This is what the whole internet used to be
This is what the whole internet used to be
And catalogues, and travel blogs, a chatroom or two
We set our sights and spent our nights
Waiting....for you...
You... insatiable you...
Mommy let you use her ipad...
âŚyou were barely twoâŚ
... and it did all the things we designed it to do...
Now look at you
[deleted]
To put the world in your hand
YouâŚ
Youuuuu
Right before the towers fell, circa â99
I'd extend that to before social media took off, so 2005-ish. Even then, it took a few years for the change to happen.
I was an unsupervised 13-year old with DSL internet in my bedroom, and I fully credit it for helping me become a somewhat well-spoken, curious, and resourceful person. Because all I would do was read websites like those, lovingly written on hundreds of niche topics.
Needing to become articulate, well spoke out of necessity, since at that time most people who knew how to use the internet were intelligent, curious beings.
Things sure have changed
Grocities was a main hub for this content. It was archived a while back. http://blog.archive.org/2009/08/25/geocities-preserved/
I had my first webpage on SunsetStrip there.
Yep my first website was on geocities. I still have some of the files (as in the HTML "code" etc.)
I made my first website (and only website) in 1998 (i think) in geocities lol wow.
I miss these days! Sure we had to contend with going to a site and being inundated with porn popups, the trade off now is advertisements popping up, not knowing what to click to continue the article, or the continuous bombardment of email request for 20% off
Punch the monkey
Yes. And it was beautiful đ
itâs what ya mama used to be đ
Edit: downvoted for casual conversation. Never change reddit
âCasualâ
Canât handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. This is the big leagues buddy. The real ones hold up under pressure. Weak ones fold đŻđŻ
Um.. What?
It's just a troll.
Not even. Just an idiot.
Nah, no idiot's acts like that. It has to be intentional.
Real eyes realize real lies. Fake redditors congratulate me in my dmâs but downvote me at the same time. Why send me a dm saying âexcellent comment đâ and then pretend?
This is your brain on bath salts đŻđŻđŻ
my friend was on my account goofy. Learn the facts before you talk nonsense
your /yĂ´r,yoÍor/ Learn to pronounce determiner 1. belonging to or associated with the person or people that the speaker is addressing.
It's adorable how hard you are trying đĽ°
[deleted]
What
Are you having an episode?
đ Itâs weird how much people crave attention like this.
Heâs getting severely downvoted and yet he doesnât have the self awareness to shut up.
He must have mommy and daddy issues.
It's literally the attention they want...
True.
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Yes, Iâm aware it means nothing. However, in your own psyche, if youâre being downvoted, thatâs a hint that youâre talking bullshit.
nah, already finished the final season. Any other dookie questions? You redditors are all the same
Mongus
Why send me a dm saying âexcellent comment đâ and then pretend?
/r/thathappened
Blame mental institution who let patients on Reddit unsupervised
Take your meds hon
Bro could have said nothing but choose to dig his hole even deeper.
If you think commenting on Reddit is the big leagues I really worry about your life goals.
It looks like you are cracking bc you canât handle downvotes that mean nothing
Look, if youâre stupid at least be funny.
"Hey, why does everyone hate me?"
You know that saying, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"? This is why it is said.
People were perfectly happy not knowing you existed. Then you had to go and show them that people exist who are just mean for no reason. You made everyone's day a little worse.
It's amazing how many people still bite to this kind of stuff. People like you are exactly why kids like them do that stuff.
What a wild interpretation of what casual conversation is.
I'll ride the downvotes with you. People getting seriously offended by a yo momma joke. WTF.
This is awesome.
I clicked a random link and I'm rivetted. http://living-in-the-past.com/aircraftflash.html
This is exactly what the internet used to be in the 90s, I'm not surprised that's when this site was started. Nobody does this anymore but it used to be all about people's personal sites and their stories. This was before it was really commercialized.
