What's your favorite internet "oldie"?

RealAccountNameHere@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 14 points –

In honor of the death of Reddit (I hope), let's harken back to a simpler time, perhaps when we old-timers were migrating from BBS chatting to Slashdot to Reddit. My favorite "oldie" is "The Website Is Down," from 2009-ish. It perfectly captures what IT support is like.

What's your fave?

30

Finding a solution to an obscure computer problem in a YouTube video recorded with Unregistered Hypercam, Windows XP/Vista background, notepad instructions being typed at 15 WPM, playing Down With the Sickness, Breaking Benjamin, or one of those 009 Sound System songs lol.

newgrounds (The Impossible Quiz, anyone remember the square root of an onion?), Numa Numa, The Evolution of Dance, Shortbits 2, Badger Badger Badger (and other Weebl animations), Onyxia Wipe Animation, bash.org, Stumble Upon (a useful toolbar?!), all sorts of great stuff from that time

StumbleUpon was great, I miss it.

Came here to say StumbleUpon too. I had "cats" as one of my tags and my parents thought I must really want one because they always walked by when I happened to be on a cat page. So that's how I ended up with a cat for my birthday. Don't get pets as gifts, people.

Ironically I remember it bringing me to reddit a few times and I did not like it at all at the time haha. I just wanted to see more crazy websites and read the SU comments. It was always fun to find yourself on some website through some other means, and then checking to see if there was any comments about it on stumble upon and being pleasantly surprised when there was

StumbleUpon is what actually brought me to Reddit when Cracked started to decline in their articles, and probably the same story for a lot of us between 30-40 that are in exodus from Reddit currently.

I actually tried to get away from Reddit probably 6 or more years ago to this federated thing but couldn't get into it then - but now with Apollo going away and the CEOs opinion made clear how users like me are viewed, even if they reverted their API pricing I won't be back.

This is the style of community I'd like to be a part of.

And don't forget about Group X or the insane number of stick figure fighting flash videos. Shfifty-five.

Square root of an onion... the answer was shallots wasn't it?

I really liked "Freeman's Mind" (link to episode 1 from nine years ago). It was super simple, literally just a first-person perspective playthrough the Half-Life games with narration instead of commentary. The narrator acted like the mind of Gordon Freeman and it was really funny. Sort of harkens back to a simpler time on youtube, when 9 minutes of a guy talking as if he were a fictional character while playing a video game was prime content. I remember watching this and in the comments I was begging Ross (the creator) to do Half-Life 2 when he finished with 1.

This was such a blast back then. It felt so genuine the way he did it.

I'd never seen this. Will definitely be watching it all!

Damn I remember this. I can still hear the sound of the beginning of the videos in my head

I miss AIM. The days where you would race home and log on to see if your crush would come on, and then inevitably not message them if they did. I had the cash register noise set to their screen names.

Typing JOSHUA in Terminate, the dialup BBS terminal client, to unlock the war dialer. It let you sequentially dial every phone number in a range and would record each one that answered with a modem handshake.

I spent an unreasonable time at the albinoblacksheep forums. Also Flash Flash Revolution was my jam!

Crap, I recognize almost everything in this thread and some of it I consider relatively recent.

I loved forums and participated frequently on a roleplaying forum. Got started roleplaying on Neopets, moved on to gaiaonline as I "matured," and ended up on a regular forum midway through highschool.

I once spent 12 hours on Newgrounds watching the most extreme content it had because I couldn't bring myself to work on a project that was due the next day in middleschool.

God this was a trip down memory lane. Thanks for this. I miss bash.org stuff, maybe some of the old ytmnd stuff, new grounds flash portal, etc.

And IRC…

There was a search engine called like crazy Pete and its tag was faster than a space horse. I remember it took over 4 mins to find a result and there were certain hours where Pete would personally get a result for you.

I was young so I'm not sure how accurate that was but I imagine that it's run by an English man from a computer in his garden shed. From 6-7pm he sits in his shed smoking a pipe and serving people web results.

If I have to pick an absolute favorite, old Neopets. Having the little webspaces there is what got me into coding as a kid and I ended up studying & working in IT.
If I can pick multiple, I'd also add phpbb forums of yore, game guides with ASCII art maps, Flash games, and MSN Messenger.

Not exactly a fav but I’ll always remember when Omegle was brand new. It was before they had video and it wasn’t full of bots. I was probably around 11 or 12 and I had a convo with someone I vehemently disagreed with some or other topic about. We were friendly tho and continued talking on AIM (friendly, never more) and at some point family came up and he explained how things that my father had done to me was abuse and showed me rainn.org. It was such a huge revelation ofc and led to me telling my family and getting my dad prosecuted. That’s why I like discord sometimes I get that old feeling of genuine convo.

Wow, what happenstance that you got help in this way. I'm sorry to hear you went through that, but so glad to hear you were empowered with the knowledge to break the cycle of abuse.

I was a kid in the 2000's so for me the oldies were playing the flash games on cartoon network, miniclip and armor games. My first real exposure to social media was YouTube 2006-2008 somewhere around there watching Smosh and whatever crap was there back in the day.

GameSpy. Finding a server you clicked with. Meeting the other players that frequented there. Joining clans and chatting it up on the forums. So much creativity flowed making banners or avatars the showed off your stats from the server and such.

FenslerFilm's GI Joe PSA Spoofs

playlist

In particular.... https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YlcXposa2I8

Edit:

The company gained a reputation in 2003 for a series of short films which parodied the public service announcement (PSA) safety messages used at the end of every episode of the 1980s animated series G.I. Joe, based on Hasbro's toy line. [...] By 2004, the videos had been considered viral hits, and Hasbro had sent Fensler a cease and desist order. --- Wikipedia

I still routinely quote from these. I think they'll probably live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life, lmao.

Are you Buzz Lightyear?

Hey kid! I'm a computer. Stop all the downloadin'!