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When was the golden age of the internet to you?
I think most of us probably agree that browsing the net and taking part in online communities used to have more of an allure, and that in recent years the online experience has been really negatively affected by corporate and cultural trends. At the same time, I have a feeling that many of us probably disagree about when the "golden age" was, and probably disagree even more strongly on what made the golden age so great. So I am curious, what was the golden age of the internet to you? What time or era did you get the most enjoyment and fulfillment out of being online, and what about that era made it so?
Gotta be from like '98-04. The internet was a little more fun when it was still this weird thing that a lot of people didn't know much about. There was this magical feeling that you were exploring this huge unknown place where anything could happen. I remember reading a story on Something Awful years ago that I think does a good job of illustrating it. This guy is shopping or something and compliments this girl's MegaTokyo shirt. The girl's mom, surprised that another person recognizes it says "Oh you must be from the internet." His answer: "Yes Ma'am, I'm from the internet." became something of a catchphrase for a while. At that time you were either from the internet or you weren't.
The rise of social media killed a lot of this. Before everything got consolidated into a few big sites, there weren't really any rules or standards in place, so everyone had their own idea of how things should work and what it should look like. A lot of things that would be a twitter account or a instagram feed now, used to be entire websites. You'd stumble into some guy's crazy 200 page conspiracy theory about how every day was really 4 days, a site that was just dancing hamsters, a guy saying Zombocom over and over again, or pretty much anything. People just made whatever weird thing they wanted to share with the world. The idea of chasing likes, or becoming an internet celebrity weren't really common yet. There were no algorithms to please. You maybe made some money selling something or running banner ads on a website, but there wasn't this drive to turn content creation into a business that you see today. Barely anyone was even using their real names online.
A lot of the magic died when it just became a standard thing that you use to show pictures of your food or book airline tickets. I enjoy the increased utility, but now it feels like everyone online wants something from me, money, private information, ad impressions etc.
You could also realistically participate -- it wasn't weird to host your own website or operate a small scale chat server or MUD or whatever, and surveillance advertising hadn't yet risen up because the corporate world didn't yet see the internet as something worth devoting much effort to. So there wasn't endless invasive ad-ware and spam.
Ah yes. And because there was less spam if you found a website you liked (or hated) you could look up their Whois information to contact them with.
This is roughly the period I was thinking of, too! I loved the homebrew feeling of the internet, and discovering something new was an exciting moment. The internet was also a separate world. These days, it's integrated into our daily lives and is now mundane: it's part of our phones, watches, televisions, cars. Many of us just leave our web browsers running with a bunch of tabs. Back then, it wasn't as pervasive. It was a distinct thing that you had to consciously connect to and use. The action of firing it up and jacking in helped delineate it from the rest of the world and turned it into an experience.
I'm certainly not complaining about the fact that it's now everywhere and integrated, because I love the connectivity and conveniences it offers. I just miss having that distinct feel.
Yes! 1998 to 2004, we had a lot more freedom back then and the internet seemed to explode with activity as speed and access improved. It had still not been corporatized yet, yet to be tamed by the PC police, it was the end of the wild west years of the internet when it had just enough infrastructural to be comfortable, but not so much as to feel constrained or overwhelmed by it.
The number of websites increased a lot, the number of users skyrocketed and our connection went from a crawl to a brisk walk; which may not seem impressive to the sprint of today, but it did allow websites to do a lot more so the creativity went way up. While the creativity did result in a ton of gaudy sites, it also had many good and interesting ones as well. Now it feels that creativity is gone, I still run across unique sites every so often, but not nearly enough. They're all too similar now, the big social media sites and app stores sucked all the creativity up, standardized and monetized it.
I feel the need to add that searches weren't so censored and you didn't end up in toxic filter bubbles caused by personalized searches. Ads were only a minor annoyance, nowhere near the craziness I see when turning off the ad blocker to remind myself why I use it. When I do that I'm always amazed, websites that look great with a blocker suddenly morph into an abomination of attention seeking ads to the point that I'm fairly sure they're scamming companies by stuffing the page with ads that they know will not be seen.