Nobody does this anymore
How do you know? All we really know is that Google and other major players don't show it to you anymore.
Google seems terrible. All it does it redirect me to a YouTube video that is about another more popular brand of whatever specific thing I'm trying to learn how to fucking do. I remember in the possibly mid 2000s being able to find a forum for the exact model and issue with people discussing it. I dunno if I'm just not doing it right anymore or if that's the goal of Google is consumer related product ads.
stick "reddit" on the end of your search and you will find more specific forum posts
So I started using google to search reddit because reddit search sucked. Now I use google to search reddit because google search sucks.
from 2014
The 90s internet baby, so many rip offs of something else getting popular and everybody in their momma's husband's brother making their own site to try and cash in on the internet making them beer money.
Ru Paul had a blog so everyone had to have one. A few amazing ones popped up like Tales of a Porn Clerk that ended up becoming a book.
X-Entertainment and Retrocrush kinda helped make nostalgia about 70s-early 90s food and toys and games get a bit more mainstream and you had a ton of the websites trying to cash in on the small essays and photos style of web page/articles, stuff like Whatever Dude, Bad Candy Reviews, Jabberwocky and a guy I remember who was a black nerd but also really entertaining but didn't really make it long. There was also a ton more but most of them didn't last past five or ten essays then just vanish.
I haven't even touched how Sean Baby also shaped some of these folks too, the cross over of how they were their own thing but also ripped him off too, I-Mockery is the best example of how you can tell they were huge Sean Baby fans, but also had enough of their own voice to stand out. Rob made some amazingly dumb but also fun little games that were little odes to his childhood, and sadly he had some incredible trauma happen the past few years.
The early emulation scene is one I miss too. So much ignorance and lack of tools, so you had to get creative with hacking roms to translate it to english, or figure out how to host your hack without a take down from Nintendo or Squaresoft pre merger. Personal pages of bizarre rants against other translators, weird grudges against offical translators that had no choice in the changes they had to make because of NoA's content policies or things that would get them in weird trouble with American media (We were still hot off the heels of Doom and Mortal Kombat in the mid 90s along with the Night Trap controversy so games were getting the 3rd degree for anything)
Also internet magazines were huge. I miss those a ton, little e-zines meant to help talent get an audience either by writing articles or short stories that cater to that particular e-zines audience.
Conspiracy sites. Oh my god I miss them so much. Just old school HTML, no CSS, just batshit content with even more batshit crazy formatting. Can't even use basic formatting past paragraphs and the
because you might end up leaving code to allow the Pentagon to hack your page about chemtrails and how Disney is working with The Japanese to use anime to brainwash your kids into becoming Chinese Agents. Much like how the authors wife left him for another woman, if it wasn't for Anime she'd never become a lesbian.
We still got a few who bang on, Kid Fenris for example. But yeah the old internet is mostly dead.
Bruh I remember spending HOURS on this chemtrails website I found in 2004 just because it was so passionately made. I remember a whole website just dedicated to getting away with crime lol
There was a site I found once that was about a group of travelers who went on a secret trip to another planet with aliens who had visited earth.
It was a complete documentation of the trip the space craft and life on that planet. the was like ~~200~~ 35 pages of information. I spent a few weeks reading everything.
I've never been able to find it again.
edit: I found it. The story is what I was thinking about but I must have gotten it confused with another site. I'm now remember a site that had a bunch of technical drawings and descriptions of alien spacecraft that had been stolen or recovered from the military. It was posted as supposivly real, (prob not) but it was really well done, really detailed professional cad drawings and descriptions.
I think it was around the time that time traveler guy was the big thing. 2005-'06 maybe? It wasn't that guy's site but I came across it while reading about the time traveler guy and reading the Serpo stuff. That's the site I can't find. anyone remember anything like that?
