Internet nostalgia thread

I feel jaded by the modern web with all its Javascript-heavy, tracking-laden, corporate sponsored clickbait shit.

I remember getting net access back in the mid 90s as a teenager, it blew my mind. Joining chat rooms and seeing messages from other people (that you had to keep scrolling the window down to see) was something amazing and new. You ask a question and someone responds, some stranger called druid78 or whatever and you have no idea who this person is or where they live but you just interacted in this 256-color virtual room and it makes you want to take a shit just thinking about the greatness of it.

The web back then really did have soul, it felt like someone's carefully curated Geocities site was a labor of love that they shared with the world for no reason, no motive other than because they could and it was all exciting and new.

Some dude would have a website where he uploaded his lunch menu or whatever, and this was back before shitty social media so it wasn't narcissistic like selfie crap but charming in a way because not many people were doing it. It was voyeuristic but not in a porny way.

It felt like each website was its own little realm, with its own style and character, and you could follow hyperlinks to completely different sites that would be part of a narrative of discovery. These days you're just endlessly refreshing the same 3 or 4 sites.

Remember shit like Happy Puppy? Web rings and guestbooks? It was all so innocent, and I guess the 90s was an innocent decade as a whole.

I remember using CheetahChat to join Yahoo chat rooms and talk shit with people. ICQ, and it's little Uh-Oh sound. Yahoo Messenger, where people coming online and popping up a message window had more resonance than some Facebook in-browser messaging bullshit.

Even filesharing with stuff like Napster was more poignant as when you only get 4-7KB down each file counts; now people are downloading whole Blu-ray rips they won't even watch.

What makes you nostalgic?

Other urls found in this thread:

fauux.neocities.org/
b3ta.com/
doorway.kapustosrub.ru/
neocities.org/browse
milliondollarhomepage.com/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>I feel jaded by the modern web with all its Javascript-heavy, tracking-laden, corporate sponsored clickbait shit.
>waaaaah!
Time to take your pills gramps.

I was there in the early days of the Internet too. You're making me nostalgic, OP.

I also feel bad for teens these days. They'll never know what it was like to talk in a teen-only chatroom where every other person wasn't secretly a pedophile.

To add to this, a part of the problem I have with the Internet now is just information overload. There's too much content, and too much novelty. It's addicting, and yet makes me tired and numb.

Nobody get me wrong: I love how tech and communication has advanced, but man, do I long for the days where new information was truly a joy to behold. I wish I was born earlier so I could've stayed in those times even longer.

The Internet is too much of a good thing, IMO.

my greatest internet moment:

>be 1998
>just bought my monthly videogame magazine
>last page it talks about emulators and have a how to play Mario Word on you computer
>no fucking way this shit is possible.dll
>get home and go online
>find the world of emulation
>I can actually play all NES, Snes ,Genesis and even arcade games
>best day ever

That internet is still here, sorta, but the giants moved your attention elsewhere for commercial profit.

hahaha I remember finding emulators too. I was in fifth grade.

and in the next year I found Napster

always something great happening

I remember watching anime on megavideo and a popup would come up saying I've watched too many minutes and I needed to wait 24 hours. I kind of miss that life.

I would agree with this. While I enjoy the ability to have better technologies on websites, such as Javascript, I still wish I could travel back to a time, in a sense, where I could relive all of those old websites and experiences.

I remember when old forums and chatrooms had a sense of community - there were few enough people where everyone knew each other, but enough curiosity where strangers would find these forums/chatrooms and keep the site lively.

It's this sense, the "populated but not crowded" that I enjoyed, yet most websites these days feel saturated with an overwhelming quantity of opinions and people.

Me too. Too much never-ending novelty has made me numb.

I've been trying to get away from the firehouse of information, but my work depends on having Internet access, and all that shit is only hop away.

I should probably get off Sup Forums.

>It felt like each website was its own little realm, with its own style and character, and you could follow hyperlinks to completely different sites that would be part of a narrative of discovery.
Some people still make websites like that, e.g. fauux.neocities.org/
But because of google, they are hard to find. Quite ironic, but imagine googling "secret little website" - the top results would be everything but the thing you are looking for.

>there were few enough people where everyone knew each other, but enough curiosity where strangers would find these forums/chatrooms and keep the site lively.

This!

Fuck, I miss those days. Finding forums with the perfectly-sized community where everyone knows each-other, and yet, still attracted new blood, is so exceedingly rare these days. If not impossible.

The only forums I can find are places that are either: massively overcrowded; jealously guarded by the ancients; or ghost towns.

