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Mostly, when I look back on Ye Olde Internet, I remember this:
I also remember when Myspace and MSN Messenger were everyone's go-to platforms for communication...and when Invisionfree Forums were a HUGE thing and a new one was popping up practically every hour of the day, getting 100 or so members, and being forgotten about after a month. Good times.
Post count celebration was a pretty huge thing on a forum I used to be on, but so was pairing up with other members and marrying anime characters...people got absurdly territorial over their pairs. If the worst you've seen are a few people getting slightly obsessed over their "waifu" character, you ain't seen nothing compared to how it used to be, haha. It was absolutely savage when a new anime came out and everyone was in a mad rush to claim the newest characters.
leet speak was also very popular when I was a teenger...u5u4lly p30pl3 w0uld 7yp3 l1k3 7h15. +|-|4|\\||(|#|_|11`/, \\/3|2`/ |#3\\|/ |>30|>13 +00|( !+ +0 +|-|!5 |(!|\\||) 0|# 3%+|23|\\/|3.
...no, I am not making that second sentence up. I think I only ever saw one person type like that though, and he did it mostly to annoy people. Substituting numbers for letters was much more common. It was a precursor to that godawful text speak that people use nowadays I guess. I think my intense dislike for bad spelling/grammar/punctuation dates from the days when I had to deal with leet on a daily basis. xD
Post counts was such a big thing here. Myself and a couple of friends here use to make a competition out of it and kind of celebrate eachothers victory of getting 2,000 posts.
On forums: different features that you had to unlock by hitting a certain amount of posts, spam parties (threads made for the purpose of getting those +1 going and therefore ending up filing pages after pages in only shorts amounts of time) and just to spite all those spammers who wanted to get their numbers high: spam forums with the post count being turned off.
Otherwise: AOL, in general ISP bloatware that was made to make you thing you need it in order to access the internet, ICQ, MSN, some of the really old social platforms that existed before the rise of facebook, a rather lax attitude in terms of video game resources (the good ol' times when nobody cared how many stolen video game assets you were putting into your RPG-Maker game).
Another thing I remember is everyone seemed to have huge banners in their signatures to the point where it would be a whole screen for one person's signature.
graphics shops were huge back in the day on PC. it was pretty hard honestly not to come across someone who was capable enough in photoshop to open either some sort of graphics gallery or a graphic shop of some sort. slighlty miss those days actually, haha.
i also miss forums in general. like, i miss the days when the internet wasn't just Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat pretty much dominating the social media-sphere. i honestly find the internet to be rather... boring and lackluster these days due to the lack of cool forum websites to see. (good) forums as i've known them to be over the years have always been little home-y communities compared to the massive social media giants and as such it always feels a bit more personal and easier to get to know someone on a forum. that's just me, though.
I completely forgot about everyone trying to do Photoshop back in the day. I know I was one of those people always trying to make something in Photoshop. I had soooooo many brushes to use.
also for those who are old enough to remember, livejournal (to my recollection) was pretty big as a blogging space among PC users. lj still exists now but it's definitely not the same as it was back then lol
I'm pretty sure I have one or two of those floating around somewhere. I'd almost be afraid of what's on it now...lol. Another thing EVERYONE seemed to have was Neopets.
I remember Livejournal! I also remember when 90% of its userbase migrated over to Dreamwidth because of Russian spambots or something, hahaha. LJ was the coolest place to give voice to teenage angst in the early-to-mid 2000s!
I miss oversized forum signatures...those were fun.
Are forum families still a thing or nah? Something kinda sad about the internet is that a lot of things don't last such as certain websites or now defunct MMOs. I wonder how much longer Neopets will exist... And what of all the Flash media on the internet since it's being phased out?
I remember Livejournal! I also remember when 90% of its userbase migrated over to Dreamwidth because of Russian spambots or something, hahaha. LJ was the coolest place to give voice to teenage angst in the early-to-mid 2000s!
I miss oversized forum signatures...those were fun.
i look through my old Lj entries and just cringe like holy crap i was a super angsty kid LMAO
and omggg forum signatures. i have sigs turned off for like... a solid year now but i kinda miss how creative people were with their signatures as long as they werent obnoxious
Are forum families still a thing or nah? Something kinda sad about the internet is that a lot of things don't last such as certain websites or now defunct MMOs. I wonder how much longer Neopets will exist... And what of all the Flash media on the internet since it's being phased out?
i actually genuinely miss forum families!! as silly as they may seem at first, they provided a sense of closeness (if that makes sense) and community amongst friends. nowadays it seems like even forum pairing is dying off which is kind of a shame
I remember using fanpop back in 2009 and posting some extremely cringey things on the Total Drama Island fanfic. I ultimately got banned for being an edge lord, lol.
I also remember that the first meme I saw was the "Bad Luck Brian" one back in like 2011.
A little late, but yeah on the graphic banners on PC and Livejournal mentions. Livejournal in particular I remember posting fics there and you post in communities to advertise whenever you update/have a new fic posted.
Pokemon Forums were still really huge and there were many more back, give or take a decade ago. Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find any small Pokemon forums at all. I can only name maybe four Pokemon forums that still exist today, three if you don't include Pokecommunity.
i look through my old Lj entries and just cringe like holy crap i was a super angsty kid LMAO
and omggg forum signatures. i have sigs turned off for like... a solid year now but i kinda miss how creative people were with their signatures as long as they werent obnoxious
i actually genuinely miss forum families!! as silly as they may seem at first, they provided a sense of closeness (if that makes sense) and community amongst friends. nowadays it seems like even forum pairing is dying off which is kind of a shame
Sigs are dead, long live flairs!
Wish we could have a small string of text in our flair tho OH WAIT WE CAN IT's USERTITLES, neat
I remember the rise of facebook. It was so small and everybody wrote very private messages on each other's "walls" (there was no wall back then) and it's weird to look back on that mood now.