Oh there was a ton of great ones! The F-Plus did an ep covering some great ones that they had to pull off internetarchive. The other one I loved was oddly really well made, just minor scripting and organizing going so you don't realize just how whack a doodle the authoress was. Stuff like Chemtrails mixed in with actual stories about some vile stuff Disneyland and Disneyworld did along with stuff about the Club 33 conspiracy so you end up having to double check what did or didn't happen.
I need to ask over in TOMT and see if anyone else can remember that sites name, I feel like nostalgia diving.
I think you'll like Neocities.
Iâm inspired by this site and it will live on long after his death.
I'm contemplating dropping the man an email....
Check out https://wiby.me and click surprise me
Oof thatâs a deep rabbit hole
LOL: http://anterras.net/CDRR/gadget_archive.html
"The Internet's largest source of Gadget images from Disney's Rescue Ranger TV show" I mean, I don't doubt the claim.
Oh man it's not Fred and his creepy Gadget Fixation. I always wondered if that guy turned out to be just overly fixated and mostly okay, or did he ever turn out to be a secret ultra creep?
hey!
No offence! That website is marvelous! I need that armchair!
This is what the internet was when I first started using it, this brings back so many great memories.
Thanks for the link.
http://www.dont-get-chipped.org/english/default_antichip_sources_en.htm
This looks like one of those fake GTA V sites.
[deleted]
Amazing website lol.
https://ashidakim.com/ A real Ninja. So real he will challenge you for $10k
Aw mate that is priceless. Watch the ninja levitation video and the guy with the hoop to âevidenceâ him actually flying itâs brilliant
Holy crap, I used to have a couple of his books back in the 80s, they were bitchin!
It sent me to https://www.starfleet-museum.org/
Quite something lol
Lmao it brought me to The Evil Overlord List! I havenât seen that in so many years I had almost forgotten about it! Man what a flash from the past
Yep, that's me.
Well I'm not getting any work done today. First one. Who knew there was an Albino Squirrel Preservation Society? And does that mean they're people who are albino preserving squirrels, or are they preserving albino squirrels?
omg, the "sign guestbook" and "view guestbook" just brought me BACK. I wish the links still worked
From the site:
âSome chapters focus exclusively on squirrel awareness through flyers, rallies, etc. Other chapters focus on the social aspects of the club with albino squirrel campouts, squirrel feeding parties, etc.â
This is gold
This is exactly what op what looking for. Wish I had a copy of my old site somewhere.
thanks! really enjoying this!
Yea my results were disturbing lol
"This website was begun in the 1990's, so some of the links on these pages may be "dead". If you encounter a dead link, you may contact me at the email address above, and if I myself am not dead, I will try to get you the correct URL. "
Just fantastic
Itâs fun to think that the webmaster would set up a trust to pay hosting fees indefinitely after his death.
OP, I feel like I'm stating the obvious here, but I think it would help if you told us exactly what it is you like about that website.
There is a videogame called Hypnospace Outlaw that can scratch that itch. Its an interactive game from the old internet mindset.
There was a site I used to go to in the early 00's run by the owner(?) of a video/game rental store somewhere in Canada. It was full of stories about his interactions with stupid and/or belligerent customers. All I remember was it was styled like a religious text and was called the Book of (Canadian name I can't recall). Does anyone remember what I'm talking about?
I believe you may be thinking of [Acts of Gord] (http://www.actsofgord.com/)
YES. Thank you!
I remember this! Damned if I can remember the name, though.
I run a business's website like this.
HTML and jpgs. That's it. You read the text, you look at the pics, you buy. Quick and simple. How God intended.
You'll notice how op's link loads quickly and just works.
When I think of old internet, I think of Wallace and Gromit or Hamsterdance, and use the Wayback Machine to relive the golden olden days of ye intertubes.
If you want the true Hampster Dance experience, you're gonna have to right-click "HELP! I can't hear the music!" and open it in a new tab, then right-click the .wav player and set it to loop the clip.
Well, this is a similar type of site but on steroids.
