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r/InternetIsBeautifulu/Atulin (4744)

Comments (321)

I really miss Web 1.0 .

Developing my first eCommerce applications. "Needs to run both on 640x480 and 800x600. Loading time must be below 8 seconds per page on a 28k8 modem."...those were the days.

Indeed, now web devs don't give 2 shits about good performance across multiple devices

We do. But when your client 'figures out' they absolutely have to have a new subdomain with 20 new screens that aren't in the product requirements and it's a month before the contract's up, and you're not even finished with the work from the original contract, you just have to get shit to work. If the client wants it to perform well across devices, they can renew the contract.

Can you install four different web tracking and analytics tools too please.

Work in digital consulting. Can confirm.

We call it a “post launch support” contract.

[deleted]

Only if you're independently wealthy.

It's not when you say "no". It's when you bill them for the extra work

Making a web page performant across devices is vastly more complicated than it used to be. What is being asked for is more complex, and the range of devices is massive and ever-growing. You have desktops with screens ranging from old CRT sizes to 4k where you expect mouse and keyboard use, and then mobile screens ranging from a 4inch phone to a 9inch tablet where you expect touchscreen use. Add in the dozens of browsers, window resizing/zoom, custom fonts, etc. that you didn't have to deal with 20 years ago. It becomes an exercise in diminishing returns when you can deliver a product that's "good enough" on every device, or get it to near perfect for more devices for 10x the time. Developers are perfectly willing to spend this time, but clients aren't willing to pay for it, so it doesn't happen very often.

Yes, there are bad and lazy devs; but by and large the problem is the ever-increasing complexity of the technology which makes a perfect solution for everyone unfeasible.

We do, we just never have enough bloody time to build shit properly.

Company I work for did a tie in with a large retailer so the customer could do what my employer sells and get discounts at the retailer. Hugely complicated and they gave use a few months. Year later it's still a mess. No matter, onto the next thing. Lather rinse repeat.

Also, 20 years ago, software development was done the same way traditional product development was done - you put together some requirements, and build the product out until it was done, and then you put it out. The industry nowadays is built on continuous delivery - you get finished with your ticket, push it out to QA (if you're lucky enough to have an actual QA team) for testing, and then you move on to something else once that gets the thumbs-up. It allows you to rapidly prototype small modular pieces, but it makes it much harder to catch problems that come up with interoperability because everyone's so zoomed in to these that they don't catch issues with the bigger picture.

Not necessarily. In the late 90s people learned that there was good money to be had in web development, and they all came rushing forward - people with zero technical backgrounds and no respect for the benefits of engineering process.

It was the wild west.

The amount of wasted effort I saw, the number of shipped defects - hell, even the ability to repeat a build... sheesh.

I left web development almost 20 years ago, partially because it was so sloppy. I hope it has matured since then.

Everyone on Medium is an expert and never tests their code.

Ah thank god, another article on when to use map instead of forEach.

Lol...wtf...I'm a web dev, and I 100% do more work for multiple devices than people did back in the day. I need my code to work on 4k retina screens, down to a fucking 320px wide screen that fits in your pocket, and literally every size and ratio inbetween...

Not to mention the myriad of browsers and their shitty out of date standards. Looking real hard at you Safari. At least everyone knows IE is a piece of shit, and the people on it clearly have zero quality standards in their browsing experience. Safari ain't much better, but people can't comprehend Apple being years behind in the tech sphere. Safari is fucking dog shit, but it's primarily used by people that expect a first class experience at the same time.

What a dumb fucking comment.

/Rant

So glad IE has an official end of life date a year from now. Can finally stop supporting it and wasting our time for the near-nobody who uses it. (Yay government mandates until then)

28.8 kbps x 8 seconds is like 2 megabytes.

You gotta cut that code bloat, my dude

That's 28 kiloBITs per second. Including overhead that's less than 28 kiloBYTEs in 8 seconds.

It was pure HTML produced by a Java backend. No Javascript, no CSS, just HTML and some tiny GIFs that hopefully were already in the browser cache.

Even if it were 29 kilobytes and not an eighth of that, 8x30 is 240, not 2000

Very possible.

But I remember a few conversations involving 600x400 animated gif logos and how it would look really pretty after the 4-minute load time that nobody would wait for.

1 megabyte = 8,000 kilobits

28.8k modem is 28.8 kilobits per second

in 8 seconds that’s 230.4 kilobits which is 28.8 kilobytes or 0.0288 megabytes

yeah, same... feels like I keep hoping to find that corner of the internet again, but it's gone. not even sure why I'm still here.

