Garfield Minus Garfield

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.