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Serious Why 2006 was the last truly great year.

Your username is why I don't rope. Planning to watch Haley's Comet return with a purchased hole. :feelswhere: Kind of suifuel that I need other people to have to mate and create her though, feels cucked.
:feelsYall: godspeed brother :feelzez:
 
Thankfully I eventually figured out how to live without friends.
Once you reach this stage, it's actually quite peaceful.
 
We didn't have internet at home in the 2000s, but I still like to remember that time. Certain sweets I loved to eat and the PlayStation 2 games I enjoyed playing.

I can still remember that I enjoyed playing Flash games in the computer room of our school.
 
Life in 2006 was the same as in 2026 and all were in social media, I don't get this. The only difference is that at least Finland's economy was in shape then, but it all collapsed in 2008 and never recovered. Everyone in my class used this, except me of course:
 
2006 was amazing! I still remember I was watching olympics and didn't had the current struggles of being a old virgin. Back then I could prevent my current state but now I realized i missed the boat.
 
Couldn't fully relate i was a kid back then, and my access to the internet was limited. Only had access for a few months before my parents decide it wasnt worth it and stop paying for it. Only got consistent access a couple of years later we'll after the golden age you guys talk about it. I kinda wish I explored more back then instead of solely focusing on cartoon network or stick games.
 
Also I don't remember arcades being a thing at all in America in 2006 (other than DDR being somewhat popular). To me arcades were dead by the late 90s, but I'm over 40.
I guess it depended on where you lived in America. Where I was living there were still a lot of people who played certain fighting games at arcades in the mid 2000s. Also depended on what day of the week and what time of day you went. Obviously arcades had been on the decline for many years by 2006, but at the arcade I went to, if you went on the weekend in the afternoon or early evening there'd be people playing on the MVC2 or Third Strike cabinets. But when Street Fighter 4 came out in 2008, the fighting game arcade scene was completely dead. Thankfully capcom at least released online versions of those 2 games in the late 2000s/early2010s.

Several of my friends worked at the arcade I went to and they said most of the money the arcade made was from 4 cabinets: MVC2, Third Strike, PIU and DDR. It was like the 80/20 rule but with arcade machines. And you had cabinets that would go like a week without a single person putting a coin in. Somehow the arcade stayed in business up until like 2013 even though for the last 5 years it was a total ghost town with most of the machines not even paying for the electricity they used. And most of the hours they worked there in the last 5 years they didn't even generate enough money to pay their hourly (minimum)wage. They'd joke that the arcade was being used for money laundering. It might have been. Very cushy job though. I tried to get a job there for years but they never needed to hire anyone because from 2006 to 2013 not a single person quit. Having a job that cushy is like sitting on a rent controlled apartment in Manhattan that you got back in the 80s. You'd cling to it for dear life and never let go.
 
I didn't get to experience 2006 much since i was a kid
 
born too late jfl. Stuck in zoomer purgatory
 
Facebook has more or less replaced the village square as the no.1 place where communities will discuss what's going on.
Maybe for boomers, but these days for young people (and even millennials) Tiktok, Reddit and Twitter are far more popular. Zoomers think Facebook is a "boomer site", and they're not entirely wrong. Most zoomers have a facebook account, but they just rarely ever use it. Even for a lot of my old friends, I look at their facebook account and their last update was from years ago.

If Meta hadn't acquired Instagram they'd be in a world of trouble and would probably be going the way of AOL, especially when you factor in the failure of "the metaverse" and the fact that Meta's AI (Llama) isn't even in the top 8. Not only are the 4 frontier labs (openAI, Google, xai, Anthropic) way ahead of them, they're getting beat by models like deepseek, kimi and qwen. And with their star player Yann Lecun gone the chances of them ever being relevant in AI went from slim to none.

the time Aaron Swartz killed himself. I'd take a free internet over anything else personally.
I'm no conspiracy theorist but if someone came to the conclusion he didn't actually kill himself, I'd understand. Hell I'd say that has a solid 20 percent chance of being the case.

