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Straight-Ad-160@reddit

Yeah, it was easy to adapt to and fun. Suddenly having the whole world at your fingertips felt wonderous. You could make friends (usually people you met on forums who you shared an interest with) all over the world, and it felt hopeful and joyous.

Now I look at social media and algorithms, and think how did I not know humans would fuck up this amazing thing way back then. I'm gen X. I'm supposed to foresee the arrival of the dark side.

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Graphite-and-Glitter@reddit

I noticed a shift because my single parent became addicted to online chat rooms (ICQ, I think) and started dating a series of people in other states, leaving me and my sister (both under 18 and jobless) home alone and without food and money. We were an early casualty of internet addiction in the mid-1990s.

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darrevan@reddit

Honestly I remember just ignoring it. Was living my best life.

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Mama2bebes@reddit

Early internet was great. For me, it was the loss of privacy that fucked it all up. For example, imagine the only emails in your inbox are from friends, family, and a receipt for something you just bought online. Now, my inbox is a total marketplace. Imagine the only text messages on your phone are from people you actually know. It was easy to adapt in the beginning when internet was used primarily for checking your emails and then we started doing some online shopping. We didn't know USPS would fall apart and brick&mortar stores would go out of business. There was no sudden shift. I was jealous of my friend who had a gov job with a lot of downtime and used it to surf the internet at work. Most people did not have access to internet at work and could get fired if caught with a cell phone on the clock. Even facebook was great in the beginning. But then they started prioritizing your friends who were superposters and burying posts from infrequent users. After they started putting unsolicited stuff in my feed, I was out. The targeting and direct marketing based on algorithms that segregate disguised as tailoring and customizing is what has ruined the internet in my opinion. Now, in order to function in society, for everything you want to do, you have to download an app and/or create an account, always giving away your information, always being tracked. It didn't use to be where we are always being bombarded with messages about what we need to buy right now or otherwise engage with some site. In the beginning there was no manipulation and no spam. I feel sorry for the kids today who think being targeted and manipulated is fine and totally acceptable.

Another random difference I see now compared to pre-internet is a lack of customer service. It used to be that when you had an issue, there were skilled agents trained to resolve your problem who would quickly answer the phone and take care of it. Now, so many companies have invested in online solutions instead of human service in order to save money on payroll. However, tech cannot accommodate for every possible scenario, so if you have an issue that is unusual, you're just screwed. The tolerance level for dissatisfaction is higher now.

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virtualadept@reddit

The signal-to-noise ratio plummeted.

When the Net was still small and not many people (comparatively speaking) were on it, there was a culture of "If you're going to say something, it should be well thought out and well written" because it wasn't easy to get on the Net. Bandwidth was low and expensive; disk space was expensive; companies and school had Net access so that folks could access things directly relevant to their jobs (or why they were in school), and dinking around on mailing lists and Usenet was secondary; ISPs were not common. It wasn't easy to get online. Using net.access for frivolous things could cause problems that we don't really think about these days (like a single e-mail list going realtime crashing a mail server due to the load put upon the system, or saying something unwise could result in a lot of honked off people e-mailing abuse@your.example.com or admin@your.example.com reporting you and demanding that your access get pulled).

There was dicking around online, but you had to be careful about it.

The bigger and more popular the Net got, the more spamming became a problem. Antispam measures weren't just so you could read your e-mail in peace, they were so that your mail server's drive array didn't get filled up every 24 hours with junk mail (which would cause other incoming mail to bounce). That was a serious business problem, not merely an annoyance. Imagine what it would be like for a company the size of one of the big defense contractors to be unable to conduct business with the outside world for a day because the mail server was down because of spam. Antispam measures have gotten much better since then.

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REDDITSHITLORD@reddit

THE MAJOR SHIFT HAPPENED IN THE EARLY 2000S, WHEN IMAGE SHARING BOARDS BEGAN GESTATING MEMES. ALSO, THERE WAS WHAT I LIKE TO CALL THE "PORN ERA" OF THE INTERNET, WHERE THERE WAS JUST PORN EVERYWHERE. IT WASN'T UNCOMMON TO GET PORN ON YOUR FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS FOR SOMETHING TOTALLY INNOCUOUS. PORN SITES WERE MUCH SMALLER AND THERE WERE MORE OF THEM. OFTEN ENTIRE SITES RUN BY/FOR A SINGLE ACTRESS. THEY WERE SUPER SKETCHY AND I'M SURE EXPLOITATION WAS RAMPANT.

