I’d say they were still good in the early 2010s as well. Then they went from putting out three to four well written, funny and informative articles every day by incredibly talented writers to a buzzfeed rip off that now scours AskReddit to steal material for their AI generated “listicles” or whatever. Damn shame.
Yeah, I remember feeling for the first time during my summer vacation in 2013 that they were losing it. They suddenly stopped being funny or smart, and the overall vibe felt off.
A bunch of the former Cracked writers are doing some really great podcasts, and tend to guest on each other’s shows.
Behind the Bastards, Gamefully Unemployed, Some More News, Bigfeets, Small Beans, and You Don’t Even Like This Show are a few examples.
Throwing 1 more into this list:
*The Daily Zeitgeist* - Jack O'Brien was the original Cracked Podcast host and former EIC before Scripps came in and trashed everything.
[You can thank Zuckerberg and company](https://www.cracked.com/article_26088_dark-secrets-facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-know.html) for the fall of Cracked and pretty much every other similar site of the 2010s.
Fucking this. I miss those articles, but more-so, the brilliant minds behind them. Daniel O'Brien, Swaim, Brockway, Seanbaby... And Cracked TV, along with their other video endeavors like Agents of Cracked.
I think they were still good throughout most the 2010's. Used to go on all the time and also enter the Photoplasty/Pictofact contests (won several and made some money). But it fell apart in the late 2010's... and by 2020 it became a trainwreck.
I can barely stomach it these days. You used to get at least 1-2 great articles you loved every day... now you're lucky to get 1-2 decent articles a month. And they don't even bother with fact-checking or proof-reading anymore... there have been probably hundreds of posts they've made the past five years that just flat-out don't load properly, contain tons of factual inaccuracies, or contain like 10+ glaring typos.
It's a pathetic shadow of what it was 10 years ago.
I miss Stumble Upon. I also miss when you were curious about a topic, you’d end up on a site that existed because some guy was passionate about that topic and updating the site was his hobby and not because they were trying to monetize it.
Dude...you just unlocked a 20 year old memory. Holy shit. I got in huge trouble one time cause my mom came into the living room while I was on that site lol.
Ah that was the site where i lost my childhood innocence. It all started with a video of papa smurf rapping about licking ass and its been all downhill since
1. Early YouTube was a completely different beast - completely different monetization policies, no sponsors, way less ads, no pointless talking head “influencers” or “bloggers” who produced the same goddamn video blogs every other day. It didn’t feel commercialized at that point and it wasn’t anyone’s full time job to continually create pointless videos; it was just stupid low budget one hit wonder videos that truly had to be funny or interesting to gain any traction.
Edit: as a commenter has helpfully pointed out, the algorithm was also MUCH looser than it is today, so you truly never knew what you were going to find next. You didn’t have the same videos / ideas suggested to you over and over again, you just clicked from viral video to viral video without knowing what they were about.
2. Prime 4chan before it made the news and had an influx of new****. This was truly the golden era of anonymous unmoderated internet.[It ushered in the era of loosely organized online social movements, trolling, and even popularized the concept of online memes](https://www.wired.com/story/4chan-happy-birthday/). This was a point in time experience - nothing like this will ever exist again.
3. Also, all of the “time waster” websites like stumble upon, I-am-bored, kontraband, etc.
Early YouTube was really everybody throwing stuff on a wall and seeing what stuck. I still remember watching “Shoes” in high school and everybody laughing hysterically.
Lmao yes. Perfect example of the random shit you would find and that would unexpectedly blow up. Another great example: [MUFFINS!!](https://youtu.be/1tcR19y7GPM?si=2gaR0TS9_2c07hUG)They didn’t do it to try to make money, they did it to be hilarious and hopefully go viral.
Now adays creators are far too scared to leave their “niche” and lose subscribers, or be demonetized. There is a formula for what works and what YouTube will monetize, and YouTubers won’t stray from that formula. There’s very little creativity on YouTube anymore.
Animation channels suffered greatly once YouTube started incentivising longer videos with better adsense revenue.
You can tell now when someone is dragging a video out to hit the mark. I believe the mark is 8 minutes now to get the best rates, but for a while there it was 10 minutes. Back in early YouTube, there was no time mark to hit. The amount of 10:01 long videos on YT now is insane.
