I know some of you think 4chan is the great cancer upon mankind, and it can be sometimes, but don’t act as if Reddit, Mastodon, TikTok or Twitter X are not; at least 4chan has some form of free speech. What are the anons of /g/ thinking of the old Internet?
Every computer was basically a retard filter, because things often didn’t just work and required problem solving, which kept most people out of the online environments. Internet was still scary for normies so that was an additional filter. There was more creativity, everyone had their own space and people were far more capable of having civil conversations. Yeah there was a lot of the same bullshit as now with arguments and stuff, but a lot of it felt like coming together with a bunch of friends and having a laugh. It wasn’t so damn serious and confrontational.
Niche sites felt unique instead of being consolidated into reddits, discords, and wikis Less retards and 3rd worlders No one gave a shit about politics More people making OC for fun rather than trying to clickbait for ad revenue Anonymous culture of never giving away personal info made internet and real life feel completely separate
How much of the world to you remember before 2011? Occupy Wall Street put the elites into overdrive with injecting group division into every aspect of society, which became noticeable around 2013 and reached full throttle around 2015. Of course normalfags came in droves in the late 2000s, but they mostly just stuck to Facebook and MySpace, so it really wasn’t a big deal. The biggest difference is people weren’t at each other’s throats 100% of the time. Sure, you’d get called a faggot, but it was in the same way you’d call your friends faggots.
late 90s/early 2000s was unironically kino. almost no big sites like youtube etc, instead the entire internet was spread out on countless different forums, each with their own flavor and culture. almost everyone had their own personal website (or many of them), dedicated to their own hobbies and whatever else they thought was cool. lots of weird avatar chatrooms and stuff like that which was fun to mess with too. there was no commercial interest in the internet back then at all basically, so everything was just done by users who thought it was neat to be able to connect with someone on the other side of the planet. i’m not a “muh capitalism” kind of guy, but it legitimately did ruin the internet and it fucking sucks
On social media and forums you could actually talk to real people, it wasn’t all just corporate algorithm content feeds, shillbots, salesmen posting as consumers and AI slop. You could Google something and actually learn useful information. Not everyone wanted my data and a subscription fee.
Every person you spoke to knew English. Trolling was an art, not low effort attention seeking behaviour Memes were funny You made friends online because communities tended to be smaller
the other thing was communities tended to have long term members and people tended to be mainly a member of one of those communities. like being part of a local club. nowadays everybody is just swimming in the same ocean alone
I remember not feeling anxious all the time, life was simpler. People were friendlier and as a whole more innocent. Socialising in person felt second nature unlike now where it’s often awkward. You enjoyed the present moment, you were bored more and your attention was not harvested for profit like it is now. People were happier and neurotic traits were far less common. You still had assholes of course but no way near as many as you do now. There was a collective sense of optimism for the future especially the technological age.
though it’s obviously very convenient now the thing I miss was the decentralization of it all, it felt like a whole wide world of very different sub cultures, now it all feels the same grey sloppa all over
All the terrible things you think but dare not say because you don’t want to be the next hitler, you could just say them then an no one cared.
Using the internet was a thing you sat down at your computer and did instead of having it always on in your pocket 24/7. Online world and real world were two different things. People on the internet were assumed to be freaks, psychos or losers by default. Putting personally identifiable information on the internet or trusting randoms was considered a terrible idea. Corpo influence was mostly limited to Google ads and banner/popup ads on less scrupulous websites nobody really demanded your personal information beyond what was essential. People were getting dumber then they were in the early 2000s as more and more western normies got the internet on their now mainstream PCs but it’s still a far cry from the Global Favela we witness today.
The comfiness of the old internet is inversely proportional to the rise of social media. Myspace was the beginning of the decline. I wish I was old enough to experience the internet in the 80s when it was the true wild west of computers.
Early 00’s internet was peak comfy because you still had that barrier to entry that kept normies out or at least retard wrangled to certain segments of the internet (social media) while you had the autiste supremacy on forums. It was just beautiful, you had niche forums that you would see update frequently like a chat room. It was common to have the average user have tech skills. People complain about it being nothing but white noise, but every place you looked there was activity online. Compared to now, where you’re more likely to chat with a bot or it’s just dead. It is almost like cable TV now, you have a few channels and local is a lot of dead air. Which I honestly think was always the plan. To centralize the internet to control the flow of information, as /x/ as that sounds.
The internet in really the 90’s up until the early 10’s was a hobbyist venue FIRST and shitposting and political attraction second. Think of it this way, when you went to a board or sought out a forum, you didn’t do it because you thought lots of people were posting there or that it was the hottest place to post. You did it because they were hubs of things you were interested in IRL. The real-life hobbies you had made the internet, not the internet telling you which real-life hobbies you should have.
It felt like a playground compared to what we have now, there was no political drama because politicians were computer illiterate. Mainstream news websites were largely ignored for everything but the stock market, they had no influence over the average Joe in terms of subversion. Old people who knew how to use a computer were browsing conspiracy hubs like glp, listening to internet radio celebrities, or posting on forums operated by bdsm/swingers clubs.
Youtube was so kino when it was just people making videos they thought would bring other people joy. Now it’s all just boring streamers whining about “the algorithm” not giving them 6 million dollars per second to do Minecraft Let’s Play #7583475285.
Attention whoring was looked down upon and attention whores were typically actively ostracized and laughed at. Nowadays 99% of the Internet is everybody trying to compete who is the most retarded and obnoxious attention whore.
we did have mobile phones, but we only really used them to txt and music everyone was more in the moment, no looking down at your phone because you had nothing else to do or didn’t want to talk to someone search engines actually gave you want you wanted, everything was created by someone and not some robot made to write shit brainrot people were also more themselves, people will change their behavior knowing that every single person has a camera in their pocket everything was just… more simple. more tech is good, but there comes to a point where you just want / need the basics, like a old car with 3 pedals, no tech, just a key and a way to listen to music.
flash games, youtube with no ads, porn, deviantart, myspace, anime AMVs, leetspeak, screamers, forums everywhere, wikia when it wasn’t shit, google when it didn’t immediately serve you sponsored links on page 1… the iPhone was both a blessing and curse