WEB RINGS WERE A THING, AND I KINDA MISS THOSE. A WEBSITE WOULD HAVE LINKS TO RELATED SITES TO HELP GET MORE EXPOSURE.

THE BEST THING IMHO, WERE THE NICHE MESSAGE BOARDS. THEY ALL DEVELOPED THEIR OWN INSIDE JOKES AND HAD A REAL UNDERGROUND FEEL TO THEM, ALMOST LIKE THEIR OWN LITTLE SUBCULTURES. THAT WAS COOL. THE MEETUPS WITH THESE GROUPS WERE SUPER FUN! AND IN THE CASE OF ONE WHERE I WAS HEAVILY INVOLVED, YOU'D TOTALLY COUCH-SURF SOME RANDO'S HOUSE WHEN GOING TO EVENTS.

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Night_Porter_23@reddit

Remember in those message boards where typing in all caps was considered screaming? 🤣

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REDDITSHITLORD@reddit

gif

I'M NOT PART OF YOUR SYSTEM!

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cartoonchris1@reddit

The shift came when socials and smartphones were tied together.

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Minereon@reddit

Mid-1990s. No, there was no noticeable shift in society. When the internet came about and became available to the public, it was mostly used by younger, more educated, and/or IT folk. I happened to enter university then, and it was quite readily available, so I took the plunge immediately. I still remember being amazed as the first GIF appeared on my Netscape (?) browser, haha. Never looked back.

For most of working society, it remained very traditional (e.g. use of print for business) for at least another decade(?). Businesses are mostly risk-averse, so most do not pick up these things quickly. Social media only took off around 2007(?). That's a little over ten years later (which means even later for corporates).

Pre-internet life was great. You had actual hobbies like collecting stuff, reading books, listening to CDs. I think these are fundamental foundations to a good life, work or otherwise.

When the internet came about, the beginning was great. It provided so much potential. I learned to hand-code webpages in HTML. I went on bulletin boards to chat with people all over the world. We were truly in a world where the idea of connecting with someone on another continent regularly was fresh and welcome. Such friendships were truly remarkable.

I pity Millenials, although they would scoff at this sentiment. I feel to be born into a world where one has not experienced a life without the net has robbed them of experiences outside of their phones. Millennials are too addicted to the internet and social media, to their detriment. Chief example, they are too reliant on the internet for information and even opinions, instead of being well-read and critically aware on their own to form their own opinions. The notion that they can get information anytime anywhere they want from the net robs them of their curiosity and self-motivation to learn.

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Ezraah@reddit (OP)

This is an unusual question but do you feel like your mind functioned differently pre-internet? Like, are there any clear night and day differences?

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Sitting_pipe@reddit

Did your mind function differently after you read Nietzsche ? No LOl... The internet is not a drug..

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Minereon@reddit

I would say no, my mind has not functioned differently pre-internet. Perhaps what you're trying to get at is the way we took in, reviewed and processed information? While the mind hasn't changed, this process has. I feel that pre-internet, we were better read, more critically capable and remembered more - not because our minds were different, but because we did things differently. We made more effort because information was less readily available.

I am confident millennials etc are not any less capable than us gen Xers. If you took a millennial back in time to the 1990s, he or she would function same as us. As I said above, the problem now is that millennials have entrapped and crippled themselves with their addiction to the internet.

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BC_Raleigh_NC@reddit

What about many stories on the….. internet about young people in 2024 who need to be taught how to use computers. Are they apocryphal? Installing an app on a smartphone is not the same as knowing how to use a computer.

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Ezraah@reddit (OP)

I meant in regards to how you feel about and interact with people, your memory, that sort of stuff. I am just curious.

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tazimm@reddit

Yes, but it's hard to separate the internet vs aging effects. Pre-internet better memory, less distraction, smaller but more meaningful group of friends / acquaintances. I was good at navigation in strange places, remembering places / names / and storing little life-hacks.

