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What was your favorite older social media site/app? What did you like or dislike?
+1 for slashdot, mainly because of intelligent topics and conversations about science, technology, scifi, games and all that fun stuff. Community participation and quality discourse made it interesting.
Everything on popular social media "out there" now is about click bait and sound bites, even comments and replies. Posts (and communities) are reduced to nothing more than grabbing a few seconds of attention.
Honestly? Niche, hyper-focused BBCode forums with a few dozen hardcore members. I was a member of a community based around a defunct tabletop game for years after the game ended. Got to know some people's lives in depth without ever knowing their real names, and as an otherwise lonely person during my formative years, they were a lifesaver.
I'll second this. Some of my fondest memories from childhood/teen years are from hanging out on the "old web" and internet forums in particular. I was home-schooled and had a hard time socializing, my forum and IRC friends were a lifeline. I also loved helping to run those communities as both a moderator and an admin.
Honorable mention to reddit circa 2010. For a while it was an awesome place to hang out, even if I did resent its role in killing independent internet forums even then.
Though I was never a mod or admin outside of a silly phpBB board I spun up that only ever had 5 members, forums had a similarly pivotal role for me back in the 2000s. With my schooling having been at home and a small religious private school in my semi-rural hometown, web forums along with AIM and MSN messenger were my window to the outside world. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that much of who I am today and what I've been able to achieve can be owed to them.
I'm a zoomer, and I know it's kind of heretic to be positive about a commercial tech product, but Discord has been fulfilling that role for me. Social media has a lot of downsides, but I hope the ability for it to be a positive driver by allowing connections between people who might never meet IRL will continue forever. It also makes opposition and alternatives to the absurd over-commercialisation of platforms that should be enabling this more important.
As a member of Gen X / Xennial, I will firmly disagree that Discord replaces the bulletin board / forum because it’s a synchronous communication tool and not really designed for asynchronous, thoughtful communication.
Discord is a gamer focused Slack with built in voice and video chat. It’s more analogous to IRC than a BBS/forum.
Ah yeah, I was referring more to the AIM and MSN messenger part of the comment above. Perhaps I should've been more clear.
Discord replaces IRC, yup.
I keep hearing a lot about Discord but don’t know how to get started finding the right kinds of communities.
Was it hard to adjust from a forum post-and-response format to something more like live chat? That’s the part that’s always seemed harder for me to get into.
Honestly, the fact that a live chat means your messages will be swept away quicker made me more comfortable posting. Also, you can talk to people directly when they are online which is nice.
It takes a while to ease into a community as always, though.
My most formative internet experiences were on a fan-forum for a kids book series. I made some incredible friendships there, to the extent that we were all too willing to plan an international in-person meetup several years in advance. I was there with a dozen or so members for a weekend - it felt like rejoining old friends.
It's passionate and specific interests that get really interesting when everyone's invested and participating and there are topic boundaries (like the niche interest) to keep the conversations going.
Yes! I loved hanging out on forums. The culture of the internet was overall different, and there was something more welcoming, inviting, and homey about posting there (whatever your topic of choice).
Any fellow former XM411/XMFan forum members still out there?
This SO much. The days spent on the forums of specific anime shipping websites (yeah, I'm one of those girls) were my most fun times online that didn't involve gaming. It felt like a real community. And everything was so much more customizable than social media sites are now.
I kinda want to make my own little forum some day. I don't even know how but it's a future goal.
You know what? For a while, long before every single person in the world including all members of my extended family had an account, Facebook was awesome.
Poke!
Poke is such quintessential early Facebook. People weren’t nervous to make new friends through the platform, and it had a playfulness that isn’t around on the net anymore. I miss those simpler times.
Playing Mafia Wars on Facebook was fun...
I don't think I ever played a game on Facebook, but people used to love it!
Is there anything cool about Facebook today?
I think the events calendar is very useful as well as getting notifications when it's my friends' birthdays. Apart from that I only really use messenger, because that's where I have the most contacts these days.
While I don't use it because I no longer have an account, I do get the sense that FB Marketplace is a handy Craigslist alternative
Oh wow, that takes me back! It felt like I was the only person without a Facebook account for a year or two, I was more than happy with the regular web forums of the time, PHPbb and such.
My then wife begged me for days to make an account because she would be rewarded in whatever way (wow, I don't even remember what it was) by adding more people to her mafia.
Fast forward a few months, she had gotten bored of the game, and I was chatting with people all day on several chat platforms and FB groups planning attacks on our rivals LOL good times!
Ya, in the first couple of years it was good. Now I use it for the marketplace and avoid the rest. I really don't like how FB marketplace is THE place to buy and sell random crap in my area now.