The only decent discussions I've been able to have recently, have been on Sup Forums (as much garbage as there is), occasionally IRC, and mid-sized Reddit communities.

Sigh.

There are still a few chatrooms like that out there, but they are constantly overrun with people looking for kik hookups and/or pedos and most of the old community left because of it.

Fuck the 90s, internet peakead at mid 00s

Back in the late 90's / early milenium years, there was a brilliant hacking site. Unfortunately I dont remember the name of it but it was completely bizarre. It was about philosophy of hacking things and had all sorts of diagrams on how to bluebox and brownbox stuff. The site closed around 2003/2004. It was called something like the mysterious zen of hacking or something like that. I learnt to googlehack from that and also all about hacker culture. The site had strong links to people like cult-of-the-dead-cow and all those elite groups. The site always opened with an image of an alchemist in a old laboratory

old web design was gaudy as shit but I wish more people took some tips from it, primarily in layout, you can do some good shit with nothing but HTML and CSS and not a single line of javascript

>megavideo
Not nostalgia

One thing I dont miss about the 90s web was the difficulty in finding what you were actually looking for.

Eat penguin shit you ass spelunker

...

.

...

,

Oh shit, I remember HotBot. It was my favorite search engine at the time, because it always seemed to get more-relevant search results than any others I had tried.

Same. Hotbot was the shit. Used to alternate between it and AltaVista

>oh god napster is gone :(
you know soulseek exists right?

This. But also Sup Forums. Time to time there would be posters using nametags that have something interesting to say , but many people instead of listening , would just call them tripfags and so on. As much as I love being user it would be nice to sperate shit posting plebs from actual people.

Anyone remember astalavista when it was a proper blackhat site, LOL?

I miss sites built by people who really gave a shit about things. You can still find blogs, but lots of times there's too much personal life drama mixed in, or people mix everything into a goulash and half the posts are irrelevant to half the people reading.

That's actually true. Everything is just a Google Search away now and it's not healthy for us.

Back in the days you are talking about I would visit maybe 40 or 50 sites a day looking at really interesting stuff. These days I am lucky to find 4 sites a day that interest me.
Everyone is too scared to put any real information on the web or to infringe copyright, or too tight fisted and want paying for it.
The web is 98% shitter than in 1999/2000 and that's a fact

akrepnalan.com

>not getting an old laptop or desktop and using archive.org for that nostalgic feel

(also this website is still up and my laptop's not time-correct but fuck you)

>living in the stone age
baka

I remember using AltaVista as my main source for downloading music for the longest time.

i make the best with what i have

you'll never understand that poorfag life

Yeah, but one of my most nostalgic sites never got archived. And I can't even find any screenshots of it either.

It's weird because it was a really popular site, and was up for many, many years. And now, it's just gone. Poof. Like it never existed.

Though in some ways, I kind of like it like that. It's something special I was a part of, and its history will stay with me and the others who remember it. No perma-archive to keep it around for the eternity of humanity.

The web was 98% shitter back then than how it is right now. All those nostalfags are just a bunch of 30+ yo fat man who did nothing with their shitty lifes, thus they live in the past thinking of what they did wrong.

You can never bring those days back and visiting old sites now is like going to a living museum, but I do think if you change your mindset to seeing the computer/internet as an appliance like a television rather than a near-omnipresent extension of yourself it should help with information overload.

Confirmed for underage b&.

I recently sold a bunch of collectibles, but before I listed everything on eBay, I tried to look up detailed info so I could be as specific as possible. Ten years ago, I would still have been able to find multiple small sites with detailed info on everything. These days, that's all gone. It was really surprising just how thoroughly purged the actual informative portion of the internet has become.

It's a shame that you can now depend on ANYTHING you put up to be crawled and then archived by a bot. Forever.

The data that was crawled may not be visible now, but it's probably sitting in someone's database somewhere.

It was shittier in terms of visual appeal, but in terms of usability and access to information, it was much better than the current web 2.0 bullshit where you can't go a second without thousands of ads or anti-ad blocking shit, shitty ass rewritten blogs, 'click next page to view the article' and the general overflow of useless websites striving to stay at the top of the search rank.

b3ta.com/

Before memes were memes

I really miss the internet from before shit started getting aggregated into massive websites like reddit. Here's to hoping the developers of NNTPchan meet an untimely death and their work doesn't get picked up by anyone else as whoever thought it would be a good idea to link every imageboard into a reddit size superimageboard was a fucktard.

>It was really surprising just how thoroughly purged the actual informative portion of the internet has become.
Holy shit this. I've been thinking I've been slowly going insane over the years with it somehow getting harder to find information about some things.

