Do you miss the internet of the 90s and the 2000s?
I miss the 2006-2009 era when smartphones were way too expensive at the time so most people didn't have them. Back then most people still had regular dumb phones and still had to socially engage with others irl and have real conversations and because the internet was so shitty on flip phones most people still had to use their PCs to mainly access the internet back then it truly was a simpler time.
I regret that with today's network speeds and computational power, we could have everything load instantly, on any device and connection and any country in the world, if websites were made with the same constraints as 20 years ago (small files, low quality images /videos). Other than that, no. Society has changed whether we like it or not, old tech is still around cf. News, IRC, they just lost their users. Even this website exists. It's not a technology problem.
Yes it is a technology problem and society has been absolute shit since 2012.
JavaShit should have been killed with fire when it was born
>>11
Javascript is never a problem for me since I started using the LibreJS add-on for GNU Icecat. It lets me know about websites that are designed to be defective. When I know a website is defective by design, I am happy to avoid that website for being defective.
I miss the net.art scene but as long as there's sites that allow me to do whatever I want without any consequences (even the actions that do have consequences mean nothing if you have a VPN), then I'm happy with the internet.
>>1
Yeah I think that's pretty much what the topic of this site is
>>15
considering this site is a relic of the old internet, characterizing it as an "old internet nostalgia site" doesn't seem fair, if that is what you are implying.
while this site is definitely old, I think it's fair to call it "nostalgia" because it was already retro at the time it was created in... 2004-05?
discussion forums were a '80s and '90s thing, by the early '00s most English-speaking internet users had moved onto multimedia-centric and ego-stroking social networking sites like myspace and livejournal. 2channel was one of the very last pure discussion forums to arise (somewhat) organically, and that happened mainly because the Japanese internet as a whole resists innovation
if you call 4-ch "a relic of the old internet" you might also have to call, like, reddit "a relic of the old internet". unless the distinguishing factor is literally never getting any significant software updates
Not really there were still plenty of people on discussion forums in the 2000s and they were still pretty popular especially to discuss media at the time. 4ch is a relic of the old internet" because textboard culture both in Japan and the west is dying people prefer imageboards over BBS textboards and fuck off Reddit is not nor is in anyway "a relic of the old internet" Sites like Reddit Twitter Tumblr and so on may have came out in the 2000s but they didn't take off and get big until the early 2010s and by that time the old internet was already dead everything started to go downhill around 2008/2009 and at first it wasn't so bad but after early 2010 things got really shitty and by 2012 we completely lost everything.
Rest in peace the old internet 1969-2012
Do you think the old internet can be brought back? What would need to happen?
>>20
An apocalypse sufficient to destroy current corporate entities with a vested interest in web bloat/advertising but not so severe as to knock our tech level back below computer tech. A wide-scale return to dial-up type speeds and/or methods would probably help though.
still find it weird that people born the same year this site was set up are already doing porn and politics
That too it is kinda both Gen Z sucks at memes and i hate how they are obsessed with sex and think 4chan culture is the entire internet i hate the fact that 4chan culture spilled out into the rest of the internet.
>>27
Can we really give fault to them though? I mean, the first kind of internet they were exposed to was the commercial/capitalist one. I'm not sure about the part about being obsessed with sex since I think that may apply to most generations since the invention of tv(?), because ever since everything got sexualized and for a lot of people sexualizing everything has become normal because of that.
The 4chan thing is new to me, I think it depends on the places you frequent.
>>27
I also want to add that what a generation ends up consuming and using is mostly fault of the previous generations' inability to control and prevent low-quality/damaging content being fed to children. After all most of the content which is consumed by kids today and therefore the content they learn from is made by people older than them, so I think that older people(previous generations) have a big responsability in how tomorrow children and new generations will end up behaving and thinking.
On a side note I would like to point out that the modern internet doesn't really look different from the old internet, the only thing that changed are the big companies governing it. Can't really prevent the web from becoming a capitalistic tool, low contents and bad media orbit around things that make most money out of people's behavior and attention.
>On a side note I would like to point out that the modern >internet doesn't really look different from the old internet,
Not really websites like YouTube used to be more simple and basic with their layout/design but now it is a cluster fuck to look at with nothing but video playlist and ads all over the place.
> I mean, the first kind of internet they were exposed to was the commercial/capitalist one.
I think you meant corporatist because the internet has been commercial and capitalist since the beginning.
>>20
I doubt it. Also the "old internet" was not that much better where pseudonymous text posting is concerned; Usenet groups and BBS were flooded with autistic trolls who had nothing else to do than obsessively post there and cultivating their online "personas" as happens everywhere where anon posting is not encouraged. Not that different from reddit.
It is true that there was very weak connection between online and offline world, tha facebooks and instagrams and associated lifestyles are completely new. Horse is out of the barn tho, I can't imagine so many people would discard their entire "life"styles now.
I was born in 2000
I can't remember any internet before 2012 except outside what I was told about it.
I mostly use fediverse and *chan / *ch boards.
The main reason I use fediverse is because IRC is dead.
