“The need to set a good ‘away message’ on AIM, since it may be up for over a day before you can get back on.”
“‘Under Construction’ banners, images, and gifs. They were on every page, the page was always ‘under construction.’
You’d put one there while you were writing the html then take it out when the final version was done, but way too many people never bothered with that step.”
“Yahoo used to have what was intended as a top-down directory of the entire internet, created by hand. It was incredibly useful at the time.”
“Downloading a song from Limewire and then going to listen to it and then you hear ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'”
“I used to keep a magazine beside the computer so I could read something while waiting for a web page to load.”
“ICQ, AIM, and MSN.
Hi,
A/S/L?
35/m/Mn. U?”
“Altavista and Ask Jeeves!”
“You rarely saw ‘Username already taken.’”
“The pop-ups. Oh my god, the pop-ups. You’d open a webpage and 20 windows would open and most of them were porn ads.
It took a while for pop-up blockers to become a thing, now you can’t even advertise with pop-ups because all browsers block them by default. I still occasionally refer to my ad blocker as my pop-up blocker.”
“Waiting for an hour for an image to download, line by line.”
“I remember one of my friends asking me, ‘Have you heard of YouTube?’
And I said no.”
“Being ‘offline.’ Now everyone is online all the time, but ‘going online’ was an actual limited-time thing you went and did, and then when you are done you got ‘offline.’ Now being online is a permanent state of being.”
“I attempted to explain ‘All Your Base Are Belong to Us’ to a young coworker, and she refused to believe it was a real thing.”
“Dedicated Internet forums for specific things instead of a subreddit. They were like mini communities and if you spent enough time on them. You went there for the community rather than the actual subject matter.
I know forums sort of still exist but they’re nowhere near what they were. I spent/wasted some great times on forums for niche games, and I didn’t even game much.”
“A/S/L
Those were the days.”
“The web pages that were way too flashy. Falling snow, custom cursors, music randomly playing, animated gifs everywhere.”
“Not gonna lie, if you kids saw what we could do to our MySpace pages back in the day, you’d flip your sh#t.
Custom backgrounds, musical Playlists right there on our page. And don’t forget the feature that no other social media has dared to attempt due to the absolute wars this started …
… The Top 8 ….
Those of you who were there with me in the early aughts, you know exactly the kind of drama I’m talking about.”
“Counters showing number of visitors to the site.”
“Chatrooms. Nowadays, everyone just chats through Messengers and social media … But back then, we had to join a website to connect with people online, and only could do so a few hours a day as there weren’t any flat rates yet.”
“Back during the day, it was taboo to show your real face on your website. This was a time where many kids weren’t smart when it came to online safety.
To be fair, this is still an issue today. Back during the day many online safety tips included to never tell someone the state you live in, real name, school or show your real photo. In my opinion, I think more people should follow those old tips.”
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Make your time!
A common saying was "97% of the people online are guys. They other 3%.. are lying."
I am female. Fun times, fun times.