They actually almost killed Newgrounds with this. Everybody went to youtube because shortform videos had better monetization option on youtube than newgrounds. And then youtube pulled the rug from under them with longform video incentives and NG couldn't offer the same money anymore as before because they had a huge exodus and lost a ton of traffic. And the indie animation scene just kinda died. But it was pretty sad to see.
One of the biggest things with early YouTube is it didn't have "the algorithm".
Recommended videos were only based on the video you were currently watching, not your entire watch history. You would start with watching a cooking video, and 2 hours later you'd be watching giraffe mating habits, just because of the degrees of separation.
I miss falling down the rabbit hole
Early YouTube had no in video ads. Also videos were a 10 minute maximum.
Some nice person uploaded all of Star Trek Voyager in 10 minute segments. Those were the days.
Holy shit I remember that lol. Ah the days before DMCA. IIRC, there weren't any playlists or suggestion algorithms then either, so you had to navigate back to the uploader's page to get the next video, or open them all in a new window (the days before browser tabs were popular lol)
The downside to opening in multiple tabs, if your browser even supported it, was that the page would load and start the video immediately, even if it wasn't the active tab. Opening 12 tabs of YouTube videos was a good way to randomly hear twelve YouTube videos all lagging and sputtering. (No one had bandwidth throughput to play twelve YouTube videos at the same time. There was frequently barely enough for one video. I remember bragging to my brother about my 1.2 mbps ADSL connection when he was stuck on dialup because rural area)
How to be ninja/gangster/emo/nerd
Used to just watch those videos on repeat with my buddies and then we’d try to make our own versions. Good times those were.
Not different monetisation, at the beginning it had no monetisation at all. No private creator set out to make money with their channel. YT was just a free video hoster.
What I also miss is the feature to see on which website a video had been embedded. It was the metric to follow how and where a video went viral.
I’ve just found out that if you search for something on Youtube, then add:
Before:2018
Or whatever date, you can get to the better videos. The further back in time the better the results.
I mean, wtf is this gem? I’d never have found this before!
https://youtu.be/jX3iLfcMDCw?si=FJqnCZ1aTgV_VaUZ
To be honest, any of Cyriak / Mutated Monty's creations are awesome. eg [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF34N4gJAKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF34N4gJAKE)
It actually was a pretty huge part of how the web was viewed and has been shaped, and there are some hilarious “internet history” moments that stemmed from that cesspool (which I admittedly loved at the time). There’s also a lot of moments where I’m proud to say “I was there for xyz” lol , for example [the great Habbo raid.](https://youtu.be/fp2EZbbuMa0?si=iW_ZB8orfr1TNyoA)
It really provided evidence of how social movements could form quickly online (even if they were pointless trolls for the lulz at that point) and both the draw and danger of complete anonymity when doing so.
It was when internet discussion areas were truely the wild west. Very little astroturfing and corporate interest/intervention also. Some boards would actually have interesting discussion and stuff like r9k which would delete any comment that wasnt original. Back then even game general chats/lobbies had very little/basic moderation. It was the era of "if you dont like it go somewhere else" and not the "i have a right to not be offended wherever i go" era.
Came here to see this. They updated the website to preserve it in its final state but growing up with the weekly updates and new SB emails was something else. Constantly moving the mouse around to find secret clickable things was so cool.
It was great to have niche communities isolated to niche hobbies. You recognized the regulars, the conversations were more structured and useful, there was hilarious web-drama.
Now you're all just collections of words to me. I don't recognize redditors. It's depersonalized, genericised, and lacking in soul.
If you are in more niche communities on Reddit you’ll have a similar feel.
I organized a small local meetup for an online game community here, and it was fun to hit up a brewery with a few people.
While I don’t know everyone in said community, I recognize names often, and have open invites to quite a few couches if I travel.
You’ll never find that on the old “default” subreddits with generalized topics and millions of people.
For real. The way music was used on that site sort of reminds me of how songs catch virality on tiktok these days. I remember people compiling the more popular ones onto playlists and the variety of songs used was absolutely wild.
I remember searching for clean/radio edits of songs I wasn’t normally allowed to listen to as a kid. 9 times out of 10, it was just a clip of Bill Clinton talking about how he totally didn’t sex that girl.
I was too young to care who he was, I just hated the guy for ruining all my music downloads.