Is it too late to nuke the internet and start over? :/
First off, MegaTokyo is a name I haven't heard in a long time...
I do agree it's right around those years. I remember being on AOL in like 96-99 and just not even knowing the web outside of the actual AOL program even really existing. But around that time I got into playing ZZT which led me to IRC and then that was the end of my internet innocence lol. I also was lucky enough to have satellite TV so I started watching ZDTV/TechTV and all those shows. It was so cool to have fellow nerds on TV!
Just looked it up and apparently it's still updating which is pretty crazy since it's been at least 20 years. It's a bit of a time capsule to earlier internet. I don't remember the last time I saw someone use 1337 sp34k, and the site is full of it.
Not only that, I think someone brought them up on the webcomics thread earlier.
There are a surprising amount of these old communities still up if you know what to look for.
I think you're spot on but I would extend the time period up to 2007. I think that is the year you can point to and say "the old internet died here". A lot of the big social media sites had established themselves and were growing exponentially, and the reveal of the iPhone was the death blow.
Yeah IPhone is probably the killing blow. I said 04 since I think Facebook and YouTube came out the next year. But a better one might be whenever Facebook went completely public and everyone's parents joined.
2007 was definitely a watershed year...by then Facebook had opened up to the general public. The thing is, this predated widespread iPhone adoption, which arguably happened around 2010 when the iPhone 4 came out. So yes, the proliferation of smartphones worked in tandem with social media to radically change the web, and culture at large, but Facebook was pretty concretely affecting these things with greater impact from 2007-2010.
Yeah, the days of ICQ (uh-oh!) mIRC and Usenet when the Internet felt like a world without borders before it became commercialised were good times.
Early 2000's. It was past that awkward stage where it was really hard to find what you wanted in the 90's but a lot of that spirit of freedom and weirdness was still alive on the net. And most sites (Reddit included) were pro-free speech, open source or at least open to developers, and no one was forcing you to see things you didn't want to see.
Dude remember New Grounds and 2005 - 2009 era YouTube? That shit was the best and I miss those days so much.
Early Youtube was a real minefield of terrible videos. There was a time when some of the most popular video types were unboxing videos (literally a video of someone opening the box of something they just bought) and the even more bizarre "haul videos" where they didn't even open the box, just held up stuff they just bought.
The darkest period was when they had that video reply feature, so half of youtube seemed to just be terrible webcam videos of people talking about other videos.
I remember many many titty thumbnails that showed up all over the site because they got clicks.
That said, early YouTube had real raw content where it was normal to curse and just say normal things and be normal people, and a lot of that is dead now.
Another thing I don't so much miss but was a canary in the coal mine was blood, death, violence, gore (as comedy in cartoons specifically) don't happen because they're so heavily penalized.
If I could change one thing it would be to remove those filters to make YouTube more real again.
I was so enamored with Newgrounds when I was in middle school in the early 2000s. All of the flash animation videos and games that were popping up were just so amazing to encounter, even if a lot of them weren't that well done.
Albinoblacksheep was my flash site of choice.
New grounds, armor games, and kongregate all are such good memories for me. Neopets too but that was a little further back. By the time youtube had started to get popular neopets was creeping towards the monetization it has now.
Agreed, definitely early 2000's. Basically before mainstream social media. The internet still felt like people were doing things primarily to share. As well, you still had banner ads and such on many sites, but they weren't taking up obscene amounts of screen real-estate like they tend to today. You could still reasonably browse the internet, even on crappy dialup (source: this was me until 2005) even without an adblocker (when they were available that is).
I agree, but I'm missing the eloquence. I hope we get to see the internet at it's best, whatever that may be. Truly neutral and without hate.
2004 - 2010. It had early social media before it sucked, the internet still belonged to the people, niche communities were common, crazy and weird videos spread like wildfire (Salad Fingers anyone?) And YTMND was all the rage.
Edit: It also had the early days of Yahoo Answers which was just the best site to hang out at at the time.
Myspace was prime social media IMO. It was true social media where interacting with your friends and talking with them was the central purpose of the website. Not gathering likes or shares.