The Fordham University "Medieval Sourcebook" been around for decades now and used to have a more 'homey' design with a faux parchment background, but its got hundreds (thousands?) of links to medieval documents. (I clicked on a few links, many may be dead)
i understood what the internet was about when i could go online and find pictures from car shows from people that were there, it was absolutely amazing that someone could take a picture with a camera, scan the photo to make it digital, upload to a website for others to enjoy something that is specific to your own liking
prior to this we had to be at this car show in person, take photos and hope they came out good when you got them developed weeks later and hopefully you knew when it was going to happen and how to get there using a map,
https://www.shorpy.com/
It's what oldschoolcool wishes it was, and probably where 2/3s the content comes from (the other 1/3 being redditor's hot grandparents).
Say goodbye to a few minutes of your life. https://my80stv.com/
Wikipedia killed these kind of websites
I often wonder how many of these webmasters are naturally dead and their sites are just frozen like amber, their heirs just paying that hosting fee as a memorial
I do this for my dad's old band. They haven't played in 20 years and he passed 3 years ago, but I will probably never take it down.
Uh oh. This page says to âcheck backâ for updates. Iâve been checking for 20 years!
huh? wikipedia killed peopleâs blogs?
http://vc.airvectors.net/index.html
Tons of well-written and well-researched writing from Greg Goebel.
This is a fun one I found.
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~pa91/military/pcloth1.html
Some dude in the early 2000s digitized all the logs of a semi obscure civil war unit. Found a fairly good description of my 5x great grandpa and 4x great uncle once removed here. Crazy some of the things they could find even in those days. Love reading the daily logs of the normal day to day that someone thought worthy to preserve
Hundreds of individual soldiers cataloged and their storyâs preserved for seemingly no reason other than to have it done. Good work of web1
http://www.rijim.com/ My husbands Uncles old blog website
I am unsure how well known this cult is, but despite all of them killing themselves their website is still on https://www.heavensgate.com/index.html and oddly pleasing to me
I am unsure how well known this cult is
quite
The first website I ever visited in 1995. Still alive and kicking today: https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/
This page was "famous" enough (with over 2000 views!) that it spawned several other pages which attempted to debunk or provide alternate explanations of the SPT phenomenon.
One man's account of trying to solve the case of a German family that vanished into thin air:
https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/
Hell yes!
I check his site every few months to see if he has any updates.
http://xpda.com/junkmail/
The nostalgia and personal experience reminds me a lot of this podcast: https://homebrave.com/
A few episodes are a bit ânewsyâ and others are purely personal. But even the ones focusing on the news are with a strong personal point of view
I don't quite see the connection between this and OP's link, but I love Home of the Brave!
Yeah, that's fair. What I can say is the link evoked a similar feeling in me. I do think it is safe to say both have a strong sense of nostalgia. And yeah, Home of the Brave is awesome!
Just go on neocities
If you like the old-school style radio (morning radio to be specific) - enjoy:
I've gotten sucked into this man's stories for hours and hours. He's the SAR guy that kept looking for, and found, the German tourists that went missing in Death Valley in the 90's.
This is a rabbit hole that's been on my list to dig in to one day. http://grandmasmind.com/home.html
One of my favs is the website of Andy Hertzfeld (software engineer on the original Mac team). His website has a lot of interesting stories of the early days of Apple: https://www.folklore.org/
This is great
How do you make one of these websites today? Is there a modern equivalent to Geocities? Or... how were they designed? And how would you do that now, without going for the slick Wix look
I'm wondering the same thing
https://neocities.org/
Okay if anyone is wondering how did I found this website , all the credits goes to this YouTube channel called Vox and here is the video i get to know about this website
I apologize for not adding the "-" between the words and turning it into another website.
That video was really cool!! VOX does a lot of insightful work. Thanks for sharing.
This is one of my favorites - http://www.sarahjanenewbury.com
what the fuck
âSarah Jane Newbury is Britain's most famous virgin.â What donât you get?
