Mid-late 2000's internet was the best time for the web.
June 9, 2020 at 12:25 pm
(This post was last modified: June 9, 2020 at 12:25 pm by Mechaghostman2.)
The internet of the 90's was mostly a time that was best for computer geeks, perhaps. Webcams of coffee pots, chat sites, Yahoo search engine, e-mailing memes to a select group of people, and those web designs that are amusing by today's standards. That said, it also took like, 5 minutes to connect and 2 minutes to load a page, and you better hope that nobody makes a phone call when you're loading that 30 second low resolution video of some chick being banged.
The 2000's is when we saw true creativity blossom. While Newgrounds started in the 90's, it really started taking off in the early 2000's, allowing for a lot of creativity with amateur animators. I'm currently looking into vlare.tv since it has an early YouTube vibe, as early YouTube was better than what it has become now. Back then, it was more than just a video hosting site. It was a social media site. You could add friends, send personal messages, even customize your page with background images and custom colors. In fact, the profiles back then were very similar to MySpace back in those old days. Remember MySpace? Where you could customize your page with custom backgrounds, music, embedded YouTube videos, etc.?
Speaking of YouTube, beyond the point of it being a social media site, it was actually YOU tube. It was a bunch of unpolished videos of people just uploading themselves talking in front of a camera, or random fail videos, or people being creative with stop motion animation using themselves as puppets, or Mario in the real world (anyone remember that one?) and on and on it goes. Now it's Stephen Colbert complaining about Trump. I mean ok, I don't like Trump either, and Colbert is funny enough, but I can just watch that on TV. This is not what YouTube is about, or at least, it's not what it used to be about. It used to be original content. Some of it was kind of semi-polished, much of it wasn't, and that was great. Since YouTube allowed for monetization, people moved for the more polished look with clickbait titles and videos that could make even someone with ADHD like myself pay attention. It went from people just talking about or expressing themselves in interesting ways to people just making videos that could get them money, which forever changed the face of YouTube.
Then there's Ultimate-Guitar. Now just a site to get guitar tabs, it too was once a social media site. You couldn't have custom backgrounds, but you could upload your own MP3 files for either music or a demonstration of your skillz, and allow others to rate them, send messages, add friends, have groups, upload images of yourself and your guitar gear, and plus there were forums where people could discuss things too. If you liked someone's music, you could favorite it, and there was even the 5 or so top songs of the week that ended up on there. I was and still am friends with many of the bigger names on that site from back in those days, in fact. Just chatting with them often about music and nonsense. Some of those people had a falling out with the site, and it seems like they actually killed the site in doing so. Then a few years later, all MP3 files were deleted and the ability to upload your own music was taken away. Furthermore, they completely wrecked the format of the profiles on UG somewhat recently. The most you can do there now is put a comment on someone's page and that's it. You can at least upload 1 minute of a 300 MB video to your profile now, though, but that's seriously just not the same. The forums are still going, but the people in the forums are often toxic and I try to avoid them. Hell, UG even used to have its own instant chat for friends to talk to one another on, but they nixed that years ago. The closest you might get to a site dedicated to music like that now is something like Reverbnation or Soundcloud, but it's just not the same.
Facebook in the old days wasn't all that bad. People just posted pictures of food and talked about where they were hanging out at or just whatever. Personally, I used to use it as a replacement for Ultimate-Guitar when all familiar named moved off that site, as they went to Facebook with a group for guitarists. Now though, Facebook is an endless barrage of people posting from CNN or Fox or whatever, and it no longer feels like people are being connected, but rather that people are just yelling at and hating one another for posting news articles or something. I'm trying to spend less time on those bigger sites and more time on the smaller ones where all the toxic nonsense and drama is gone. If I'm going to be addicted to the web, I might as well find some better sites to feed that addiction.
We had more choice and freedom back then. Things were a lot less about corporations trying to make a buck off you and other people selling out to join them, and a lot more about individuals just being themselves. Yes, there were politics injected into things every now and then back in those days, but now it's everywhere. Politics have their place and are important, but I don't always want to think about them. I actually avoided them for a while and was even unaware of the recent riots and what led up to them for about a week, and you know what? It felt good. I wasn't as stressed out.
Not to mention, your information is no longer private and is being sold to ad companies. Plus freedom of speech is so heavily regulated on the more popular sites now. I'm still on a 30 day ban on Facebook because I said "She thinks that trans people are evil" because someone commented that the person thinks evil things are trans. We were just discussing a screenshot of someone saying some stupid things about trans people and flat earth or something. Because you know, context isn't important, right?