But either way, regardless of what you think about the Reddit model, what happened to Swartz was a massive miscarriage of justice. They tried to give him 35 to 50 years in prison just for hacking MIT and downloading academic articles. Not even like top secret classified government files, just fucking academic articles. Prosecutors usually don't even try giving pedos or murderers sentences like that, at least not for first time offenders.

He got charged federally too, and federal courts have something like a 95 percent conviction rate. So I can see why he'd be motivated to kill himself, but at the same time the government clearly wanted to get rid of him...
 
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Based, I miss the early 2000s. Today is ass.
 
I just miss the internet of the 2000s. Normies didn't have as much of an online presence. Not as many people carried smart phones in their pockets and the web was tailored more for desktop computers. Social media hadn't fully taken off and online communities were more quaint and dedicated. There wasn't as much censorship and privacy/anonymity was respected. The atmosphere of the internet was more optimistic as there were far fewer culture wars. And above all, there there weren't any predatory dating apps.

The internet was once a true frontier that was built for nerds and geeks. It was a true golden age. Normies sacked the internet like the barbarians sacked Rome. Everything is more cynical, dumb and obnoxious now after the normification of the internet.
 
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Those times were better simply because there were neither smartphones nor dating (fuck) apps, and above all, this damn "wokeness" of today was completely unknown.

The internet was practically a lawless space, and you could troll on numerous forums/communities until you were blacker than a nigger from Central Africa. :feelskek:
People were generally more normal and had a better sense of humor. You actually saw humans on the street, instead of all those smartphone zombies with broccoli-haircuts.

Yes, you could even still see Germans regularly!

On YouTube, you could post absolutely any crap and hurl insults at other niggas in the comments. And you actually interacted with people there!
Surely at least half of the comments today are posted by bots.

Yes, I much preferred that time, and I would say that at least in Germany it was like that until about the end of the decade, maybe even a little longer.

In den 2010ern fing die Scheiße so langsam aber sicher endgültig richtig zu dampfen an. (In the 2010s, things slowly but surely started to get really bad.)
They banned my accounts where I had uploaded a massive amount of RAC.
And suddenly terms like "hate speech" appeared.
 
I was 1 year old :feelsrope: :feelsrope:
 
Near 26 year old Zillenialoomer who was on the Internet very early on (since 2002-2003). I'll give my thoughts.
1) 2007 was when "social media" really began taking off. Facebook opened up to the general public, twitter started blowing up in popularity and Tumblr was created this year. Yes, social media was around in 2006, like myspace and friendster (and facebook existed then but it was only for college students) 2007 was the year social media really blew up.
Honestly understandable, though I would argue at that point it was still in its infancy and therefore a lot of guys who were LTN-MTN were still able to get foids and the real brainrot didn't happen until a bit after smartphones were made. Foids weren't able to play Pick-A-Chad like they do now for sure.
2) 2007 was also the year 4chan slowly started to decline in quality. 4chan started getting media coverage like the Fox News piece about it being an "internet hate machine" and 2007 was the year "project chanology" started. Both of these things brought in newfags that slowly changed the vibe. 4chan was still fun in 2007, but it wasn't the same as 2006.
Lol, that's how I found it when I first started lurking the 'chan in 2007. Some high school kid close-ish to me posted a bomb threat and got doxxed through 4chan and my local station did an entire news piece on it. I honestly have no clue how different it was before then, but around the Trump election, holy shit, the zeitgeist became gigaraped and 4chan started to became troon-op central. That's when it was starting to become unbearable to use. I literally just post on /vr/ every now and then and that's it.
3) The iphone came out in 2007. This planted the seeds for 24/7 connectivity and ultimately lead to the internet being designed around smartphones as opposed to desktop users.
100% agreed, though everyone I knew was still using flip phones until 2010-2011. Very rarely saw people with smartphones before 2010.
4) Digg started blowing up in popularity in 2007 which created the updoot/downdoot "hivemind" culture that Reddit (it's spiritual successor) would weaponize.
Barely remember Digg and honestly never got the point of it, but agreed with this.
5) The "2008 recession" technically started in late 2007. Several companies did hiring freezes that year, getting a job became more difficult, and the economic optimism of the mid 2000s evaporated.
Honestly too young for this as well to really remember what the job market was like but agreed. My parents sold their house for pennies on the dollar back then and never bought a house again after that, the recession turned them into lifelong rentoids.
Then there was forum culture. Back in 2006, small, independently hosted forums (like this one) were where most discussion took place. Every forum had it's own culture and you were expected to assimilate to that culture. Outsiders who came in and tried to change the culture (or just refused to assimilate) were considered the bad guys, but now it's reversed and "gatekeeping" is now a word that has an almost universal negative connotation.
Tbh I'm hit or miss on this one. I definitely understand reasons to gatekeep, but I remember being too intimidated to make forum accounts on sites like Resetera and IGN when I was younger because I would lurk and see some of the "power users" back then acting like dickwads and having metaphorical dick measuring contests, and cause drama with other users over menial bullshit.