Check out most sites dedicated to amateur radio.

https://admin.qsl.net/index.php

http://prop.hfradio.org/

https://ksarrl.org/deeplink/

it's the sense of community, not the style I miss. thank you, though.

Ironically the rise of social media was the downfall of the internet community.

very true. it was easy to exploit by corporations. we went from a club of a few thousand to a landscape of millions. it will never be the same.

I jsed to wonder why popularity killed the fun in things until someone pointed out that when things are smaller people do them because they want to do the thing and are on the same page, but when they get popular a lot of the people do it because everyone else is and they don't really care or even resent the popularity. This leads to a mix of indifference and people who are just there to ruin it for everyone else because they don't care about the thing.

Then you get companies that just want to profit off it before the popularity dies off.

It's a sad feeling when a hobby you love blows up and suddenly people who are in it for the look and the attention join. And then they start seeing you as the clueless outsider.

the sad reality of corporate america.

Hey now! When it comes to profit motive America’s not the ONLY country. Relatively speaking, we’re a new kid on the block! Plenty of countries find new and pernicious ways to wrest profit from sincerity.

Technically, it's what created America in the first place right?

Ah yes, because the internet only exists in America

ignorant comment. let me help educate you!

of all the countries in the world, the US ranks #3 for total number of internet users, outplaced only by China -- whose population is about 1.4 billion in comparison to america's 330 million. in comparison, we (USA) have 313mil recorded internet users (or, almost 90% of our population), while China has around 850mil recorded internet users (or, about 60% of their population) -- and India -- a country with a population of 1.3 billion to our 330 million, and only about 43% of its population is on the internet.

now that we agree that the USA has VASTLY more of an internet populous than even countries with over 5x our population, let's break down why my comment specifically cited american corporations and not international ones.

in a conversation about how social media and the monetization of free data was the downfall of the freeform web 1.0, we're talking about facebook (a US company), google, (a US company), twitter (a US company), youtube (a US company), and the US bill that enabled these countries to have a monopoly on the internet market, even regardless of the internet's populous, which was the US Patriot Act.

so, no, not "because the internet only exists in America", but rather because the internet is most pervasive in America, and the companies who actively monetized our (global) data with the help of its government, are all US-based. :) so yes, corporate America was the correct entity to blame here.

hope that was informative! have a nice day!

We've even got a name for this phenomenon: Eternal September

There are still bbs’s out there if you look around.

the internet has changed. it's not the same. thank you, though. if it brings that back for you, then i'm glad. :)

Undoubtedly, I started out with a 600 baud acoustic coupler, my first browser was mosaic and and I used gopher way more than the web. I think when there was a higher bar of entry it really selected out the people that were around on the net. Not that there weren’t assholes back then but it took a fair bit of intelligence and technical know how to get online and I think it weeded out at least some of the idiots. And it’s not that I don’t think that the availability of the internet to the general public is a bad thing but it brought the rest of the world into my world and a lot of the reason I spent time in my world was I didn’t want to have to interact with the rest of the world all the time.

so true... if you haven't already, I think you'd love to read Edward Snowden's book Public Record. he goes into great detail from an IT perspective on how web 1.0 changed and why. it was a very nostalgic read that agrees with a lot of the points in your comment.

September hasn't ended since 1993

Lord yes. I used to get into so much trouble. And people look at me REALLY funny when I drag out my old acoustic coupler modem ( currently packed up for the move).

we went from a club of a few thousand to a landscape of millions. it will never be the same.

Eternal September

I thought it was AOL in 1993...

I'd say the 2000s were a good period of the internet, I think it was around 2011 when it started getting really shit.

For me, 85-91 were the prehistory years, 91-93 was the swell, 93-95 was the tectonic shift, 95-01 the Golden Years, 01-06 the decline, and in 2007, it was all over.

I miss Galaxy Chat. I miss creating GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire websites with my friends. I miss being able to submit my website to ten different web crawlers and actually ranking highly if I had good content. I miss Hotmail. I miss the feeling that I was in control and that I was communicating with other people.

Now, I just feel like I'm being guided by algorithms to interact with bots. Nothing is human anymore.

I was all about my geocities page in 1998, teaching myself HTML to make it more dynamic. I would proudly send my link out and watch my view counter to see if anyone actually looked at it. It felt like a brave new world.