IRC isn't that dead. There are still plenty of active channels around. That being said, they are mostly full of old schizophrenics.
Probably not too different from fediverse in that regard, really.
>>33
that "weak connection" between irl and the net is key. That's what defined the old internet of the 90s and 2000s for me. What i experienced online during that time had very little consequence in the real world. And that era is never coming back. In fact its moving at hyper velocity the other way. We will soon be in a world where your real identity is tied to your online identity EVERYWHERE you go
That is too young to remember the old internet the late 90s zoomers were the last generation to see the old internet if you were born after 1999 you're too young to remember it.
Internet ages as they ended.
Ancient internet (1993) -----> Old internet (2001)*? -----> Mid internet (2007) -----> New Internet (2014) -----> Hell
The 2005-2008 era was the last good era of the internet and the last era where there was actually a disconnect between the internet and real life and you could actually log off the internet completely. When smartphones started becoming more common and affordable around 2009/2010 that was when everything started going downhill and people who didn't know how to use a computer now had access to the internet and by 2012 the old internet was dead.
>>35
That is strange. I'm only five years older but my memories extend way beyond 2007 (the analogous time window for me). My earliest memories of the internet are from 1999. I think Old Internet stopped being Old Internet for me around 2004 when I noticed that websites were completely different.
I do miss the older protocols. That shit was just about dead by the time I was old enough to use a computer, but they were still alive in recent memory at the time for me to experience them. I remember seeing Gopher links in 2001 and so on. I barely understood the purpose of FTP but I did go to FTP sites because I liked to look at folders and files online.
>I think Old Internet stopped being Old Internet for me around 2004
I think that was when the golden age ended and the climax of the final good days were 2005-Early 2010.
What was the beginning of "Web 2.0"?
>>49 What was it though? Is there something that can be pointed at like, that was the start of the chapter?
>>50
From a technical point of view, dynamically modifying webpages based on a server-side application's response to user input was made possible by the XMLHttpRequest JavaScript API, which was implemented started in mid-1999 in IE and late 2000 in Mozilla (though in both browsers it wasn't particularly mature until roughly 2002, and not a completely formal specification until 2006.)
"Web 2.0" as a term also was popularized by a conference in 2004 though it first appeared in someone's article describing the future of the internet in 1999.
I think the first widely used Web 2.0 application was Gmail in 2004 followed by Google Maps in 2005. There were earlier websites that made use of dynamic webpages but none became all that popular, or survived for very long (except for Microsoft's shit.)
fuck i want the old internet back so badly i don't even know how to browse for cool webpages anymore since the net is so centralized to huge websites now
i thought things were officially dead 2012 onwards what even happened in 2012 that caused the internet to be completely done for.
>>53
gangnam style hitting 1 bn views on youtube and being in everyones mouth; the signal that a critical mass of "normal people" were now on the internet
>>35
prob gonna get underageb& for saying this but Anon here was two years old in 2008. I barely knew how to use a computer in 2012, let alone browse things such as image and discussion boards(though considering the type of kid I was at that age and a few years down the line that was probably for the absolute best), though I have always had a bit of deep regret for not chinning up and browsing 4chan before the post-moot era instead of brushing it off as the website the news said was for nazis, so I could have gone down the net culture rabbit hole while it was still even a relic of its past. Even if I wasn't here for the best of our days, I'm still glad to be here with the oldfags to spread their wisdom from the times I was in diapers.
Stay cool, Channel4.
You're a fucking retard get the fuck out of here you're too young to remember the old internet and don't belong here anyone born after the late 90s is not old enough to remember the old internet or even 2000s pop culture as well i don't know why but there seems to be a tendency from people in their late teens and early twenties to be fascinated with the era they were alive in but too young to really experience.
Get the fuck out little kid you don't know shit about old internet culture you're a social media baby.
>>57
Lol this kid spending his time in a nursery home instead of playing football or fornite with his schoolmates.
I never pretended to; I even said in my post "even a relic of its past," as minuscule as any relic of the 90's and early 00's may have been at the time(if it even existed at all, which according to the general consensus of the thread wasn't the case, sorry). I know that 4chan culture isn't the whole internet, otherwise I wouldn't even be here. Read my post before replying.
>>48-51
I think the terms are a bit nebulous and depend on who you ask. Some people think HTML webpages with cgi-bin scripts are the beginning of web 2.0, and those sites date back to the late 90s. I think for most people though, web 2.0 is a design philosophy. The era of round corners, gradients, icons, user interaction, and so on. Social media is probably the biggest delineating point, but then again, blogs and forums and 2ch style BBSes fall into that category as well.
It's just one of those things that you know when you see it. The details are a bit murky though.
Is "Web 2.0" even an accurate term anymore? Considering how the web seems to have moved on from open APIs to walled garden social media stuff (and phone apps) as well as the trend towards fewer gigantic sites, should we maybe have a new term for it?
>The era of round corners, gradients, icons, user interaction, and so on.
