What was the internet like before social media? Your experiences?

[Phoenix]

I unfortunately came after the days of thr old internet and sort of grew up on and around social media. I cant help but feel like a lot of it (maybe minus youtube) its very boring, depressing and generic. Pages lack creativity etc.

So what was it truly like in the old days of the internet? It feels strange wishing for days I never experienced

[xixxii]

the internet is big and has been for a long time, and it was around for a long time before twitter and facebook! the internet has always been used as a tool for communicating with other people, with websites where people post boring stuff and annoy each other and advertise junk no one wants. there have always been parts of it that are boring and depressing as well as parts that are exciting and interesting and fun.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

The internet before social media had often a wild-west like feeling to it; when I was a young boy, I used to browse, among other things, a board directed at script kiddies and one directed at pyromaniacs; at the first one, one could get hacking tutorials and software (including prepared exploits and "RATs"), at the other one tutorials to make explosives and videos of members blowing things up using them. My mother nearly went mad when our local pharmacist called her after I tried to order several substances needed to create a highly explosive but unstable blasting agent  .

People in communities for youth culture where often quite crazy, including the admins and mods; the atmosphere there was often very toxic, but on the other hand you could learn a lot there. There were utmost crazy niche topics. I remember a german community exclusively for reports about meeting prominent people who banned everybody who made a posting with a single (!) spelling error.
Niveau was honestly lower than today. People would laugh about pranks and jokes that wouldn't even provoke a smile nowadays.

[brisray]

Back in the mid-1990s the internet was slow, expensive and awkward to use. Social media has always been a part of it. The Bulletin Board System (BBS) was one of the first methods, and the first of those was started in 1978, but I didn't start using them until the mid-1980s and by then there were thousands of them. There were general chat ones and ones specializing in any subject you could think of.

Some got very toxic, people acting like fools on the internet is nothing new, but most of the ones I used regularly were interesting. How bad was it sometimes? It's the time that the term "flame wars" dates from.

Not forgetting that around 1997/8, I got chatting to some woman in one of the BBSs and I eventually moved to the US and married her.

Instant Messengers were new and we'd spend hours chatting on ICQ and when AOL started sending out the floppies for AOL IM, we started using that. My wife still has her AOL account from those days, the same as I still have my yahoo.co.uk account.

While we doing our thing on that, ISPs and others created their own systems. Lycos, Yahoo and others all had their own user groups. I became a Superuser in the technical ones on both Lycos and Yahoo. When Lycos closed theirs in 2004, I was surprised to get a box from them. I've still got some of the mugs, mouse pads and other stuff that was in it.

I was poking around in Reddit on Wednesday, and saw someone posted some "advice" to a Windows user to run rd Windows\System32 -Recurse -Force. The same sort of junk that was being passed around on BBSs 25 years ago.

I once got entangled with a strange person in one of the groups. The film The Matrix had just come out and he got into his head he was living it! He also wrote a website and said people using Internet Explorer couldn't use it. He got all bent out of shape when I posted a screenshot of his site inside IE and explained that user-agent spoofing was a thing and not too difficult to do. I should have just left him alone but couldn't resist winding him up.

It wasn't all like that though. I was in another forum a year or two ago, still using the same username as usual, and a fellow old Superuser messaged me. It was pretty cool chatting to him again. Last October I got an email from someone who I first started chatting to years ago. He had just started university and wanted help with programming principles. He said he remembered me from years ago, how I helped him through all 4 years of his course and now he's a multi-millionaire and wanted to thank me. I don't know what went wrong and couldn't do that for myself, but hey oh, some things aren't meant to happen.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

I remember my internet experience pre-social media revolving around ICQ, E-Groups (which later became yahoo Groups), playing the Discworld MUD and playing Diablo 2 and Unreal Tournament online. I remember how excited I got when I found out about 'Trillion' which was a chat program that integrated Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger and MSN Messenger all in one app, so I could message everyone I knew with just one log in - that was the pinnacle of online socialising back in the day.  Ofcourse there was also an abundance of forums (I was addicted to finding interesting EZBoards and getting to know people on them).

