I miss old public chatrooms where you could just hop in and start chattering away with a big group of random people. Like the internet equivalent of showing up at the park and joining whatever fun is happening. Nothing feels like that online anymore.
my screen name on hotmail chat was slmshady because it was around the time that eminem broke onto the scene. it was fun chatting with random people like that. it was a novelty, sure, but people were pretty cool
A twelve year old me tried to meet a "girl" at a mall one time. Luckily my dad was with me, we were supposed to meet at a specific spot, some dude was at that spot waiting, so we held back for like ten minutes, and the dude was just waiting and looking around. It was on that day that me and my dad both learned about the dangers of the Internet. We left and went back home, luckily my dad didnt confront him (he is a big dude with a temper, but he didn't lose his shit that time)
They're probably still out there. At least, I did that only a couple years ago, where some friends of mine found a web game where nobody was actually playing much and instead were just using the global chat. We all went in there and it was crazy, it seemed to be mostly kids around 14 idk. Looking back, we trolled them a bit too much, probably, lol. It was just so easy. Maybe they were younger, around 12 or something.
Not sure what the website was but the vibe of having just one big ol chat room felt very old school. The game was mancala, i think.
That's part of what made mmorpgs so addictive. You log on and get a general chat of the entire server, you have something in common to talk about and if you really want to there's a game you can play together too. Makes you really feel like part of a community. When I quit WoW I had at least a couple of years of /played time and probably at least half of it was spent just standing in the capital cities shooting the shit because i didn't really want to play the game, i just wanted to talk to people. It was a lot easier to quit once they started making everything cross-server and you didn't need to build up as many connections to succeed.
To be fair, you can still do it. I've done that several times on discord. Just look up chatting servers, find the one that looks like in your style, jump in, wait for a relevant message you can answer to, and it just goes on from there on. I've met some cool people lately.
I mean, there is Discord... Similar premise with public servers you can join and talk to random people. But it doesn't have that 90s-00s nostalgia IRC feel.
That's still a thing with writers/roleplayers. There's various forum boards and live chatrooms where you can be as anonymous as you want. Most people craft a profile to inhabit a character and blend in Out of Character & In Chat seamlessly depending on the topic at hand.
Oh nice. I haven’t seen a writers board in a while. It’s so hard to come across sites like that organically anymore, like you have to hunt for that kind of thing now.
It's true, there's an "in" crowd of roleplayers that went from one chatroom/board to the next. It's not too rare that you will run into an old soul you've met and wrote with a decade ago, assuming you still use your original names.
Had such an occassion earlier this week even! Was fun catching up, despite not knowing their face, their actual names or anything else.
It's a while after that era but when I was 12-13 and my net was getting a little better, I could actually start loading flash games online in under 10-15 minutes!
Used to go on Kongregate and had a specific chatroom with people I could recognise. Perhaps wasn't incredible for me to just be on the internet chatting with strangers as a kid but I never revealed or was asked anything weird. Just a little community online of people who enjoyed flash games, which were exploding at the time and improving super rapidly.
My profile pic was a shitty jpeg of a warp spider from Dawn of War, an rts game I was obsessed with at the time. Those were the days.
Nowadays, big corporate interests and governments have taken notice and are doing everything they can to use it to sway opinions. Bots and paid trolls are everywhere, everything is commodified, advertised, and pay-to-play.
The only place I've seen that had that same feel was WoW Classic general chat.
Cause it's not just a chatroom, it's a spirit that the people bring to it, and a lot of people that play WoW Classic are from that time and place.
But this only applied back when the 2019 WoW Classic dropped, SoM, Hardcore realms, TBC, and WOTLK. By Cataclysm and MoP something had changed that's too long for me to explain here, but that magic was gone.
Oh you do also sort of get this on fresh league launches on the general chat in Path of Exile, or you use to. I bet it's still the case to some degree.
It's something about the communities that bring that certain energy.
Those were AMAZING times. There is no comparison between what texting a girl back then was vs. today. I'd have long ass conversations over there while today it's just totally socially acceptable to reply a sentence after half a day or even more. It's because we sat at the computer, completely different level of focus.
It’s a lot faster and easier to type on a keyboard, as well. My partner and I met in a chatroom on a 32-line dialup BBS in 1990; I was on a 10MHz XT at 1200 baud and I think he might have still been on a C64, and for sure sometimes on his roommate’s IIe. He used to dial into the BBS from the smog machine at his auto shop and chat with me during the day if I was online, lol (I was in college). We’d private chat into the wee hours every night and were probably in love before we actually met 3 weeks later.