On FB, you don't really interact with your friends list beyond liking an occasion post, or commenting "congratulations!" when a baby is born. It's decent for keeping up with major life events for relatives or old friends, but there's no incentive to interact with them on a deeper level.
I'm personally more attached to pre-2004 Internet, but there was definitely a lot to be said for this period of time as well. Web 2.0 was exciting, lots of innovation was happening, and it seemed like things would continue getting better and better. As far as community goes, I personally saw it as an age of decay, as most web forums started to disband. Sites like Digg, Reddit, and others didn't capture the same feeling or sense of community...it was a totally different beast. Old messages boards had in-jokes that everyone was aware of and took part in their creation and proliferation in a way that Digg and Reddit, even, or especially, in their earlier days couldn't hope to capture.
Again, this is also based purely on my personal experience, as I know there still must be plenty of communities out there that have that same kind of spirit. It's just there was a lot of change happening post 2004, what with Web 2.0, social media, and chan-/meme culture.
And on that note, as a new Tildes member, this place feels like reddit ca. 2007, and I'm more than cool with that. But I'll still wax poetic about a simpler time even before that (as others will do the same re: Usenet/BBS's).
1999-2014. The message board era through the initial rise of social media.
I'm a bit younger, so I'd say for me it was 2011-2015, that's about when I started Reddit which I genuinely enjoyed back in the day. The internet was much more of a wild west before then. YouTube was also getting bigger with non-corporate content creators that just wanted to make the best content and little ads. Webgames were also well and alive.
'95-'98
There was virtually nothing on the internet that existed to make money. Almost everything you found was a pure expression of someone's passion for a hobby, a fandom, an area of study…
And there was very little out there period (relative to today), so finding anything cool felt like uncovering some ancient treasure you weren't meant to find.
It was a fantastic time.
I never came across that, but I would have been very impressed if I had. I was amazed by something as simple as clickable image maps!
Remember image maps before they were client side, when the browser would just send the coordinates the user clicked in the image off to a CGI script which would send back the correct URL based on the coordinates? Hard to believe something so simple at one time required a server-side script.
It's hard to say. Good arguments exist for before I came online in a real way (pre-2005), when I was minimally online (2006-2008), and then when I was in high school and college (2009-2015). To be honest, I just feel like there's an argument for the fools-golden age of the internet being now - honestly, without changes, it's going to keep getting worse. "The internet has devolved into 'five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.'"
Source: Cory Doctrow's article https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I probably first used the internet around 2009, and the social media platforms I used in those days were YouTube and then, in 2012, reddit. While I certainly missed the 'golden ages' others have perceived, I'm not sure if I've experienced one during my time, nor do I really buy into the concept. Depending on who you are and your particular interests, the 'golden age' may have come at a different time, or there may have been several such golden ages. My memories of 2012 reddit aren't overwhelmingly fond: even then the site had poor discourse, and even now you can find subreddits with excellent discussion.
Geocities. I learned HTML at home as a teenager. I so wish I could go find my old page on one of the archives.
I really miss stuff like web rings, using them to explore all the different fan sites. Since it was the 90’s, I was super into Pokémon, so spent a lot of time researching all the crazy unsubstantiated rumors people came up with about the games. Back then, there was no easy way to fact check if Bill’s secret garden was a real thing, so you just had to bring him a team with all the eeveelutions plus dragonite at lv. 100.
I remember one site had a midi section, with chip-tune sorta versions of Pokémon music. There were some tracks I didn’t recognize, and got OBSESSED with trying to find. It was many years later before learning they were from the Japanese show.
Mid 00s. I played Runescape on dialup from like 2003/2004 which worked surprisingly well with a connection cutter, as we could be online and still get phone calls. Yeah, it sucked to drop, but it was just a game.
Then DSL and broadband in general were hitting in this still-dialup-optimized online world. You could find everything quickly, pages were mostly static HTTP still with some emerging soon-to-be Web2.0 stuff. Forums were everywhere for all your topics and they were booming, usually.
