The infancy of YouTube and Twitch. Everyone made content for fun, pretty much no one was nude or in a hot tub, monetization didn’t censor everything.
It was nice 🙂👍
Early YouTube and twitch, early reddit, pre-instagram. That was a good time.
Gah, I miss those days. I had a personal video on YouTube from the early days. Something or another flagged it — probably the audio I used for the cheap “credits” I put in — and the video went away.
More recently, grandmas birthday video. It got taken down a year later, likely because I had short, edited clips of Peanuts included. 🙄
Oh, and you mean Justin.tv.
Best era of the Internet was before the DMCA. At the time it passed I knew it would kill a lot of my favorite things about the Internet and I sadly wasn’t wrong
What’s DMCA?
Digital millennium copyright act. It effectively moved the burden of proof for copyright infringement from the copyright owner to the accused, short-circuiting the existing IP laws, among other things.
It is where much of the drama around copyright online stems from. It’s used as a way to quickly stifle anything someone posts that’s something you don’t like.
It made circumventing DRM itself illegal, even if you’re not breaking copyright by doing so (even if it’s for your own research or backups).
For me, it was the 90s, before the entire landscape got consumed by giant corporations. I know it wasn’t all roses back then, but it felt like you could find anything online, and it opened up a whole new world.
Remember when almost every new web site had a guestbook and would sometimes let you sign up for an email address using their domain? I had a [username]@britneyspears.com email address for a while.
I want my ICQ and my IRCs and my “you’ve got mail” and my horrible screeching that means I will be online soon back.
I’m not even kidding. Give me back my 90s internet.
Go play HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW right now, if you haven’t. Trust me.
I keep wanting to go back to usenet, but I hate that it’s not included by my ISP anymore
http://www.eternal-september.org/
free access to text froups
WHOA! Thank you so much!
Well, have a nap, then FIRE ZE MISSILES!
Hokay
I have a lot of nostalgia for the late 90s/early 00s when the internet was still exciting. Videos! Games! Flash! Chats! Piracy! Winamp!
Viruses…viruses everywhere. And god damn we loved every second of it
It was wild. An MP3 could be music, porn or it eats up your whole hard drive.
I remember spending 3 whole days downloading LotR: Two Towers (a huge feat as I had to finesse the entire household to not pick up the phone for those three days), only to end up with an audio-only file and a shit ton of viruses. Glorious memories
It really whips the llama’s ass.
The best era is the first 5 years you experience it. That’s when all the magic happens. Recapturing that level of awe wonder and pure joy is hard after you become a veteran.
It was obviously when Homestar Runner was at his peak (the character himself, the webseries named after him, and the website it’s hosted in all at the same time). This guy literally changed the accents of some people.
sbemails, TGS and tragdor are forever etched in my brain.
kids, don’t play with too many knives. Crash stunt man gonna save some lives.
I’m actually glad they’re still around, they released a new cartoon last month.
Personally, for me, it was up until about 2008ish. YouTube and blogging existed but it was all still mostly amateurs having fun. There weren’t really paywalls and the iPhone was still so new that you didn’t assume someone else had a smartphone. My circle of friends mostly had blackberries so we could chat/email with friends and get information (like news headlines or sports scores or even directions) but going fully online was still a deliberate thing you did on a computer. Bosses, being older, still assumed you were unreachable after work hours.
Basically, it was the era right before the internet became a requirement to function in society but it still had lots of fun content.
Before the web when it was all ad free and just nerds was pretty cool. The email list / Forum era was pretty good.
The Fediverse, today.
But no not really. If you are on Tiktok or shit like that suddenly there are actually people living close to you. Connecting to people you can actually meet is important.
I was not expecting anyone to say the TikTok era is the best of the internet. Each to their own I guess, you’re wrong though
What? Everyone is on Tiktok, which is not the case with the Fediverse. The platform and lots of content suck, but it can also be valuable (short videos from things happening without press censorship and delay). The fediverse is still tiny in comparison and doesnt cover these things, like looking for restaurant reviews next door
The 2000s for sure - from early online games and MMORPGs to a lot of forums, when Slashdot and Reddit were good, the start of Wikipedia, etc.
There was more optimism around everyone communicating with eachother internationally, and fostering communities. Nowadays it feels everything is dominated by a few big monopolies, and there’s a lot more censorship.
The few years before social media and the iPhone.
I’d have to do some digging to come up with the year, but I can describe it. It was after WWW happened, and all sorts of web content and communities took off. Search engines, like Altavista, had no algorithms except trying to find the thing you were looking for. Everything was free because it was ad supported, but (and this is key) the ads were no worse than what you’d see in a magazine: no popups, no sites making it impossible to hit the back button, etc. Maybe the worst thing was something would blink.
Once the war between ads getting worse and ad blockers avoiding them happened, everything went to hell. People making content had to come up with different business models, search engines started pushing paid content, paywalls started popping up, and the user experience went down the toilet.
I like the internet a lot now but I miss the Flash era. So many game devs creating so many unique bitesize concepts. I still play many of them on flashpoint but every now and then you get hit with the depressing realization that its over. Like watching old taped cable and realizing you can’t actually change the channel.
The early 2000’s. When I clicked the chat button on ICQ that connected me with a stranger anywhere in the world, that blew my mind as a kid.
