2000s-era Internet Nostalgia

On 1/2/2023 at 3:39 PM, TasAcri said:

It was great when computers were still a bit harder to use and there were no smartphones. Not being completely user friendly filters out a huge amount of dumb people.

 

And then the tools became user friendly, the internet became fast enough even for low attention span standards and social media that allowed every narcissist to promote themselves became the norm. So now the Internet is even worse than the outside world.

You definitely have a point there. There was a minimum amount of technical savviness that everyone was required to have back then to use a computer, which certainly had a positive effect on the userbase. Smartphones are the biggest problem, though. There's practically no barrier of entry in using them, and they're cheap and easy to carry, making them absolutely ubiquitous and a constant presence in everyday life. Computers require you to be at home or at the office or some other such place and, you know, actually sit down at a desk to use it. It's a more laborious process and that's by no means a bad thing.

As for 2000s-era Internet...I have only begun using the Internet in the late 2000s, so I don't have any first-hand experience. However, I have used the Web Archive to explore old websites from that era a lot. I'm kind of embarrassed to say I've spent way too much time exploring old gaming websites, Gamespy with its Planet Network in particular - I just love browsing the pages of those old gaming communities. I suppose I just have some sort of indirect nostalgia for it all, even if I haven't lived through it. My first computer had been for years a W98 PC with no connection on which I played old games from the late '90s, which kind of explains it.

I remember YTMND very fondly.

It's still around, but kind of a ghost town.

Fan sites and wikis were still good in the 2000s and early 2010s, because you didn't have wealthy """philantropist""" (e-begger) Jimbo Wales sucking it all up into Wikia/Fandom, which he then gradually loaded down with all the ads and interface bloat in the universe.

These days, most properties and fandoms have a Wikia, and many have problems beyond just the incredibly bad infrastructure they're on. The Doom community rejected this, which I'm very proud of, but most don't. Some more obscure properties like Splatterhouse and Syndicate have some fantastic fan sites which date to the early 2000s and are amazingly comprehensive and high quality, with some very crude and highly underdeveloped facsimiles of such existing on Wikia.

Web hosting is expensive, so I see the practical issue, but Wikia is well past unbearable and these sorts of nerd encyclopedias desperately need a more functional framework further away from the unrelenting corporate advertising machine which makes up the backbone of the 2020s web.

Fan sites used to be so much nicer, and far more distinct and personalized. Speaking of advertising, Google search used to be good a decade ago, unlike now, where it's absolute gar-bitch.

On another subject, /b/ was never not trash, but there's much I love about 4chan in general, which is a very big site, each board having its own culture. It may be full of rats (/v/ was already beyond unbearable by 2010), but I'll be on that ship until it well and truly goes below the waves, I treasure the good corners too much.
 

Anyone here remember Machinima?  They were a big gaming channel on YouTube that used to post stuff true to their name, i.e. machinima. The first video I watched from them was Counter-Strike for Kids. As a kid back then, I didn't get the satire back then, and I remember I wanted the extreme gore version.

It's too bad they deleted all of their videos and closed down since 2019, and they have quite a history of sketchy practices, such as perpetual contracting. Hundreds of videos from them might've became lost media.

Speaking of Counter-Strike...

This was one of the first videos I watched on YouTube. Based on the first FPS game I've played, no doubt.

8 hours ago, Panzermann11 said:

Anyone here remember Machinima?

I do and I don't miss them. They were a disgustingly predatory company that chased away all their best contributors, especially all those who actually made machinima videos and most of the content they had left was garbage. Rest in piss.

Meh. I remember spinning in my chair waiting for my dial-up to load hotmail. Forums which were pissing contests and everyone was obsessed with their post count. Buying games and installing it with cd's, which was long hard work. 100/200+ pings. The advent of Steam. Flash games. Badger badger badger. Limewire.

Dark times. :P

Remember the times when frames where the hottest new shit for some, and modern bullshit for others.

No mention of Animutations from early 2000s, a sillier and safer predecessor of 2010s era YouTube Poops? Neil's content was weird but amusing.
 

I did make a list of all the ones I could find, given the originals were in Flash: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQvY23Sy6MM-jBepEW_b7LqjGp8ADtjqN - Keep in mind some use rapid flashing lights, Rubber Duckie and Wizard Power do have some strong effects on it.

It was an interesting time period, because more people were online with better connections than in the 90s, but it wasn't as conglomerated as it is now. As Chopblock was saying, Wikia/fandom is a great example of the downside of this, where organic communities get shat on by slumlords who only care about spamming ads. What makes matters worse is that those slumlords are the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs the mediocre and pretentious Wikipedia, which means they already have a source of income, on top of rich donors, but that doesn't stop them from panhandling. Sidenote, please do not donate a cent to Wikipedia/WMF, it's trash for this and many other reasons. I wish I could deplatform it, then it could be rebuilt from an archive/mirror. Anyway...

/b/ was never good, but 4chan really was a major nexus of internet culture, and imageboards had a certain insane creativity you couldn't get anywhere else. Underneath all the shitposting, there were gems. But still, it's funny to me how people act like browsing the *chans was the greatest thing they ever experienced.

The rise of big tech censorship, the culture war, and moral crusading has definitely made the internet less chill than it used to be. Social media tends to have an amplifying effect, and also tends to bring out the worst aspects of people and culture.

I found my way here via doom wiki. I've said it before, but much props to the people here for declaring their independence from Wikia. I started out writing content on the wiki, but migrated as soon as I learned of the fork. With some difficulty, I've been able to revert most of my Hexen walkthrough content on the Wikia, replacing it with much more basic walkthrough from strategywiki. My wikia content covered the last two hubs, and it's now on the fork; I also rewrote the first three hubs exclusively on the fork, so that's something.