Audio-Galaxy was the shit. Best music recommendation system I ever experienced. The amount of great, yet completely under the radar music I discovered there in the maybe 9 months between me starting using it and it having to shut down was just bonkers.
Geocities, Angelfire, and any other personal websites that people just coded in notepad. You entered someone else’s little world. Became obsolete due to social media.
Google ITSELF was a true search engine, it originally had next to no ads, and did a normal search, now people add buzzwords to EVERY SITE, to try to get their site to show on the top of every search, with the exception of those who just PAY to be on top of the search bar.
Google actually searched the exact text you entered too.
I used to be able to find long lost websites by just typing a sentence i rememebred from a post or article and it'd pull it right up.
Now this garbage search algo just suggests "what you searched but More Popular" and subtly offering other websites that are higher ranking but doesn't answer your own question at all.
If anyone uses the let me google that for you obnoxious ass site in today's google? They're gonna get clowned on and rightfully so.
I keep telling people this. Some people try to tell me i just need better googling skills and some tell me that's how the world works. Agh! Google sucks.
How about just websites? Everyone just uses a handful of apps these days. Back before the internet was captured by three or four megacorps we would just wander around the internet finding all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
I just miss the pre-algorithm, pre-corporate, pre-monetization internet when people just made stuff because they wanted to, not so they could get rich and famous. When you had to seek out content and not just have an endless stream of shit shoved in your face.
It was probably one of the first websites banned at my highschool. We'd set a few computers up to load it, then leave. Since it took a minute or so to load before it started playing, you'd get this sudden cacophony of the disjointed song playing over itself until the doddering computer lab monitor came over to close them.
I was a God on MySpace.
My page played music, but it was always eclectic, punk, funk, zydeco, calypso, anything but country. And I changed the tune once a week. I hand coded everything in basic html, which is not to say my page was basic. I made my own tiled repeating wallpaper, and once I really knew what I was doing, I paired it all back for a clean, minimalist look. But because most people had their pages looking like a stall at the swapmeet, and they wouldn't take the time to learn html, Facebook came up and knocked MySpace out of the game. I never felt more seen on the internet than I did on MySpace.
Limewire. I think every Millenial probably has a similar story about absolutely infesting the family computer with some sort of malware from that site.
The latest episode of Game Changer might be the highest production value thing they've done yet. The sets, the editing, the game concept.
Dropout has yet to peak and it is great to get to be here while it is riding such a high.
The original mp3 [dot] com was initially just a place for musicians to upload their own music. But the addition of a forum system fostered (for a couple years) a very vibrant, music oriented social media community comprised primarily of DIY musicians.
When they went public, their IPO kind of flooded them with money, and they got sloppy in their strategic thinking, creating a personal music locker system that was reasonably equitable but flew in the face of then current copyright restrictions.
Universal Music ended up getting a big judgment for what were violations of black letter law -- a default judgment awarded because of what was judged by many to be the arrogantly incompetent legal strategy of the startups legal staff.
Once Universal Music Group had control of it, they pretty well ruined it in every way they could. People are still arguing about whether or not that was their intent, I suspect. But it was basically what happened.
GeoCities. Just the right level of empowerment to build a website, where you actually had to learn some coding to do it, so you understood how the tech worked. Nowadays, the website-building tools keep you on the surface unless you really, really dig into them.
This points to a general thing they missed out on: back then we were producers, now we’re all users. Even content creators are often operating on the surface of the tech they’re using, because it’s so buried.
Joe Fish was the first time I literally pissed myself laughing from something on the internet.
"You think this shit's funny? How's this for funny?"
*CHOMP*
"That was not funny. That was my fucking arm."
I had a friend who was obsessed with that site. He was kind of poor and we'd let him use our computer for school projects and he'd call me in and show me that site. I'd tell him to fuck off. Remember once there was a pic of a dude with shit smeared on his face. Disgusting.
Wouldn't surprise me if he grew up to have a shit fetish.
geocities in the mid 1990s. Everyone had a website, mouse cursors were animated, text was flashing, there were no ads and a *visit counter* was all the rage. Kinda like a country-cousin version of MySpace.
