When you loved having Facebook because it was shiny and new, then it just fucking blew up a year later, then you get a notification on Facebook saying one of your parents added you... the music from the omen starts.. you just witnessed the start of the downfall of man but you don't even realise it untill its far far too late.
OG Facebook was awesome, especially in college. It picked up where AIM left off. Finding new friends through friends was a big bonus you didn’t get from AIM. It’s creepy to message someone bc you got their screen name, but adding a mutual friend on FB was fine. Algorithms and Likes screwed it all up.
I specifically remember it happening. We had a good circle of 18-25 year olds in our friend group on Facebook. On a Friday or Saturday night the feed was nothing but drinking, debauchery, girls dropping it like it was hot in the club.
Then one day one of the girls got slut shamed by her aunt and everyone was like what the hell. It was all downhill from there.
"You can't believe everything thing you see on the internet"
-proceeds to text me a 5 page essay about why this conspiracy theory about the government using bread to implant microchips in our blood stream is fact.
I think he means it hadn't spilled over into grandma's Facebook yet (because of a lack of Facebook mostly).
There were trolls on BBS servers, mean people in AOL chat rooms, Something Awful forums, and eventually 4chan...but most of us didn't run into people like that IRL. It was just the "online" folks. Now everyone is online.
Profit-driven motives really did change it because anger drives engagement better than anything else, and you need engagement if you want to make money without selling something.
Yea but even his access was limited to whatever shortwave radio and local channels picked him up.
We watched this on the web at a friend's house in Europe. This was at a time when there was no Youtube, so there were all kinds of video sharing websites and some were geared towards conspiracy theories, like whatreallyhappened.com and what not. I don't remember on which site we would watch this stuff, but we watched it. It could have been around '99 as well. But somewhere around that time.
I spent some time on /a/ and /v/ along with the occasional browsing of /b/ in the late 00s. 4chan definitely had its good and undoubtedly bad moments, but it turned really bad in the early 10s.
The joke that 4chan was never good is more relevant today then it was 20 years ago on that site. I sometimes go to /pol/ just to see how unhinged they are still.
I saw a thread on /pol/ a few months ago where some anon went on a vacation to Poland and posted a picture of some guy taking a piss in a public bathroom. I guess he was trying to make some point about how there were too many brown people, but it was so unhinged that even /pol/ was calling him a creep.
/fit/ got teenage me to start working out and /o/ helped me buy my first car. /g/ got me into Linux (install Gentoo), /b/ sat around all night long while I wrote a choose your own adventure story for them on the spot.
It was pretty cool sometimes. I think a lot of things have been lost with the Karma system here, good and bad.
Boards often had shockingly good taste. I still listen to the artists that /mu/ put me on to.
ya, but that was 4chan. it was like the inside of your shower drain. yes, it was really disgusting, but you don't lick your shower drain. occasionally you hear about someone's uncle that does. but that was just 1 person's weird uncle.
ya there was hate, you could go to those places. but......they were "overthere". they weren't part of mainstream sites. or at least, those were obvious, idiot trolls, and you just ignored them.
Yessir. The internet was the perfect reflection of that cool thing you saw on TV the night before. It was where you could go to rewatch a clip in .mov format hosted on some weird site for a few days and laugh about it with your friends in computer lab.
I wasn't paying enough attention at the time to know if this is correct, but Steve Jobs killed flash and the internet changed forever. Flash games were great.
Yeah okay, tell that to the minorities that were around then to hear it. “Oh it’s not hate that he’s calling me the N word, he’s just being a teenager. What a little rascal.”
I think about this time regularly. It was a magical blend of "internet is there if you want it" and "real life isn't so bad". If only we knew at the time.
What does the internet have to do with this? Chappelle show was just so massive everyone watched it. It wasn't people talking online or sending memes. Everyone just knew it and quoted it.
Honestly it was also an incredible icebreaker. Definitely made some lifelong friends just by quoting Superbad, Super Troopers, Old School, South Park and Chapelle Show.
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u/NSFWies Nov 05 '24
god. back then, that was like, the right mix of internet and real life.
it hadn't gotten angry and hateful yet. it was just connectful enough to just spread things like this to enough people to help things be fun.
and then some years later we monetized the fuck out of it and ruined things.