https://youtu.be/X2UXIaAo12w

Broadband internet was a game changer. I spent a lot of time on fark.com and various other message boards. Chatted with friends over AOL instant messages and IRC.

There was a certain video format for Realplayer that seemed to be the extremely popular for a while and it still…. (Buffering)…. Sucked…. (Buffering)…. Ass

This is a little bit before, but a story worth telling (again).

In 1995, I got AOL. Of course, this was in the days where only dialup existed, and when AOL was not flat rate, but charged extra for any time spent online over 30 hours a month. I had some bills.

My 486 computer had a 14.4Kbps modem in it, which I decided I would upgrade to a 33.6Kbps. This was the fastest I could get at the time. Surely, I would enjoy this new superfast speed, right?

No, no I would not. I noticed that I was only ever connecting at 2400 - and this was when the “standard” for dialup was 14.4. AOL advertised 28.8 at the time, as I recall.

I tried all manner of modem strings to try and get my fancy 33.6 to connect to AOL at any speed higher than 2400, to no avail. I spent hours waiting in line in their “support” chat rooms (which I later learned were staffed by unpaid volunteers who may not have known anything about anything). Then I finally decided to try using the toll-free 800 number (which AOL charged a premium to use).

Bang, connected at 14.4Kbps. Back to my local number, 2400. … Wait what? Okay, then it’s not me, it’s them.

I did even more digging to discover that AOL only offered “high speeds” in certain metropolitan areas. AOL numbers local to me were not included in any of those, so I got 2400bps, because that’s all AOL would give. And by this time, the “standard” for dialup had jumped to 28.8Kbps.

All of those super high AOL bills from before (they’d since moved to flat rate unlimited) were exacerbated by “downloading art” at 2400bps.

I immediately went to the grocery store, bought a computer magazine, thumbed through it until I found a regular old ISP (Netcom), and called them on the phone to sign up.

In the late 1990s I was at university using their OC-48 lines. So I had a share of a ~2GBit connection while most of the people were lucky to get 56k.

In the dorms, everyone was assigned an IP address but most people still didn’t have their own computers. So my roommate and I convinced a bunch of other people on our floor to give us their IPs - and our RA was also a Network admin, so he was able to facilitate. We ran a web server, forums, Quake and Team Fortress (1) servers (Clan Clam for folks that remember Quake Clans), and some very private file servers. All running on found hardware.

The speed was so fast compared to most folks that it was a bit like having a data related super power.

Magic. That’s when higher speeds started coming around. Downloading a song in less time than it took to listen to the song was suddenly a reality.

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My first brush with the internet was in 2000. We had our family computer in the living room. Our dial-up ISP was Funcow. The local newspaper had a little section where they talked about fun websites to visit (family-friendly of course) and we would check them out in the evening. I know that Google existed but we didn’t use it - we had AltaVista, then Yahoo. These were also website directories - basically lists of websites grouped by topics. So if you didn’t find what you were looking for on one website, you’d try the next one, and so on. And the websites themselves were basically made by hand in html. To stand out some people threw in lots of little animated icons garish colors, weird website layouts, background music that couldn’t be turned off… It was 100% amateur and unpolished, and much much MUCH more diverse than today’s internet. But slowly, massively popular websites and tools started to dominate. Microsoft had a huge presence through Hotmail, MSN.com, and MSN Messenger. But Yahoo Messenger had video chatting first (IIRC). There were fansites about everything under the sun but no Wikipedia so researching any given topic in depth was a mammoth, tedious task. In 7th grade I wrote a research paper on ferrets and referenced about half a dozen websites but only collected about two sentences worth of useful information from each - so research was still heavily reliant on books and libraries. Speaking of libraries: that’s where almost everyone went for free internet. Schools and colleges also had computer labs with free internet and woefully inadequate content filters. It was crazy. It was awesome.

You can catch a glimpse of what the websites were like using the web archive. A good starting point would be a popular web directory, like for example the Google directory from 2004.

Forums instead of social media, IRC/ICQ/AIM for chat, websites were much more static… unless using Flash, newgrounds full of Flash games.

FTP/IRC was source of media distribution until transitions to, bittorrent was new, and napster, limewire, kazaa were things. Newsgroups have existed for all time, but not really including them because less mainstream.

Windows would allow broadcast messages to just pop-up on your computer. Needed to implement your own firewall like Zonealarm, these things weren’t just default… computers kinds of just ‘directly’ connected to the internet without any appliance in the way at first.

Edit: Oh yeah, and Steam didn’t exist, so games were bought individually in boxes at stores, and valve games were like sharing your IP with friends, listing of servers… speaking of, early Counter Strike and stuff didn’t have any anti-cheat… if you added anti-cheat to your CS server when first coming out, people getting caught would be shocked, since they didnt know they could get caught, always in denial for ‘false positives’, and really find out who of your friends aren’t actually good and were just cheating all along.

Less central control, more diverse places existed, always felt like you were discovering new communities where people knew each other.

Anything you could think of, ANYTHING, had a community somewhere.

Back in the AOL CD via postal mail days, the Internet was the AOL home page. News feeds, email, dumb games, chat rooms, message boards… and rotten.com for everything else.