Got a word for you: Tumblr. Have fun!
Oh believe me, I’m there already. But it’s not quite the same. You find a tumblr you like, you follow them, and then everything is delivered to your dashboard in a clean, orderly, sane environment. That and with their free premade themes finding the tumblr that has the falling asterisks, the auto-playing music, the animated gif background, and the magic wand cursor with a sparkle trail just isn’t as common as you might think. And with the dashboard, you never really look at individual tumblrs again because it’s inefficient to visit all the tumblrs seperately. Then, tumblr is built off of reblogs, so there just isn’t quite as much of the dorky “I’m 12 and here are pictures of my cat. Click the dancing cat to see more of my cats! Click the flying mailbox to email me fanmail!!! I love sailor moon and CATS!!! Click the Crystal Moon Wand for my favorite Sailor Moon episodes!!” stuff that went on with personal webpages of 2000. Sure, you reblog the sailor moon gifs you like, and the cats with pizza, but…I dunno. It’s not the same.
And Newgrounds? That was a wild new frontier…now it’s all marketing and JonTron. The rawness of everyone barely understanding the technology they’re using isn’t there.
I’ve been thinking about this all day… and other than the mass-democratization of the Internet, I can’t think of anything that I really liked about the old way when compared to the new way.
I mean, most corporate web sites are pretty useful and let you do useful stuff. Online videogaming is much more solid than it used to be, and is much less dependent on the exact nature of your rig and your internet connection. Even the ease of file sharing makes most hobbyist boards more rich than they used to be in terms of photographs and other aids.
OP, you should take a look at reddit if you haven’t already. There is a subreddit for just about anything you would want to discuss, and many of them have tight-knit communities. Several subreddits also have an associated IRC channel, if chatting is your thing.
thanks
i have heard of it and glanced at it but never looked at it closely
I was with you until “leet speak.” I personally remember it being more prolific then. The only time I’ve ever used “leet speak” was c. 1989-1992, back in my Commodore days. The abbreviations I see these days aren’t “leet speak” so much as texting shorthands. And it’s not really so much a distinction without a difference, to me. “Leet speak” is meant to be more excluding, while texting shorthand is something anyone can instantly understand. “u” for “you” and “b4” for “before” is texting shorthand. When I think of leet speak, I think of words like “pr0n” and “suxxor” and “warez” and “1337.”
Before Geocities shut down (it’s still a thing in Japan, of course,) they archived all the remaining websites and posted them as a torrent. It’s almost a terabyte of data. There’s a research project going on about it here -
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
And there’s a Tumblr of random screenshots from the archives -
Memories … Light the corners of my mind …
Gawker article about it:
I just ordered a pizza online. Take that old internet!
Not really, no. Complaining about lowest denominator sites is like complaining about super market tabloids. Yeah, it’s shit, but it’s serving a specific market and there’s a lot more out there. Message boards, chats, and irc are still around, if that’s your thing. There’s enough indepth discussion on any topic to last you several lifetimes. They just don’t happen on twitter.
In my mind there were two thresholds that stand out. The first was when internet celebrities started to be tossed around in the mainstream media. That still seems weird. The next was the “arrow to the knee” meme from a couple years ago. It burned out fast, but my god was it everywhere. People who didn’t even play video games were mindlessly regurgitating it.
thank you!!!
I miss old-school communicating internet like online diaries/journals. You got to know people (and vice versa) VERY well uinder the cloak of anonymity. It’s nowhere near the same talking with the same people on Facebook because “everybody listens”, so to speak. I have a few friends from back then who just threw caution to the wind and post anything and everything. Others, including myself, become link addicts because we don’t want everyone on our FL there to know our deepest secrets.
I miss some aspects of the “old” net, but certainly not the technology. The browsers, plugins, and frameworks we have today make things so much easier for most users.
I am dismayed by how much of the web is dominated by purveyors of hyperbolic click-bait. When Digg and Reddit came on the scene, circa 2005-2006 the web was shifting into high gear with “social”, and this lead to a lot of nonsense, as was to be expected. Coupled with the rise of Youtube and Facebook, the signal to noise ratio on the web grew worse. The rise of small media conglomerates like Gawker and Vox has, IMO, polluted a good swath of the web with poor quality content.
Remember radio in the US before Clear Channel? I think there’s a comparison to be made, but it’s early and I need more caffeine.
But the 'Dope will always be there for us, right? Right?
I’m not sure if anything could make me feel older than talk of the “old” Internet. 
Hey, remember when there wasn’t internet?
Shit, remember rotary dial phones?
I find the ClearChannel comparison interesting. I grew up in the '60s and used to sit up late at night listening to AM radio from far off. Every station had its own style. And I felt that I learned something while waiting for the station ID–Dallas was conservative, Louisville tried to sound big-time, Bostonians really were intellectual.
Similarly, I thought that the early Internet was fascinating. Everyone’s web site was unique to him or her. People with totally esoteric interests could find each other. Some really obscure topics, including local history, could be found by anybody. I felt that I learned something new every day online.
I don’t have that joy anymore. The damn ads are a lot of the problem. Personally, I don’t mind having things tailored to my interests, but I am so farging tired of diet aids and the like. Try selling me a car, how 'bout it? I’m tired of endless memes, celebrity news, and biased new sources. In short, what’s happening to me with the Internet is what happened to me in the late 1970s when conglomeration began in radio.
I miss amateurs!
i’m 42. i remember it quite clearly. but it seems really odd to think of trying to live without it. i’m sure you’d adjust though, if somehow it were gone.
yeah, and books you read and the “underground” bands you liked, that was all part of your identity and solidarity with like minded people back then… now, finding peope who share your interests is SOOOO easy. Not that that is bad, just, it’s not like it was. I agree also, of course, to the appeal of sincere, quirky, ameture sites. and about corporate conglomerates watering down everything and making it stupid and commercial.
I regret to see that the custom of typing (Warning: Video) when people link to one seems to be fading away, though I don’t object to video content on principle.
This message board seems to be one of the exceptions in this regard.