Though honestly that's probably most gaming and tech related forums today, still. I don't go on those that much.

I would definitely say forums like this one are the perfect combination of gatekeeping and being friendly towards the main userbase. The majority of spaces that stopped gatekeeping completely (pre-Aaron Swartz death Reddit, pre-2016 4chan, probably more I could think of) turned into unrecognizable shitholes.
And that brings me to my next point. Back in 2006, people posted on the internet because they wanted to express themselves, wanted to discuss something they genuinely cared about, or wanted to connect with others. The rise of social media changed all that. Now most people just want to craft a reputation for themselves, farm engagement, virtue signal, or push an agenda of some sort.
Trvth. Fucking. Nvke.
Not only that, but these days apparently sending someone you don't know a DM is considered "weird" and "creepy". If you DM someone these days you need to have a good reason to. But back on the old internet these barriers didn't exist. A lot of the online friends I made back in the day were from either me randomly messaging them, or them randomly messaging me because I posted my MSN/YiM/AIM on a forum or in a guestbook.
Yeah I agree, I never understood this either. A lot of niggers online, especially late Zoomers and foids, act like you are forcibly shoving your penis into their orifices when you DM them. I've made quite a few friends through just randomly DMing people as well, though these days I'm pretty asocial tbh.
And it's not just the internet that was better, it was real life too. People were generally more friendly and extroverted. "Third places" were still common. 2006 was sort of the tail end of mall and arcade culture. Arcades had technically been dying for a long time, but there was still an active arcade scene if you were into fighting games or DDR/PIU. By the late 2000s, arcades were becoming ghost towns, and so were malls. Online shopping and online gaming made these things "obsolete", but the rise of these things and the deaths of the third places like malls and arcades are a large reason why people are so unsocial, terminally online, hyper-introverted, isolated, and atomized today.
I remember when my local mall had a small arcade with Tekken 3 and DDR cabs along with one of my favorites which was Arctic Thunder. Believe they also got in a F&F Tokyo Drift cab one day as well (my local movie theatre also had this one), but I remember it always being out of service. They tore the entire section of that mall down in 2014 and got rid of all of the arcade cabs in 2011 or 2012. It was highkey heartbreaking.

Almost all of the malls in my current area are dying. There is one active popular mall in my area, but it has spots of high crime, especially after 6 PM. It's filled with hoodlums and wiggers roaming. I'm new-ish to the area I am in but it only became like this after COVID. The last time I went (2024) there were wiggers in the parking lot beefing over a foid and they were about to fight each other.

I honestly wish I could time travel back to this time and be back in Texas. Even with my current stats as a LLTN-MLTN I would have probably been able to easily bag a cute alt chick at the mall instead of being a near 26 year old incel. I was born at least a decade too late.
 