You had your friends phone #s memorized (I still remember their old #s) and got used to chatting with their parents. And in college there was a fair bit of wandering around looking for your buddies, which is kinda fun.

I spent a year abroad, phone calls home were expensive, so we wrote letters. I called home like every 3 months. It was tough - lonely, starved for news from home, struggling to learn a new language and make friends. But it was also character-building.

No doomscrolling... when bored you'd just skim the newspaper and when THAT was done, well move on. Now I can waste HOURS on reddit before noticing!

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Minereon@reddit

Let me try again. In terms of how my mind works, no, I do not feel it has changed. It functions pretty much the same way.

However, in biological terms, in terms of speed, memory recall, overall capacity, it has deteriorated, but that's because I was 21 when I first got on the internet, and now I'm 51. It's old age.

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

My attention span is shorter than it was pre-Internet. No question in my mind at all

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Tiny_Salad_6510@reddit

Yes, to be able to basically have the answer to any question I can think of with minimal fuss over the last 20 years has definitely changed the way that my mind works with respect to asking questions and filing data.

I expect to be able to know anything and that has changed my relationship with the world, but it has not made my relationship relationship with the world better. I think a decent analogy is when older generations got vacuum cleaners and dishwashers. The idea was that it would save them work, but what actually happened was that they just kept their houses cleaner and spent as much time on household drudgery as they ever did. I might have access to more information more easily but I’m using it to build bigger (but no more meaningful) sandcastles.

But as another poster said the deterioration in my attention span, ability to concentrate, speed of thought, et cetera is down to old age and not down technology.

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I_Am_Telekinetic@reddit

I’ve forgotten the question already but I do remember building sandcastles at the beach as a child.

That was fun times.

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hhmmn@reddit

My take,not sure everyone agrees but pre internet and personal computers analyzing data, writing, presentations, or any office activity required a lot of planning and fore thought. I think this fundamentally changed younger folks. Not making a value judgement but making a observation

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

The internet now feels like an extension of my memory (for facts). For an example, like I wont remember the name of a particular art work, but Ill be able to remember where I looked it up or saw it and find it through that. Pre internet Id just remember the art work.

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Sitting_pipe@reddit

I am a Network/cybersecurity "insert buzzword here" for 24 years.

Did you notice a shift in society, or did that only come along with algorithm-driven social media?

I hated the internet at first, it was boring and not much going on. In 1999 i got my first pc, took it apart overclocked it and game over i was hooked. There was no shift in society until the last 10 years with the "influencers" and money generated bullshit.

Was it something you adapted to easily, or did you struggle to get used to it?

I adapted to it once i decided i wanted to adapt to it, it wasn't a necessity at all.

Do you have a clear distinction of pre and post-internet life? Which do you prefer?

There is no clear distinction to pre and post life it's like, do you notice yourself growing tallker as you age? You really don't. It just became a part of life. But i can remember life before the internet. That's the difference.

How do you think your experience differed from Millenials?

GenX drove the path for everything you see the millenials using today, the experience they have is not anything close to what GenX experienced. And it's supposed to be that way. Life progress like this it always has. Like life before phones, tv or vehicles.

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UsualGrapefruit8109@reddit

Awesome. By the time you woke up, the movie trailer downloaded.

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OverKy@reddit

When I got on the internet for the first time in 1990, I immediately knew it was special. I tried to explain to friends and family that this strange thing was about to change the world. They ignored me. You see, in 1990, mostly only white loner male nerds used computers or the internet, so the thought of everyone using the tech almost seemed silly to most.

I explain to friends that the internet would raise the overall education level of the planet by several grade levels and we would become much more intelligent within a few years....and we did, seemingly without most realizing it.

Fast-forward a decade, around the year 2000. People were catching on. Internet services were spreading to small rural towns. I remember having dinner with a friend at this small diner in the middle of nowhere. Internet had just arrived in their small town that day and it was the talk in the diner. As I listened quietly, I heard other customers talk with excitement about their offices being wired or the courthouse being wired up for the net. They didn't understand it, but it felt like the day "Mayberry" first got phone service.

