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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Square root of an onion… the answer was shallots wasn’t it?
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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.
I’m so sorry that happened to you. How brave you must be to have dealt with that.
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.
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…
Damn, came here to post bash.org too. Guess I will have to put down my wizard hat.
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.
Damn I remember this. I can still hear the sound of the beginning of the videos in my head
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FYR72mr0E
Also homestarrunner and foamy the squirrel
Strongbad emails were my jam back in the day. Trogdor still gets mentioned periodically with friends to this day. Truly timeless entertainment right there.
That was perfect!
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.
all your base, peanut butter jelly time and numa numa were the height of humor. I used to love old ebaums world
FenslerFilm’s GI Joe PSA Spoofs
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’!
GameFAQs video game cheats.
I remember walking to the library specifically to look up video game cheats on GameFAQs, printing them out on dozens of pieces of paper so I could fold them up and keep them in the appropriate game cases.
I’d go so often and get so much exercise from it, my parents didn’t even bother limiting my video game time.
I spent an unreasonable time at the albinoblacksheep forums. Also Flash Flash Revolution was my jam!
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.
I don’t think it’s online anymore but at it’s peak I used to read every post on mlia before it became garbage
This just made some very rusty neurons fire, and I remembered FMyLife for the first time in 10 years.
…and it turns out it actually still exists, wow.
FML was the best. I had some app for it for android, not sure if it was the official one, but it was essentially just text and a few basic buttons. I could spend hours scrolling that thing.
Oh man, MLIA and FML were staples of my internet browsing once upon a time.
My first doomscrolling experiences were FML and I Can Haz Cheezeburger
That video reminds me of You Suck At Photoshop, which actually did teach me a good amount of basic photo editing knowledge.
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.
