Garfield Minus Garfield

Remember when the internet was all goofy shit like this instead of algorithmically optimized social media angst?

All the big social media platforms were around when this started. The dominance wasn't in full swing yet but it only took a few years for vbulletin and everything else to dwindle.

I miss the old internet. I'm pretty sure anyone old enough to have experienced it misses it.

there was still angst then, it just was more targeted in single directions, not like now where the angst is aimlessly directed at society, sponsored by squarespace

And the people who were there before the old Internet missed that too. Something something eternal September.

Sounds like a cologne.

Angst, by Squarespace

The internet was never all goofy shit like this. The launch date of G-G is "February 13, 2008", and we already had the creepy Facebook, deplorable shit like jailbait was in full swing, gore was not just popular, it was old news. Internet advertising was already very toxic for many years, and its surveillance capabilities were also ever-increasing. Not to mention, the Eternal September lasted for 15 years now.

My point is, it changed, yes, but "The Internet" was always shit, and you can also always find good fun, as always. You can turn off the doom, and enjoy a good never-ending scroll of a myriad of fantastic hobbies and people sharing their human experience. It takes effort, just like it did back then.

> It takes effort, just like it did back then.

I think this is a sentiment missing from lots of the rose glasses back watching. It took effort to find all these fun things, it still takes effort to find fun things. The only difference is that now the effort floor is in the icy pits of hell and its so easy to slide all the way down there. Things were different but you still had to work for it. Sites were smaller and there were less people, those things still exist, probably more so, there's just an ocean now. We have to learn how to swim maybe but we can still cross.

It still is; it's just different

I was there. Nope.

Waiting ages for basic serif pages to load over your 56k (or 128k connection if you were rich and had ISDN)? Nope.

Downloading tracks from KaZaa/WinMX/Limewire/Napster for a million hours only for them to be some warped shit that the studios planted? Nope.

Getting malware just for existing? Early software firewalls that burned CPU cycles/crashed your PC? That were the only option because hardware firewalls were stupid expensive and not at all practical for residential use? Nope.

Norton Antivirus? ABSOLUTELY NOPE.

Blue screens when you looked at IE or Navigator the wrong way? Nope.

Flash? Lol, nope.

WAP? The 2004 kind? Lol, hell nope.

"This page is best viewed on Internet Explorer", i.e. IE4/5/6 or it's basically unusable? Nope.

Having to actually go seven or eight o's into the Gooooooooooooooooooooooogle footer to find what you were looking for? Def nope.

Almost everything about using the Internet is better today IMO. Faster, prettier, more secure and more cross-platform.

You have to work hard to get hit with a virus these days, especially on iOS/macOS or Linux, though it's much harder on Android these days too. Also, I loved wasting my life on /., but Reddit is so much better, even after the API-pocalyse.

I definitely miss open messaging platforms though. AIM for life.

The gore sites are a prevailing memory from early days. (I was first online in the mid-90s.)

Rotten rings a bell there.

The old internet had something today's internet lacks: a justified belief that the future would be better. Things were new and exciting, and you saw opportunities and rapid improvements everywhere. Today it's just governments and megacorporations, and bureaucracy upon endless bureaucracy.

www.mnftiu.cc legendary

Flash brought a lot of good stuff...

I was there too.

Napster was good because it was new. And the music was yours when you got it.

Never used NAV. Never cared to. Linux didn't need it.

Hated Flash too, and never used it. Internet was still great without it.

WAP was new, too. But Ethernet existed, and we wired our house.

Used Firefox/Netscape Navigator. Avoided IE pages like the plague.

I do malware research. You're grossly underestimating how common malware is today. Ever hear of ransomware?

Not everything on the Internet is better today. Some things are, but many are not.

And don't even get me started on the cesspool that Reddit is.

we had facebook, but things weren't centralized to only 5 websites yet. You are right though, there's a lot about the old internet that was better, but there was also stuff that was worse. It was more untamed perhaps. I certainly don't miss rotten.com or goatse or the absolute cesspit reddit was at the time (as you mention). We tend to forget about this and just think about the good, like individual weird blogs hosted on their own quirky websites actually being able to find an audience (which still exist to some extent but not to the same degree at all). Still, I think "the internet was always shit" is too cynical of a take. Some parts of the internet were always shit. Some of it changed for the better, some for the worse.

God I miss ye olde FYAD

Garfield Minus Garfield is an iteration of a trend on SA and FYAD of editing Garfield comics by re-ordering panels, removing panels, removing characters/dialogue/etc, and shuffling panels from other Garfield strips to make humorous and/or unsettling mashups.

That is to say the trend predates the 2008 launch of the site.

Hmm, when I think “old Internet” I don’t think Napster, IE, WAP… I think usenet, gopher, telnet MUDs, IRC netsplits and FTP warez.

Old internet was something different socially for subcultures, especially DIY subcultures and communities.

You just don't connect with people the same way on giant message boards or platforms like Reddit where you're one user out of a billion.

