What exactly was your favorite era of the Internet?

What exactly was your favorite era of the Internet?

strawpoll.me/13474362/

>1983-1994: Primitive Web
>1995-2000: Dot-Com Bubble Era
>2001-2006: Classic Era
>2007-2013: Independent Media Era
>2014-present: Hashtag "Post-Ironic" Era

Other urls found in this thread:

web.archive.org/web/20000229083043/http://www.dragonball-gt.com:80/
youtu.be/m3gcb_9Q10E
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Classic Era somethingawful days were pretty great, although the bubble was fun too (we didn't have the normies and ads and etc, we were rewriting history, ending the business cycle, etc etc; so much incredible optimism back then that's basically dead now).

2001-2008

Hashtag era is by far the worst

Late 90's to late 00's, before the invasion of Google and Facebook and smartphones, before the botnet became truly prevalent. Message board culture was strong and there was a sense of community in many places. Compared to Facebook, the groups were smaller and more personal. Torrents weren't being monitored yet, so you had unlimited access to free movies and software. It was a real cornucopia of things.

Opera and Firefox were actually GOOD browsers. No Windows 10 yet, Win XP was still very much relevant. Infant Sup Forums, with it's old timey memes and culture, now lost forever. In general, small hobbyist websites that actually specialized on things, before the era of the wikis.

2001-2008 Era

Golden times of youtube content made in my country
Golden times of youtube poop
Golden time of XP
Golden time of Runescape

96 to early 00's. 96 because that's when I first got access at home.

If you were optimistic these days, you were naive.

> t. used to work in an incubator

the internet since 2007 was a mistake

Once Skype, YouTube and Google Maps arrived, all free, I felt that now, now it's pretty comfy.
Has pretty much all I wanted from a network.

this.
It was all over once social media got big

That moment when haven't lived in anything but the hashtag era..

98-2005 was my favorite times. Unmonitored torrenting that were basically a lucky dip between what you were looking for, a crippling virus or cp. Chatrooms where people were actually excited to meet eachother and chat, pre trolls and memes, and playing D2/runescape/early dota with mates and having LAN parties.

2006 - 2011

i distinctly recall 2012 as the year it stopped being fun. im not sure if thats more to do with me getitng older and more jaded, or the culture shifting. some of a, some of b, mostly c i imagine; c being the post nerd culture assimilation.

>Golden times of youtube poop
u wot m8

youtube poop was never good, its literally in the name.

that shit was the start of the ironic maymay phase we are stuck in

fuck you cunt.

french?

classic era!
first highspeed internet, first real and good contend appeared, decent forums, fewer fuckups online

got my modem 97 and there was not so much to do. changed around 00 iirc

before women used it

MOTHER
FUCKING
MSN MESSENGER

none ever wanted that shit

2005-2009, the thinking man's choice

2001-2009 was all godly. I miss old Newgrounds so much.

Exactly THIS.
Exactly.

Same maximum comfy. But the Independent Media Era saw plenty of torrents and iso rips and the government was less adept at using technology than now.

web.archive.org/web/20000229083043/http://www.dragonball-gt.com:80/
Still looking for an old Tenchi Muyo! site on geocities I used to go to.

Now

It has always been shit but it's getting better

you're going to have to try harder

>mfw I had 512 kb/s broadband in the late '90s

maybe if you had no friends, NERD

>someone disagrees with our meme opinion
>must be trolling

>tfw still had dial-up in 2012

2001 to 2008/2009

After that it all goes down from a freedom point of view, Internet merge with reality, people are fined for what they say online, everything get more and more centralized and repressive, Internet turn into a HUGE circlejerk and media use twitter, facebook or Sup Forums posts for their headline. It's a tragedy, people are online 24/24 with their phones and start gigantic drama over small irrelevant things, it's filled with pseudo-political contents and the GAFA make sure censorship is a thing. Internet is turning into a gigantic safe-space for consumers and the utopia only exist in small corner of the net. People give ALL their personal data to gigantic corporations that collaborate with governmental agencies.

The post 2008 crisis Internet also turned people into products, those product are sold to coporations. You use a service, but in fact you're a product and your data and time are sold to advertisement and marketing groups.