Yeah, for me Web 2.0 is a design philosophy. When websites switched to html with basic colors, backgrounds, gifs, and fonts to everything having to fit in a circle or have round corners. I miss browsers having everything default to a inset/outset border and text looking all pixelated.
>>68
I have heard the numbers go all the way up to Web 5.0 at this point. In some sense we're showing our age by speaking exclusively of 2.0. Though frankly, 3.0 and beyond never were as popular in the discourse and not many people really care to distinguish. Old vs New is good enough for most people.
im new here. idk what to do
Lurk more lurk for months or years if you don't know about old internet culture especially textboards do some research.
>>74
Years? Is this a language? Why would someone lurk for YEARS?
It helps you not look like a dumbass and eventually fit in.
Heh, don't mind me. Just browsing the ol' Chill-web.
I assume you just want to me redirect to the board so people can see the bump you just made in the speech bubbles thread, but for any real newcomers out there looking for pointers:
https://4-ch.net/ascii/ AA Bar
http://aachan.sageru.org SJIS collections
>>51,67 Cheers. Yeah it was the technical perspective I was interested in. I know the difference from a design perspective as you guys mentioned, and I remember the general atmosphere of the Net changing from "1.0" to "2.0" I just wondered if there was a particular turning point that stood out, or a certain technological advancement that allowed the design philosophy to proliferate. So thanks!
>>68,71 Hmm, really? That's mental
Pseudonymous forums and such were actually hella lame. The way most people heard of them was through some kind of magazine, they were usually a cliqueish circlejerk of people with similar subcultural/retardcultural affinities. Which were heavily moderated by the host himself and gatekept to keep a bunch of losers in an autistic bubble. It is why anonymous communication became such a big and influential thing. Usenet which actually goes back to the 80s could be pretty cool though.0
Literally WHO DOESN'T?
>>86
I don't know about the 80's but the late 90's usenet felt stiff and neckbeard-y for a teenager (the then-equivalent for a zoomer). You had almost the same content as if on a pseudonymous web forum with the problems you mention (which are easier to see now in retrospective), but with arcane system of posting and formatting conventions on top of that. A lot of nerds posted with real names, proud of that as like it was an achievement and flamed each other to death, sometimes offline too. And then you had moderated groups, which were dying already as the admins had disappared in many cases and therefore it was entirely impossible to post there.
So I started a new hobby awhile back I created a new folder on my computer and started saving and collecting as much old internet material I could find. This is going to take a few years to complete because I have to dig under a lot of 2010s garbage to find what I am looking for because a lot of stuff has been lost overtime. I plan to release this folder at some point it contains stuff from the early 90s up until 2009.
>>90
It's not technically from the internet but you might check out archives like this. http://textfiles.com/bbs/
Also old FTP sites. This place lists a shitload of them. https://www.mmnt.net/
have any of you heard of heyuri?
Fuck off Kuz nobody cares about your shitty attempt at trying to create a imageboard similar to 4chan in the 2000s. If you're gonna do that at least do it right fix your broken buggy slow ass website and stop trying to bring zoomers to it as well because you're desperate for traffic.
>>93,94
Heyuri is nice, no need to give him so much grief over it
>>94
I think it'd be really sweet if he changed his imageboard to be similar to 4chan on June 21, 2004 actually
>>58
Probably noobs that at least semi-realize that the current internet is shit and desperately want something else.
javascript:show('options1599910673')>>20
We could just start anew with another section of the internet entirely, such as the gemini protocol, gopher again, matrix chat. If we can't reclaim this territory(which we can't with how much money there is in it), we can at least find a new home.
also faicking captcha
>>95
I love it but i dont like how the entire "old 4chan style culture" is spamming tomo and going overboard with the language by using words like "teH SuxORz!" every sentence. It feels forced. I also don't like how much they praise their admin, it feels like a circlejerk and it is annoying
That's because Kuz only allows people on his site who will suck his dick he cannot take any form of outside criticism. Whats funny is that the original Heyuri was ran by a zoomer born in 2002 who is not even old enough to remember the old chan culture and Kuz was a ban happy SJW mod on that site.
EKSKUSE ME HAF ANY OF YOU PERHAPS MAYBE HEARD OF THIS PLACE KNOWN AS HEYURI
>>99
Agreed, but I think moving to the darknet makes more sense. It aids the anonymous ethos and many corners of them already feel like the old net.
Who knows and who cares he was a faggot just like nigger Kuz they are both shitty people.
>>105
how is he a pedophile? if i remember correctly he was the one who immediately instated the ban on lolis. Also why are you so angry? Did he cross you?
>>103
All we really need to revive the "old internet" is to have participation. It doesn't matter what protocol it is, what the aesthetic of the website is, darknet or clearnet, we just need people to break away from social media and free hosting and content aggregators and start their own servers. What really made the "old internet" was the decentralized aspect, it wasn't 3-4 single platforms that everybody posted on, but everybody effectively had their own service on the internet.
Hosting is cheaper than ever. Domains are less than $10 a year, a little Raspberry pi server is about $40. Right now I run a web server, a gopher server, ftp, and email from my house.