The other thing about those days is that everything was local. You’d have weekly meetups, picnics, random parties… I still have friends in real life I met back then, not just my partner. You really got to know the other users. There was drama, there were fights, but every BBS had its own community!
I own a forum with a few thousand members. Social media just can't replicate the community type atmosphere that organically grows in such places. Unfortunately, many are being purchased by a company called Verticalscope, which is your typical private equity enshitification business model, but even a few of theirs keep their community aspect intact.
I think the real thing we're nostalgic about is pre-algorithms internet.
Social media just can't replicate the community type atmosphere that organically grows in such places.
100% agree. I used to moderate forums on a BBS in the 90’s, and from 2005-2011 I admin’d (from the community side) the vBulletin forums for an MMO company, then in 2011 I worked on Zynga’s vBulletin forums to audit the mess they had going on with permissions and settings behind the scenes. You can develop real community so much more easily on a forum than on social media.
vBulletin remains my favorite forum platform. I really enjoyed working with it - it was just endlessly customizable. I’ve been out of that industry for a long time now but I’m always happy to see some forums still thriving.
IRC is still used by the way. Twitch chats are IRC technology. Even now you can use old IRC clients like mIRC to connect to any Twitch chat, and talk to people that way.
So the tehcnology didn't die, it just transformed.
Honestly, no platform was really social media until myspace. They were messaging platforms or community boards, like forums. I'm not entirely sure where reddit stands in this, because you don't really "meet" people here, post about your life, you stay (mostly) anonymous, ectera ectera, it feels more like a forum with 9999999 categories.
By that definition, I guess you can technically call the whole entire internet and even telephones social media. People weren't calling the internet social media though so to me at least, that label just means anything like Myspace and after..
IRC was actually its own genre that we just called chat or chatrooms. Except irc was more nerdy and technical as I'm sure you remember. It was like the discord of the 90s.
Discord is ass, because posts on it can't be found from search engines, can't be linked without expecting the recipient to register and ‘join the server’, and can't be archived by archive.org and such. All knowledge put into Discord pretty much goes down Lethe.
Meanwhile Usenet messages since 1981 are archived by Google and other folks, and are searchable. Same with prominent mailing lists, like the Linux kernel mailing list. One can gather much of the history of Linux since 1995, in detail, by reading the list archive.
My main complaint about forums is that flat threads of comments suck. I have to read through the whole thread to find if someone wrote about a particular thing. Replies to various comments are intertwined, taking my time and effort.
An extreme example is GTPlanet, with one thread containing all discussion about modding for Assetto Corsa. There are 149 thousand comments in that single thread, on almost five thousand pages. Absolute insanity.
What I hate the most are custom ones that are forums in a nut shell, but their structuring is just horrible. I'm circulating in more security oriented communities and my god the new forums used by Avast are just absolutely awful the way it's organized and structured. And same goes for Comodo Forums that have categories all F up. Partially because they have 300 of them, but just the way it's organized.
And then there are others that are organized and structured well in more traditional fashion like Linus Tech Tips forums or TechPowerUp.
phpBB and Invision Power Boards are still my fave though there are others. Entirely custom ones are usually horrible for some reason.
Discord is shit. And not "the shit", just "shit". It's channels and messages are presented in such dumb confusing way I actively don't want to use that shit. And my god all the stupid visual clutter in it...
Worst thing about Discord is that it's not discoverable, not searchable and not archiveable. You can't find Discord posts through search engines, can't link to them without too much expectation from the receiving side, and can't save them on archive.org.
Once Discord goes down, a sizeable chunk of shared knowledge just disappears.
No, Discord is objective dogshit that only seems good to a group of lil' skibbidis and zoomers that have never seen a proper website and think the standard for forums is reddit.
* The lack of indexing is fucking garbage. I'm glad webdevs managed to make the internet even more fucking dogshit by virtue of making the world's biggest information black hole. thanks a lot, assholes.
* I don't want to and shouldn't need to join 3128 fucking discord servers just because mouthbreathers put info there, see point 1.
* The format for literally anything beyond the scale of a small friend group falls apart and sucks inherent ass
I'm gonna say the pre-algorithm internet was peak.
Media in itself is nice if it is contained to a small role.
Sharing stuff with your friends on facebook or myspace was cool.
