I’m not exactly sure what the point of this is going to be, this is essentially going to be a stream-of-conciousness rambling to try and process a feeling I’ve been having for a while now.
I doubt I’ll come up with anything profound or even noteworthy to say, hell, I’ll be surprised if I manage coherent in this self-indulgent, wistful lament of a post. But I can’t be the only one feeling like this, or perhaps I am, and I’m just showing my age. Either way, I miss the old internet, I guess would be the central theme of what I’m trying to get across here. (and trust me, I’m as suspicious of that feeling as anyone else)
What do I mean by “the old internet”? Well consumers of whatever form of media this eventually becomes, I was born in 1991, two years before the World Wide Web was launched, The internet is almost as old as I am. As such, I remember the early days of this newfangled computer-machine wizardry. I wasn’t allowed on it for very long as a kid because we had to unplug the phone from the wall to plug an ethernet cable into the phoneline socket (people still used landlines back then) But since all little me wanted to do was go onto the cartoon network website and play the flash games, that wasn’t too much of a problem. I remember there was this turn-based Dragon Ball Z flash game I couldn’t get enough of for some reason.
Anyway, as time went on. I, and those around me would discover new websites with new and fun distractions. Obviously Newgrounds was a big one, and the only example I think I’m going to mention that still exists, and, at least based on a cursory glance, doesn’t even appear to have changed that much. Which is honestly comforting, but there were others too. A friend from school showed me a site called Phrozenflame.com that had a lot of flash animations on it that I found really cool. Also, who remembers proboards? Everyone was on a proboards forum somewhere, and most people had their own, I know I did, it was hacked and deleted years ago and lost to time, but I had one. I met some pretty cool people on some of those, most of which I’ve since lost contact with...I wonder how they’re all doing.
The charm of things like these for me was that anyone could make a website about anything, no matter how esoteric, and present it with equal weight to a mainstream interest. Who remembers Mr. T vs. Everything? A series of photoshopped comic strips that featured Mr. T taking on various celebrities or fictional characters, that would invariably end with him throwing them into space, and the villain of the strip reacting “Damn that Mr. T can throw Helluva far” (side note, I have never once encountered “helluva” as opposed to “hella” outside of that website.) Other running jokes included the A-Team’s van being the fastest thing in existence, and his gold chains acting as some kind of invincible shield.
So prevalent was this creative spirit on the internet that I once joined a forum that was essentially a hate-site made by a friend of mine at the time, dedicated entirely to bitching about a specific group of people from another forum known only by their online handles that they, and therefore I, and the few friends I brought along, didn’t like. (I was 12 and stupid, and didn’t go outside nearly enough please don’t judge)
humour was a great driving force of the internet of yore. It gave rise to rampant creativity from the likes of Jonti Picking of “Badger Badger Badger” and “Weebl and Bob” fame, also theNarwhals thing, guy doesn’t miss. He still has his own website but the videos are hosted on YouTube for reasons I’ll get to in a bit. Well, now’s as good a time as any, there was another, called Rathergood.com, had this one video about singing cats, “we like the moon” that also spawned a TV ad, that just redirected to a Youtube channel when I tried it a while ago, and rather than give about 6 more specific examples I’ll get right to the point.
As fun and adventurous as the early days of the internet were, nowadays,while some places I mentioned do still exist, I can’t imagine they see much traffic. Functionally speaking, there’s maybe three or four big websites people use that mostly just reference each other, a few places to buy things, and New-Cable, otherwise known as streaming services.
The reason for that is simple. As the internet became more and more mainstream over the years, audiences on the internet became bigger, and...well, there’s no other way to say it really, more profitable.
In business, there’s a phenomenon called the “tendency towards monopoly.” The basic idea is that any business that becomes successful enough will grow, expand, and usually, buy smaller businesses to expand further and diversify.
Eventually corporations become so big that we now live in a world where everything is owned by maybe four or five of them if you go far enough up the chain. In essence, this is also what happened to the internet.
There are still holdouts sure, but at a time in the early 2000s where you could find pretty much anything on YouTube, why would you even go anywhere else? And since YouTube became the place where the audience was, why would you bother making and paying to host your own site when you can just make a YouTube channel for free? I guess what got me started thinking of this is the recent mass-exodus from The Escapist of their entire video team, among them, Yahtzee Croshaw, whose series, Zero Punctuation, was one of the few constants of the internet for the last 16 years. Whatever else happened, whatever drama you heard about, whatever was going on in your life, however dead The Escapist otherwise was for a number of years, you could count on Yahtzee to be there and deliver a few minutes of irreverant critique every Wednesday, regular as clockwork. (his books are fun too, they’re on audible, I’d recommend them)
The
end of Zero Punctuation very much feels like the end of some kind of
institution to me, I know that’s silly, because 2 days later, the
former video team of the Escapist launched Second Wind, and it looks
like, functionally, all that happened is Yahtzee didn’t put a
review out one week. (at
time of writing, Second Wind has just had it’s introductory stream,
we’ll see how long it takes me to make this, if I do at
all.)
UPDATE:
it’s roughly a week later, I was going to record this and make a
video, but I wasn’t happy with the recording and I feel like the moment is
gone, so I’ll just make it a blog post. Anyway, in that week,
Yahtzee debuted his spiritual successor to Zero Punctuation, “Fully
Ramblomatic.” Which is essentially ZP with a paint-job, which was
what I expected, and I think all people wanted really. In fact, early
followers will know that before The Escapist signed him to make ZP,
his first two videos that got him the gig were both subtitled “a
Fully Ramblomatic review.” and because the whole endeavour is
patreon-funded he doesn’t have to watch the language anymore, so if
anything it’s a return to form in many respects.
Even so, Second Wind isn’t a website, and on the current internet, I doubt it ever would be, it’s a Youtube channel with accompanying Twitch Stream, and why wouldn’t it be? That’s where the audience is.
I’m not completely blinded by nostalgia, I do think things are better this way to a point. Things were always going to go this way as the internet became a mainstream utility. I just miss those early days of discovery, that’s all. As much as I do believe the convenience and ease of connection of the latter-day internet is for the best by a long way.
That’s basically what the title of this means, the internet, as a thing in and of itself, isn’t fun or exciting anymore. It just is. Even though there’s still a fair amount of funny stuff on it.
So what do you guys think? What were your favourite sites of old? What were the forums you went on, and, statistically, created dedicated to? Share some classic internet memories in the comments! (if this ends up on a medium where there indeed, are comments)
Thanks for letting me ramble for a bit.
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