I still learn about stuff that was around at the time and know I barely touched the tip of the iceberg, but I also miss the smaller, lighter, unoptimized web because it was easier to navigate. If we could have that, plus all of the malware/exploit fixes I think the Internet would be a much better place.
i think if there is an idyllic age of the internet it would be this for me as well - nostalgia for those sweet, sweet dial-up connection sounds - many hours on runescape and habbo hotel, the simplicity of social media at the time being limited to message boards and early iterations of facebook, myspace and bebo for me made the internet a much nicer place to spend time, albeit with peoples favourite songs blaring through your speakers when you visit their page
I don't understand all the technical aspects you mention, but I agree on the mid 2000s. That was the heyday of forums for me. My haunts were of the goth nature. Plus a thriving community on IRC.
Now the forum is still there, no real life for about 10 years or so, and we've moved to discord instead of IRC. It's kinda sad. Like an abandoned shopping mall.
I first got on the Internet when I was around like 8 or 9yo in the mid-90s. I was one of the few kids that I knew who had Internet access at the time. Didn't even have widely-available Internet access at school until a couple years later.
But I think probably early/mid 00s was the Golden Age, when I was in my teens, which probably colors my perceptions. Regardless, certainly before Facebook's opening up beyond college students and before YouTube becoming a thing. Blogs were all the rage. Xanga, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. At the time, Wordpress was just kicking off. You no longer needed to know HTML/CSS to make a website, which to me sorta democratized the Internet pre-social media (though I had created my first website entirely out of HTML when I was like 11). Instant Messaging was still important and you had your pick: AIM, MSN, or Yahoo. Even ICQ, which kinda merged email with IMs; I still know my ICQ number!
The web was starting to coalesce on these platforms, but there wasn't just one place to be. So there were still places to explore, different communities and sites, offering different things. It wasn't quite the Wild West of the late 90s that I initially experienced, but it wasn't quite the centralized Internet that came together in the latter 00s and early 20-teens that we're still living in. It was normal to be part of multiple websites and services offering similar products with differing perks. Yeah it could be annoying that I'm on Xanga, while a friend is on MySpace. Or they use AIM while I use Yahoo Messenger. But it was just an accepted part of life. It was OK. No one place or product or company was all-powerful like today. In fact, out of all the companies/services I listed, I think only Wordpress is still in widespread use and active development.
It wasn't all great back then, but it was exciting. To see how the Internet would develop and where the world would go. Just didn't realize it'd end up this way. Suppose that was my young person's blinders on. Idealism. Wasn't cynical enough yet, haha.
I don't know when the golden age was, but fie me it ended some time after Facebook became publicly traded and when we reached this point where people use apps for everything instead of viewing content in a browser.
It's hard to say what is the golden age because different "eras" have had their strengths. I loved getting into AOL chat rooms and interacting with people from all over. I liked the rise of Flash animations and games on Newgrounds and Ebaums world - people making content just for the sake of making content, even if it was just weird. Social media in its early days I think had a lot of allure to it - I went through Myspace, Xanga, and Facebook and it was a fun way to see other sides of your friends. Even now, being in the information age is wonderful! The other day I was having issues with my garbage disposal and I could find a video that instructed me on how to fix it. I also love the pure amount of video essays and more stimulating podcasts that are out there - none of that would be available if it weren't for the widespread internet use.
Having said that, I think there are some issues with how we interface with the internet. Anonymity has some problems, and while it is good to protect people where they can safely express views or disseminate information, it also allows the worst of people to come out a la the greater internet fuckwad theory. I wish that more of us could remember that people are on the other side of the screen and that being kind doesn't cost us anything.
Tildes is the best community I've been a part of.
That said, it's hard to beat being a teenager discovering the web, IRC, low level "hackering" and my buddy from school telling me he invaded NASA and got proof ETs really existed.
I would tie this to some key dates (there are plenty more, but these come to mind):
Positive:
Negative:
Based on this, I'd say that 2005 to 2013 was the golden age of the internet.
Early 2010s. Tech was advanced enough that most sites didn’t suck too badly but there wasn’t nearly as much advertising or intense spam as there is now.