Hotline FTP client

Wow, time hasn't touched that place at all
if it weren't for the post dates I would've taken this to be an archive from 2003
It seems to have preserved that old web attitude and userbase too
It's a living fossil of sorts

beautiful
just beautiful

doorway.kapustosrub.ru/

neocities.org/browse

Coming through

milliondollarhomepage.com/

i blame niggers and jews and their shit "culture."

>I've been thinking I've been slowly going insane over the years with it somehow getting harder to find information about some things.

Yep-yep... good info is hard to find these days. Especially for anything health or "scientific study" related. It feels like everything is just baseless assumption built atop a mountain of other baseless assumptions, sometimes built upon bullshit, non-peer-reviewed studies with a sample size of 5. Or sometimes just state-sponsored science where the people conducting the thing know they have to reach a certain conclusion in order to get grant money so that they can eat.

For scientific topics, I've found that adding -"as a mother" and -"want what's best for" as really helped trim-down the bullshit on Google.

Outside of Google searches though, information is sparse and useless on any sites I search. Sometimes the best information is stuff deeply embedded and unknown to the rest of the Internet.

Says the memebox.

>Lycos FTP search
>astalavista.box.sk
>appz&gamez
>keygenz&serialz
>mirc wars
>LAN warez parties
>the time before all ROM sites became "emulator news" sites

This. I find it quite odd that tripfags are received so negatively on the grounds that they adopt a persistent identity of any sort (rather than the quality of their posts). People have even stopped taking ad-hoc identities within threads for the sake of discussion.

So many good BBSs have gone too, and most IRC channels are down to circlejerks.

Altavista was great, I remember when Google's results were typically irrelevant.

>study

You have to go to peer reviewed literature now. I use web of science, and google scholar, more than normal google searches.

im rly glad this site is still up

>mentions FFXII, picture of Suzumiya Haruhi
>both 2006
not even that old, the page looks older than it is

I remember that.

i wonder if anyone else used go!zilla

the haruhi stuff was about the last time it was updated actually. site's been around since 1997 and hasn't changed much since then

i used to use the site back in 2000 when it was pretty much just evangelion and card captor sakura themes and wallpapers

okay so turns out i'm wrong and the site does get the occasional update here and there, but mostly under-the-hood stuff or the creator showing off his desktop program.

...

>For scientific topics, I've found that adding
>-"as a mother"
>and -"want what's best for" as really helped trim-down the bullshit on Google.
kek

i don't doubt it though.

oh wow.

I was a CL for area51 lol

Miss those days of telling people how HTML 4.0 worked

>One thing I dont miss about the 90s web was the difficulty in finding what you were actually looking for.

" Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them." -- Daryl Zero

Maybe finding something you were looking for was hard, but those times when you were visiting individual's web pages, and following their links at the bottom of their pages, surfing and surfing, and finally discovering a great page that you had no idea existed, not on the information superhighway, but alongside some densely overgrown jungle on a tributary of the Orinoco ... priceless.

I miss the internet when it still did have soul and it's like a whole brave new world. People there were genuinely curious and learn computer-related topics because they were simply astonished by computers and the internet.

Now people access the internet only because money and and opportunities. People learn to code to seek career opportunities. People from business background make a website to generate money and filled the internet with capitalism and ad-full websites.

>Holy shit this. I've been thinking I've been slowly going insane over the years with it somehow getting harder to find information about some things.

People just don't make guides and catalogs of information anymore. It used to be every possible topic had a page with a big ugly table holding everything you could want. I guess we just assume some merchant or giant aggregator will keep modern data around forever, but they don't. Once it stops being relevant to clicks, it gets purged. On my own site, I notice that the really old product info is what people are looking for. Probably mine is one of the last standing.

it's all Wikipedia now

+Fravia's site

webdev here. I'm sick of all the modern-looking design crap. My plan is to make my designs have 2000-2007 look while making it mobile-responsive.
There really is something about the feel of vintage internet.

>pravin lal quote

the feeels

Late reply because I was at work.
I know that it sucked. The quality was dreadful and that time limit blew dick. It's just something that stands out as a relic from that era. I kinda look back on it fondly.

If you'd read BNW you would realize how accurate this assessment is. In the book and in our lives we are bombarded by so much stimuli that everyone ignores everything.

Ugh. That reminds me. I read the book "The Shallows", which was about the Internet and how it grabs our attention only to scatter it. And which in the long-term makes us shallow, hurried, and distracted thinkers.

It feels like I forgot all of the book's lessons, because here I am, barely alive and addicted to stimulus.

Fuck.

3spooky5me