You all are taking me down memory lane!

Remember getting “award” banners to display on your angelfire/tripod site? I had a section dedicated to all the awards other sites gave me. So much win.

Yes I definitely do!!

I also loved webrings- little connections of sites working together to share their audience. I ran a really popular MAD Magazine fansite from like 1994 to 2002 and we all helped each other develop and share new content and ideas.

We were independent but it felt collaborative instead of competitive. We weren't fighting for ad dollars or clicks, it was just passion

+++GREETINGS, FELLOW HUMAN+++

A/S/L?

+++LOGIC CORRRRRRRUPTRD BLEEEEH+++

I wonder if anything like that exists still?

It would be more surprising if it didn't tbh

Edit:

Neocities is a thing

There are some small communities here and there. But sadly it's not the same, the mentality of people has changed.

Ah, yea that's definitely something that's gonna happen.

I mean, I'm sure something like geocities could exist still however it would definitely take time to get popular. The person making it would also have to take into account the way the internet and humanity as a whole changed as well though. I'd do it myself because experience is always good. Sadly i do not have the funds or even a small amount of experience that would be needed to at least get started.

Another problem is that nowadays there are so many alternatives that are more popular. People lean more towards reddit, facebook groups, discord servers, live streaming sites, dating apps, etc. There will definitely be people who are looking for the same thing as us, but the number is much smaller than before.

That is very true. I assume at this point it would require having enough money to burn on a project like that. Could it work? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of money.

You forgot MSN messenger

I was an ICQ man, myself. But I did dabble in MSN, Yahoo, and AIM. I think it was mandatory to have every fucking chat app back then

Now it’s a fight for upvotes and thumbs up, subscribers and it can all be manipulated by bots.

I know what you mean and the closest I came to it was VR chat with a VR headset. Hopping through different worlds, finding new people to talk or just new things to see and never knowing what to expect kinda feels like surfing the web did some time ago. Also it's not as big as the whole internet as not as much people own a VR headset (yet), so you feel more "special" or part of a community like back then. It's not the same, but the closest I got on a emotional level.

that sounds really nice and exactly what I mean. sadly I don't have the resources for a VR headset or I'd try it out. omegle and chatroulette are sort of similar to a degree, just getting connected to a random person. unfortunately there are a lot of penises and bots.

You actually don't need a vr headset to go on vrchat. It's better if you want to add body movements to your character, but you can hop around without a vr set too.

I am not an expert though, because when I tried it I didn't enter worlds with other people bc I thought they were big, but I could only find max room of 16, which is more attention than I'd have wanted to.

If anyone can point out how to see bigger rooms, I'll be happy to give a try.

Addendum: it still hits a very different spot from the old days. I personally liked how it was almost exclusively text based, vrchat from what I saw is voice chat only.

Agreed - my forums and the friends I met on there was my life. In person and on the internet.

it was a different world, right? it was awesome.

Even stuff like gaming was all individual server based. You’d launch your game and look through servers for that game and try different servers until you found a community you liked. When steam didn’t exist and you’d have to join various forums/IRC channels to connect with people. You lose something by streamlining every step of social interaction.

Now it’s just press play and matchmaking throws you in a game with a bunch of strangers you’ll likely never come across again (I know dedicated servers and server browsers still exist, but the culture has shifted). It’s kind of all the same mindset of today’s corporate internet.

Not to hijack your point, but I think that Ham radio itself, having had a recent uptick in interest, is sort of reinterpreting that lost sense of community, at least the ones who aren't bunker bearing artillery nuts. The range is rather narrow (and there's a lot of Qanon crap right now, thanks Facebook) but I think as more people leave the internet they'll be looking for more localized niches that acknowledge their humanity.

Same. Sites like Reddit and Twitter are so utterly impersonal by comparison.

I actually went through a thread on ham radio the other day. For another perspective here's the argument against getting involved in it. Basically that the equipment is expensive and there's mostly just crazy old people:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/nga1vp/whats_a_hobby_thats_dying_in_popularity/gysbk59/

Yep!

I've only just got into it in the last 6 months. I'm 35 and it's all older men. Sometimes there are 'nets' running and all they are talking about is their ailments and how crap their day has been.

I like the long distance 'DX' Comms and satellite imagery stuff.

Nah, there's some women in here. It's just that they're physically indistinguishable from the men.

It's the beards.

We're like dwarves. ..And my AX.25!