I think a social media platform really changes every time there is a huge UI „update“. The feel is not just on the surface, how you interact with something is that something in the digital space.
So for me it was the introduction of the timeline instead of a profile page that made it less usable, which happened at the end of 2011. Then things started being introduced that took the focus away from connecting with friends and made it more about games, the marketplace and eventually Facebook became a general purpose platform for shopping, news, hobbies and entertainment. I hear that in some countries Facebook is considered the Internet, you can get a data plan with unlimited Facebook. Crazy what it turned into.
It actually was. And honestly when it started to change, they had a few great games on it, too.
Hell I remember when my college was first added to their network and I tried adding friends from HS but couldn't find many of them. Be it because they didn't head off to college or their schools were smaller and not added yet.
People say opening it up to everyone was what killed it, but I think the downfall started when it was opened to high school kids. Before, you could post pics of doing lines of coke off a hooker's ass and it had zero impact on your outside life.
Loved stumbleupon. Hated to see it go.
Oh man, that brings back memories. Just clicking the next button, not knowing what would come was really interesting. However, as it lacked a true community it also became increasingly frustrating as it basically became a lot of spam and fluff content with no way of giving true feedback.
Stumbleupon was doomscrolling before the word was invented, I guess.
I think I discovered reddit through it though just like @gpl. Did take me a minute to figure out that reddit wasn't working the same way as stumbleupon :)
Stumbleupon is how I discovered Reddit and basically never went back to it! They did themselves in.
Once stumbleupon changed to become Mix, it just wasn’t the same. I truly miss it so much.
I think search.marginalia.nu (a search engine for old-web/neocities type sites) has a random button which is sorta simular to stumbleupon.
Oh really?! I'm going to have to check this out. Thank you!
It hasn't gone away, but it's gone away from my life, Newgrounds.
When I was in elementary and middle school, Newgrounds was the center of my online life, outside of RuneScape lol. I remember when YouTube came out and all my friends at school were showing me videos I had already seen sometimes years before on Newgrounds, and I also remember getting annoyingly elitist about it lol.
Stuff like the Clock/Lock/Glock/whatever crews, PicoDay, Alien Hominid, Brakenwood series, just all of the pure creativity of the flash games and videos back then.
So, like me, you’re right around 30 right? lol
It's our turn to be old, I've been waiting my entire life for this.
I think this is most of us here (pulls out walker) 🤣
God, you're bringing back memories. I came to also say Newgrounds. We'll never be able to get back that lost Flash content. The Clock Crews, omg. I remember when AH was just a flash game; now I heard Behemoth is doing another Alien Hominid remake and I'm down just to relive that again.
You sound just like me lol. Shoutout to albinoblacksheep too. In hindsight it was such a weird thing to be elitist about as if it mattered we already saw these videos years ago. It didn't make me special for knowing about something first. I should have just enjoyed the fact that they were now liking the things I liked. Speaking of RS, I'm feeling tempted to get back into it as something I can do instead of reddit if they kill Apollo.
Albinoblacksheep! I used to watch The 5th Avocado on repeat lol.
I wanted to play RuneScape so badly as a kid, but we were super late to the DSL days and I simply couldn’t load the game on dial-up. The image of that progress bar between the two torches is forever engraved in my mind.
Lol that image, and the Half-Life 2 era loading bars for HL2 deathmatch and CSS are forever in my mind.
It's wild how quickly we forget about how "bad" the Internet was for gaming for so long, and how quickly we get used to the way it is now. If I have to wait more than a min now I am wondering if the game crashed or my Internet went out.
4-digit Slashdot user here. The early days of Slashdot were pretty interesting (e.g. Columbine, 9/11), but it was always frustrating to have stories chosen for us by the site admins. Digg was less serious, and honestly I can’t remember much about it. Reddit had a chance to be great, but blew it. Maybe the best social media site is still to come.
I thought Digg was great in the early days, but agreed it was mostly random content with less of a community. most of my digg memories are actually the diggnation podcast.
digg also what pushed me to start subscribing to various rss feeds so I’ll always appreciate it for that
Digg peaked with Kevin and Alex doing DiggNation. There was a very brief Reddit podcast with Alexis, but it was a pale reflection of an internet legend.
I liked it for the limited community it had… so when that changed I migrated my focus to reddit. And now I’m trying to find that feeling somewhere else again. I think the official mobile app gradually changed how people use reddit. Putting a way to post a submission before choosing the subreddit at the very center of the app won’t affect existing communities at first too much, maybe the amount of posts being removed for not reading the rules increased… but eventually that culture kind of took over and people browse the popular page rather than visit the community. These are the big subreddits.
I moderate a few communities that are still „autark“ probably because first you have to find them. r/impressionsgames is my favorite.