Look through neocities.
Cool
livinginthepast.com is under construction. You like sites which are under construction?
Otherhand.org
Amazed they are still open for business
thanks for sharing that. now i must go to compusa to buy a tower of CD-Rs.
This is Turkish singer who was really famous in 90s in turkey ans is still well known. She passed away recently.
http://akrepnalan.com/
I highly recommend the game Hypnospace Outlaw. It really captures the charm of 90s/00s geocities and angelfire sites.
Seeing that layout brought back some memories.
http://blackpeopleloveus.com/
Goes to livinginthepast.com to check it out, under construction đ
If you use hyphens between the words, it works.
r/oldschoolcool
I like this guy. Different format, but similar ongoing blog, don't mind the title he barely speaks about evolution... mostly science topics, his travels, research, birds....
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/
He's a real scientist, not a panderer, so don't go if you get triggered easily.
Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your suggestions made it possible to find cool websites I never knew existed, thanks
Also, I want to thank you for making the post reach 1k+ votes. It's the first time something I posted has reached 1k+ votes
The more important thing is that you have seen a good website that you can spend hours admiring, I never imagined that something I post would bring back memories of so many people.
All credits go to Vox YT Channel for searching the website, I just want vio and posted it here for similar websites)
I don't know if this is along the same lines, but there is a site that is set up to check on the one event of the year...
https://isitchristmas.com/
You might be better off looking for youtube channels and podcasts.
First one's free. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w
[deleted]
thats not a âflat earth rantâ, and you clearly havenât read past the first paragraph if you think it is.
[deleted]
I wonder if people read that exceprt, took it literally and tried to explain how that would work and now... flat earthers. I wonder if this was the article that spawned the phenomenon.
Are there any websites similar to livinginthepast.com? I am in love with it! If you know of any websites, please let me know.
*Are there any websites like livinginthepast.com? I'm in love with it, so if you know of any websites like it, please let me know.
Galaxy fold 4
Check out futility closet
https://aesthes.is
the font against this background is horrendous.
ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Livinginthelast.com says itâs under construction??
living-in-the-past.com
Thank ya
Didn't expect to see Towcester mentioned, what a pleasant surprise.
Amish.com /s
HTML AF
livinginthepast.com is... no longer active? a squarespace site with waves? what am i missing haha
Living-in-the-past.com
ohh. thanks haha
yoo northern ireland
What is this website about? Looked up Google, Wikipedia, not much luck
Just saw this on a Vox video. Spent an hour exploring the website.
This might keep you occupied for a time - Marginalia randomized.
Remember when you used to explore the Internet, when you used to discover cool little websites made by people and it wasn't just a bunch of low effort content mill listicles and blog spam? About.
This brings back so many happy memories of just discovering a new world. Honestly has made me kind of sad, though. The internet of today is just so stale, its all the same. Creativity itself has been put into ticky tacky little boxes made by Youtube 'creators' and influencers.
Give me some weird ass shit where you input random words and scroll for hours looking for just what suits you. I think that's what's really gone. You used to be able to go on a journey of self-discovery, finding things about yourself you didn't even know were there just by seeing what other people will dedicate themselves to bringing to others. Now, its just about getting enough clicks to monetize. Sure, there are still very passionate people. But there's a different kind of passion in creating something that you're almost certain like 5 people will see and then still doing it!
I think the concept for these more creative sites is called digital gardens.
Good term to know! Thanks I'll have fun searching around for them!
the internet used to be underground and counterculture, but like all things the âmainstreamâ touches, itâs turned to complete shite. like gay pride parades.
Much more succinct than me! It was a new kind of counterculture with nerds running the show for once. I just miss the wild west feel; where you'd go on a website, see a whole section on bomb making, and then wipe EVERYTHING just to be safe haha
Corporations got their claws in I feel like the soul just died. I'm even getting tired of reddit, it's just poorly disguised ads and the same 10 jokes over and over and over.