I'm also 35, and got my license a little over 20 years ago. It's always been old guys, and back then there were a lot of WW2 vets that got into radio in the service, and kept it up as a hobby when they got back. I never did much actual radio stuff, then or now, but I'll always remember the stories and hanging out on Saturday mornings, letting my coffee go cold while they talked.

I didn't like coffee back then, but I was certainly not going to be left out or be the only one without a mug in front of them.

The sites are basically abandonware. Most hams are well-meaning and want to help, so many of the current older crowd took advantage of the new medium back when they were our age and created these pages, which were promptly forgotten once their brain dump was put out there. Free hosting sites such as Geocities and their ISP just keep the site alive long after its forgotten.

For a lot of it, it's still good information. The physics haven't changed for the most part - just the underlying tech. If the hams that made the page are still aware of them, they probably feel the same and feel no need to update the page. After all, the skill of hand-coding of the straight HTML they used has been long since forgotten as life has moved on. If it's not broke, don't fix it and all. Hams usually like to tinker, but once something is working, they usually leave it be.

This is pretty frustrating with regard to software, since some of it is very niche and nobody else has made a replacement. Satellite tracking and radio control programs are especially difficult to get working with their Windows 3.1 era DDE app communications. Sometimes the authors pass away and the software is permanently abandoned. This is before open source software became a 'thing', so it's just gone forever, stored on a hard drive in a Pentium 90 sold in an estate sale or crushed in a recycling plant. Luckily, a new crowd has taken to writing open-source and modern apps, so hopefully this problem won't be as severe in the future as other people can pick up the torch.

It's also worth noting that ham radio is a somewhat cyclical hobby. Many get really into it before taking a break for a year or 10. Sometimes that coincides with the sunspot cycle. In my case, I have a lot of hobbies and I just park the radio shit for a while as I do other things that life requires or I enjoy. Occasionally I get back on and listen for a bit, and maybe even have a conversation or two. But as pointed out, the crowd skews older and male, so you're going to find a lot of old guy conversations.

Personally, I don't like talking to people on the radio very much. I just like to experiment and am fascinated by the 'magic' of radio. There are a lot of facets to the hobby, and you can get a lot of enjoyment out of it without talking (verbally or otherwise) to another human at all.

Cool. I'm a GenX guy so my nostalgia technology was the BBS's in the late eighties/early nineties. There's still telnet BBS's around, just not over the phone lines, so I'd probably be more apt to explore those.

I didn't know telnet BBSs were still a thing. A lot of dialup BBSs went that route once membership fell off and many of them charged monthly fees. Telnet BBSs are a lot cheaper to run than a dialup and make the system available to a wider user base, so I saw the appeal. Unfortunately, the era passed and the web took over at that point, so the writing was on the wall. More people had access to IRC and AIM/ICQ, so a subscription walled garden just wasn't as appealing anymore.

It's still a hobbyist thing but still going on - https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

Hah. Amazing, but not surprising. There are ham packet radio BBSs out there, too - although not many. Some of the old Kantronics TNCs had a built-in rudimentary BBS with mailboxes and such. It would be somewhat trivial to craft such a system these days and have it run on a Raspberry Pi. I'm sure it's been done before.

I'm Gen-X, and my time with dial-up BBS was 79-85. There were message boards with conversations that would go on for months. I remember trading numbers for all kinds of places.

In my freshman year of high school, 82-83, there was an Apple ][ in the library. I had one of my own, so when I was at school I would continue my obsession. That library computer had a modem, and I used it all the time. Anyway, I remember the day I successfully dialed into some UNIX box at White Sands Missile Range. I didn't do anything but look around at directories.

That all ended in 85 because I found the internet.

I've been online for 42 years. Jeez, I'm old.

Heh, I started high school the same year. My library also had an Apple, and one day I went in the library with a floppy to try out a game. The librarian didn't want any game-playing and threw me off the computer. I retaliated by secretly moving books around on the shelves to mess up her organization system, until she caught me and sent me to the principal's office. The crazy thing is today I work as a public librarian!

I mainly spent my time programming in assembly and Applesoft BASIC. But sometimes I would break out a Brøderbund game like Star Blazer, Serpentine, or Choplifter. The librarian at my high school didn't care as long as the volume was kept low.

I took a high school class in Apple BASIC. I remember the big project was coding a random dice roll. I still have my floppy disk from the class, for all I know it might still work, as many of my Commodore 64 disks still work.

