>>1209462This is a subject I have talked about before. Sadly the old Internet ìs pretty much dead and buried.
I am someone in my mid 30's who has been using the Internet since around 2002 or so and as a result I have pretty much seen it change and evolve over the decades.
The biggest change or course is the Internet used to be so much smaller in those early 2000s days. If I remember right here in the UK in 2005 only around 35 percent of all houses here had Internet.. Compared to today in which it's around 95 percent. Yet despite this it felt so much bigger. Forums for everything, websites made from love and soul. People took the time and effort to make websites just for fun. Forums for TV shows and games were all the rage.
Or course the culture was different as the Internet wasn't everywhere. Nowadays you can't escape it. The Internet is 24/7 as it's on your phone and with you all the time. It's on your phone, your laptop, your pc, your console, your TV, your game console and even your fridge.
You can't escape the Internet. But back in those early days the Internet was a place you went to. It was an office space. You had to turn your PC on, get that dial up ready and wait for all to load.. It sure as hell wasn't instant like today. Webpages took time to load. The Internet was slow. Then when you were done you turned off your pc and that was it; You were disconnected from the Internet the second you turned off your pc and stepped away again unlike today in which the Internet is everywhere.
And the Internet back then was a wild west. You really could find anything. Of course not always for the better as shock sites for gore and extreme porn were commonplace and entirely unrestricted and open for everyone.. But like I said earlier there Forums and sites for everything. Movies, games, TV shows.. People's personal hobbies. Flash got mega popular and of course Newgrounds with it and that was great fun with endless free animations and games.
Reddit getting popular pretty much killed all of those. Nowadays we have YouTube, Reddit, a couple social media sites and that's all people ever use.
Nevermind how the Internet now is being overrun by ai and bots, has been scrubbed clean by and taken over by companies and corporations. And of course across the world governments are getting involved and trying to censor and age gate as much of the Internet as they can.
Sadly the glory days of the Internet are long gone and will never come back. It got much bigger, it got much more popular.. But a part of its soul died in the process.