I guess the seizure of Megaupload by the USA mark the symbolic end of the Internet of Freedom and the start of Internet of Consumers. Nonetheless things started to go down before that.

t. Got Internet in 1995

youtu.be/m3gcb_9Q10E

>seizure of Megaupload
Yeah, that and the TPB trial

I thought it was dumb phone posters.

I didn't get an internet connection til 2003, but everything from there to like 2007 or 2008 was actually pretty great.

Youtube was crap in 2007, just web animators and low quality cds. Now at least there are audiobooks and various other types of instructional videos.

IRC was cool (yeah I know people still use that but really I cannot get into communities anymore). Also those pretty shitty websites where you could download random viral videos. Also Ragnarok Online back then. All these forums. Fuck, internet was great before I came here. What the hell happened?

I remember pirating PSP games one rapidshare or Megaupload link at a time and piecing them together.

Good, good times.

Classic era has great contents (flash stuff and better enjoyable shit) but internet and resource was terrible it self.

In 2008 internet start to flooded by normies so it becomes full of mess

Present day. The internet itself isn't painful today, just some of the people on it.

I had 516kbps in 2005

>Mfw that one forum i used to post in from that RTS released in late 2000 (which was one of the first 3D games i played along with tomb raider 3 and X:BTF) is still around

I also remember warcraft and runescape being played in the mid 2000's, heck even floppy disks were still pretty prevalent back then

Really makes you feel old

*being played in the school's PC lab

Jesus it's late already

Yfw it probably looks much worse now, someone needs to update this graph

BBS/FidoNET was comfy AF, starting using it when I was 9

classic an a big part of independent media era

This, although the grand majority of my experience was contained within WinMX and IRC.

>runescape
my nigga

I had ADSL in the late 90's.
It's sad that most people still used dial-up in the early 2000's.

This. 2001~2009 was amazing.
I'm not brainlessly hating Reddit here, hut it really killed smaller forums.

Consumerist Internet fucked up everything too. Perhaps it really was a mistake to let the Web go commercial.

born to late for primitive web and to young for dot-com bubble era, so voted for classic era, 2007 was alright.

2000s
Newgrounds
Daily Irate Gamer videoes
Early Sup Forums
Early youtube with the fancy 5 star system
Windows XP
PJ64

life was simple

Newgrounds. Specifically games. People shit on flash but goddamn there were a lot of good flash games.

2005-08

The time I know about youtube, online music streaming, free anime, weekly naruto/bleach/one piece/ES21 (before onemanga btw), etc.

Online porn was never really my thing until 2012 or so. Even then I mostly into JAV because muh gravure idol/ex-AKB48

Primitive web was barely usable, dot-com was comfy, and the classic was probably best, while the independent era was all around good, after all it was the golden era of flash games, although it was the beginning of the end with the widespreading of facebook and twitter, which was ultimately the cause of the current cancer era.
I think the best sits between 2004~2006 and 2010~2012

1983-1994
then post ironic
then dotcom bubble
then early 10s
then classic

the 'classic' era was the worst
retard sites
normies
kids
flash
java applets
internet explorer

late 90s were a bit better cuz less kids & other shit.

also stop making this thread op

>Early youtube with the fancy 5 star system
>Windows XP
>PJ64

I'M THE SCATMAN

After 2007 it went downhill.
Social media, smartphones, big data. Fuck it.

I forever prefer 99s shit domains with 56kb/s, low content and the ability to improve it. HTML/css, IRC bots, mediafire/megaupload.

Now it's all owned by the media, DRM and there's no good content.

Everything before this.

The "independent media" era was more 2007-2011, and from there on it's been post-ironic hashtag shit. My favorite is classic but independent media was the sweet spot for downloading things, with hard drive space and internet speeds greatly increasing, anti-virus software actually functioning, torrent sites overtaking P2P software, and less government meddling shutting down sites.

oh god I just jumped back in time 10 years

95-00 because that’s when I started

95-00 was where it was at. Usenet still wasn't a total wasteland, IRC was still cool, Napster brought us treasures we couldn't imagine, and the web was still (mostly) simple enough you could use a simple web browser, even on an Amiga.

Hand writing PPP scripts, +++ATH0, Yahoo! email...good times.

>perhaps it was really a mistake
It was.