Yep and a site (or a group/board) will reflect the nature of the people that run it.
I think Digg was always meant to be throwaway content in favor of grabbing attention. Same problem.
Reddit was bound to reflect overall media culture just because of the madness of crowds. IMO the best forums were the the strictly managed and intelligent groups like r/medicine and r/askhistorians.
4 digits? Shit; I'm at 6 and I thought I was old-guard there.
Same, 6 digits here as well. I’m pretty sure the 4-digiters were personally served bowls of hot grits by CmdrTaco himself.
Boy that reference just threw me back into my university days. Haven't heard it in forever.
I'm also a 6-digit user.
I'm not sure if it qualifies, but I miss StumbleUpon. It was a fantastic way to find hidden gem websites, and in some ways it was 'the algorithm' before Instagram and TikTok had it down.
My two nostalgia sites were myspace and Xanga. I relearned how to do html and just learning how to do cool Internet things back then. Spacehey is trying to recapture the myspace spark though.
www.metafilter.com - It's been around since the late 90's, and is still fairly active. It was pretty much one of the very first "Web2.0" sites of user-generated content. At the time, blogs were the big thing. People had evolved past "homepages" where you'd set up a static little gallery of everything that interests you and people started posting daily. The web had started to move away from static content into feeds of new content every day. Metafilter was an experiment in allowing anyone to post to a communal blog. It wasn't so much about logging your life as it was a content aggregator with users posting links to the most interesting things they found on the web. It's always found a balance between the offbeat/absurd and the factual/newsworthy. I learned about it from kottke.org I think, and when I first signed up I had a 3 digit userid. I haven't spent much time there in the past decade, but I think I'll start checking up on it more often.
MetaFilter is something special. I was fairly active there eons ago and it blows my mind that it’s still alive. I’m not sure what the community is like there today, I’m sure it’s evolved over the years but I have no idea if it was for the better or worse. As far as I can tell it still gets a lot of use. I have to give them credit for leaving the design largely unchanged, it definitely still has that lovely Web 2.0 feeling that tickles my nostalgia.
One notable thing about MeFi is the cost of sign-up. Anyone can browse for free but you have to pay to contribute. It’s only a tiny amount ($5-10 IIRC) as a one-time fee, but that small barrier to entry helped keep trolls and shitposters at bay. I still hold that particular design decision in high regard; I suggested Tildes consider it back when the site was brand new but the idea was met with a mixed reception.
I also really like AskMeFi, the separate sub-site specifically for questions and answers. Not discussion starter questions like on AskReddit, but queries for information and advice, more like Yahoo Answers or Quora. The quality of answers on there was always quite high in my experience. They also had a feature that allowed sensitive or embarrassing questions to be asked anonymously, which I used on several occasions and found really useful.
Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure why I stopped visiting over time. I only have fond memories of it. I’m inclined to check it out again now and see what’s new.
It's been years since I've been active there, but from what I've read mathowie sold the site in 2017 there was a bit of a meltdown when Trump was elected, which ended up with jessamyn buying the site. I read a great interview about that here: Why Does a Librarian Own a Social Media Site That’s Been Around for Longer Than Facebook?.
So she’s the owner now? Jessamyn’s awesome, I hold her in the same regard as Victoria from Reddit: a skilled and versatile moderator who is level-headed and genuinely kind. I’m frankly amazed that Jessamyn has stuck it out for so long, as far as I know she’s been there from the beginning. I can’t believe she hasn’t completely burned out after all this time.
Somehow I missed the SomethingAwful revolution, but the people who loved it, still love it today.
@ZeroGee
I also missed this. I checked out the website and it seems super slap happy and fun, yet serious. I like the boundaries they setup, such as a financial incentive to commit to the rules and to maintain access if you break the rules. I would love to hear from others here who are members, or have been members. I'm considering joining, if it's still active a fun place to get a return on investment (of time, with connections and a sense of community).
I spent a huge amount of time in the 90's on IRC and on the right server and channel I could have some of the most amazing conversations. It isn't a social media website of course.
However, I had one guy I absolutely hated, my nemesis. He would pop up when I would least expect it and at the most inopportune moment. His name was netsplit. I still have nightmares about him, git.
Bash.org is somehow still around.
I spent quite a bit of time on IRC as a youngin in the early 2000's. It was a good time, though I never got to form deep friendships there.
Oh man, there’s a site I haven’t thought about in years. Agree with you though, it was more for fun browsing than connecting with other people.
As someone who never used IRC (born very early 2000's), bash.org is great and I love going through all the old logs and p much doomscrolling.