In the 80s, everyone around me was dumb as a rock with no technical savvy. Most would've had trouble finding our state on a map.....and today, I see these exact same people whipping out their mobile phones, swiping, talking about gifs and jpgs and file sizes and bandwidth, etc., and I'm in awe. These people who once couldn't even type are now communicating with people all over the planet.

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uglyugly1@reddit

The Internet was great. It was the proliferation of smart phones and social media that fucked everything up.

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Night_Porter_23@reddit

I think this is a pretty good take. The internet was like a really cool box in your home that could get tons of information. Having it in your pocket makes things way worse. You cannot even have a conversation anymore without someone pulling their phone out to look something up, check a fact, reference a meme, whatever.

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recycledcoder@reddit

I have been online since before there was a line to be on.

First BBSs, then bridging PTSN to X.25, hop onto bitnet on a VAX in some university in West Germany, hop to CERN where timbl had some weird ideas about "the web".

/home/$USER/public_html gave way to /bin/gci, C code gave way to Perl, Mosaic gave way to Netscape. It was the wild west, it was home, it was my escape from the shitty little backwards country I was born in.

It became the failed promise of humanity, the dystopia, Brave New World rather than 1984 - attenuated into malignant mediocrity.

I'm sorry, kid - we tried.

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BC_Raleigh_NC@reddit

Information is only as good as the person who uses it. Giving everyone an encyclopedia in 1984 would only help them if they actually read it. Same for the internet in 1994 or 2024. You can still choose to be ignorant or waste your time. I find social media is fun but it can be a big waste of time.

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yasaitarian@reddit

For years, the internet was optional. There were people who were into it and people who weren’t. The vibe of the internet was discovering what other people had to share. Novelty. People.

But algorithm-based social media brought back the traditional real world hierarchy purely based on Western beauty standards and wealth and SO MUCH advertising. It’s not a space where people seek novelty anymore.

I think we are all so burned out with the 24/7 targeted stimulation, i don’t think we really even can identify novelty anymore.

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BC_Raleigh_NC@reddit

Burned out? Who is on the internet 24/7?

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bjb8@reddit

The thing is it was a slow transition, it wasn't easy to feel because it occurred over many years, so personally things didn't change for me suddenly.

However we do have the hindsight to be able to compare before and after. There are advantages and disadvantages to it, which are in these comments.

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BMisterGenX@reddit

I prefer mid level internet life.
Like when if you wanted you could look up a menu online for restaurant before you go but no one expected you to constantly scan qr codes and download apps.

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Appropriatelylazy@reddit

I told millennials I used to hang out with online "you guys were born here, I'm an immigrant."

That's the difference.

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Appropriatelylazy@reddit

I told millennials I used to hang out with online "you guys were born here, I'm an immigrant."

That's the difference

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join-the-line@reddit

It wasn't light switch, it slowly crept into our lives. It wasn't until it was in our hands all of the time that it became all encompassing

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rimshot101@reddit

Early users of the internet were kind of figures of fun and most people thought they should get a life. A friend of mine had a t-shirt that said "WWW.GETALIFE.COM". It was a riff on these new "web addresses" that the nerds were on about.

Now, I'm looking forward to being wheeled out in front of school kids to tell them about the before times.

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SpaceAdventures3D@reddit

In terms of societal shifts, these are a few things that stand out.

I. AIM. (AOL Instant Messenger). The mass public starts to text chat each other in real time as an everyday form of casual communication.

II. Online gaming becoming common place. It becomes unnecessary for 2 people to be in the same room to play games together. In some ways that is a freeing and convenient experience, but in other ways it is the start of a trend of societal isolation for many people.

III. Amazon. The destroyer of bookstores, from small independent shops all the way up to the corporate giant Borders. People like the convenience of shopping online, but local economies take a hit as small mom-and-pop shops, sundries stores, small toy stores, comic shops, and even some large chain stores are decimated.

IV. The Drudge Report. This conservative media site took a few years to become massively popular, but it was at the forefront of communicating conservative leaning news, scandals, and conspiracy theories.

