Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Hello, I grew up in this era, with 4chan, bbs forums, anime, and stuff.

I’ve largely missed the past 9 years of internet history, or more like, I feel I’ve not fit in anywhere since 2012 or so.

I read online that the old internet was better, the communities, ppl, memes, and stuff. What is your take on that?

I’ll keep my story short to try and express what I’m used to on the internet:
Bbs forums, dbz gifs and forums, everybody trolling each other,
Gfx battles, amv battles, runescape, guns online, conquer online, vanilla wow, ragnarok,
4chan, /jp/, flanfly, /a/, 2ch, steam, friends, hamster dance, badger vdance, caramel dance
T.a.t.u.,
All your base, how I shot web, goatze, meatspin, small knit communities, independent forums, bananaphon,

MSN, aol lesbian chat room trolling, trolling everywhere before it was a word…

Basically, I felt like I had real friends everybody trolling everybody, everything was more magical,

All my friends left internet, and communities now seem so strict, serious, and not fun… and kinda like fgts, dunno where I belong now

What are all the ppl from that era doing / at now?

Btw we talked like this:

Lol fahg, Wat r u doin, sup, yo let’s pk, no u, sux0rs, n00b pwned, cool story bro, u mad? K, asl 14/f/wa

Sry I’m on phone now, we didn’t have these then either, so yah wat r ur guys opinions on all this , wat r the ppl doing now from dat Tim is dere plac they hangout, does internet suck now or wat, wat am I suppose to be doin now pls tell me kthxbye

The only thing better about old internet memes is that old memes were built to last while modern memes die after a week.

hmm… Let's see…

- twitter is huge in the current year, though some users on this site hate it… I think…

- 4chan had gone downhill 4 years ago, with a lot of its users migrating to *8*ch

- 2ch changed it's name to 5ch

- the internet (as a whole) had become more distrustful of big news, worried of potential bias

That's all that comes to mind for me, but reply to this post if you have any questions, and I'll try my best to answer.

Sorry if I didn't answer all your questions; I didn't have much time to.

Well the old internet being better is debatable in my mind.

For one, if you lived in say Ireland, getting internet was a bitch and you did it by cable and only really at schools for folks who could not afford the top of the line machines and landline connection.

There is also how there were some services today that didn't exist like youtube, Dailymotion and even DeviantArt or any art sites you can think of other than chans.

Hell, I could not tell you the amount of times old anime fans describe how much of a bitch it was to get info on stuff they liked or footage.

Even the idea of the internet being something useful for game, book, video and other types of sales was laughable from the top businesses' perspectives.

That said, it is easy to see why people prefer the old days as the issue these days is that the internet has exploded in how big it has gotten and that the wild west days of its younger years are coming to an end. And there is a study that I saw that brings up that the internet with so much information and how fast it is to eat up all that data on it does make people's attention spawn shorter when using it, hence why probably memes die so quickly these days compared to before.

It is kind of like flying planes back in its younger years, it was special and marvellous since not all that common and was a fantastical idea come to life. Nowadays it is so common that people these days don't consider it anything too special, and I imagine as soon as public space travel and colonizing other planets becomes a thing that starts hitting its stride it will capture the minds of people before becoming another mundane activity of daily life just like the internet seems to becoming.

I feel you man. From the glimpse of the old internet that I got when I was young, it seemed somewhat better. Memes lasted for years, and not everything was in the hands of a few websites. There were options for where you went. Now it's mostly:

"Want to be anonymous? Go to 4chan!"

"Want to post your opinion? Go to Twitter!"

"Want to share something you found? Go to Reddit!"

I have a friend in his early 30s who hasn't kept up with memes and acts like he's from that decade of the internet. He uses terms like "kthxbai" and thinks being an atheist is still considered edgy and trendy. It's kind of endearing in a way, but it's not something I'd trade Gen Z memes for.

What was internet culture like in its early years?

If you were a gamer it was a time of unbridled trash talking and the freedom to use anything to get under your opponent's skin.

The proverbial dark age of the internet before the enlightened gentry laid down the rules as to which words could not be used.

Yep
old internet was much much better
sad that I missed out on most of it
internet now is just stupid shit that’s pushed as “meme of the week” and outrage over stupid things

The internet nowadays is 50% ironic and 50% constructed outrages.

There's a reason for the rapid decline since the end of 2010: memes became a part of pop culture. This entry basically says what happened.