I was on IRC (all over the place, usually on a couple of servers at a time) from 1995-2010. It was just part of having a computer turned on and connected to the internet for me for such a long time, definitely a habit in much the same way social media became for just about everyone else slightly later.
It was the way for geeks to communicate for many years though, often in addition to forums particularly in the late 90s/early 00s.
I’m still using irc. There’s a few channels that I used in the 90’s that I still use to this very day.
As do I. While I jokingly lamented netsplits, its sad that IRC isn't such a massive social phenomenon any more such that distributed servers and netsplits are a common occurrence. I miss them frankly.
I've been using irssi for a very long time, do you remember when the mIRC exploit appeared in which pasting a relatively benign string into a channel would crash all mIRC users? The chaos was beautiful. I never did it myself, I didn't need to, everyone else was doing it constantly.
Even though the disruption included important communication channels , I revelled in the chaos, it was hilarious.
People always judge me for this, because they just don’t know it also had a different side to it, but I still feel very positively about the mid 2000s/early 2010s 4chan… if you can call that social media. I feel like some people do, others don’t (I normally wouldn’t, but I think it’s a bit of a grey area). Probably also because I‘m feeling nostalgic, but outside of /b/ there were actually some gems where great discussions could be had. I just really liked that one second you had a deep and beautiful conversation with someone about life and it’s hardships, the next second someone posted the most out of context gif and I just found it hilarious back then. I loved the spooky stories on there, the fake little mysteries, sometimes real mysteries, STEM discussions and the particular humour on there. And no, I don’t mean offensive humour. I mean a certain meme culture that just had a very fertile soil on 4chan boards (although I did like the typical 9/11 gifs, etc.).
When you knew how to navigate it and stay away from the horrific stuff, 4chan was fantastic. On Reddit there’s the misconception that it has always been exclusively bigots and right wing conspiracy theory nut jobs, but that’s just not true. Yes, it had those aswell, but definitely not exclusively. And no matter how hard I’m trying to explain, people won’t hear it. A lot of the memes that later flooded every other website came from 4chan and seeing them come to life was pretty special. If you remember the early gif compilations on Youtube, that’s the kind of stuff I‘m talking about. Today I‘m not interested in 4chan anymore, it definitely changed. And I‘m not denying that parts of 4chan have always been extremely fucked up and I never condoned them.
In general I always loved forums. I was registered on so many different ones. One for each of my favourite bands, a horror movie forum, gaming forum… and I couldn’t wait to come back home from school to check if I had replies to my messages. I liked the specific etiquette on there, even though it was strict. If your message wasn’t formatted correctly, you got a slap on the wrist from the mods. And even though I always found it exaggerated, it had a certain charme. I liked that everyone on there knew each other and friendships could form.
I also liked MySpace and early Reddit was nice, but it unfortunately turned to shit quite fast. I never liked Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
I never used 4chan that much but i wonder if the quality started declining as a result of 2016 and /pol/ getting bigger (many users hate /pol/, but it does influence the other boards). I feel like groups of people there purely because of hate would probably not make good content in general.
That's exactly what happened. The internet and social media started going downhill when it started to get popular in 2010. We all know that the quality of anything tends to go down once it gains popularity.
I used to be a loser and a nerd for using the internet—now it's commonplace, and you're strange, old, or admirable for NOT using the internet.
This seems to be my opinion regarding 4chan. I really wanted to be part of the site, but ofc... in the more fucked up sense rather than as someone who enjoys the freedom of being anonymous.
Nowadays, I'm not convinced nor do I want to go on it. I think all the stuff regarding 4chan, esp since moot's retirement, is bleh. I think Anonymous being linked to 4chan is amazing, on top of Project Chanology, the time 4chan helped a war vet I think w his birthday, and other things like being wicked smart enough to track someone faster than official channels is crazy. But also, I just don't wanna be part of that site cause everything seems to turn downhill nowadays.
Plus there was that one time i stumbled upon a 4chan-linked Discord server where everyone gets a number so... yeah 4chan edgelords are boring. And +1 about FB, Twt and IG. I'm used to them but yeah. I like forums a lil bit more now.
The Palace, which was a graphical chat in the mid-late 90s. It still exists, but it's not quite the same experience as it was, and it's much quieter. I liked that you could only have a certain number of people per room, so it felt cozy. Dropping in somewhere new where a bunch of people were could be a little intimidating though.
Other than that, probably invite-only LiveJournal. I believe a good chunk of the early regulars to my nearest city's subreddit were from the local LJ community. I met a lot of really interesting people through LJ, too. I liked the way communities were handled - a lot like subreddits in many ways. You could subscribe and see them in your friends feed, or go directly there to check new posts. (LJ is still around, too, but a shell of its former self. I believe it's owned by a Russian company now.)