Anyone remember the old YouTube layout on desktop? Those customizable channels were the bomb — that’s another thing I miss. Seemingly every website had some ability to customize heavily, be it with images or even CSS.
If we speak about me then I had two:
For me it's late '90s/early '00s. My story is somehow a "classical" internet guy in my country (Romania).
First I've heard of this "internet" was when I was browsing MTV's teletext: there were pages about bands (sort of like Wikipedia today) and in the contact section there was a "internet link" for some bands, followed by "www.ironmaiden.com" (or whatever the band name was) and I was wondering what that was! Then in 1996 some of my highschool friends got into programming college and started coming with stories about the internet. The one that I remember vividly was when one of them came to me and told me "dude!!! I found an internet page where you can find band lyrics and cover art!!! It's called yahoo and you can search for a band name and get all types of information." Being a (metal/punk) music lover, I asked him to get me some cover art for some bands and in a few weeks he came back with two floppy disks with said cover art. I was astonished!!!
Then in late '98 I got my first job as a IT technician at the high school I was student at. They were the first school in my town to have an internet connection. It ran on dial-up and that's when things started for me. I found out about IRC and joined a few great communities, but the "breakthrough" for me was when I created a new channel for the supporters of a big football (soccer) club. I became the admin and the channel grew to almost 400 people daily. I started using bots to automoderate the channel, then to save the logs. From this I started learning some HTML and created a web page to post the logs.
Still on IRC I found out about the possibility to download MP3s. It was insanely slow, but worth it! I was able to download music albums the next day after the official release - that was almost impossible before. This was the second hobby of mine: I created a geocities page where I kept track of what I downloaded and put up links to where people could download the music: I wasn't aware of "piracy"; after all I was in Romania, which was out of communism just a few years earlier.
But for me the most important thing was getting to know new people. In those early days I got to know people all around the country and met with some of them: I even fell in love with a girl on the other side of the country and was mad enought to visit her by taking the train with almost no money (a 24 hours ride).
Then later (2002-2004) I bought my first domain name and created a website where I posted news and "editorials" about the football team I supported. This is when I first set up a forum and a great community emerged. I then moved to Bucharest, where I met most of the people from this community and we had our own group going to the matches. And so on and on...
Anyway, around 2007/2008 facebook made its way among people and then everything went downhill: there was no community as before - everyone kept posting their life on there. There was no group discussion anymore, there were no debates. People started giving themselves the most importance and here we are: the internet today is awful.. or maybe I got older and don't see its charm anymore.
I still love the internet and use it as I learnt 20+ years ago: I read and search for what I need, I never browse without and ad blocker, I don't have a facebook account (and for that matter instagram, tiktok, snapchat and all the other distractions).
Whatever years where we had Napster and flash games. I used to sit for hours and hours downloading music - the whole discography in one go when I had only heard a single song from an artist, because why not? It was available - and listening to it while I played stupid little games.
And now I can do that on my phone, so easily with all the game apps and music streaming services, but it’s lost its magic. It just felt more exciting back then when it was all new
I apologise if this comes over as just a comment to be controversial (it really isn't ment to be) or naive (maybe it is), but to me, this feels like the golden age of the internet.
I've been online since the mid nineties, living through the irc/geocities/myspace/FB years, so that's a bit my frame of reference. And during these years, never has the abundance of kind human beings and great quality content felt so overwhelming as it does today.
It probably helps I have managed to build myself a little business on the internet, big enough to make a living for me and my partner, and that would not have been possible without the innovations of the last few years like creator subscriptions & social media.
Of course, I recognise the downside of all these innovations as well. Aside from Tildes and Reddit, I'm not personally active on other social media platforms anymore because they make me sad. But making that choice I also discovered how much beauty there is to be found outside of these walled gardens. To my eye more than ever before.
I hope it gets even better. I hope every human manages to find a way to fit the internet in their lives to not make it feel like a drag. I hope beautiful people keep investing in the internet, by letting their voices be heard. And I hope money and/or government won't be able to smother those voices.
I'm looking outside and the sun is shining. Maybe I'm just having a really good day.
For me, it’s going on to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon’s website to play their flash games. I miss those times.