V. Geocities and Blogspot. For free, anyone could have a website or a blog. For better and for worse,

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elijuicyjones@reddit

Our experience differed from millennials inasmuch as we were some of the young adults making the internet into businesses that we see today. Millennials were children and some of them went to work for us and changed the world, and some of them went to work in the same baby boomer crucible of fire we did previously.

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RolandOfGilead@reddit

I feel like it gets harder and harder to remember the before times. I got the internet in late 98 at home, although we had it at my work probably 6 months before that. It's sometimes hard to imagine what I did with my time before that. I know I worked, I know I came home, but what then? I guess I went out more in my 20s than I do now, and I probably have replaced a lot of tv with streaming or scrolling on a device.

As for the societal shift, I didn't see it. The thing to remember is that the "internet" or even computer time was a deliberate act, like turning on a TV or popping in a DVD or turning on the radio. Your computer was probably on a desk or a table and if you wanted to do anything internet related, you went there and sat down and when you were done, you moved, but the internet stayed on the desk. I had a cell phone in the late 90s, so that sense of connection came in, but much more limited than what we experience now.

One cultural thing I did notice was that I think internet and computer stuff got lumped in with other age gap kinds of things. Older people had the same dismissive attitude as they did with our music or fashion, that "I don't understand why you kids like this or do this" attitude. I remember my work in maybe 99 or 2000 had a series of paid computer classes, everything from Word to AOL to whatever, and I thought the instructor was going to start openly drinking in the room because of the older people. They were afraid to touch a key, and it seemed like they were almost deliberately refusing to learn or retain the information. Again, that "this isn't for me it's a young people thing" attitude. (To be fair, considering how many older people have fallen into the right wing echo chamber online, maybe it was better when they were resistant.)

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UF1977@reddit

There was an impact, but honestly I didn’t really notice any big shifts in society until smartphones started to proliferate. Until then, time you spent getting online was time dedicated to doing whatever you were doing, whether that was work, porn, or cat memes. It didn’t dominate most people’s every idle moment.

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TemperatureTop246@reddit

The biggest shift happened around 2009-2010... Social media like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, etc. were still relatively young, but engagement was becoming a KPI and driving lots of cash flow. It's only gotten steadily worse over the years. Now, almost ANYTHING you do on the internet is tracked and monetized in some way.

I do remember there being a big problem with popup ads in the late 90's/early 2000's, but it was easy enough to turn off javascript and still have a workable site. Now, most sites won't even load without javascript and 25 different tracking scripts, a paywall, half-page ads, etc. it's frustrating.

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DisastrousMechanic36@reddit

It was wild and exhilarating. Suddenly you’re talking to people all over the world. New ideas and services that have never been possible or suddenly reality. A free flow of ideas and information without the insanity of social media.

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Strong-Piccolo-5546@reddit

I was in college and my political science professor had someone from the geography department teach us how to use a browser since he was the resident expect on the internet.

its cringe worthy embarassing.

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tachophile@reddit

I remember thinking "why would someone buy books on the Internet without being able to look inside when there are bookstores on nearly every block". Amazon books were the first thing I recall being able to buy online and only knew about it because of the billboards and ad trucks driving around the city.

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Brxcqqq@reddit

I think about this a lot. I first began to use the internet in 1993, my first year of college. That was also the time of my first email account. It was a slow burn, and I didn't really began to use the internet all the time until the late 90s, and didn't have regular access at home until 2000. It's been a sea change. For my first extended trip abroad, mid-90s, my mom gave me money to fax a handwritten sheet home once a week.

The internet has destroyed my attention span, and made me stupider. I used to be able to read a novel in a day, curled up with a hardcopy book and reading several hundred pages with few interruptions. I can barely read a news article these days with undivided attention. I used to memorize seven-, and later ten-digit phone numbers, and be able to retrieve them from memory when necessary. Same with addresses, and other sets of data. We used to be able to navigate with nothing more than a paper road atlas, or city map.

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Appropriate-Idea5281@reddit

I bought a 486 computer with a 2800 baud modem from circuit city and the free AOL trial. I remember getting a lot of porn spam and the amazement of being on a website in Russia. I found this game called gemstone which was a mud ( multi user dungeon) which I became addicted to. Unfortunately for me there was no local dialup number and I ended up with 300.00 phone bills.