I loved The Palace. Nobody here knows what I‘m talking about when I mention it, so I‘m glad I found someone else talking about it. It was definitely not appropriate for my age (I was 12) and I also had really bad experiences there looking back, but I spent so many hours creating my avatars on there and that gave me a creative outlet as a child. I also just spent a lot of time talking to my friends on there after moving away, so this feels particularly nostalgic to me.
I was a baby on the Internet at the time, too. I hung out at Kids Nation a lot before being a wizard at another youth centric Palace.
I had a great time editing my avatars too :)
I was gobsmacked when I got my ‘congrats you’ve been on LJ for 20 years’ email. I made friends I still talk to regularly now because of LJ and journalfen (mainly because I spotted a now-friend scrolling through fandom_wank on a library computer and awkwardly introduced myself, haha).
20 years! I think I closed most of my older accounts on LJ, not sure how recent the newest one is. Grats for keeping yours open that long :)
I've done things like that! For me, it was chatting up a stranger on a bus because I saw her using a custom hair toy. I was convinced she was one of the members of my favorite forums (long hair community). It was a long shot, but I was right! I had the pleasure of meeting up with her several times, both locally and once she moved to Canada with her husband.
I miss LJ. No funky algorithms. If a friend or community person posted something it showed up in chronological order. Freaking magical!
I grew up with:
AIM - this was the go-to, always open, sometimes with witty away messages. I miss it so much.
MySpace: It's the butt of so many jokes, but I loved MySpace, and I was sad when everyone went to Facebook. The world would be a better place if MySpace beat Facebook. The things I loved are what everyone else hated. I liked going to pages and seeing how they were customized, what music people were into, seeing their longform blog. I miss this.
LiveJournal - AIM and MySpace were for friends. LiveJournal was for strangers. You could blog anonymously, and I liked it.
A couple of niche forums for video games and the like that started talking about the games and just broadened over time to just a community of people.
StumbleUpon - my go to "when I'm bored" app.
Early reddit...like way back in the early days.
I always hated twitter. Facebook I hated but see its benefits...I just don't think the benefits are worth it. I never understood Instagram.
I like TikTok though, so I guess I have something in common with gen Z. But it's more of a time waster than an app I love.
If I could re-make the internet, I'd start with AIM and tack in StumbleUpon, and I'd be happy as can be.
+1 on AIM. Never used it personally but looking back I wish it was brought back. Instead we now have chat programs that masquerade as spyware unfortunately (thanks facebook).
Tumblr before Yahoo, loved the quirky microblogging that reminded me old Geocities. Also theming was so simple, I learned HTML and CSS practicing in Tumblr.
Current Tumblr feels so different, shame how it is now.
I’m going to sound insane and I can’t remember what it was called *exactly. It was the late 90’s/early 2000’s, and it was called like cyber cafe/city something or other? You created an avatar (like whole body, not just a head) and you went to the city to “buy” stuff for your house. And you’d have chat rooms where you talked to other “citizens” but you were in an actual room. I remember I went to a “club” and actual music was playing, stuff you’d hear normally and not just MIDI songs either.
It’s gonna drive me crazy, I can’t think of what it was called but I spent a lot of time there.
CyberTown?
I think that’s it!
Edit: that’s definitely it. There’s a revival website but idk how active it is. https://www.cybertownrevival.com/#/
Yeah, it looks crazy familiar. Jealous that you played it as much back then.
I was on there a LOT. It just had such a futuristic feel for that time period. And of course the internet still felt very new to me, then as I was just getting my feet wet.
Second life?
Nope, but similar.
Habbo Hotel?
Nope. I know it started with cyber- something. Gonna drive me nuts trying to remember 😅
This seems like a good place to mention a couple old-web communities I used to hang out in circa 2008. They weren’t social media (did the phrase even exist yet?) but they were social and collaborative and fun. These were all geared toward writers and linguaphiles.
First was Ficlets, a collaborative flash fiction site launched with some fanfare by AOL in a bid to stay relevant, with endorsement from John Scalzi. You could publish a “ficlet” which was a block of text no longer than 1,024 characters. You, or anybody else, could attach a prequel or sequel to any existing ficlet, and there was no limit to the number of either that one could have.
It was a great format. We took turns making up installments of long serialized stories. It was a joy to set up a cliffhanger and watch someone else run with it, or subvert it in unexpected ways. We played with the medium too. We created complex choose-your-own-adventures with branching narratives. We set up writing challenges where participants could pin their entries to the initial post as sequels. Friendships were forged. Those were good days.