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On a related note, I have noticed that zoomers (or at least certain subcultures within this demographic) have been attempting to revive sites/services they never had a chance to utilize (spacehey, neocities, escargot, etc.). I think this speaks volumes to how impactful/fun the "golden age" of the Internet was prior to social media becoming more siloed (i.e. Discord servers that you cannot even view unless you join the community) and "big tech" limiting users' creative expression in favor of (what they perceive to be) ease of use.
A lot of my old Zoomer/young Millennial friends do this, myself included, I've made a few Neocities sites over the years. A lot of us were around when these sites were a thing and definitely saw and browsed through them, but a bit too young to actually make something like a personal Geocities site.
 
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Good high effort thread OP.

Some of the upsides of being a ruralcel are that our community took a bit longer to "modernize" like the rest of America, so even around 2009-2010, smartphones just weren't that widespread, and generally, most people didn't really mess with the internet.
 
2007 was also the beginning of 'Casual gaming,' where games had to appeal to everybody. The 360 and PS3 caused a massive influx of normies into the medium, which led to all the unique rough edges getting sanded off most games. That's why so many games started feeling the same.

It was also the start of the DLC homosexualry, microtransaction dogshit, and all the other cancers that came with it.
 
2007 was also the beginning of 'Casual gaming,' where games had to appeal to everybody. The 360 and PS3 caused a massive influx of normies into the medium, which led to all the unique rough edges getting sanded off most games. That's why so many games started feeling the same.

It was also the start of the DLC homosexualry, microtransaction dogshit, and all the other cancers that came with it.
Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007 for instance; whereas the previous installments were all singleplayer-minded, this one had a multiplayer that normies adored because it was stupid chaotic fun. Give one of these fools a Rainbow Six game and see what they do with it.

Honestly, probably the last game I've played that wasn't from 20+ years ago that was fun was Dying Light, and it's because it's damn fun parkouring around and slaying zombies, and it's a pretty decent singleplayer experience. But there's way too much slop nowadays. Just look at the fucking steam marketplace, games literally look like clones of each other. I'm no old head but damn, I see it.
 
I'm no conspiracy theorist but if someone came to the conclusion he didn't actually kill himself, I'd understand. Hell I'd say that has a solid 20 percent chance of being the case.

But either way, regardless of what you think about the Reddit model, what happened to Swartz was a massive miscarriage of justice. They tried to give him 35 to 50 years in prison just for hacking MIT and downloading academic articles. Not even like top secret classified government files, just fucking academic articles. Prosecutors usually don't even try giving pedos or murderers sentences like that, at least not for first time offenders.

He got charged federally too, and federal courts have something like a 95 percent conviction rate. So I can see why he'd be motivated to kill himself, but at the same time the government clearly wanted to get rid of him...
He was driven to suicide 100%. Idk whether he got "suicided" or not but it doesn't really matter, the end result is the same, he's dead and we lost an advocate for piracy, encryption, safety measures, anonymity, open source code and freedom of access to culture. Don't give a shit about reddit, I haven't witnessed its ascension to stardom but all I know is, they closed r/jailbait after Swartz died. So there's that.

The case was mishandled because imo someone wanted to get rid of him, obviously. The agenda was clear even from 15-20 years ago, regarding the direction the internet had to take.
 
Good high effort thread OP.

Some of the upsides of being a ruralcel are that our community took a bit longer to "modernize" like the rest of America, so even around 2009-2010, smartphones just weren't that widespread, and generally, most people didn't really mess with the internet.
so how those "most people" paid their bills? Travelling to the bank to pay bills in 2010?

Online-banking forced everyone to have a computer and Internet-connection soon after 2000 where I live. The banks simply closed and the fees became exorbitant to force people paying their bills at home using a computer and Internet instead of travelling to the bank. And for a long time now it is simply not possible to pay bills in a bank unless you live in Tampere or Helsinki (Danske Bank). You can't even get cash unless in Tampere or Helsinki and only 3 days a week and in those days only during 2 hour window (long queue, so you probably would still fail).
 
2007 was also the beginning of 'Casual gaming,' where games had to appeal to everybody. The 360 and PS3 caused a massive influx of normies into the medium, which led to all the unique rough edges getting sanded off most games. That's why so many games started feeling the same.