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cyvaquero@reddit

Media slapped URLs on everything but it didn't change much about day to day for most people. It was more of a slow roll at work and home until the iPhone and then Android introduced ubiquitous internet to the general population.

There were geeks like myself that had Treos/Blackberries before that, but we were very much the minority.

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Ellen6723@reddit

You know the old saying… show me a great fortune and I’ll tell you about a great crime. Internet is no different… Initially most successful / high valued internet companies your eBay / Amazon / PayPal etal derived a competitive advantage over their bricks and mortar contemporaries because their model / platforms avoided charging consumers some state and other taxes. This gave them an unfair competitive advantage to bricks and mortar concerns - impacting particularly mom and pop size businesses. I would argue this enabled / caused much of the consolidation / transformation of retail in the US over the last 25 years.
It really wasn’t until the advent of social media and its widespread adaptation that the internet had the arguably horrifying impacts to our culture and the social fabric of communities. Many of the platforms we use on the regular are just data capture skins to enable those companies to sell consumer data and target consumers.
I have a very distinct memory of pre-internet / pre cell phone life. I think on the one hand information, education, and opportunity are now much more accessible to all… on the downside the internet has brought the death nell to the idea of ‘experts’ and the concept of trusted sources. Pre internet we passed a slew of legislation that benefited a lot of groups - minorities / women / poor people / the elderly… and those things were off the backs of actual mobilized feet on the ground sustained movements. The internet based movements of the last 15 years see gun violence and women’s rights seem to be less efficacious in terms of actual change. But it does allow for greater participation… in the form of the Ukrainian flag or or a black box as your profile picture. :/

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RetroactiveRecursion@reddit

It was new and exciting and cool. Before phones and before widespread broadband, people would run home after work/school to hear the lovely squelch of their modems to check their email and see if Taco Bell/HBO/Waldenbooks had a website yet. I like technology and liked the early internet before it's all we did and before people started using it to bully kids, pretend to believe "alternate facts," and recruit terrorists.

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Praxistor@reddit

It was like the world went coco for coco-coco puffs

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77_Stars@reddit

I think algorithm driven social media is when the cultural shift happened. Life online was still fairly new and exciting up to about the 2010s when smartphones became more available.

Before that it was a web-surfers paradise and forums and chat rooms were popular as social media in earlier internet times. Even Twitter was a fairly fun place up to about 2015 when the algorithm took over. Then it sucked.

I don't like content being curated for me. I also despise big corp having their tentacles all over the www. It used to be a fun, weird and more social place before censorship and big corp got involved.

This is just one Gen X view. I miss the earlier internet but not dialup modems, lol.

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2Dogs3Tents@reddit

I remember going online at the early stage and being able to see a map of the ski trails at Hunter Mountain (NY) and being blown away that this was available "on a computer" lol.

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Deluxe-T@reddit

My friend Jimbob was pulling himself stupid in chat rooms and trying to get us in on the action. It put me off the internet for quite some time. I am no longer friends with Jimbob.

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CitizenChatt@reddit

I spent hours waiting for a little tiny video to download on this super slow Compaq computer. 😕

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fuzzypotatopeel72@reddit

Everyone and their dog was trying to get people to invest in the next big browser. Most lost it all.

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Subject-Ad-8055@reddit

It wasn't this night and day shift it was kind of a slow adaptation of the new technologies. I do remember a point where I was in a mall and I looked around and I saw a lot of teenagers staring at what we called crack berries phones and I remember that being kind of a wow moment to me but other than that it was very just slight and subtle they were some cool moments like when we discover we could go and get money from a machine sitting in front of a business stuff like that.

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EdwardBliss@reddit

In the mid 90s, around the time of Netscape and Geocities, the idea of posting on message forums was magical

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Helenesdottir@reddit

And a personal homepage you could share with friends.

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Sea-Percentage-1992@reddit

I think you expect to have the answer to everything now. ‘Oh I’ll just Google that’. Whereas before random facts and trivia would require a trip to the library, so you’d likely not bother. I’m not sure if that means my head is now full of stupid facts and trivia, as opposed to more sought out in depth knowledge than before.

d.