Before long AOL realized they had no way to monetize the site and pulled the plug. They had been out to pasture for ages by this point but Ficlets was their swan song. The creator of the site, Kevin Lawver, quickly spun up a clone of it cut off from the AOL brand and called it Ficly. Many of us migrated there. It had a different color scheme and a worse name but it was basically the same thing. Kevin was a hero for holding the community together but eventually the costs were too much for him to bear and he had to shut it down too. To his credit, he archived all the content published on the site and as far as I know it’s still online today.
Some of us Ficlets/Ficly refugees migrated over to a third site called Protagonize. It was a welcoming place with a similar concept, minus the character limit, so stories didn’t have to be quite so frantically paced. To be honest I missed the practice of writing economically. I had some fun on Protagonize for a little while but by that point the community was too scattered and it just wasn’t the same. Eventually it was shut down too.
Lastly I used to frequent a site called Wordie. It was the weirdest place, kind of an informal user-created dictionary. The main thing you did was create lists of words. You could create a list for any theme imaginable and share your lists with other users. We would come up with outlandish concepts and then have conversations in the comments section for each list. You could add any word to a list. If the word didn’t exist on the site you could add it, and provide your own definition for it, or upload an audio pronunciation for it. On the page for any word you could see a list of all the lists that word appeared on. It was oddly social, and surprisingly fun. We got creative with the definition of “word.” We were quite silly.
Eventually the site was acquired by (and absorbed into) Wordnik, which is still online today. I think some of our silliness is still preserved in there but it’s a lot less discoverable now. The site is billed more as a legitimate dictionary and all the emphasis on user-created content was removed. I haven’t looked at it in ages so I’m not sure what the current state of it is. Lots of happy memories associated with the Wordie days though.
Not a website or app, but Echomail (fidonet) in the 1980s and early '90s. Since I started reading Tildes I've noticed a lot of people say it reminds them of "old school web forums" but personally I don't see it, neither in aesthetics or culture do I see a similarity. What I do find Tildes reminiscent of is Fidonet, or usenet at its calmest, least argumentative.
Usenet. I've never been a heavy sleeper, so I'd go about normal life during the day: studying/working, spending time with my partner and friends etc, but overnight when everyone else slept I'd then download that days posts to the usenet groups I subscribed to and spend a few hours reading—and even occasionally posting.
The DVD Forums - A website and forum that ran from the year 2000 to 2022 (although I only used it for the first couple of years) that contained news and discussion of DVDs, back in the early-ish days of the format when it was new and interesting, and to compare releases (eg region x was a "flipper" (double sided disc that needed to be flipped over halfway through), region y came in a super jewel case, or a snap case etc).
+1 to guts. Tumblr was the best from 2009 to mid-2010, then it went downhill mid-2011. I created themes, had so many good conversations with other microbloggers, and it was normal to drop quick messages in people's inboxes to say hi or compliment them. That internet era fueled my creativity and social development.
The internet started to change after mid-2010, then rapidly went downhill from mid-2011. Sad.
Man. I miss it.
It was GameFAQs forums for me. I got regular internet access not long after it was just hitting it's initial popularity in the late 90s. As a teen with a gaming passion in a rural school where that wasn't really a thing, it was great to be able to discuss games with other people. I still prefer that old forum way of posting to this day. Although, admittedly, following along with multiple topics becomes a bit of a headache in forums. My email would get spammed with update notifications.
Ultimately, like most places on the internet, the more popular it got the more insulated and toxic the users got, so I moved on not long after I graduated high school. Digg became a thing not long after that. I liked it in the beginning when it was smaller and felt more familiar, but I still enjoyed it even after it got popular. I just didn't participate in it as much. Then that whole kerfuffle over whatever people were outraged about at the time moved most people to Reddit. I still liked that Digg felt like one community when compared to Reddit which is basically a collection of mini communities.
Other than that I used a handful of generic forums here and there through the years,. Even ran my own for a time. I think it was the PSO Hackers Guild or something cringe like that. Basically just a bunch of us that tinkered with Xploder cheats for Phantasy Star Online.
Man, I played way to much Starcraft back in the early 00's and I was on the GameFAQs starcraft forums pretty much daily.
Another fellow GameFaqs alumni. Not just some nice discussion on even the most niche games, but some of the best guides on the internet, before Fandom rose and the strategy guides of olde shifted more to wikis of varying completeness. And thing things shifted even more and we have some sort of loose collection of google sheets maintained by isolated Discord servers.
I do miss the old days of a nice tidy guide. often with bits of humor in them.
Old private server Ragnarok forums. I was knee deep in the community and even helped make one of the strongest guilds on the server. It will always be a special time to me
Same here. I was on a smallish pserver with maybe 50 people where everyone knew everyone and it was a blast. I would be playing till 4am because they were all in a different time zone. I remember this game very fondly - too bad it didn't really hold up for me :(
I still like the halfbakery although I haven’t posted much in recent years. Several of the giant personalities from earlier years have passed away or retired from the site, but there is still some great wit. And sifting through past posts is never ending fun.