2 hours ago, Xcalibur said:

but that doesn't stop them from panhandling. Sidenote, please do not donate a cent to Wikipedia/WMF, it's trash for this and many other reasons. I wish I could deplatform it, then it could be rebuilt from an archive/mirror. Anyway...

While if you say is true, I'd agree: BUT Wikipedia is the biggest database ( far as I know ) of information, with 913 administrators factchecking, making sure everything is true, citing their sources. It'd be unfair just to get rid of wikipedia, it's not onky a valuable source of information, it's also one of the oldest (popular) websites, which means they have to pay for servers and all that, remember, companies need money.

11 hours ago, openxt said:

While if you say is true, I'd agree: BUT Wikipedia is the biggest database ( far as I know ) of information, with 913 administrators factchecking, making sure everything is true, citing their sources. It'd be unfair just to get rid of wikipedia, it's not onky a valuable source of information, it's also one of the oldest (popular) websites, which means they have to pay for servers and all that, remember, companies need money.

Wikipedia has its uses, you'll generally get an idea about a subject, maybe not 100% correct or comprehensive in each aspect, but it's there, and often reliable. I'd say that it can be incredibly unreliable or skewed if a subject is highly politically contentious, because there are many people who wield greater editing and moderating power than most, usually through legit and valuable contributions, mind, but who aren't as neutral or unbiased as claimed.

There's also efforts by corporate and government initiatives to tweak and influence content for their own goals.

Wikipedia is owned by Jimbo Wales, who aside from having great personal wealth, has secured great funding for Wikipedia. When they do donation drives on Wikipedia, it's not because the site needs that money to stay running, it doesn't, they have all the funding they could ever need for hosting and infrastructure. Instead that money gets spent elsewhere, which I would have much less of a problem with if they were upfront and clear about it.

exactly what @ChopBlock223 said. Don't get me wrong, WP isn't that bad, but it's mediocre and biased, with people gaming the system all the time; overall it lacks excellence and reliability. They're also not forthcoming about their financial situation. And as I said, there are archives/mirrors of its content, so the whole thing can easily be rebooted under different management, which I think would be the best way to resolve its issues.

Sometimes i like to go on youtube and search "(keyword) before:2008-01-01" really to just reminisce on old videos. I think it's the easiest way to actually find old videos from the late 2000's and early 2010's. i've found some real gems while going through that.

On 1/7/2023 at 4:10 AM, Armaetus said:

No mention of Animutations from early 2000s, a sillier and safer predecessor of 2010s era YouTube Poops? Neil's content was weird but amusing.

I did make a list of all the ones I could find, given the originals were in Flash: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQvY23Sy6MM-jBepEW_b7LqjGp8ADtjqN - Keep in mind some use rapid flashing lights, Rubber Duckie and Wizard Power do have some strong effects on it.

 

Huh, so before we got Buffalax, there was Neil Cicierega. We need to bring back animutations, that's for sure.

On 1/10/2023 at 12:03 PM, ChopBlock223 said:

Wikipedia is owned by Jimbo Wales, who aside from having great personal wealth, has secured great funding for Wikipedia.

I remember reading this NYTimes article years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/jimmy-wales-is-not-an-internet-billionaire.html

I don't think Jimbo Wales has great personal wealth, I think having $1m is fortunate, but he does not have some endless trove of "run Wikipedia for free out of pocket" wealth.

Because you might encounter NYTimes paywall:

1 hour ago, insertwackynamehere said:

 

I remember reading this NYTimes article years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/jimmy-wales-is-not-an-internet-billionaire.html

 

I don't think Jimbo Wales has great personal wealth, I think having $1m is fortunate, but he does not have some endless trove of "run Wikipedia for free out of pocket" wealth.

 

Because you might encounter NYTimes paywall:

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Actual quote from Wales himself:

Quote

No one knows my net worth, not even me. The largest part of my net worth is my stock in Wikia, which is a privately held company. For privately held companies with no openly trading stock, it is not very easy to estimate values. I have a certain amount of stock. Maybe it's worth something, maybe not.

https://www.quora.com/Is-Jimmy-Wales-rich

He talks on Quora all the time.

I think he's sitting on a little more than a million dollars. My boss has more money than that from a few meth lab hotels.

Other websites give estimates ranging from $1,000,000 to $22,000,000.

I always think back to this classic:

I love using archive.org and visiting old fansites...

On 1/11/2023 at 5:37 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Actual quote from Wales himself:

 

 

https://www.quora.com/Is-Jimmy-Wales-rich

He talks on Quora all the time.

 

I think he's sitting on a little more than a million dollars. My boss has more money than that from a few meth lab hotels.

 

Other websites give estimates ranging from $1,000,000 to $22,000,000.

Yeah I guess that makes sense, also in 2013 (NYTimes article publish date) if he had any money at all outside of Wikia/Fandom invested publicly, he'd have a lot more money today thanks to market performance throughout the 2010s. Digging deeper I see Fandom was valued at $200m in 2018 but may be worth more "now", "now" being early 2021 before a lot of the recent market downturns (https://www.wsj.com/articles/tpg-backed-fandom-buys-gaming-e-commerce-platform-11614186324). So in that case, maybe he's even a centimillionaire (whether on paper or liquid, I don't know, but given an acquisition happened I'd assume he cashed out at least a bit).

On 1/11/2023 at 11:37 PM, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

My boss has more money than that from a few meth lab hotels.

Interesting boss.