The magic of finding a small community somewhere that shares your interests is a relic of the past.

[xixxii]

The magic of finding a small community somewhere that shares your interests is a relic of the past.

i don't think that's true at all. finding small communities requires different techniques and skills than it used to, and communities use different platforms and structures to communicate with each other, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. people are still people, and people still have hobbies and enjoy talking to other people about shared hobbies. i'm in houseplant care & fairy kei fashion facebook groups, a bookbinding discord, a my little pony collectors forum, and on this forum right now, for example.

[candycanearter07]

i don't think that's true at all. finding small communities requires different techniques and skills than it used to, and communities use different platforms and structures to communicate with each other, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. people are still people, and people still have hobbies and enjoy talking to other people about shared hobbies. i'm in houseplant care & fairy kei fashion facebook groups, a bookbinding discord, a my little pony collectors forum, and on this forum right now, for example.

i agree, im in at least 5 different sub-100 discord communities and theyre all usually pretty nice!! i think the whole thing of me being scared of big servers and like interacting a ton on giant platforms because anxiety kinda helped, and also looking out for if a creator you like has a server (if its not a super popular one chances are the server is cozy and small)

[MrsMoe]

The internet has been pretty much a part of my life since I was four years old, but I didn't join my first social media (Tumblr) until 2014. Before that point, I'd just be fucking around on youtube mostly by watching AMVs for my favorite movies and cartoons or playing kid-friendly flash games.

If any of you guys were raised on animash please speak up

Gradually, I started veering off to other places like Equestria Daily or Warriorcatsrpg, because they were relevant to stuff I liked at the time, before eventually getting curious enough to try Tumblr. My life's been ruined ever since 

[milo]

I first started browsing the Internet around 1999 when I was 11 years old.

I think the biggest difference is the barrier of entry. These days, the Internet is accessible every minute of the day by pretty much everyone. Back then, if you were on the Internet it was because you really wanted to be there, or your parents did and had a setup you could use. You needed a good computer, not everyone had one. You needed a separate phone line and all the equipment required to connect to the Internet. Once connected, you had to have an idea of what you wanted to do. It was definitely more of a hobbyist thing that attracted geeks and nerds. People at school would make fun of me because I wanted to spend so much time online.

One thing I miss the most about not being connected all the freakin time was that it was exciting to log on and get into your chat room/program and see your friend online too. It meant that you both happened to be sitting in front of a computer logged into the Internet at the same time. It was like running into someone at the coffee shop. Or maybe at school you would coordinate with your friends to log on to the Internet at a certain time so you could all chat together. Nowadays, everyone is accessible 24/7 and it takes some of the magic away from chatting with my friends when I know that no matter what, my message will reach them right now. Leaving someone on "read" wasn't so much a thing because sometimes it would take days for your friend to get your message and be able to respond just because people weren't always in front of a device that could access the Internet.

Corporations hadn't quite figured out how to squeeze every dime out of every person, so the Internet was a bit more "fun" I guess. You could actually find unique things and projects people worked on out of passion. There were pop ups and people trying to scam you out of your money, sure, but it was general knowledge that stuff like that was shady at best and harmful at worst so you stayed away. It surprises me to see pop ups making a comeback as corporate funded ads. I'll be browsing an article and suddenly there's a video playing in my face advertising a car I don't want.

[DiffydaDude]

The internet before social media had often a wild-west like feeling to it; when I was a young boy, I used to browse, among other things, a board directed at script kiddies and one directed at pyromaniacs; at the first one, one could get hacking tutorials and software (including prepared exploits and "RATs"), at the other one tutorials to make explosives and videos of members blowing things up using them. My mother nearly went mad when our local pharmacist called her after I tried to order several substances needed to create a highly explosive but unstable blasting agent  .