I used to frequent The Well as I transitioned away from newsgroups, but Kur05hin was my real jam for a long time.
I still use MetaFilter and Slashdot.
I miss IRC, but I seem too be unable to muster the necessary effort to figure out Discord.
You might like Matrix if you miss IRC. It’s pretty cool tech, and it seems to be where FOSS communities are moving to chat.
IRC still exists and has lots of users if you're interested. I've used libera.chat before and it was pretty good, particularly if you're into tech related discussion.
Prodigy Classic Chatrooms. It was my first experience on “the web” and throughout high school got to know pretty much everyone in our small corner of the universe. The web felt both massive and intimate at the same time. Kind of hoping to rekindle that a little with Tilde. You all seem like a good sort.
A few of us used to go to the one person's house in high school who had gotten prodigy, we would chat with all kinds of people.
At night, we would wrap his PC in blankets and pillows in an effort to not wake up the adults with the dial up modem signing in.
I don't know if it could be considered social media but Stumble Upon was awesome.
Oh yeah! Shame that it’s gone, I really enjoyed the concept.
AOL might not qualify, but those Warez/server rooms was where I spent a significant amount of time in the late 90s, how I learned to program VB and was introduced to Photoshop and Bryce3D...which lead to Napster, Gnutella, imesh, and their derivatives.
After college I fell into digging, 4chan, and eventually tinychat where I had met some pretty awesome people. Some of us branched off to our own rooms for maybe a year until drama occurred. That's when I found reddit.
Look at that a fellow bearded warez alumni. In the late 90's into the early 2000s I was deep into the scene.
I worked with couriers and setting up dumps. High bandwidth servers that weren't accessed directly by users. Instead their high upload bandwidth was used to transfer the releases to smaller ftps, to the various irc bots etc. etc. FXP was a godsend.
I was a very naughty boy back then. I'm still very thankful to Sweden and its glorious symmetrical trunks, particularly the numerous servers located at their universities.
I did my absolute best not to fill their disk space and interfere with normal usage. I'd spread things out quite evenly among a very large collection of servers I had ummm adopted.. It also helped in that my dumps could go unnoticed for years as a result.
I had this friend from Israel in the scene, he lived in this really large apartment block. He sorted out high-speed internet for the very large number of residents with the cost split between them such that it was very cheap.
But of course since he set it up, whenever he wanted bandwidth, he had ALL the bandwidth. He used to burn every single release onto cd then later dvds. I remember him saying he had a collection of over 14,000 burnt discs. He had no intention of playing any of the games, or watching those films at a later point. He just liked collecting them. hahahahaha
I’m not sure MUx games s count as social media, but I spent a truly ridiculous amount of time on Pern-fandom MU*s back in the late 90s.
I was also really into Usenet, particularly the X-Files and Sailor Moon forums, and mailing lists for Star Wars The Phantom Menace and Labyrinth. From there I think I ended up on Livejournal, then journalfen, and then when those stopped being a thing I found Fark.
I don’t really go to Fark anymore (although that might tick up somewhat now) but I still check in for the annual headline contests because they are hilarious. I also regularly go back to the poison ivy tea, HA! HA! guy, and bigz2k threads whenever I need a laugh. A lot of the images are broken links now but the ones that are still there are very nostalgic.
I loved Google+
Not exactly social media but can I shoe-horn this in here?
Trogdor the Burninator and Maddox.xmission were my go-tos back in middle school.
AOL chat rooms were where I grew up and learned to “cyber” as a young teen.
My main hangout spot in the aughts was the Roosterteeth forums. They had a great community around that site and I formed friendships I still maintain to this day, long after the forums themselves died.
I also spent a lot of time on the Vendetta Online forums. Vendetta is a real time space flight sim MMO (quite a novelty at the time) and I played heavily during the alpha. That sites forums (still up, still barebones) and IRC channel had a nice community of people who liked shooting the shit and talking about game design. I’ve lost touch with basically everyone on it, but still occasionally wonder what some of the old heads were up to.
Wow rooster teeth. Is that the same rooster teeth that produces podcasts these days? Black Box Down is one example.
They’re a fully fledged media company now. But back then they just did Red vs. Blue, a machinema using Halo.
Holy cow how did I not know they did Red vs. Blue? I used to watch that all the time when it first started.
Anyone remember Bebo? IIRC if you had an AIM account around the time AOL bought it, an account was automatically created for you. Spent quite a but of time on it.
