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How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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In 3 letters:
"a/s/l?"
And then you would openly answer that you were ten. And then a 16yr old would offer to date you on Runescape.
I actually really miss topic-oriented chat rooms. I know they don't seem to be liked/used at all whenever a site adds the ability, but back during AIM they were really the coolest.
I thought it was so fun to just go see what kinds of rooms someone had opened that day, or sit and listen to people. I could talk to complete strangers about my hobbies and we would even learn from each other, and often continue talking for months to a year.
I wasn't exactly allowed to have friends, or in fact even speak to non-family, so the ability to socialize like that so often in my free time and then eventually come to know regulars at a favorite forum meant everything to me.
This was also way before all this shit, when (at least in my neck of the woods) being as clear and civil as possible, accepting nuance, and providing viewpoints/links were considered far more important than "whoever incites the mob first doesn't get doxxed."
I credit what debating skills I have entirely to the amount of time spent lurking on the forum and watching two specific users fight each other every time they met.
You should get on discord! It's like the instant messenger of our youth but with more features. You can find a discord for every hobby.
I've been on discord for almost a decade, lmao. Appreciate it. Unfortunately, my experience with "a discord for every hobby:"
โข Two thousand general servers. Your theme is 18+, furry, 6th grade goth/weeb, or all three.
โข Remainder don't have a description, or don't have a name/description that's at all explanatory.
โข Whatever server you do join will either start out snubbing the newcomer (dealing with that now), will already be dead (half my list), or WILL, without question or exception, die in 6-12 months (the other half).
The last time I went looking for hobby groups, the only server in existence I could find for one of my favorite games seemed active as hell, and was entirely in a language I wouldn't be able to converse in. I'm still upset like a year later.
I also think, generally, it hits a spot that's close to that, but it's not quite that, in large part for the server lifespan thing. They're expected to be more stable, but because of that, joining them feels like a bigger commitment than popping into a random AIM chat for 2 secs. Leaving one is a big statement.
I'm curious whether this might be a reason places just end up as a husk instead of seeing new blood like a revolving door like one would have expected.
There's a whole server-specific atmosphere sometimes, some of them have miles of updating rules and other have none. I joined one semi-recently that had a trigger board paragraphs long and while I would be fine with any one of those individually, I was amused and horrified to find the specific combination of member-submitted triggers left me completely unable to talk about my life.
90% of my existence, past and present, was upsetting to someone, and all I could do was talk about birds or something and send extremely careful memes while I waited to be yelled at.
Everyone's known each other for a while but the standard format REALLY doesn't lend itself to in-depth discussion as much as it does to chatting, which pushes the subject higher out of sight. Meaning the usual scenario is a place for a bunch of longtime friends to get together and talk, as long as they're talking about absolutely nothing of import. Which is fine for a good while.
Creating threads is a thing now, but I've never seen anyone use them aside from to harass a user or see what they did, and no one wants the amount of threads a forum typically has, crammed into a discord menu.
I'm not aiming for slander, if I couldn't stand it I wouldn't have been in it for so long. But it really is the bastard love child of forums and chat and the combination carries some drawbacks if you're hoping for either one.