Kibo.
/smacks you around with a large trout.
I started out on BBS’s. Trade Wars baby!
Me too. Also endless longer and longer variations on ROTFL. (“ROTFLMAOPMPASTC!”) That was sooo 1997.
*rolling on the floor laughing my ass off, peeing my pants, and scaring the cat.
I remember the salmon of correction from GEnie. And the fish puns.
Oh, sure, the bbses, but that didn’t have the fads as such. I mean, we’d get the latest zines, but…
On the Internet internet, it was the Hamster Dance and that awful dancing baby.
On the BBSes, it was making really basic ASCII art sigs.
Older still. The smiley-face emoticons go back to at least 1982:
Wow, someone beat me to mentioning Mahir.
I remember there was something called “Jared, Butcher of Song,” which was basically an animated guy singing (badly) a Guatemalan folk song. I never actually had a chance to see it, though; I only saw it mentioned in the newspaper once. I’ve been curious about it ever since.
Hampster Dance , of course. (You guys are spelling it wrong.) 
And also, Jared: Butcher of Song
Sonofabitch! That’s what I get for trying to find Jared before posting.
I bought my first computer in 1995 for the sole purpose of going on AOL chat rooms! It was so exciting to talk to random people from all over the world! Getting together to “watch” TV shows like ER, Oscar telecasts, sporting events…it was great fun for awhile.
Also when AOL instant messenger came out, all my friends and I thought…how perfect, we can talk to each other online for free and not pay long distance charges!! Of course this was before the days of cellphones, if you can imagine that! (1997…)
I’ve been on the internet since for atleast 14 years now and the first real big fad I remember was Xpages.
Everyone and their mother had one of these drop down, fill in the blank, XPAGE. It was amazing.
I bought my first Mac in 1993 and was pointed to Usenet for porn. With my 14.4 modem!
Using NCSA Mosaic, we also went to the Delft University (Netherlands) FTP site, which had a ton of softcore porn pictures. I remember the site was overloaded quite a bit.
It’s peanut butter jelly time!
peanut butter jelly time!
now where you at
where you at
there you go
there you go
peanut butter jelly
peanut butter jelly
peanut butter jelly
peanut butter jelly
peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat
Chiming in on those dumb “[Insert name here] Ate My Balls” sites. And hamster dance. The song is now stuck in my head.
(24, first on the web sometime in the mid-90s, I guess.)
The Usenet Oracle. I remember sending questions and answers shortly after I had gotten email back in 1990.
BTW, all of you all… Stay off my lawn!!
The first one I ever saw was a nude picture of Loni Anderson.
I came in to mention Mahir. How weird was that? A buddy of mine works for cafepress; Mahir mechandise helped put them on the map.
I’d have to say looking up URLs before browsers became the norm. “OOOOH this is the PANTAGON!” Me and my friends thought we were doing something really secret and anarchic.
I’m not sure it counts as a fad, but the first thing I remember everyone getting really flipped-out over was Mosaic.
Hamster Dance was the first fad that I can remember “being a part of.”
(I can remember the existence of the Dancing Baby, but I never bothered to watch it- it seemed dumb.)