The skill of hand-coding the straight HTML they used has long been forgotten.

:facepalm: Any web developer can hand code HTML just like they did in 1995.

By forgotten, I mean forgotten by the person who put up the Geocities page in 1997 and just forgot all about it. I mean, of course HTML is still out there.

Looking for a new hobby. What is the appeal of ham radio? Is it spendy to get started?

If you want to get on HF and communicate round the world be prepared to drop a fair few pennies!

You can get on VHF/UHF with a small handheld for a lot cheaper.

The appeal of HAM to me as a Non-HAM friend of a HAM operator looking in;

You pretty much get to develop and sit behind this cool battle station scanning through frequencies and looking for interesting people to talk to. My friend’s setup had a lot of data visualization elements like oscilloscopes and such and idk why but this appeals to me. I would later go on to navigate warships and my chart table had the same appeal with the multiple GPS’s, paper chart, tools like the compass and parallel motion protractor, and radar screens, map projections, etc. Making music I have a similar setup with oscilloscopes, phase visualizes, and spectroscopes.

Strictly speaking they have little input into decision making but I just like being able so see so deeply and clearly what I am manipulating and hearing and it helps me think different ways sometimes. At some basic level I guess I just love the beauty of monitoring data, modulating inputs and receiving outputs; and I think the RTLDSR (sp.) community gets some similar stuff out of their hobby. Also modular synthesis and all its cousins.

Also I’m a huge fan of that website that lets you monitor tide, air currents, and temperature around the globe as well as air quality and some other random variables.

If any of this makes sense HAM might be for you. Also it’s cool to talk to people all over the place but in 2021 I think that’s less the pitch since that’s easy and more it’s about the difference of comprehension, control, customization, and the feeling of generating it and maintaining and operating this. Idk if I’m explaining well at all.

websdr.org is a really good one that basically acts as an indexer for multiple varied-range receivers across the planet.

And https://motherfuckingwebsite.com

I'm a teenager and wasn't old enough to go on sites like Livejournal in their heyday, but occasionally I chance upon an old forum and wish I could've participated back then-- no modern site has been able to replicate the sheer amount of creativity and the sense of community that existed in those spaces. Reddit works fine for what it is, but it's a lot more transient, in the sense that there are millions of people participating, commenting here, posting there. Even in smaller subs it's hard to make connections for some reason.

yeah, you're exactly right. this thread sent me on a journey back to my livejournal actually... the most recent post on a community I loved was by me, 2 years ago, wishing everyone well since it was dead. sort of like visiting a cemetery.

though for what it's worth, people from that heyday have reached out to me since and there's really no revisiting that era, even for people who were in it. a couple of us have gotten together, but the ideals and expectations back then were so different from where they're at now. a lot of us (i'm 30 for reference) feel lost in this new internet landscape. the conversations are all basically the same - "man I really miss it... good luck out there."

it's a sad reality that society shifts and changes, and what is societally lost can never be returned to.

Same, but with DeadJournal and Xanga. It's sad that we can never truly go back - I would love to just chat one more time with my guild buddies on Neopets or InvisionFree forums. I still visit them to see if they are still there, although I know they're just cemeteries now, relics of a time when going online was such a different experience.

https://wiby.me/

Search something there and enjoy

this is really freakin' cool.

Came across alot of old Angelfire sites last updated in 2002. Crazy timecapsules.

Maddox’s site is still fucking up and I love him for that.

You'd be amiss not to check out https://DemonContainers.com/

They even finally updated the spacejam website due to the new movie :(

It’s here with web3 and Ethereum. The forums and IRC have migrated to discord but the spirit is all the same

It’s basically us trying to claim our youth again. It’s gone, all we have are our memories. Niche but active forums, away messages, being excited about the latest Winamp update. Ahhh.

I grew up in the early days, back when you got bullied for having an email address and using the internet.

So much more fun back then. More of a small community, bad actors were relatively few and far between.

Then, like all things, when it became accessible to everyone, it became the trash heap we all know and love.

I always wonder about memories like this. Was the internet really more pristine back then, or were we?

“Influencers” weren’t a thing.

Also, it was a smaller and more like-minded community.

Sign my guestbook

Watching your page counter go up by one visit.

Check out my Geocities page, there's lots of Under Construction gifs, but I translated the Gundam Wing opening song lyrics into English, it's awesome.

Hand coding HTML! A three K file back then communicates the same information as 100k file today.