It was just... Smaller and personal, I guess?

It feels like everything today is optimized for monetization, ads, tracking, etc.

I guess I could summarize it as saying the internet went mainstream and changed its audience and charm.

If you had to encapsulate the vibe, it would be "people just post shit to see if other people are as weird as they are."

It was a whole era, folks. And I don't mean "does anyone else" Reddit crap that is absurdly naive. This was way more before and way more naive than that. You didn't have any expectation that you were normal (even if you were weird). You just did it to gauge how fucking weird you were.

> Waiting ages for basic serif pages to load over your 56k (or 128k connection if you were rich and had ISDN)? Nope.

> Downloading tracks from KaZaa/WinMX/Limewire/Napster for a million hours only for them to be some warped shit that the studios planted? Nope.

I was there too, and realized that these sort of reductions in speed made one far more mindful of what one was doing

> Almost everything about using the Internet is better today IMO. Faster, prettier, more secure and more cross-platform

This too is particularly debatable. Applications are thin wrappers around web browsers, there are constant annoyances (want to receive notifications for this webpage? Not now? We’ll ask you later.) I bet if I pulled someone from 2005 they’d look at a lot of things on a current website and see malware. And is it really more cross platform when we’ve achieved that by having less platforms?

>Remember when the internet was all goofy shit like this instead of algorithmically optimized social media angst?

I first accessed the internet in 1998 through school. I still like it more how it was in those days. Most people didn't care about the Internet so the people lurking the Internet had a particular interest in it or were technically inclined.

Once some guys discovered they can make tons of money through the Internet, those good times are over.

It's like you travel to a beautiful place which is not popular. Once it starts becoming a major tourist attraction, it will be ruined for good in 20 years.

All of that was terrible. It was still better than tiktoks and facebooks.

smash like and subscribe, code blitz50 for 0.5% off sea of legends

Indeed.

We had "Altavista" and for a very short time it was OK, but then quickly decended into a ad-ridden "portal" This was 1997 or so.

The web was full of popups, and then popunders. It was not uncommon to close your browser in the computer-room, then have to close 20 popups that kept coming back. Some of which showing straight out porn. At least scams like viagra, "buy gold online" or "download more memory" malware.

Before Google, it was merely undoable to find anything useful between all the banners, gifs, "only readable in netscape" search-engines.

Before Mozilla/Firefox, popups made it almost impossible to browse the web for longer than half an hour before the browser crashed or the computer locked up.

Chat was insecure, scammers, groomers, malware injection, mitm was everywhere. There was no privacy.

Forums, BBSes and NNTP were full of "trolls" before this term was even known. Flamewars, flamebait, and again, scammers, groomers and malware everywhere.

I do have fond memories of this time. But also know these memories are distorted. It was a dark forest already.

The main difference, I believe, was that the majority of internet users back then were smart - mostly western - educated or young people. I.e. the "tech literate" folks. Those who know how to deal with malware, scams, groomers, privacy, hackers. Those who know how to navigate around popup-bombs, redirect-loops, illegal-content and criminals. But the bad stuff was there from the early days. Today, the "bad stuff" has shifted, from criminals into monopolized big-tech tapping our attention and data, but it has always been there, this dark side.

What you described in your first paragraph is still the old internet and it was way better than the post-truth/bot/AI hellscape of today. I’ll take “creepy” stuff over a complete separation from reality any day.

And also, very different things exist. So yes, it's hard to find the "same" things or "similar" things, but if one adapts a bit to more up to date trends, the horizon broadens a lot. For example, there is much less life on traditional forums now, but much more life on YouTube.

>the absolute cesspit reddit was at the time (as you mention)

You prefer the corporate, censored, ad-ridden site that reddit is now? That is bizarre.

The internet of old was better, in my opinion. It took work to be there; now it takes work to not be there.

I'm not sure anything on your list is even about "the internet", as opposed to other tech around it. Do you know what people mean when they say "the internet?".

Ok, maybe a more accurate statement would be that the ratio of goofy shit to angst-generating bullshit was much higher in 2008. Maybe it was 70/30 in favor of goofy shit and now it's 1/99 in favor of bullshit. We had Facebook and Twitter back then, but neither had been weaponized against us yet. Both had a very different flavor than they have today.

Absolutely. I remember being about 14 or 15 years old, reading old .txt files about, like- how to build blue boxes and experiment with the phone system, C programming tutorials for MUDs that had peaked in the late 90s, IRC archives (even though IRC was still around, I had no way of finding my way to good channels), and getting this distinct sense that I had just missed something really cool, and was stuck with an Internet that had already passed its prime.

in the case of reddit I do. We don't need to return to the quasi-CP and complaining about SJWs era. I'll take a censored ad-ridden site with a somewhat less toxic userbase, though of course as always it would be best to have the best of both worlds. Old reddit was just way too unwilling to take out the trash and instead let it fester.