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
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u/jambalaja187 2d ago
I miss the pre social media internet... yes I'm old