The best Internet 1.0 event for me was purchasing $5k in Olympics tickets because in late 95 no one bought shit on the Internet.

Second was being ranked a top site in a specific area of study by several prestigious universities.

Now I'm not a professional web dev but I do have fair bit of webdesign education. Unless you're using something like bootstrap (which is just prewritten css basically) or worse, some WYSIWYG, you're going to write HTML.

HTML isn't really what makes websites bloated or slow to load. It's external API calls (mostly) for analytics, higher quality media content and maybe tiny bit JavaScript.

Usually you'd go with a frontend framework like react, Vue or angular and rarely write "pure" html.

Vue is like the worst of all together.

It's prewritten CSS combined with API calls rendered on the client side.

I miss some of the weirdness and the discussions with people, but not the slowness, sketchiness, and general lack of information. I'm glad Slack has come back as a sort of chat room system and people can still make creative websites with wordpress these days, at least.

Discord as well

Also, people still use IRC 😅

Also, people still use IRC 😅

I feel attacked.

yeah, I remember when this button style was created by a blog called Antipixel and spread really fast. I made a number of buttons in this style back then.

Phpbb forums and blogs were more web 2.0, as it was defined by the interactive/collaborative nature of these ecosystems. It was the start of almost anyone being able to add content to the internet

I met my best friend and love of my life on a Phpbb...in 2016!

Web 2.0 was even better but 3.0 is trash. Internet used to be the wild wild west place with tons of different communities and "corners". Now it's a corporate hellscape made up of about 4-5 different sites tops. The entire culture is different now. People don't separate the internet with real life anymore and it's caused so many different subtle changes. Plus the fact people used to make stuff and put it on the internet for fun. They did it for the lulz. Never used to be all about monetary gain and politics. Was way more fun.

There are lots of smaller sites and platforms and programs like that. You're just older and not discovering the others.

As soon as those small platforms get any form of traction, they get bought out, and that happens anywhere in the world.

A high profile recent example of this would be musical.ly which got gobbled up and replaced by TikTok

there really aren't in the same way though, the internet is colossally different and it's not just nostalgia. The internet is just an extension of real life now, not a place to discover niche new experiences.

Disagree, I still run some niche sites. The issue is that what we all know of as social media is more convenient then trying to find some niche site and sign up for it.

You have to trust that this niche site isn't going to sell your email or start spamming it.

People are comfortable with cooperate spaces that all their real life friends use. Sadly social media has won because of the stickiness of friends and family. But there are still niche sites. Just spend more than 2 minutes looking for them.

Even if they exist they're so insanely fringe and outside of the normal ways that people understand using the Internet, at this point.

That you feel that way demonstrates you are personally becoming more conservative in your social life.

Erm, wut?

You're old now. Old dogs don't learn new tricks.

I'm not old tbh, I'm pretty much in between. I appreciate the differences but acknowledge that things are unavoidably different.

This is a little kid trying to pretend he knows what internet in 1999-2009 was like lol.

And yet you reply to my other comment with 'Truth.', make your mind up if you're going to be toxic or not lol

Can I ask for a recommendation?

Leetspeak too.

May I introduce you to https://neocities.org/browse

same.

I still write stuff in that style. my motto is that "if it isn't 100% functional in the command lime with the exception of multimedia, I did something wrong."

Look at kitta.net it's some person who made a blog in 2002 and still on it let's all email her at once

It's still alive, check out the site Neocities!

I don’t. Our current web has its problems, but it’s never made me restart my computer due to an endless stream of pop up windows. Also don’t have to use plugins like QuickTime, real player, activex, or flash to do basic things like watch a video.

I loved being part of webrings - a group of like-minded fan sites all linked to each other with a banner.

XXX FREE PORN

Yeah man.

I was too young for 1.0, but I was around during 2.0 in the smaller communities and forums. I miss Internet Culture. Web 3.0 killed everything with AI. It became too good. No longer was finding the fringe communities and little corners of the internet special anymore.

On a related note, you can now find your old Geocities page.

I mean, maybe. They're not all there just yet, but a ton have been restored. I'm still looking for mine.

This place is a goldmine.

I had a tripod site. RIP my first website.

I was able to archive some of it from webarchive but sadly parts of the site were missing.

Malwarebytes blocked it saying it's a trojan. Anyone else?

The security on a geocities site must be hilariously outdated. Likely a false positive.

I somehow remembered my old address, Soho/3326 and there it was! 25 years later. Priceless!