It was also the start of the DLC homosexualry, microtransaction dogshit, and all the other cancers that came with it.
2007 was the beginning of 'Casual gaming,'???!! What is casual gaming? What the fuck? You are completely clueless.

PS1 and PS2 sold way more than PS3 and most players were casuals. PS1 and PS2 also had way more licenced games, like every movie had an official game with it, usually very bad, but so called casuals bought them without reading any reviews. Now we don't even have an official video-game for winter or even summer Olympics any more, not even official football/soccer World Cup game. Back in the day we had official video-games even for Champions League seasons. No official, licenced WRC game any more!

You are also completely clueless about the start of extra paid content for games. It started much earlier on computers and on Xbox also. PS2 online did not have a store like Xbox and online was free and one needed to make an account for every game.

Japanese gamers will pay five yen per minute.
 
2007 was the beginning of 'Casual gaming,'???!! What is casual gaming? What the fuck? You are completely clueless.

PS1 and PS2 sold way more than PS3 and most players were casuals. PS1 and PS2 also had way more licenced games, like every movie had an official game with it, usually very bad, but so called casuals bought them without reading any reviews. Now we don't even have an official video-game for winter or even summer Olympics any more, not even official football/soccer World Cup game. Back in the day we had official video-games even for Champions League seasons. No official, licenced WRC game any more!
You’re the clueless one. It’s not that casual players didn’t exist before, it's that AAA games started getting dumbed down for them in the 360 / PS3 era. Stuff like hand holding every step, cinematic spectacle, and stripped down mechanics to make these games safe for the widest audience.

You are also completely clueless about the start of extra paid content for games. It started much earlier on computers and on Xbox also. PS2 online did not have a store like Xbox and online was free and one needed to make an account for every game.
That’s irrelevant. Microtransactions on the original Xbox were niche and barely affected game design. The real shift happened in the 360/PS3 era. Also, old PC addons were full expansions, not chopped up DLC, which mostly sells pieces cut out of the main game.
 
i wish i was born 10 years sooner so i could properly experience the 2000's internet, sure i did but it was mostly in 2008-2009 which was the tails end
 
2006 was the final year when there was some good British music. The likes of Arctic Monkeys, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, Keane, Snow Patrol, Kasabian, Muse all dominated the UK charts that year. But that nasty Jew Simon Cowell wanted to erase all music incels liked and his nasty plan succeeded. Since 2009 all music has been only for foids, chads, fags and niggers. There is no music anymore for sub 5 men to enjoy and that nasty Jew Simon Cowell caused all this.
 
It’s not that casual players didn’t exist before, it's that AAA games started getting dumbed down for them in the 360 / PS3 era. Stuff like hand holding every step, cinematic spectacle, and stripped down mechanics to make these games safe for the widest audience.
Examples?

First, nobody even talked about "AAA" games since only physical games existed and no digital distribution of games (which allowed much smaller game-projects on consoles to be released). Even many PS3 games were/are still disc-only. You are saying that official Disney games on the PS1 were NOT hand-holding and had complex mechanics? Are you aware that old consoles' controllers had way less buttons? But still somehow were more complex to play. Of course no cinematic spectacle was possible and budgets were way lower and games were released more frequently, like Naughty Dog releasing a new so called AAA game in ten and a half months (Crash Bandicoot 3). Compare how they will only release one game on PS5 in the same year as the PS6 is planned to be released (2027).

Have you even played console games before the release of PS3 and X360?