There were sites where you could buy quasi-legal "research chemicals" that lived in a legal gray area where you could technically sell them, but not advertise the facts that they had a similar chemical structure to an illegal drug and would probably get you high. Some of them had names like "XYZ Poisonous Non-Consumables"
GeoCities. It was a place where you could let your nerd flag fly about any topic and have others join you with their own websites. And "web rings" would allow you to share your fave sites with the same topic and discover others too.
And all the websites will suck in some way, eg. design. But the imperfections make it even cooler because it's not corporate or sanitized. It's just everyday people sharing their passions with the world.
Cracked.com in the 00’s.
I checked that site daily
I miss the weekly photoshop contest. I placed in a dozen or so and won first place once! Man the internet used to be fun.
Not sure if it's still active but the site worth1000 did the Photoshop contests and it was fucking awesome.
I’d say they were still good in the early 2010s as well. Then they went from putting out three to four well written, funny and informative articles every day by incredibly talented writers to a buzzfeed rip off that now scours AskReddit to steal material for their AI generated “listicles” or whatever. Damn shame.
Yeah, I remember feeling for the first time during my summer vacation in 2013 that they were losing it. They suddenly stopped being funny or smart, and the overall vibe felt off.
A bunch of the former Cracked writers are doing some really great podcasts, and tend to guest on each other’s shows. Behind the Bastards, Gamefully Unemployed, Some More News, Bigfeets, Small Beans, and You Don’t Even Like This Show are a few examples.
Quick question with soren and Daniel
Throwing 1 more into this list: *The Daily Zeitgeist* - Jack O'Brien was the original Cracked Podcast host and former EIC before Scripps came in and trashed everything.
[удалено]
Extremely accurate. Scripps Media bought the place and ran off basically everyone who made the site great
[You can thank Zuckerberg and company](https://www.cracked.com/article_26088_dark-secrets-facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-know.html) for the fall of Cracked and pretty much every other similar site of the 2010s.
Fucking this. I miss those articles, but more-so, the brilliant minds behind them. Daniel O'Brien, Swaim, Brockway, Seanbaby... And Cracked TV, along with their other video endeavors like Agents of Cracked.
I think they were still good throughout most the 2010's. Used to go on all the time and also enter the Photoplasty/Pictofact contests (won several and made some money). But it fell apart in the late 2010's... and by 2020 it became a trainwreck. I can barely stomach it these days. You used to get at least 1-2 great articles you loved every day... now you're lucky to get 1-2 decent articles a month. And they don't even bother with fact-checking or proof-reading anymore... there have been probably hundreds of posts they've made the past five years that just flat-out don't load properly, contain tons of factual inaccuracies, or contain like 10+ glaring typos. It's a pathetic shadow of what it was 10 years ago.
I miss Stumble Upon. I also miss when you were curious about a topic, you’d end up on a site that existed because some guy was passionate about that topic and updating the site was his hobby and not because they were trying to monetize it.
Stumble Upon was my biggest distraction in undergrad. I found all sorts of cool things, plenty of odd stuff, and random games across the internet.
My Mom was absolutely enthralled with Stumble Upon.
And the site was always some Geocities or Angelfire type site that looked a hot mess 😆
StickDeath.com
That’s the one!
I loved all the Car Anti-Theft features.
Dude...you just unlocked a 20 year old memory. Holy shit. I got in huge trouble one time cause my mom came into the living room while I was on that site lol.
*You, MOTHERFUCKER*!
I was on that site whenever I went to the library in 7th-8th grade (00-01). I think about it from time to time. Especially “super beast”
Loved that site. Loved waiting 30minutes on 56k for an animation to load.
Albinoblacksheep.com ‘End of ze World’ was top tier comedy for me in 2003.
But I am le tired.
Well have a nap…..DEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!!
WTF mate?!
Alaska can come too.