Omg ! I’m half way down on the left - flashing green badge 😂😂😂😂

Did you make that badge? Or is this some cruel coincidence?

Nope I definitely made it - my blog was a special flashing gif museum of awful

How was it called when you were browsing a website and in the bottom of the page there was a special link to go to another, same theme but unrelated website?

Web Ring?

Hah. I just found my Webring from forever ago a couple weeks ago. https://members.tripod.com/~HX_Scheherazade/ring.html

All those separate porn sites did that too.

Are you thinking of web rings?

I believe you are talking about “webrings”.

They bring what?

They bring “s”. It’s an underground group committed to perpetuating the “cool s” phenomenon

Ain't no party like an S Club party

One does not simply join a webring.

I believe you meant to think of web ring.

For me these were the bumper stickers of the web. Everybody could find one they’d relate to. Which one did you use?

I remember at least using the "validated HTML" and "RSS" on my sites. I might've had some in forum signatures, but I think they were mostly longer and thicker banners.

Ob yeah these “validated” banners were basically a badge of quality back then, right?

You could validate your code (at W3C I think) and if it was OK you'd get a link to a picture to proudly place on your site.

Yep, exactly

Oh man, forum signatures! What a throwback. Making terrible sigs using Paint Shop Pro and following DeviantArt tutorials… what a time

Then taking it to the next level by turning it into a gif so that you could have transparency.

I was a little sad these weren't all usertitles

Matt Damon aging meme

[deleted]

Wow that's very cool! Thanks

Reminded me of that too! It’s like the next evolution of it

Oh man, Trillian... that takes me back a ways.

"this site was written in notepad" was peak badge flex.

Me as a teenager coding my school ICT website project in notepad whilst everyone else used dreamweaver. I thought I was so clever 💀

I think I made a note of "NOT made with dreamweaver" on my pages. 😂

Wow, this brings back memories!
Also lol at "10% bald", "20% bald" etc haha.

Right underneath the Bald ones are "Nice Breasts" and "Big Penis".

Simpler times.

And seeing the AIM logo brings me to an era that this generation will never understand. Although this probably applies to most of the web 20+ years ago

I miss AIM so very much.

I used AIM right until it was shut down five or six years ago. I still have the app on my phone and can’t bear to delete it.

Remember all the custom buddy icons with the AOL guy getting shot and stabbed and blown up and all that lmao

Oh shit I remember those! I had so many great icons. Thank you for unearthing a fond memory from nearly twenty years ago

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-09/1/16/enhanced/webdr01/anigif_enhanced-11881-1441139674-14.gif

I loved having like ten conversations going at once, spread out over the screen.

So many strong bad references

Yeah. Those badges, banners and things like those. I liked '00s of the web. They were probably even earlier, but that's when I first had my Internet connection.

It was actually charming how some things were more unified in the old web. And now... it's not unified but oversimplified. I don't mean new HTML is worse, of course it isn't. But web people are often doing lazy jobs IMO. I feel like old websited were more unique, even having those similar things. But they were made by someone's idea, not by template or just oversimplified trend.

I always hated oversimplifying and recently there I heard people starting to hate those things too (in logos for example).

Web guys would probably be doing a lot less “lazy” a job if everything wasn’t managed by content management systems, or react modules spitting out the code, or any of a multitude of these sorts of variants. And it’s really impossible to do otherwise these days because websites have to be so big now. We don’t live in an age where a company needs just a couple of pages maintained by one or two guys any more.

Yeah, I know, I know. What I meant is that design is lazy. And often too simple. But not in all sites. There was that time, when Microsoft website was like that iirc. Also I don't like Minecraft website. And given that I can't find link to articles is even worse. Like I would like to see the list of articles.

Reddit is actually very amazing site IMO. Everything has a reason and works fine.

Still happens on GitHub

Although they aren't usually done in pixel style anymore, no?

Mostly SVG but quite a lot are bitmaps

All of them are bitmaps when displayed, pretty sure

Nope, by default they are SVG in most READMEs. Much lighter.

I didn't know "IKEA addicts" was a thing😂

They absolutely are and it was funny to me to find this out. I asked why and pretty much they answered “adult legos and you get to eat meatballs before building it.”

I used to make so many of these for myself; it was so fun. Why did the internet have to become what it has become?

Money. See, the internet wasn't a utility, so it needed commercial infrastructure. Thus, monetization of every damned bit.