We need a new internet.
The problem isn't the internet. All that cool stuff is still out there and more is created every day.
The problem is for- profit corporations owning 95% of search.
It's gotten to the point that Google returns results primarily from a pool of a few thousand massive corporate websites, nearly all of them e-commerce.
I'm not even talking about targeted paid ads. The algorithm itself is biased towards the big players.
For a while there, being crafty with SEO could get smaller sites ranked well, but SEO is basically dead.
Honest question; is the algorithm targeted towards large companies, or do they just have the money/resources to be able to research the algorithms and cheat their way to the top?
I curious if any changes to algorithm to help smaller sites would actually stop large companies from adjusting to the new parameters and ending up at the top again.
Specifically biased towards large corporations. Even in local search results, where the ranking factors are:
Most local traffic occurs on main highways, which if you've ever driven through any mid-sized American town you'll know are dominated by giant box stores and national chains... it's expensive real estate. So in most cases distance favors corporate results.
Relevance; it stands to reason that the huge chains have more diverse options that will fall into many different umbrellas. You'll notice that google includes places like Walmart in local search results with the caveat that "their website mentions product __". What if I'm not looking for a product?
How well-known a business is... pretty clear here. Passing through a town looking for lunch? Your local search will return Mcdonald's, Taco Bell, Etc, because of course huge national corporate chains are more well known. Isn't the whole point of search to show us what we DON'T already know?
Yeah, I agree. That's why I made the search engine linked above.
The main problem isn't the Internet, but how we interact with it. Get off Google/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter and you'll find the Internet starts to look very different, much more diverse, much bigger.
Remember when Google had the âIâm feeling luckyâ button and it would load some random site?
I think turns out that counterculture nerds are actually pretty intriguing and created something everyone wanted to be a part of.
The problem is, most people really do suck, and now most people are on the internet. They offer little value except of course their eyeballs which advertisers love, and their shitty opinions, which the advertisers/sites/modern creators cater to.
Oooo, like the rainbow flag at the opening of an episode of The Boys? You know the one? gives me shivers
That's counter culture for you. By the time you've put the label on them, they've already grown so big as to go to shit. It's always been that way.
In the mid-late 90s there was a site dedicated to a guy who was making a very specific kind of aluminum foil ball.
If you're very careful, you can separate the super-thin foil from the paper of a York peppermint patty wrapper. His goal was to make an absolutely solid aluminum foil sphere, by layering that thin foil over and over.
And over and over and over.
He got it up to somewhere between the size of a softball and a basketball the last I remember, and even had it x-rayed and weighed to show how it was something like 95% the density of pure aluminum all the way through. He worked on it and blogged about it (before that was even a term) for years.
I even started my own ball in the same fashion because of him! I got mine up to about golf ball size over 6 months or so before I lost track of it. Heck, if anyone could find the site archived somewhere they'd be my hero.
I fear that aspect of the internet is gone forever.
Never did I think I'd feel left out of a man's aluminum ball project but here we are lol
I like how you're putting the blame on the creators and not on YouTube forcing them all to become one thing otherwise they can't pay their bills. It's not the fault of the creators, I've seen many a fantastic channel have to become more and more generic just to stay recommended/monitised.
The entire concept of monetizing a hobby is the problem.
The pre-mainstream internet was people sharing their passions with others altruistically, or even just for themselves as a kind of digital diary; not for money.
Oh god thank you. That's the internet I miss.
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Yeah it's completely automatic with no voting or moderation, so you sometimes find results that are a bit out of place.
I've kind of not wanted it to be like Reddit, because I feel like that tends to sort of make things a bit samey and cater to the lowest common denominator; which is the opposite of what I want. I want weird shit.
Made my day, wonderful mean of searching. Is there any other software / service online that search quality content ? I guess the algorithm is based also on the creator experience and personal knowledge ? Thanks a lot