Limewire and their main chat room

“You’ve got mail”

MySpace and its personalization you could do based on the music you loved that week and the ranking of friends who hadn’t pissed you off

MSN messenger’s “So-and-so is online” door opening notification sound when it was someone I looked forward to talking to everyday

TalkCity days in the 20’s room with @ZombiesAteMyArm and all the other losers who ignored life, including me

But I mainly miss the patience the old internet taught me. Nothing was quick or solid, especially the connection when someone kicked you off by picking up the home phone.

I actually miss news websites that were primarily text. They had a lot more information per pixel than pages full of photos. And watching videos nowadays requires sitting through ads.

When the internet was new, I figured it was a medium that was different from television. But it has become more tv-like.

AOL and Yahoo chat I guess....had some pretty fun times on those platforms. Memories of staying up super late with music playing and people just chatting the hours away. Friends and total strangers all at once.

I miss the zero filter stage when corporations didn't control what can and can't be said online.

AOL messenger and the ability to put music on your MySpace page.

I also chatted a lot on OptiChat. That was a cool place.

I am 26 (birthday few days ago). What do you expect me to miss?

Putting into a browser the following url

nntp://user123:[email protected]:119/alt.comp.freeware

And getting a actual post listing.

Today's browsers don't even recognize the "nntp" protocol.

Dial up BBSs. They didn't even technically use the internet as we know it now. Some nerdy person would have a dedicated computer with software such as message boards, text-based games, etc. They would advertise the phone number to dial to access the board, or multiple phone numbers if they were rich. These were hobbyists who wanted to provide an environment for like-minded people to chat, and they were always local people.

I would sit there in the evenings and dial up one after another, and go into the chat boards and play games like L.O.R.D. (Legend of the Red Dragon), and that's how I spent my evenings. Around 10:00 or 11:00, I would log off the last one and get on the internet proper, so I wasn't waking anybody up with dial-up noises. That way they didn't know how late I was up.

Hostinfo & whois queries used to be straightforward; now they're meaningless. And traceroute has gotten increasingly difficult to interpret.

gopher and menu driven interfaces…
I still grieve the death of Netscape.

Playing runescape with my cousins

The cute custom free e-cards

MySpace, the owner of the site actually friended me….🤣

AOL was cool plus no one really knew that much about how the internet worked so they seemed understanding and friendly!

MSN messenger, Hyves, IRC, ICQ messenger, the lack of popups for cookie consent, newsletters, paywalls, advertisements, etc.

Netscape?

No ads on youtube

Just my own excitement because it was something new to me.

The Experience Project.

MSN groups. I used to interact on those in the early 2000s.

Oh… definitely screaming at my computer because of dial up!!

Experience Project...

When ad blockers usually worked all the time and were undetectable by websites who could not demand I shut it off or else pay.

Dialup connecting sound.

2 Girls 1 Cup (JK)!

Nothing much.

When things were mostly forums and websites were made by individuals, not companies. When all sites were not owned by like 5 companies.

Yahoo, MSN messenger.

Yahoo answers
Windows Live Messenger
Experience project
Old YouTube with long cool content and no ads.
Galeria Marqueze
Activity in Hi5 (now is a dead site)
Vampire freaks (social network)
Kiwibox
FaceBox
The Pirate Bay
Megaupload

neopets 💓

MUDD

The optimistic 'library of everything, for everyone'.

Sound of the dial up modem:

[media=https://youtu.be/QDS4B0mM-ew]

Yahoo and MSN messenger.
There were lawsuits because pedophiles.
So because of them noone is allowed to have these nice things.

Game servers being run by the community and not by the publishers who can simply turn them off after the game lost ~80% of the playerbase. The 20% still playing paid too.

Ask Jeeves

Flash game websites like Miniclip, Coolmath, Nitrome and so on

Virtual Places/Excite Chat

Is Rotten.com still around?

When it was all sharing, and there weren't any paywalls.

Limewire
Msn
Aol
Yahoo Pool
Old style forums

NO AI!!!

The lack of filthy censorship.

MSN Messenger. Omegle.

John Olinger

Rotten.com

ICQ

Club penguin

Yahoo answers