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What was using the internet in the early 2000s like? (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What kind of websites did people visit? Were people friendly?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Newgrounds (still exists!)

Homestarrunner (still exists!)

Neopets (also somehow still exists!)

Websites for advertising movies was a thrilling new phenomenon.

Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people's personal sites (before the term blog even came around), discussing a niche topic.

At the same time, a whole lot of sites were still disseminated by word of mouth, person to person, or maybe via email. Running a TV ad for a website was basically a gigantic gamble for early sites... only those with huge amounts of money could even attempt it and it often just outright caused the whole enterprise to fail if you had moderate or little funding.

We did not have touch screen mobile devices with full keyboards, we had SMS T9 texting, which (like pagers before them) led to shorthand (lol is probably the best example) and a good deal of early internet lingo.

There was no ability to basically constantly post some kind if personal update to your personal site or eventually MySpace as is now the norm with modern tech and social media, so people that post usually put a good deal more thought into it.

Forums. The old net used to be far, far more based on communities in forums. Far less emphasis on basically mundane, every day posts about your life and opinions, and more centered around actual discussion of topics or issues.

Oh right of course: GameFaqs.

Back when you could only use the internet if no one else was using a phone in the house, waay before 8 hour in depth video guides explained to you how to do everything in a game...

We had to print out guides with chapter headings written in ASCII art, and it was quite common to be seen as giving up or cheating if you needed a guide to complete a mission or unlock some secret.

Oh and if you think lag is a problem nowadays in online games, try playing an FPS where most people have a ping around or over 200, constantly rubber banding all over the place, yourself included.

Or getting desynced in Starcraft for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, basically every game.