NES games are difficult, but that is because games were very short, no saving, to make them artificially longer and better value for money. Jak and Daxter 2 on the PS2 is a very difficult and frustrating game. But the first Jak and Daxter is not difficult. Jak 3 was made less difficult because of criticism that Jak 2 was too difficult (and no way of making it easier, no difficulty settings or any options to make it easier). So maybe that counts as "getting dumbed down", but the first Jak game is the easiest, so oldest game is the most "dumbed down". I don't know whether they made Jak 2 easier on the PS3 re-release, or/and PS4 release, does it even have a PS5 version? Original PS2 disc-version (at least PAL version which I have) is super difficult to progress past certain missions with modern TVs that have input lag, back then we only had CRTs without input lag, so playing on the PS2 with modern TV is not fun. Maybe the re-releases made the game easier to compensate for input lag of flat-panel TVs. PS1 has a lot of super easy games (very dumbed down), often without any difficulty settings (like was typical in the past). So called accessibility options have come to the fore because of the Game Awards pushing them and the need to appeal to the widest possible audience, but they are options only and off by default.

My general issue here on this site is the exaggeration of how things were so different in the (not so distant) past when they weren't.

By the way, when old console games were broken, full of bugs etc. they were not getting patched, but today almost all modern games (even those without any micro-transactions and paid DLC) receive at least an update or two to make them better after wide-scale testing by the players reveals new problems that were not seen in internal testing before release. Sometimes a game had a new print with bugs fixed or new release. European release with fewer bugs than Japanese, earlier release. So that was worse situation back then. People expect now continuing support, updates, patches, more content, so micro-transactions or something has to pay for it. Or just release a full game and leave it at that. Some do that still, but people don't buy games anymore like they used to. Kids of today just play free-to-play games on their smartphones and complain if a game costs even 5 euros and automatically think all games are free (like they unfortunately are on the phones, but that came because paid phone games were not selling or were pirated so to combat piracy all games were made free-to-play with micro-transactions).
 
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dnr most of that wall of diarrhea. Your preachy tone is annoying as fuck.

My general issue here on this site is the exaggeration of how things were so different in the (not so distant) past when they weren't.
I don’t need more than that sentence to see you’re talking BS like a typical normie.

Imagine being 36 and saying that things weren't diferent back then, when you literally lived through it jfl. I lived trough it and clearly remember how much better shit actually was.
 
1) 2007 was when "social media" really began taking off. Facebook opened up to the general public, twitter started blowing up in popularity and Tumblr was created this year. Yes, social media was around in 2006, like myspace and friendster (and facebook existed then but it was only for college students) 2007 was the year social media really blew up.
2007 wasn't the breaking point when immediately everything went to shit. There was a miniscule increment 2006 -> 2007 in metrics you'd point to when it comes to enshittification.
2) 2007 was also the year 4chan slowly started to decline in quality. 4chan started getting media coverage like the Fox News piece about it being an "internet hate machine" and 2007 was the year "project chanology" started. Both of these things brought in newfags that slowly changed the vibe. 4chan was still fun in 2007, but it wasn't the same as 2006.
Please stop pretending like you posted in 2007. Most of this website's active users were barely conscious in 2007, let alone posters on the chinz in 2007. Everything you hear about that period is just 3rd hand impression. It's incredibly rare to find 2007 posters now even among 4channers. I know a few, the true degradation of site was around 2012, and complete metamorphosis to boomer central retardfest in 2016. Ironically, the site is better now than it was around 2018.
3) The iphone came out in 2007. This planted the seeds for 24/7 connectivity and ultimately lead to the internet being designed around smartphones as opposed to desktop users.
Iphone is another myth, phoneposting started plaguing sites in latter half of 2010s. Iphone being a thing arguably didn't even do anything for years and years. Everybody just likes to point to a specific year and proclaim everything was doom afterwards.
I wouldn't pick 2008 because of the recession nor any year past that because the damage had already been done.
2008 recession was the biggest inflection point of history in past 3 decades, including covid. Above 9/11. The one event before that, that beats it is fall of Soviet Union. Some dumb gadgets being a thing, social medial being in its infancy or a cringe fox report have nothing on 2008.
2006 was near the end of the "old internet" but it also had the benefit of having high speed internet and youtube. If you're under the age of 35, you probably don't appreciate how revolutionary youtube was. Prior to youtube, video content on the internet was scarce and scattered. You had to really look for them and download them. Then youtube came along and it was a site where you could upload videos about absolutely anything, for free, and you could watch them without having to download them. Back then there was no monetization for youtube. People made channels and just posted videos about stuff they liked and genuinely cared about. Monetization and the rise of "e-celebrity" culture ruined all that.
Rise of e-celeb culture started around 2010. RWJ and Smosh being the first true e-celebs on the site. You have outliers like Fred and nigahiga, but the monetization model that eventually led to what youtube started around 2010.