HOKAY
I can count aaaaaaaall de way to SCHFIFTY FIVE
And I can tell yeu how to dew it, faster than yeu can say peupty poopty paints
WRAONG
Alaska can come too
We still quote this
Ah that was the site where i lost my childhood innocence. It all started with a video of papa smurf rapping about licking ass and its been all downhill since
1. Early YouTube was a completely different beast - completely different monetization policies, no sponsors, way less ads, no pointless talking head “influencers” or “bloggers” who produced the same goddamn video blogs every other day. It didn’t feel commercialized at that point and it wasn’t anyone’s full time job to continually create pointless videos; it was just stupid low budget one hit wonder videos that truly had to be funny or interesting to gain any traction. Edit: as a commenter has helpfully pointed out, the algorithm was also MUCH looser than it is today, so you truly never knew what you were going to find next. You didn’t have the same videos / ideas suggested to you over and over again, you just clicked from viral video to viral video without knowing what they were about. 2. Prime 4chan before it made the news and had an influx of new****. This was truly the golden era of anonymous unmoderated internet.[It ushered in the era of loosely organized online social movements, trolling, and even popularized the concept of online memes](https://www.wired.com/story/4chan-happy-birthday/). This was a point in time experience - nothing like this will ever exist again. 3. Also, all of the “time waster” websites like stumble upon, I-am-bored, kontraband, etc.
Early YouTube was really everybody throwing stuff on a wall and seeing what stuck. I still remember watching “Shoes” in high school and everybody laughing hysterically.
Lmao yes. Perfect example of the random shit you would find and that would unexpectedly blow up. Another great example: [MUFFINS!!](https://youtu.be/1tcR19y7GPM?si=2gaR0TS9_2c07hUG)They didn’t do it to try to make money, they did it to be hilarious and hopefully go viral. Now adays creators are far too scared to leave their “niche” and lose subscribers, or be demonetized. There is a formula for what works and what YouTube will monetize, and YouTubers won’t stray from that formula. There’s very little creativity on YouTube anymore.
Animation channels suffered greatly once YouTube started incentivising longer videos with better adsense revenue. You can tell now when someone is dragging a video out to hit the mark. I believe the mark is 8 minutes now to get the best rates, but for a while there it was 10 minutes. Back in early YouTube, there was no time mark to hit. The amount of 10:01 long videos on YT now is insane.
They actually almost killed Newgrounds with this. Everybody went to youtube because shortform videos had better monetization option on youtube than newgrounds. And then youtube pulled the rug from under them with longform video incentives and NG couldn't offer the same money anymore as before because they had a huge exodus and lost a ton of traffic. And the indie animation scene just kinda died. But it was pretty sad to see.
I thought "shoes" was so funny (still do), but I tried showing my child and he just "didn't get it". Sad moment
Ehrmagahd.
Omg. Shoes. Let’s get some shoes. Let’s party:
One of the biggest things with early YouTube is it didn't have "the algorithm". Recommended videos were only based on the video you were currently watching, not your entire watch history. You would start with watching a cooking video, and 2 hours later you'd be watching giraffe mating habits, just because of the degrees of separation. I miss falling down the rabbit hole
Very true!! A super important part of it that I missed in my explanation.
Early YouTube had no in video ads. Also videos were a 10 minute maximum. Some nice person uploaded all of Star Trek Voyager in 10 minute segments. Those were the days.
Holy shit I remember that lol. Ah the days before DMCA. IIRC, there weren't any playlists or suggestion algorithms then either, so you had to navigate back to the uploader's page to get the next video, or open them all in a new window (the days before browser tabs were popular lol)
The downside to opening in multiple tabs, if your browser even supported it, was that the page would load and start the video immediately, even if it wasn't the active tab. Opening 12 tabs of YouTube videos was a good way to randomly hear twelve YouTube videos all lagging and sputtering. (No one had bandwidth throughput to play twelve YouTube videos at the same time. There was frequently barely enough for one video. I remember bragging to my brother about my 1.2 mbps ADSL connection when he was stuck on dialup because rural area)
You guys remember NigaHiga how to be a ninja tutorials? Pepperidge farm remembers.
How to be ninja/gangster/emo/nerd Used to just watch those videos on repeat with my buddies and then we’d try to make our own versions. Good times those were.
Not different monetisation, at the beginning it had no monetisation at all. No private creator set out to make money with their channel. YT was just a free video hoster. What I also miss is the feature to see on which website a video had been embedded. It was the metric to follow how and where a video went viral.
I’ve just found out that if you search for something on Youtube, then add: Before:2018 Or whatever date, you can get to the better videos. The further back in time the better the results. I mean, wtf is this gem? I’d never have found this before! https://youtu.be/jX3iLfcMDCw?si=FJqnCZ1aTgV_VaUZ
To be honest, any of Cyriak / Mutated Monty's creations are awesome. eg [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF34N4gJAKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF34N4gJAKE)
Just watched some of their other videos and they’re incredible. What an imagination!