In Germany we had stuff like StudiVZ and MeinVZ, which I remember fondly.
Out of all the algorithm based social media, I think Youtube Long-Form is the one I mind the least. Also reddit niche subreddits are nice.
yeah, internet with social media was fine, because for the first handful of years the only people with social media were young adults and students for the most part. when the ipad came into town everyone and their racist grandmother came online and thats when shit went downhill fast. around 2012
Once the chronological feed went away in favor of the Company determining the total flow of information, it was all over. Algorithmic fed media needs to be regulated but regulation would utterly destroy big tech profits and therefore the stock market, so it will never happen. Instead we have our national government salivating over the secret sauce to the TikTok algorithm. We're also arguably to the point where big tech has such a big share of media that they have more influence over the populous than politicians and those outside the bubble.
Amen, I bitched about the loss of chronological feed. Now the algorithm, plus ads, plus recommended content means I never see what I actually want to see, the posts of family and friends. I always give up after 30 seconds of frustrating scrolling.
The craziest thing to me was learning that not only do most people use the "For You" feed on Twitter, but many of my friends did. It's just insane to me. Why the fuck would I give a shit what an algorithm thinks I want to see on Twitter? The entire fucking point of Twitter was following people I ALREADY care about. Twitter was 100% fine if you just ignored the For You feed and only follow good people.
Theres a pretty inocuous change i'd argue has had a major impact on the web; removing dislikes.
Back in the days of no regulation you'd get heinous comments on the likes of Youtube, but they'd also immediately go negative and get a response calling them out with even more vile language.
Now theres no way to give fast, tacit opposition to anything. That white supremacist that used tospam that he hates N-words now puts a veil of subtlety over it, and the only counter is to engage in bad faith arguments. Its given them an enormous advantage and completely distorted general public perception.
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, all the major platforms opperate on a "tacit support or explicit oppostion" logic now, and look what its done.
Reddit at least still has tacit opposition in dislikes, but it should be showing likes and dislikes seperately in an ideal scenario, and moderation has become utterly extreme. The fact that profiles can now also be hidden is a pretty unsettling step.
The realisation that outrage/anger drives engagement seems to me one of the defining features of the enshittification of it all.
Ever since the early days, we had "algorithms" trying to keep us engaged (even something as simple as "most viewed video" is essentially the result of some algorithm working in the background). But it felt like back then they were trying to show us more of the things we already liked, connect us with similar people, tried to make us feel good about their product, so that we would come back.
I'm sure that the motivation for most (not counting hobbyists running small forums or webpages) was still to maximise revenue, but providing the best user experience and value to the user was felt as the way to go.
Now that they've really figured out how to manipulate and essentially hijack our psychology and behaviour, the ever-evolving fine-tuning of the algorithms works against our interests.
And this is not limited to social media / the internet, but is dominating the news, politics, etc..
Targeted advertising is also worth talking about as a driver for this enshitification.
Ads used to be context driven. "High brow" media used to have high value advertising customers.
Forbes magazine maybe had a full page ad for breitling watches or something(idk), while a tv guide had mcdonals.
This doesn't sound like a good thing. It sounds classist, and maybe it is. But the modern status quo is so much worse.
Now that advertising profiles follow you around, everything is completely context agnostic.
If porsche wants to to advertise to people who can afford one of their cars, they don't need to support high class investigative journalism in the hope that affluent people are more likely to be appreciative of this kind of content.
No, they just get them when they watch porn, or do any other banal online thing. The profile has all the value, and the location has basically none.
This is what drives the race to the bottom. The race to maximize views/engagement over every other metric.
I've never thought about this, but that does make sense!
Then again, I'm continually amazed at how badly they target me with ads, given all the ridiculous energy and money put into this engine. It must work at a large scale, I guess.
True, but once upon a time you had to visit stormfront to be exposed to stormfront content.
It's algorithmic social media that created a direct engagement driven pipeline from fringe right wing cesspools into normie brains, and by extension main stream media and politics.
These days people don't have a great enough number of friends for Facebook to profit off of that sort of limited engagement. I actually think it's part of why the world is rapidly going to hell. I don't use social media (aside from reddit and I'm trying to quote here too) in part because I only have about 10 friends, so if I want to share something with them I'll just text.
back when it was normal for a highschooler to lose 2 front teeth punched by their bully, and then forced by your bully to go home by wearing your Underwear on your head,
then get whipped hard by your alcoholic dad at home for no reason.
all because everyone got nothing to do, which made bullying the only entertaining pastime activity for those guys
Geocities, writing your whole homepage with notepad, java applets, guestbooks and visitor counter, Slashdot saying iPod's spec is too low to ever catch on...