And that brings me to my next point. Back in 2006, people posted on the internet because they wanted to express themselves, wanted to discuss something they genuinely cared about, or wanted to connect with others. The rise of social media changed all that. Now most people just want to craft a reputation for themselves, farm engagement, virtue signal, or push an agenda of some sort.

2006 was about the last year where "the internet" and "real life" were two truly completely separate things. What happened on the internet didn't matter in real life whatsoever. But the late 2000s is when I started noticing the internet slowly creeping into real life, especially youth culture. 2007 is when I first started hearing internet lingo in real life. I'd hear people use internet memes and references like "epic win/fail" and "needs more cowbell" in real life from time to time. It didn't bother me at all back then, in fact I thought it was funny, but in hindsight I realize that the internet merging with real life ironically ended up ruining both the internet and real life.
Hmm, perhaps i'll grant you this.

I'd pick 2008 as the last truly good year. For obvious reasons. There's a lot of moving parts that contribute to the hell we are in. Perhaps if we focused on one aspect, like dating we could narrow it down further.
 
Please stop pretending like you posted in 2007. Most of this website's active users were barely conscious in 2007
I'm 40 years old. I was a grown man in 2007. I started posting on 4chan sometime between late 2005 and early 2006. I was mostly a /b/tard back then.

And used the internet long before then. I was posting on gameFAQs back in 2000. I had a neopets acccount back when it came out back in like 2000. I was using newgrounds when it was new and relevant. And I was posting on guestbooks (some of which functioned as a pseudo-forum) on fanpages hosted on angelfire and geocities back in the late 90s.

So yeah I am in fact speaking from personal experience.

Also maybe I didn't word the OP properly. I didn't mean to imply that 2007 was a bad year. It was good in a lot of ways and I have a lot of nostalgia for that year. The internet was still fun back then too. It's just too many bad seeds were planted that year to call it "truly great". The damage that was done in 2007 was subtle enough that I didn't really notice it at the time, only in hindsight.

I'd say the year the internet really started going to shit was 2012/2013. 2007-2011 was a slow burn. Then 2012/2013 was a freefall. That's when Tumblr politics took over the internet and started infecting real life and when cancel culture started.

phoneposting started plaguing sites in latter half of 2010s.
I don't know where you live, but where I lived at the time, everyone had smartphones by 2012. I got my first smartphone in late 2012 and even back then then I was considered a late adapter. One of my friends was even like "you finally got a smartphone?"
 
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I would say 2007 was the year the seeds were planted for making the internet as bad as it is today but I wouldn't call it bad year by any metric, In hindsight when I got onto the internet in 2009 I was experiencing the last dying gasps of the old internet it makes me wish I was born earlier so I could experience what the internet was like before the normalfags invaded, I kind of got the experience as normalfags weren't fully invading every website but I was a young kid when I experienced it. All this to say I might be biased but the old internet didn't really die until around 2013/14.
 
All this to say I might be biased but the old internet didn't really die until around 2013/14.
Yeah, admittedly a lot of this is subjective based on when you started using the internet.

If you ask a Gen X usenet user, the old internet died in 1993 when eternal september happened. They'd argue that 80s born millennials like me ruined the internet. If you ask someone born in 2000, they'd say the old internet died when Tumblr died off back in like 2018.

For me, geocities/maxpages/angelfire fanpages were a core part of what I think of when I think of the "old internet". Those completely died off by the late 2000s.
 