Hey thanks for sharing this here! I made this project a few years ago and nobody really showed any interest in it at the time, but I left it running anyway. It was my first experiment with lazy loading a large array of elements using javascript. I might try to update it with what I have learned since then as it is admittedly a little buggy, now that it seems to have found an audience.

Oh man I was like whats this and when it opened... the warmth

Holy shit the unbearable lightness of nostalgia

Wow! Those were the days.

It reminds me of Fark

Fark is in there.

Yup. Fark was kind of Reddit before Reddit

yeah...it was pretty cool. I used it until I learned about Reddit, back in 2003? 2002?

I miss these, can we bring them back?

We learned our lesson, we promise.

Sweet old forums. Now everything is a cringe on twitter or Facebook.

Honestly I’d argue the site we’re using is more of the spiritual successor to forums than FB or Twitter.

Holy shit I wasn’t expecting this to make me so emotional damn I wish I could go back to being an 11 year old in 2009 browsing lucid dreaming forums

Feel bad that my eyes instantly caught "explicit women" at the top.

Bring these back.

How?

We all abandon social media and return to message boards.

It's funny how they're making slack-alike chat on a federated platform when people seem to want activitypub or even NNTP in markdown with a webui presentation.

OH MAN this brings back so many memories!! What a nostalgia run, amazing.

Reloading that page is a wild experience :)

This website also has 3182 of them. I dunno if they're legit or parodies, but they're pretty funny.

Woah! One of these is mine! This era was a beautiful time on the internet.

If you guys like this old web feel, you should play Hypnospace Outlaw

This was the original collection. Site doesn't work anymore, I'm surprised it's even still up.

Well now I’m missing webrings and guestbooks and all sorts of nostalgic garbage

I used to make these :( kind of wish I could see them again now, damn

Found my site on the first page. That was unexpected.

Whew, ICQ, now that brings me back

How did they come up with that uniform design?

Heraldry.

favorite random badge

Heres my signature banner from an old forum. https://i.imgur.com/OeoDEO0.png

IRAPE24HR.

What.

GREATEST JOURNALLLL

It looks like r/Place if it was organized.

how do I make one of these for myself??

“RubHub” noice.

"Blog roll" lmao

Not sure why, but I dialed right in on the "Eat Your Soup" tag. That's a great name for a website or a podcast or something, even an album title for one of those more "intellectual" artists (like They Might Be Giants or De La Soul.)

That font.. those badges.. sooooo good

Omg, I remember these. I had a few. Can't remember what they were though.

I think we should bring the back

Aw I found Stumbleupon (rip), made me feel sad lol

Don't be sad. Here's a hug!

Wow…blast from the past.

I love this, I want to design more of them

I used to make these! I had completely forgotten!

I miss the 88x31's

Foes anyone re call invision free forums?

Wikipedia has something similar to this for user web pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hires_an_editor

“When Apes Rule”. They predicted the rise of WSB lol

Definitely hit the nostalgic button on my end. Lol

I'm digging the 0%, 10%, 20%...100% bald ones

Damn kids

Wow, haven't thought about these in like 20 years.

All I remember about these is that I used to create really stupid ones like “Water Drinker” and “Oxygen consumer.”

My thought process:

Badges? What badges.

Oh...

Oh no.

LOL rubhub?

Anal Dash

RENAL FAILURE

We used to be into "user bars" (e.g. https://www.deviantart.com/macilot/art/Simple-themed-userbars-61363386) and we'd have them in our forum signatures!

Hello nostalgia! I wish we could still use them, kind of

Oh man, I used to have a decent talent for that, I made all my own and even did commissions. I wonder if I could ever dig those files up!

This should be a fun challenge to try out text recognition. Saving this for later.

They're cale userbars and the biggest userbar site is still around

This immediately hit my nostalgia button. Thanks for posting this!

Very cool. What about the little triangular ones that would show up in the top corners of web 2.0 sites, like little sashes?

I miss user bars!

I still have my icq#

I loved these in the early 2000s.

On mobile. I did a one thumb scroll down and stopped it randomly and the first one I laid eyes on was "rubhub" and now I can't stop chuckling to myself.

Don't click the link if your brain is allergic to little blinky things.

this is awesome

was there a website that people used to make these during that time?

Badges? Badges? We no need no stinkin' badges!

I miss classic forums

so good!

My favourite one: https://web.badges.world/badges/operated/linuxpenguin(2).png

I saw these all the time on DeviantArt.