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The infancy of YouTube and Twitch. Everyone made content for fun, pretty much no one was nude or in a hot tub, monetization didn’t censor everything.
It was nice 🙂👍
Early YouTube and twitch, early reddit, pre-instagram. That was a good time.
Gah, I miss those days. I had a personal video on YouTube from the early days. Something or another flagged it — probably the audio I used for the cheap “credits” I put in — and the video went away.
More recently, grandmas birthday video. It got taken down a year later, likely because I had short, edited clips of Peanuts included. 🙄
Oh, and you mean Justin.tv.
Best era of the Internet was before the DMCA. At the time it passed I knew it would kill a lot of my favorite things about the Internet and I sadly wasn’t wrong
What’s DMCA?
Digital millennium copyright act. It effectively moved the burden of proof for copyright infringement from the copyright owner to the accused, short-circuiting the existing IP laws, among other things.
It is where much of the drama around copyright online stems from. It’s used as a way to quickly stifle anything someone posts that’s something you don’t like.
It made circumventing DRM itself illegal, even if you’re not breaking copyright by doing so (even if it’s for your own research or backups).
It was obviously when Homestar Runner was at his peak (the character himself, the webseries named after him, and the website it’s hosted in all at the same time). This guy literally changed the accents of some people.
'99-2009, the best time for me…some aspects are better now (cheaper, faster, more stable) but search engines are absolute shit now and social media is a stain on society. The never ending need for increasing profits year on year kills everything in the end… It’s killed so many good aspects of the net.
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Why would i use a search engine owned by the Russian state? I’m no great fan of capitalism but it’s better than a mafia state run by a balding despot
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The few years before social media and the iPhone.
The 2000s for sure - from early online games and MMORPGs to a lot of forums, when Slashdot and Reddit were good, the start of Wikipedia, etc.
There was more optimism around everyone communicating with eachother internationally, and fostering communities. Nowadays it feels everything is dominated by a few big monopolies, and there’s a lot more censorship.
Personally, for me, it was up until about 2008ish. YouTube and blogging existed but it was all still mostly amateurs having fun. There weren’t really paywalls and the iPhone was still so new that you didn’t assume someone else had a smartphone. My circle of friends mostly had blackberries so we could chat/email with friends and get information (like news headlines or sports scores or even directions) but going fully online was still a deliberate thing you did on a computer. Bosses, being older, still assumed you were unreachable after work hours.
Basically, it was the era right before the internet became a requirement to function in society but it still had lots of fun content.
Early YouTube and early Facebook were really good. I liked old Facebook, as well as the timeline update. I miss Joe it used to work. I don’t use it or any other equivalent social media because none of them work like that anymore. Lemmy is the only social media I use and that’s more of a discussion board rather than keeping up with IRL friends.
Early YouTube comment was great before it got inundated with ads and sponsorships. I miss the silly humour you don’t really see that much anymore. The last good era of YouTube was the height of youtube haikus, that sadly, like a lot of things, got replaced by tiktok content.
I’d have to do some digging to come up with the year, but I can describe it. It was after WWW happened, and all sorts of web content and communities took off. Search engines, like Altavista, had no algorithms except trying to find the thing you were looking for. Everything was free because it was ad supported, but (and this is key) the ads were no worse than what you’d see in a magazine: no popups, no sites making it impossible to hit the back button, etc. Maybe the worst thing was something would blink.
Once the war between ads getting worse and ad blockers avoiding them happened, everything went to hell. People making content had to come up with different business models, search engines started pushing paid content, paywalls started popping up, and the user experience went down the toilet.
Anywhere from the 90s to the mid to late 2000s because that’s when you saw the most personal websites being made and what I would consider the golden era of Newgrounds. Now, I wasn’t able to experience the personal websites of the 90s, but through various means I’ve seen some really cool personal websites from back then.
I used to love doing web design. Was perfect career for me, a mix of creativity and coding. Websites then were art, creative, took risks. Then cms became standard, sites all looking the same. Sites are more user-friendly now, but I miss the wild, weird internet of its early days.
The best era was 1993. I’d spend maybe 1 hour a day and read every new thing there was to read on the web.
Things went quickly wrong after you couldn’t read every webpage update before new updates. The www was no longer human comprehensible.
Before the web when it was all ad free and just nerds was pretty cool. The email list / Forum era was pretty good.
Before the questionable fake content and the pollution of websites by intrusive ads.
The few years when Google was fully usable.