Honestly I agree with this. I struggle a lot to cope with how the world has changed around me so much since then.
 
you’re talking BS like a typical normie
what is BS? I mean you mean bullshit. So you mean that I provided wrong information. What is factually wrong? BTW, I agree that Internet is way worse now that everything is made for phones and not desktop computers. I am very far from being a normie, though I am not sure what you mean by that.

In general, I think great times ended when WW1 started. Income taxes, welfare states and women's right to vote happened. I oppose inflation politics also.
 
Videos before YouTube were a problem because they were heavy files and speeds back then were extremely slow. I started connecting to the internet with a 14,400-baud modem, and it was excruciating. There was a video format called RealVideo, and it looked awful because of how pixelated it was. Another one was RealAudio, for music, which was also terrible because of its poor quality.

Back then you had to make an effort to find things, which is why there were more communities — not like now, when social networks hand everything to you prepackaged and want you to visit certain pages or follow certain people. Page counters, guestbooks, web rings — all of that no longer exists. Even Usenet, which was quite decent for debates since most groups weren’t censored, was replaced by the dreadful Reddit.

For me, everything went downhill with the appearance of that stupid movie “The Blair Witch Project,” when they used the Internet to run a fake campaign to promote it. There’s a before and after: the cultured internet and the dumb internet that expanded to this day. I always felt that’s when the dumbing-down of the internet began.
 
On YouTube, you could post absolutely any crap and hurl insults at other niggas in the comments.
Not the case anymore. Once I commented "retarded whore" at a foid who "deconstructed" religion and became an atheist (a hedonist in reality), and the comment got removed.

I've also said "GTFO" to a normie who bragged about his girlfriend, and it got removed. So YouTube's comment section is sterilized and censored.
 
Of course I was born in 2006 so :feelskek:
 
In 2006, I was 23/24. I was an incel then. I was an incel before. I'm still an incel now.

Life as I knew it was no different back then, despite allegedly having less challenges.
 
Not the case anymore. Once I commented "retarded whore" at a foid who "deconstructed" religion and became an atheist (a hedonist in reality), and the comment got removed.

I've also said "GTFO" to a normie who bragged about his girlfriend, and it got removed. So YouTube's comment section is sterilized and censored.
This is now done automatically by AI.
I'm phrasing my comments rather carefully, but I'm still more or less shadowbanned.
Aside from that, it's already full of with bots anyway.
JooTube is dead
 
Great post. I unfortunately never got to experience the early ages of the internet (only about as early as 2012, but it was far gone at that point) or a life where everyone wasnt socially retarded. But i came to this conclusion myself after reading old GameFAQ posts for help on old games i play. I was surprised at how friendly people were toward each other, none of that irony bs you mentioned. It’s so unfortunate large companies ruined the internet by letting normies slowly infiltrate. The nail in the coffin was fs the smartphone. Once everyone had the internet at their fingertips, it was no longer a place for social outcasts and “nerds” to post freely amongst each other.
monetization model that eventually led to what youtube started around 2010.
The internet is now optimized around profit. You cant even search for the video you want on JewTube without it giving the same top earning posts
 
what is BS? I mean you mean bullshit. So you mean that I provided wrong information. What is factually wrong? BTW, I agree that Internet is way worse now that everything is made for phones and not desktop computers. I am very far from being a normie, though I am not sure what you mean by that.

In general, I think great times ended when WW1 started. Income taxes, welfare states and women's right to vote happened. I oppose inflation politics also.
A lot of it is nostalgia. Early internet users miss the tight knit communities that existed on obscure forums. But it was definitely harder to cope back then, which is why i honestly agree. You had to wait almost a full day sometimes to torrent a full season of an anime in 360p because of internet speeds and/or small amount of seeders.
 
The internet is now optimized around profit. You cant even search for the video you want on JewTube without it giving the same top earning posts
I actually have some background in search algorithms. Youtube doesn't even use keyword search unless you basically word for word spell out the title. Everything is a recommendation algorithm, even if you search for something specifically. It probably only fetches like 5 results from a keyword/semantic layer and rest is algorithmslop
 

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