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Purple-Haze-11@reddit

Chat rooms were fun as hell

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bm1949@reddit

College 93-98. I learned more about the internet before and after college than I did during college.

Napster taught us about downloading files. Then we grew up about it all, collectively.

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MarquisInLV@reddit

There was no noticeable shift until smartphones and social media became widespread. You could only use internet at home so people were still present in social situations and not constantly distracted. Misinformation was less of a problem too. There were always crackpot corners of the internet, but it wasn’t amplified all over the place.

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bearrito_grande@reddit

Such a great point! The necessity of having to be on a desktop was a significant factor in maintaining pre-internet social interactions, though they were beginning to wane as some people found web-based outlets for recreational companionship. The introduction of Web 2.0, where the user-generated content and social media…well, for me that was the real game changer. Shit went off the rails at that point and hasn’t been the same since. YouTube, for example, used to be a lot of corporate content. Movie trailers, clips, comedy skits from networks and their offshoots, and artists promoting their wares, musical or otherwise. Web 2.0 introduced YouTube clips from anyone and everyone. It wasn’t just YouTube though. Almost everything changed. Even the most corporate of sites provided for increased customer interaction and commentary.

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Specialist-Box4677@reddit

It was weird before the Internet. But in a cool way. If you didn't exactly know a fact, and nor did your friend, you'd just argue about it for ages. You very rarely had both sides of an argument unless you knew someone with a different point of view. It's so fucking wild to me that even though we could all now argue both sides of anything if pushed, the world has never been more polemic because we've all decided we have The One True Version of Events, and a community of people to feel right with. Having all the world's knowledge has driven us into corners. Who saw that coming?

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RiffRandellsBF@reddit

Yes, pre internet I had no idea that people could get railed by horses. Post internet videos of that very thing were sent around like crazy. At least we were adults when this stuff showed up.

Millennials are probably depressed because they've known since they've known about this icky crap their whole lives. They never had an time of innocence like we did. I feel sorry for them.

On balance, the Internet has done more good than harm. But that's only recently when the good became apparent. In the beginning, it was societal cancer.

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

In the beginning, it was societal cancer.

it was?! I just rememerr it being a complete free for all, you had to deliberately seek out what you wanted, then talk to actual people on message boards. I made loads of friends in various music scenes that way.

Now its all just whatever the algorithm gives people on their feeds and wanting clicks for $ and bots trying to influence elections. It feels waaaay more cancerous now than then...

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

you had to deliberately seek out what you wanted

Not if it was goatse. The original rickroll.

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

where even is .cx?

quarter of a century later and Ive still no idea where Goatse.cx was.

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

So in 1999, a hacker and Hick associate who used the handle Merl1n registered Goatse.cx “for the purpose of trolling,” according to a person familiar with the early days of the site. The meaning of the domain has been hotly debated... “Honestly, no one talked about the meaning of Goatse so I’m not sure why merl1n chose the name,” said our source. “But with the .cx domain a lot of people pronounced it ‘goat sex’ as well.”

But at the time, the Hick crew knew a dedicated webpage would help them spread the word of Goatse. The unusual .cx domain in particular was a brilliant touch, as it hinted at some undiscovered internet realm.

https://www.dailydot.com/society/goatse-revealed-kirk-johnson/

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

I always assumed it was some small place, like cook islands, a ton of gay stuff was hosted there because then you got the .co.ck, which makes sense.

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

no WAY is that still their domain 💀

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

pretty sure it is, Im a kiwi, I know people from there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ck

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

Business organizations! 9-year-old me is DYING

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

if theres anything we have learned over the past 25 years, its that porn is a business...

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RiffRandellsBF@reddit

Downloading a picture of "sunset" from usenet didn't mean you were getting a sunset. Hell, most of the time it meant you were getting something else. A few times it was something utterly horrifying where you couldn't hit "delete" fast enough.

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xtiaaneubaten@reddit

so kind of like a reddit feed then...

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Inamibles@reddit

The internet wasn’t as homogeneous as it is now, it was a digital “Wild West”. And the initial response to its emergence was similar to how we’re all currently speculating where A.I. is about to take us. But to a somewhat lesser extent.