Yeah Bebo was big in the UK and Ireland, from memory it was the pre-Myspace social media of choice for younger people and I remember using it during my final years at high school turn of the millennium.
Not sure if it was popular elsewhere, it definitely had a few years as the place to be for us though.
In the US I don't think it got big until 2008ish. I think that was around when MySpace hit its peak as well. I don't remember it being popular for very long though.
Newsvine.
Niche as hell, but it was a news-focused social media property which encouraged citizen journalism projects. Back in the day I had a hell of a following on there. Then they did a UI redesign which slowed the entire thing down, MSNBC folded the site into their main feed, and before long the entire thing closed up shop.
But for a couple of years there it was a thing of beauty.
Long before Reddit, I was a heavy user of VERY niche forums- my first two forums (going back over 20 years now) were first for an anime/manga series, then I found my way to a site technically dedicated to Final Fantasy games (though many, many topics were discussed), and then ultimately to a general anime and manga forum. That one I actually still use... but it's become very, very quiet. Mostly because its main draw used to be that it hosted torrents (which they stopped doing in 2019,I think), and then you could discuss things... but I believe most of its traffic migrated over to r/anime... which is also part of the reason I went to Reddit.
AOL chatrooms taught me how to type quickly - they scrolled so fast that if you made an error whatever you were trying to reply to was 7 screens up.
I don't remember how, but I found my way onto the asylumnation forums, and spent way too much time there; I really enjoyed the 'where in the world' games (think geoguesser before google maps - someone posts a photo of a location, users try to guess where, winner posts next photo).
At some point, someone on asylum pointed to reddit, and I migrated all my time wasting there.
If it counts, Club Penguin. Played that all the time as a kid from like 2010/09ish onwards getting everything I can and talking to random people online, and buying a lot of the merch and DS games and whatever else. Was a really great time and I'll always miss it
Maybe it's a bit controversial, but I really liked Google+ and I feel that if it wasn't for the controversies regarding names and YouTube accounts, it would have been a very good social network. Also Google reader was great, I have no idea why they killed it off.
The Palace visual chat was something truly special back in its day. Its twilight years were in the early 2000s, which was when I was primarily active, but even then there was plenty of excitement on the platform. Anyone could create a server without too much technical know-how, and it even had its own scripting language if you wanted to make it feel more interactive and game-y. It was surprisingly effective for the time, and I don't think there's ever been anything quite like it since.
I somehow ended up being active in two BBS forums when I was growing up:
My hangout was Kali.net. It may have started with just connecting Doom and Descent players but it became a bunch of unique communities around each multiplayer game of that era. Even Blizzard shipped it on their first Warcarft2 disc before Battle.net was created but even after that a lot of players still preferred Kali for the community.
While not a social media site per se, when I found Aintitcoolnews in the late 90s I went in *hard* because I found the messages (posts? whatever) to be such an engaging churn of conversation. Whatever else became of Knowles, it was instructive to watch his moderation of the site & observe how rules were laid out and enforced.
This was pre-Disqus and the community features were fairly homespun, but for a movie geek who had always found the Prodigy/AOL scene to be a little too generalist for my interest AICN was addicting.
I was a big fan of kuro5hin back in the day - RIP.
DMOZ. Definitely more of a community than a social media app, DMOZ was a semi-independent project of Netscape whose purpose was to build a human-curated catalog of the web, standing in contrast to Yahoo at the time. If you applied to edit a category and were accepted, you had access to the editor tools to be able to review and curate submissions in your level of the taxonomy and also to apply to edit in other areas, but the greatest part was the editor community. The DMOZ editor forums, IRC, and the eventual spinoff projects like MusicMoz - especially after AOL acquired Netscape and DMOZ's future was inevitably uncertain - were a home for me. Great people. Edit: I guess there was a little bit of social media involved - I forgot about building your editor profile page to tell people about who you were, and your Bookmarks category!
Ultimate Metal had some official band forums back in the 00's. Posted there a lot around 2010-2013 but it was being replaced by Facebook pages after that. The forums still exist and some of the old members occasionally still post there, but it's pretty much dead now of course
Oh, gosh. Did anyone use DailyBooth? It just popped into my head while scrolling this thread and reminiscing. A quick search informed me that it lasted until 2012 (!!!!) but I remember this being so fun when it launched in 2009.
It was essentially a public Instagram feed, but only of photos taken directly from your webcam. If I'm remembering correctly, all comments also needed to include a webcam photo. It sounds kind of silly, but folks got very creative with it. It even lead to games people would kick off, like scavenger hunts where folks had to find a household object and snap a photo, then pick what the next commenter had to find. It was good, wholesome, early web 2.0 fun.
First post!