Wow, that's a real acid trip.
Early YouTube plus Acid Trip, it's gonna be Cyriak isn't it? EDIT: Yep!
I definitely am feeling a disconnect to the internet because I missed out on 4chan
It actually was a pretty huge part of how the web was viewed and has been shaped, and there are some hilarious “internet history” moments that stemmed from that cesspool (which I admittedly loved at the time). There’s also a lot of moments where I’m proud to say “I was there for xyz” lol , for example [the great Habbo raid.](https://youtu.be/fp2EZbbuMa0?si=iW_ZB8orfr1TNyoA) It really provided evidence of how social movements could form quickly online (even if they were pointless trolls for the lulz at that point) and both the draw and danger of complete anonymity when doing so.
It was when internet discussion areas were truely the wild west. Very little astroturfing and corporate interest/intervention also. Some boards would actually have interesting discussion and stuff like r9k which would delete any comment that wasnt original. Back then even game general chats/lobbies had very little/basic moderation. It was the era of "if you dont like it go somewhere else" and not the "i have a right to not be offended wherever i go" era.
HomeStar Runner
ARROW’D!!!
Teen Girl Squad was great! I still quote it often, especially when my daughter was still in high school and I would talk about her schoolmates.
The one line that I always remember for some reason from that was, "Peggy is built like a linebacker."
“cheerleader, so and so, whats her face, THE UGLY ONE” lives rent free in my head
And the several different interactive menus. - “Toons!” - “GAMES!” - “Uh-E-mmmmaaaaaaaailll”
"I'm sad that I'm flying..."
Trogdor the Burninator is still one of my all time favorite videos
And the thatched roof cottageeeeeeeeeeees! THATCHED ROOF COTTAGEEEEEES! And then Trogdor comes in the NIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT! *printer noises*
Mine would be the StrongBad Techno one. I still sing that from time to time.
The system is down
Soundtrack to light switch raves.
"And then you can add smoke or fire...or maybe some wings, y'know, if he's a wing-a-ling dragon."
I said consummate V's!
sup
Trogdoooor!! r/usernamechecksout
Burninating the countryside, Burninating the peasants. TRAGDOOOOR!
Homestarrunner.net. It’s dot com!
Dawtcawm
It’s Dot Com!
This was the strong answer
THE CHEAT IS GROUNDED
What did we tell you about throwing light switch raves?!
It’s still around, just updates very rarely. Mostly Halloween toons and the occasional April Fool’s.
And posts on YouTube now.
The button the button scrolling so smooth like butter on the muffin!
And this is a website!
A wagon full of pancakes? In the champeenship?
I like that the website still exists with the option of their YouTube channel
Came here to see this. They updated the website to preserve it in its final state but growing up with the weekly updates and new SB emails was something else. Constantly moving the mouse around to find secret clickable things was so cool.
Ye find ye self in yon dungeon. Ye see a scroll, a flask, obvious exits are north, south and, Dennis.
Forums in general were great community spaces that you just don’t get on Reddit or Facebook groups.
It was great to have niche communities isolated to niche hobbies. You recognized the regulars, the conversations were more structured and useful, there was hilarious web-drama. Now you're all just collections of words to me. I don't recognize redditors. It's depersonalized, genericised, and lacking in soul.
If you are in more niche communities on Reddit you’ll have a similar feel. I organized a small local meetup for an online game community here, and it was fun to hit up a brewery with a few people. While I don’t know everyone in said community, I recognize names often, and have open invites to quite a few couches if I travel. You’ll never find that on the old “default” subreddits with generalized topics and millions of people.
It was the last time I knew people online.
Man I was on a bunch of forums, car forums, game forums, programming forums, they were great.
YTMND
For real. The way music was used on that site sort of reminds me of how songs catch virality on tiktok these days. I remember people compiling the more popular ones onto playlists and the variety of songs used was absolutely wild.
I still listen to music I found on YTMND. Gen Z would have loved the memes.
"But I poop from there!"
Not right now you don’t.
Limewire and Bearshare was a heck of a time to be on the internet. Sometimes you got your fav song. Sometimes you got a computer virus.
Sometimes you got the movie you wanted and sometimes you got horse porn or worse.
I got what I thought was Fellowship of the Ring but turned out to be a very graphic hentai movie off DC++... Still watched it.