Definitely classic era. Less centralization, social media, mobileposting

time before ads, when i could download a program from a webpage instead downloading a downloader that downloads said program along with a shitload of malware and other crap. time before failbook and rest of this cancer. in short the time before fucking chimps took over throwing crap left and right

>Sup Forums is now young enough to nostalgia for the mid-late 2000s

someone? yeah, i guess you can call everyone posting in this thread "someone"

The optimism was for the Bubble, which was 90s, not 2000s. The Internet was slowly turning to shit ever since 2002 or so, but at least we had some lulz in the 2000s.

>Golden time of XP
XP was absolute dogshit until SP2 and wasn't "good" until SP3, if you think modern Windows have shitty releases you should have seen XP. It was an unmitigated disaster, nothing worked, it would decide to randomly crash and corrupt your data, and it was so ridden with exploits that connecting to the internet was like walking through a minefield.

Not to mention the OS itself just sucks because it's nothing more than a bloated version of 2k with unnecessary bloat brought in from ME.

the only thing I miss about the old days of the internet was nobody knew anything about security so you could just run some shitty SQL injection exploit on some lamer's phpnuke site and take it over, made you feel like a real 1337 h4xx0r

present would be the best era if it wasn't for governments and their buttbuddies fucking things up like usual, not to mention the american culture of politicizing and turning every encounter into a fist fight ruining all it touches

Hashtag era is definitely the worst, they're inflated by normalfags and Google's ads, bad trends, feminists, and SJWs.

Social Media is the worst thing to happen to the internet.

Alt.binary days

Satan is right.

>knowing what the internet was like from 1983-1994, considering it was good
>making post ironic second best
>using the term "normie"

The best era was 2001-2006 for me.
I used to visit a ton of different sites, eg for news, you visted each source. Each hobby had a forum, every person had several ways to contact me. Irc bots were a huge attraction to certain places.
Then everything started to get aggregated.
News were all in one place, every webapp was made by google, people stopped to use desktop IM clients, social media got mainstream, you can't just read about something, you have to tell people you read about it for no reason.
Games stopped having multi player LAN modes so LAN parties died.
Tech news outlets started to shill products rather than review them.
Phones stopped being good at texting, so people stopped using them for communication. (T9 was more than 4x as fast and 20x more predictable when it came to autocorrelation as current keyboards. Texting while driving was not an issue because nobody needed to look at the phone to type.)

Most technology that were shit back then is still shit today: GPS, printers, phones, monitors, windows, linux, osx.

People thought we would have flying cars by now. Instead we got twitter.
Humans were a mistake

Usenet was pretty great before eternal september (i.e. the first introduction of 'normies' to online communication).

We have flying skateboards though.

>normies
>normies
>normies

Pas celui qui a poste mais je suis Francais aussi. J'etais trop jeune pour connaitre les YTP pre-2008. J'ai apprecie la periode 2008-2010 tho

As an 18 year old (turning 19 in December), I really wish I had been born a few years earlier.
The internet pre 2007 seemed like such better place in pretty much every way. People were happier and more optimistic. Internet forums had a more "innocent" and childish sense of humor. There was also no ridiculous amounts of political hate anywhere.

I got into computers at an early age thanks to my older brother, so i was still able to experience some of the internet before 2007, but nowhere near as much as I would have liked to.

oh there were
better than www T.B.H.

>tfw we can never go back

I might've gotten into this too late thanks to living in post-commie country, but what my 10 year experience tells me is that before smartphones Internet could could've been salvageable

Sup Forums may be a shit hole but it's one of the only few places left on the internet that isn't ruled by social media and smart phone users. Prolly why I've been hanging around this dump for the past 10 years.

>but it's one of the only few places left on the internet that isn't ruled by social media and smart phone users
What time portal did you just step out of?

Actually the net is way, way more regulated, safer and cleaner now. I'd say almost sterile. Back in early-mid 00s if you took a wrong turn or two you ended up hd full of viruses and CP. Hell I thought Sup Forums was illegal because there always was a CP or bestiality thread or two on Sup Forums.

Also nowadays there's just so much more fetish porn available. Every fucking kink is catered to. On twitter! I see that as a problem, though. Back in the day you needed to expend some effort to get to the sources. Remember saving up those pics/vids? I do. Not anymore. It's all up front, "respectable", clinical and accessible. Tailored to cause severe addiction and human misery.

relatively speaking, of course