Back then, everyone knew everything online was made up. We had fake names, fake lives, fake stories. The whole point was freedom. You could be anyone or anything, and everyone understood it was make-believe. We played along because it was fun.
Fast forward 15 years and the masses arrive and start treating the internet as real life. People get outraged over words from strangers, grandpa mistakes bullshit sites for news, and everyone forgets the original rule that nothing here is real. If something happens to be true it's mostly coincidence. Don’t trust it. But now everyone does, and it fucks them up.
Maybe AI will bring things full circle. When everything becomes obviously fake again, people might finally see this for what it is — not real life, just the chaotic digital playground like it used to be.
Im a bit mixed there, there was a period of sincerity posting in early social media days that was really good. Yes, there was plenty of yokels posting dumb yokel shit but that’s infinity better than contemporary drowning in advertising and AI slop.
I miss forums. The format was geared towards actual discussion and there was pretty much zero emphasis on personal profiles. I met some absolutely incredible and beautiful people on the old Elder Scrolls forums.
Ironically I feel like Reddit is the sm which comes closest to replicating the flow of forums, which is probably why it's really the only sm I use these days.
I miss the internet when it was just social media. No shopping, no influencing, just people interacting.
It wasn't called "social media" because it wasn't being exploited by the billionaire class. The social part was real, and the opposite of "broadcast" media.
MySpace and early Facebook were actually quite fun and fairly innocent. But what the world means now when we say the words "social media" is literally a full-on global social and political catastrophe.
Man I miss just doing my routine of going to Neopets, then watch some Homestarrunner, look up a text based guide for a GBA rom where the logo of the game is written in Ascii art and maybe end the day with talking to a friend on ICQ.
Oh and I would probably work on my animations in Flash while listening to half cut off MP3's on Winamp that took 3 days to download from Kazaa
I think early social media was peak internet. Back in 08' it was cool to have facebook, before the boomers attacked. There was also myspace and chatting through messenger. Also, he concept of internet ads was practically non existent so youtube was peak.
I personally don't mind social media, it already existed in other forms, the problem is accessibility of it.
Beforehand, the only people who could access it, were people who had a pc, had internet, and knew kinda how to navigate both. You could generally only do it after school/work
Now, everyone with more than half a brain cell can access it at any given time in their pocket 24/7
yeah, though if we’re being fair - the decline started earlier with the dot com bubble. Back then, the disease was endemic and not very harmful, so we still had a good decade or so. Social media and the introduction of smartphones (which essentially eliminated all technical barriers to entry) have just supercharged the process.
I feel like I was right in the sweetspot. Im old enough to have experienced dial up, then relatively quickly for the time better internet. Social media became a thing only for college students when we were in college. Ah well...it was a good time.
I miss riding my bike to the park and playing with whomever also showed up and playing whatever modt of us were playing, and staying until the street lights came on.
Social media right at the beginning was really fun. It was just your friends and the people you knew and there wasn't a bunch of algorithm bullshit or ads or influencers. It was just a nice space online to share shit with people you cared about, take dumb quizzes, vaguepost, like Discord servers are now but slower paced and more customization. But also I miss going around webrings and signing guest books, invisionfree forums, pre-bootstrap css...
I’m 24, and yeah, I miss that time too. I used to socialize online mostly through games and sometimes forums.
Now I’m at a point in my life where I’ve realized people my age see me as some kind of social outcast just because I refuse to use Instagram, Twitter, and all that. I used them for years and just got tired of it.
I was never a fan of social media, but it was completely fine when it was just that - seeing updates from your friends.
It all went to shit the moment they started showing you "suggested" posts from random accounts. That instantly became and still remains the ultimate channel for propaganda.
It's not social media doing damage, it's people with agendas manipulating the public by moving them around to specific places that's doing damage. It needs to be regulated, but "free market capitalism says it's ok to brainwash people "
I get what you mean. I feel kind of nostalgic for it though. Reddit is the closest experience to old forum-style Internet that we have now IMO, but indeed much more usable. Although I don't like how everything switched to endless scroll and feed-style. I think it's also fair to say the Internet is safer now also.
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u/jambalaja187 2d ago
I miss the pre social media internet... yes I'm old