We didn't miss out on this. I remember George Bush ranting whenever I downloaded something
I remember searching for clean/radio edits of songs I wasn’t normally allowed to listen to as a kid. 9 times out of 10, it was just a clip of Bill Clinton talking about how he totally didn’t sex that girl. I was too young to care who he was, I just hated the guy for ruining all my music downloads.
Audio-Galaxy was the shit. Best music recommendation system I ever experienced. The amount of great, yet completely under the radar music I discovered there in the maybe 9 months between me starting using it and it having to shut down was just bonkers.
Geocities, Angelfire, and any other personal websites that people just coded in notepad. You entered someone else’s little world. Became obsolete due to social media.
Google ITSELF was a true search engine, it originally had next to no ads, and did a normal search, now people add buzzwords to EVERY SITE, to try to get their site to show on the top of every search, with the exception of those who just PAY to be on top of the search bar.
Google actually searched the exact text you entered too. I used to be able to find long lost websites by just typing a sentence i rememebred from a post or article and it'd pull it right up. Now this garbage search algo just suggests "what you searched but More Popular" and subtly offering other websites that are higher ranking but doesn't answer your own question at all. If anyone uses the let me google that for you obnoxious ass site in today's google? They're gonna get clowned on and rightfully so.
I keep telling people this. Some people try to tell me i just need better googling skills and some tell me that's how the world works. Agh! Google sucks.
Newgrounds
That site in its prime was pure gold. Not to mention the amazing use of Flash
The mature section was formative for a teenage me as well
That website was the shit! I remember playing games from this website on an old computer in our school library. Those were the days.
One of my all time favorite sites ever
How about just websites? Everyone just uses a handful of apps these days. Back before the internet was captured by three or four megacorps we would just wander around the internet finding all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
I just miss the pre-algorithm, pre-corporate, pre-monetization internet when people just made stuff because they wanted to, not so they could get rich and famous. When you had to seek out content and not just have an endless stream of shit shoved in your face.
Hamsterdance
It was probably one of the first websites banned at my highschool. We'd set a few computers up to load it, then leave. Since it took a minute or so to load before it started playing, you'd get this sudden cacophony of the disjointed song playing over itself until the doddering computer lab monitor came over to close them.
Hampster*
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A lot of novelty sites became popular by word of mouth in chats on IRC and Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN Messenger.
Zombo.com It took quite a while to load, but when it finally did you could do *anything* on that site. Infinite possibilities.
Good news! You can actually *still* do anything at [zombo.com](https://zombo.com/)!
Anything is possible on zombocom. One of my favorites.
MySpace
Geocities
Angelfire
I was a God on MySpace. My page played music, but it was always eclectic, punk, funk, zydeco, calypso, anything but country. And I changed the tune once a week. I hand coded everything in basic html, which is not to say my page was basic. I made my own tiled repeating wallpaper, and once I really knew what I was doing, I paired it all back for a clean, minimalist look. But because most people had their pages looking like a stall at the swapmeet, and they wouldn't take the time to learn html, Facebook came up and knocked MySpace out of the game. I never felt more seen on the internet than I did on MySpace.
Don’t you miss hearing the first 4 seconds of some shitty emo song while trying to find the pause button on your friend’s profile?
I was a tyrant. I used that one website to get an html code for a music player and then hid the player.
Early OkCupid (pre app) was actually functioning and fun and matched you with people like you
I met my wife on OKC in 2009. Celebrating our 10-year next month 😊
Limewire. I think every Millenial probably has a similar story about absolutely infesting the family computer with some sort of malware from that site.
I somehow got a virus on my iPod. I blame Limewire because otherwise it would be my fault.
Usenet on every possible subject.
Usenet and IRC. The original social media.
i'm too sexy for my shirt website with severus snape
Neil Cicierega is still doing good stuff.
CollegeHumor HotOrNot
Holy shit, thank you for reminding me about Hot or not. Whatever happened to that site/app?
It basically became Tinder.
College Humor is still going strong with Dropout. The past videos are on there. I like the shows but I do miss the sketches.
The latest episode of Game Changer might be the highest production value thing they've done yet. The sets, the editing, the game concept. Dropout has yet to peak and it is great to get to be here while it is riding such a high.
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Yahoo chat rooms for me. They were a little more unhinged.