I hate what the big sites have become, honestly. They were cool back in the day, but now they're not even worth it. It's either disconnect from the web entirely, or stay connected on smaller sites. The smaller sites don't connect you to as many people though, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the normies and corporations can keep the big sites to themselves, while the people tired of that crap find refuge in the smaller and less controlled sites.
The 2000's is when we saw true creativity blossom. While Newgrounds started in the 90's, it really started taking off in the early 2000's, allowing for a lot of creativity with amateur animators. I'm currently looking into vlare.tv since it has an early YouTube vibe, as early YouTube was better than what it has become now. Back then, it was more than just a video hosting site. It was a social media site. You could add friends, send personal messages, even customize your page with background images and custom colors. In fact, the profiles back then were very similar to MySpace back in those old days. Remember MySpace? Where you could customize your page with custom backgrounds, music, embedded YouTube videos, etc.?
Speaking of YouTube, beyond the point of it being a social media site, it was actually YOU tube. It was a bunch of unpolished videos of people just uploading themselves talking in front of a camera, or random fail videos, or people being creative with stop motion animation using themselves as puppets, or Mario in the real world (anyone remember that one?) and on and on it goes. Now it's Stephen Colbert complaining about Trump. I mean ok, I don't like Trump either, and Colbert is funny enough, but I can just watch that on TV. This is not what YouTube is about, or at least, it's not what it used to be about. It used to be original content. Some of it was kind of semi-polished, much of it wasn't, and that was great. Since YouTube allowed for monetization, people moved for the more polished look with clickbait titles and videos that could make even someone with ADHD like myself pay attention. It went from people just talking about or expressing themselves in interesting ways to people just making videos that could get them money, which forever changed the face of YouTube.
Then there's Ultimate-Guitar. Now just a site to get guitar tabs, it too was once a social media site. You couldn't have custom backgrounds, but you could upload your own MP3 files for either music or a demonstration of your skillz, and allow others to rate them, send messages, add friends, have groups, upload images of yourself and your guitar gear, and plus there were forums where people could discuss things too. If you liked someone's music, you could favorite it, and there was even the 5 or so top songs of the week that ended up on there. I was and still am friends with many of the bigger names on that site from back in those days, in fact. Just chatting with them often about music and nonsense. Some of those people had a falling out with the site, and it seems like they actually killed the site in doing so. Then a few years later, all MP3 files were deleted and the ability to upload your own music was taken away. Furthermore, they completely wrecked the format of the profiles on UG somewhat recently. The most you can do there now is put a comment on someone's page and that's it. You can at least upload 1 minute of a 300 MB video to your profile now, though, but that's seriously just not the same. The forums are still going, but the people in the forums are often toxic and I try to avoid them. Hell, UG even used to have its own instant chat for friends to talk to one another on, but they nixed that years ago. The closest you might get to a site dedicated to music like that now is something like Reverbnation or Soundcloud, but it's just not the same.
Facebook in the old days wasn't all that bad. People just posted pictures of food and talked about where they were hanging out at or just whatever. Personally, I used to use it as a replacement for Ultimate-Guitar when all familiar named moved off that site, as they went to Facebook with a group for guitarists. Now though, Facebook is an endless barrage of people posting from CNN or Fox or whatever, and it no longer feels like people are being connected, but rather that people are just yelling at and hating one another for posting news articles or something. I'm trying to spend less time on those bigger sites and more time on the smaller ones where all the toxic nonsense and drama is gone. If I'm going to be addicted to the web, I might as well find some better sites to feed that addiction.
We had more choice and freedom back then. Things were a lot less about corporations trying to make a buck off you and other people selling out to join them, and a lot more about individuals just being themselves. Yes, there were politics injected into things every now and then back in those days, but now it's everywhere. Politics have their place and are important, but I don't always want to think about them. I actually avoided them for a while and was even unaware of the recent riots and what led up to them for about a week, and you know what? It felt good. I wasn't as stressed out.
Not to mention, your information is no longer private and is being sold to ad companies. Plus freedom of speech is so heavily regulated on the more popular sites now. I'm still on a 30 day ban on Facebook because I said "She thinks that trans people are evil" because someone commented that the person thinks evil things are trans. We were just discussing a screenshot of someone saying some stupid things about trans people and flat earth or something. Because you know, context isn't important, right?
I hate what the big sites have become, honestly. They were cool back in the day, but now they're not even worth it. It's either disconnect from the web entirely, or stay connected on smaller sites. The smaller sites don't connect you to as many people though, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the normies and corporations can keep the big sites to themselves, while the people tired of that crap find refuge in the smaller and less controlled sites.
