Dollar Tree being only a single dollar on everything.
I didn’t know Dollar Tree existed further back in the years like the 80s. But, I didn’t discover the store until like late 2000s. That store was a godsend for my then mostly broke ass. Sure the quality of products could’ve been better and the food selection could’ve been better, but they were there for me and others who’re strapped on budgets.
And it was a good 16 years while that lasted. It is a little annoying at times to shop there and know it is no different than Dollar General and Family Dollar. But it could’ve been worse.
Mint Chocolate Chip Soft Batch cookies. Once they disappeared, the cookie changed to taste like Soft Chips Ahoy.
Season cliffhangers.
Young people will never understand me in 1990, banished up to my parent’s bedroom to use their TV because they had a movie on downstairs, watching William Riker calmly say “Fire” on a borg cube containing HIS CAPTAIN, and then the music du-du-du-du-duuuuu and the words “to be continued”
And then having to wait an entire goddamn 3 months to find out the outcome.
Ending seasons on cliffhangers was magical. It’s still attempted sometimes today, but in the age of binge-watching and in some cases years between seasons, most shows just wrap up one season arc and start a new one. Kind of sucks.
A lot of good shows also end up canceled with cliffhangers so it’s a double-edged sword. I’m still pissed about Alphas not having a proper ending.
Playing shitty RPG maker ripoffs, Kongregate…most of the time. Being an Indie dev was so easy 10 years ago, just pick up action script 3, and make a flappy bird.
Physical media, physical buttons, watching sports without a subscription.
My last marriage.
StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.
It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.
Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010’s. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.
For someone with ADHD, StumbleUpon was like a button that injects dopamine into your brain.
Really fucking addictiveI was so pissed off when that company bought stumbleupon and trashed it. I hunted and searched for an alternative and nothing was ever the same. It was a huge death blow to the internet I loved. 😭😭😭
We have so so many human AM’s out there, trying to destroy every single bit of joy that we have.
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
90s Japanese cars.
Windows XP and 7. Before all the “AI”, bloatware and unnecessary features. Oh and that pinball game that was on xp.
that pinball game that was on xp
This one? Someone made an ad free port of it for android but it unsurprisingly got pulled off google. You can play it here and there’s a link to the git where you can prob get it for android still
I don’t want to play it! I want to fondly remember having fun playing it…
the transparent electronics vibe, the whole y2k was a fast and awsome era
y/a answers before i jumpted to reddit, then oracle killed it.
INDEED FORUMS, and glassdoor reviews before the astroturfing, legal threats.’
the golden age of shows/movies pre-2010, everything after that were replications of each other, and mostly filled with boring titles and copaganda militaryganda, funny enough started appearing around P45 first term. sci-fi had a pretty bad streak after 2010s, if any was remarkable enough to be re-watched. the decline of cinema quality correlated with the rise in streaming.
There’s definitely still good movies and TV shows that aren’t replications of other things.
Dune and Arrival exist during this timeframe and they are amazing. I’m sure you can find smaller productions that are also good. Oh, I also discovered The Expanse during this time.
Obligatory Fuck 45.
Completely disagree on the movies. 95% of movie advertisements are for the big budget, low writing quality blockbusters. More than half of my theater’s current showings are typically original IP (or first-time adaptations) and the majority of award winners are original/first timers. If you’re not seeing the original titles, I don’t believe you’re looking for them
100%. I just watched One Battle After Another, and Bugonia in the last week or so, and both were awesome and original.
The internet.
Early internet, before everything became monetized, had an authenticity to it that we will never see again.
Beat me to it.
Welcome to the Splinternet fellow countrymen! Please pay $99999 to access “GlobalHumanRightsAdvocacyOrganization.europe”. Thank you for your cooperation!
👊🇺🇸🔥
Democracy
Human rights
Rule of law• The Rule of Law is a myth, and as a result…
• Human Rights is a lie, and as a result…
• Democracy never existed.Americans downvoting you because human rights to them is only what happens in America, not what America does to the world.
It’s either that, or I have a little buthurt fan following me around. It happens here a lot.
Hanging out and house parties after high school let out, with no cell phones
Fuck yes! I miss this. And bonfires! I just miss having a reason to be outside late at night. Now it’s just…. Weird.
The early mass-adopted Internet, where every company aimed at kids had a website with free games, where everyone who wanted to share about themselves or their interests did so in their own little corner so you could rabbit-hole your way through the link trees, most stuff was non-monetized or had easy-to-block ads, and no tracking of your behavior was really happening.
Remember AOL Keywords?
All this stuff is still around, you just ignore it in favour of things like lemmy which are better at stimulating dopamine production.
All this stuff is still around
This may be true, but,
you just ignore it
is an unfair claim. It used to be easier to find unmonetized small sites and blogs. I know some still exist, but I can’t help but wonder how many more are buried out in the web, unable to be accessed by newcomers because those who run search engines have different interests than their users.
Yes but since most users aren’t using these spaces they are not the same.
People who weren’t online at the time can’t possibly imagine how truly awesome the Internet used to be.
I miss separate websites.
I didn’t have internet till like the 2010s
What did I miss out on?
You used to visit websites. News aggregators weren’t a thing so you’d visit the different sites focusing on different things. Search engines actually worked so you’d constantly be stumbling upon passion projects by highly knowledgeable people. You’d also find geocities sites teaching you how to go Super Saiyan, it was the wild West.
Instead of reddit and Lemmy, there were hundreds of niche forums. Maybe this is just me but human connection was a LOT easier. The internet was mostly populated by tech-savvy people who were excited to be online
Memes as we know them weren’t really a thing. They existed but you’d reply with them when they were relevant. People didn’t really “post” memes and no one was making the mass-market garbage that fills the Internet today.
I could go on a tirade on the last one because I truly believe memes were a significant factor in the downfall of internet culture
You should make one! Neocities works if you need a host, free with no ads
Yea. These people always fantasize about personal websites. There are still a lot of those outside of the mainstream websites.
I would rather a guess that it’s way more than the early days of the internet, but it seems like the most amount of effort these people can put is to whine about the good ol’ days.
Reminds me of MAGA folks.
Insanely stupid take that tells me you weren’t online before Facebook
Every Cartoon Network show having it’s own free games on their website was peak computer room time for me in elementary school. Fun fact: If any of you remember the Amanda Show from the early 2000s, their website AmandaPlease.com was up til 2017. It was a true nostalgia moment to remember to look at once in a blue moon as a chuckle to old website styles.
The first game I every played that had “dailies” was a Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends browser game, that gave you a “chores list” you had to complete before accessing certain activities. You’d get a new list every day, and if you didn’t complete them, you’d have a longer list the next time you played. There was no login or anything, I assume it just worked off of browser cookies.
Spacejam is still up!