The emergence and uncertainty of A.I. feels like those early days of the internet. And it has some of us thinking “Ok, here we go again. Exactly how is this going to shape society this time?”

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dfh-1@reddit

Early Internet world was full of hope.

Later Internet world was...full of truth. Too many bad actors and too much potential for abuse.

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aj_star_destroyer@reddit

I remember getting on a browser for the first time and surfing the net. I think I looked up how to juggle. I didn’t immediately begin relying on the internet as a source of information. Most every page was homemade back then in the mid 90s. The web was a hodgepodge of random personal pages and troves of very specific content. Big businesses quickly put up websites, but they were pretty primitive at first and just barely starting to create interactive content. I remember someone telling me that Skittles had a website and were giving away free bags of skittles if you went there and registered for their emails.

But the internet developed blindingly fast. By the dotcom boom in the late 90s I was online much more. I had a job with a little business that had created an online html page generator and later got into selling website templates to small businesses that wanted to get online. I participated in several online forums, the precursors to places like Reddit but small enough that they all had pretty tight knit communities. I was there when Radiohead (my favorite band at the time) streamed this quirky broadcast that was mostly Thom dj-ing a bunch of electronic music and the band performing “Knives Out” live. Napster was huge around then and I think that was my first taste of the internet being a place where you could find anything—and that was years before Facebook and YouTube were conceived.

It was like the Wild West back then. So many innovations happening so fast and turning the world from personal computers on LANs that operated largely independently on software from CD-Roms to computers being portals to the World Wide Web. We knew it was huge but no one had quantified it yet and the possibilities seemed endless. The internet was far from being so integrated into our daily lives as it is now. Wifi was just a concept. You couldn’t bring the internet with you. You got online only from a fixed machine that was connected to a modem. You printed out the info you wanted to take with you. Your life was largely offline still while you were out and about. That really was the case until smartphones and cellular data were developed. You were connected only at home or at work if you had an office job.

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SilanceDoGood@reddit

For me, during the query timeframe, the internet was more of a work tool. It wasn’t until the first iPhone came out that my personal usage exponentially expanded.

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shellevanczik@reddit

I programmed the only Apple 11e in the library at my high school in the fall of 1983. There was no instructor nor anything to go on. I spent the next 8 hours constructing a hollow box and making it slice across the screen, screen saver-like.

I was enthralled after that. I truly loved it and wish I kept up with programming, alas.

The early ‘90’s was fun because there was more engagement and more to do. One really had to know what was up in the early days, because the chat rooms exploded! The text was shortened and the lingo could be dense for the uninitiated.

I’ve loved every aspect of the internet and still look forward to seeing what’s coming next!

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velvet42@reddit

I feel like I adapted to it pretty easily. I started college in fall of '94, and that was my first experience with the internet. I dived right into early forms of social media in telnet talkers when I was in school, and then the message boards of the 00's. I wasn't into AOL chat rooms, but I knew other people who were. I admit it took me until my first couple years out of college, but I like to think I developed a healthy skepticism earlier than a lot of my peers, as email forwards and early clickbait (you won't BELIEVE number 4!!!) gained traction in the early 00s

I definitely feel a clear distinction between pre- and post-internet life. As to which I prefer? While I am incredibly grateful to have gone to school before the social media boom, and I would not be heartbroken if facebook shut down tomorrow or, better still, had never existed, I couldn't go back to pre-internet days. I couldn't go back to not having the world at my fingertips. It's not the internet that's bad, it's the cancer of algorithm-driven social media that's bad

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cheesecheeseonbread@reddit

I'd click on a link. A page would start loading. I'd do a chore or get a coffee while waiting for the page to load.

I'd come back & forward jokes to friends over email. Click another link. Go do something else for awhile.

Then I'd watch hamsters dance or look at a page or two of gore on rotten.com.

Then I'd say "fuck this", get high, & go to a show.

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mstermind@reddit

Pre-internet for me ended around 1993. I paid for an email address in 1994, and sent my first email to a library located in a US city with the same name as my home town. They never replied.