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
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.
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You have not used Yandex.
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Congratulations for killing your own freedoms in the most Western way! I wonder if your virtue signalling gave you any benefit other than strengthening the genocidal Anglo empire’s worthless ego.
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Been using Yandex as my default search for almost a year now. It’s like the old Google and DDG. It doesn’t have as many SEO sites like Google results and actually respects when you put quotes around to force include a word in the query making it much more useful for searching up programming errors. The only downside I found is that it has a bunch of anti-degeneracy filters which sometimes interfere if for example if you search up something like “unixporn” it will try and block the word “porn” in the results. Also translate.yandex.com is really good at translating Russian, but seems slightly worse than Google translate for Chinese.
You will need to turn the “safe” filter or whatever it is, if you want to avoid that.
The lesson to be learnt is the country that disrespects “copyright” style BS laws in foreign country will end up being the more free one. And there is only freedom in knowledge and wisdom, not social discourse which is always a bunch of political minigames.
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 loved that period where WWW was buzzing with naive excitement and USENET was still popular for having conversations, it was a good time.
The few years before social media and the iPhone.
Anywhere from the 90s to the mid to late 2000s because that’s when you saw the most personal websites being made and what I would consider the golden era of Newgrounds. Now, I wasn’t able to experience the personal websites of the 90s, but through various means I’ve seen some really cool personal websites from back then.
Early YouTube and early Facebook were really good. I liked old Facebook, as well as the timeline update. I miss Joe it used to work. I don’t use it or any other equivalent social media because none of them work like that anymore. Lemmy is the only social media I use and that’s more of a discussion board rather than keeping up with IRL friends.
Early YouTube comment was great before it got inundated with ads and sponsorships. I miss the silly humour you don’t really see that much anymore. The last good era of YouTube was the height of youtube haikus, that sadly, like a lot of things, got replaced by tiktok content.
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.
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.
I used to love doing web design. Was perfect career for me, a mix of creativity and coding. Websites then were art, creative, took risks. Then cms became standard, sites all looking the same. Sites are more user-friendly now, but I miss the wild, weird internet of its early days.
The few years when Google was fully usable.
Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.
I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.
Search engines no longer exist. There are only content recommendation engines now.
Before the web when it was all ad free and just nerds was pretty cool. The email list / Forum era was pretty good.
The best era was 1993. I’d spend maybe 1 hour a day and read every new thing there was to read on the web.
Things went quickly wrong after you couldn’t read every webpage update before new updates. The www was no longer human comprehensible.