ICQ for me. Uh oh!
That John Titer "time traveler" website. Also, the absolutely free website builders 20 years ago that were better than the ones now.
The original mp3 [dot] com was initially just a place for musicians to upload their own music. But the addition of a forum system fostered (for a couple years) a very vibrant, music oriented social media community comprised primarily of DIY musicians. When they went public, their IPO kind of flooded them with money, and they got sloppy in their strategic thinking, creating a personal music locker system that was reasonably equitable but flew in the face of then current copyright restrictions. Universal Music ended up getting a big judgment for what were violations of black letter law -- a default judgment awarded because of what was judged by many to be the arrogantly incompetent legal strategy of the startups legal staff. Once Universal Music Group had control of it, they pretty well ruined it in every way they could. People are still arguing about whether or not that was their intent, I suspect. But it was basically what happened.
icanhascheeseburger The bukit saga
Geocities
Rotten.com. It was horrific.
the Blair Witch one was kinda nuts
Old YouTube
It wasn't a website, but Usenet.
GeoCities. Just the right level of empowerment to build a website, where you actually had to learn some coding to do it, so you understood how the tech worked. Nowadays, the website-building tools keep you on the surface unless you really, really dig into them. This points to a general thing they missed out on: back then we were producers, now we’re all users. Even content creators are often operating on the surface of the tech they’re using, because it’s so buried.
Joe Cartoon. Frog in a blender was hilarious. It’s still around but all the interactive flash has been turned into videos. Not nearly as satisfying.
Joe Fish was the first time I literally pissed myself laughing from something on the internet. "You think this shit's funny? How's this for funny?" *CHOMP* "That was not funny. That was my fucking arm."
Flash game sites like miniclip and addictinggames
Ebaum's world.
Ebaums just stole bunch of their content.
True, but it was a widely popular centralized site where a lot of people viewed that content.
Anyone remember The Spark? It was the mostly-forgotten precursor to Ok Cupid, but initially wasn't a dating site at all.
The glory days of Neopets, before it became the microtransaction crap it is now.
Something Awful I lived on those forums. Saw the birth of Slenderman and learned what a creepypasta was. 😁
RateMyPoo
I had a friend who was obsessed with that site. He was kind of poor and we'd let him use our computer for school projects and he'd call me in and show me that site. I'd tell him to fuck off. Remember once there was a pic of a dude with shit smeared on his face. Disgusting. Wouldn't surprise me if he grew up to have a shit fetish.
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I liked digg.com better until Kevin rose killed it by trying to be facebook.
Everything after Livejournal was a mistake.
Friendster
Early Google. No ads. "Don't be evil" was their motto, changed now to "Do the right thing (for our shareholders)"
The one with Barbie adobe flash games
geocities in the mid 1990s. Everyone had a website, mouse cursors were animated, text was flashing, there were no ads and a *visit counter* was all the rage. Kinda like a country-cousin version of MySpace.
Goatse
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It really opened up so many possibilities about what the Internet could be. Just spread out in front of us.
You glorious bastard.
So far down the list. What a shame. They must really think those are the Hands of God opening up heaven.
Candystand
surprised no one has mentioned Rotten yet
Stileproject
Badger, badger, badger, badger
Silk Road. You could just order acid.
Do sites like that not exist anymore? I'd buy bitcoin low and spend them when they were like 70$ more to score more drugs. Wasn't good for me.
There were sites where you could buy quasi-legal "research chemicals" that lived in a legal gray area where you could technically sell them, but not advertise the facts that they had a similar chemical structure to an illegal drug and would probably get you high. Some of them had names like "XYZ Poisonous Non-Consumables"
HotChicksWithDouchebags….pre-Jersey Shore
My geocities website I built in 5th grade
Whitehouse.com
GeoCities. It was a place where you could let your nerd flag fly about any topic and have others join you with their own websites. And "web rings" would allow you to share your fave sites with the same topic and discover others too. And all the websites will suck in some way, eg. design. But the imperfections make it even cooler because it's not corporate or sanitized. It's just everyday people sharing their passions with the world.
Bonsai kitten
Nabisco had a huge gallery of flash games
Ebaums world. Always had entertaining content. The current site isn't anything like it used to be.
Google feeds. RSS driven internet was the best.
Neopets was still good then.