People in communities for youth culture where often quite crazy, including the admins and mods; the atmosphere there was often very toxic, but on the other hand you could learn a lot there. There were utmost crazy niche topics. I remember a german community exclusively for reports about meeting prominent people who banned everybody who made a posting with a single (!) spelling error.
Niveau was honestly lower than today. People would laugh about pranks and jokes that wouldn't even provoke a smile nowadays.

YESSS ive noticed this a lot these days, why the heck do people only laugh at weird crap now, like if it aint some stupid crap like a bouncy horse with the bakemonogatari tongue twister audio and some text saying "why blud be bouncing bro thinks he a [picture of a dollar store bouncy ball] (skull emojis)" then it isnt funny and people are gonna make fun of you for that. like dont get me wrong sometimes it is funny but i kinda wish we had the old memes back, like when i see some femboy furry with an ironic pfp saying some crap like "she x on my y til i z" in a kinda hood-like kinda cutesy way, it makes me think "man, i wish i could be looking at like, a thinking dinosaur meme or, i dunno, something that isnt this crap".

[bingus_baby]

Not forgetting that around 1997/8, I got chatting to some woman in one of the BBSs and I eventually moved to the US and married her.

A very sweet story, as I don't hear much about successful online relationships. Turns out long distance wasn't impossible after all! Very happy for you two!

I was poking around in Reddit on Wednesday, and saw someone posted some "advice" to a Windows user to run rd Windows\System32 -Recurse -Force. The same sort of junk that was being passed around on BBSs 25 years ago.

Reminds me of this godawful image. [CW: Derivative of an ableist slur] https://files.catbox.moe/ik30nh.jpg The image was based on a [very controversial website] joke, but as a kid I was just a Nintendo fan and wanted to learn to make a Legend of Zelda triforce in Notepad! I typed out the script it described, and as I was typing it thought "Huh that's a weird folder it's referencing. Maybe it's looking up the holy list of unicode characters??" I saw the red flags, but wanted to try it anyways. I think I was 11 or 12, which was definitely old enough to know better. Luckily, I had AVG installed which flagged the resulting file as a Trojan. I really wanted to generate this "triforce" and whitelisted the file. Windows Defender got in on the action and told me not to run the file. Whitelisted again. And eventually the computer told me, "I'm not running this file," and then I gave up lmao

Eventually I found out what System32 is and realized my mistake. If I was successful, this would be a far more embarrassing story, I'm sure. The moral is, as long as Windows is around... foolish users will try to delete system files. (It happens to the best of us.)

[Eunice]

I was definitely around before social media. Then, facebook was only for university students. Ordinary folks were not wanted. But there were lots of friendship groups for women. They had interest groups: pet lovers, graphics creators, little fun committees like charms and adoptables. They would have email groups, which were often very sociable and busy. There would be committees who could build basic websites for people who had never done that before. They were really good fun. But the prerequisite of most of the groups was that you had to have a website. When people started ditching their sites in favour of facebook, which had now opened to everyone, the groups diminished until the last one, the Garden of Friendship, closed around 10 years ago. Social media killed them.

Some of the websites were pretty tough reading. Women would write about surviving domestic abuse, death of their children, raising their children's children. They could be very personal. But that was the point. We could say anything with our sites. No censorship and no companies telling us what to do. I miss those days.

[Semper]

Pre-social media internet for me was playing on Neopets and looking for fantasy art of dragons during computer class in middle school and printing them out in full colour using a school printer. It was a wonder no one stopped me lol.

My brothers and I would also play a lot of flash games and read gamer webcomics like VG Cats or we would be scouring Serebii for info on any new Pokemon. Omg also there was Weebls Stuff. My high school friends and I would sing Magical Trevor to each other all the time. We even did a live reenactment during the drama component of gym class.

I also have this particular memory of finding this one personal website while I was on my dragon art hunt, where someone had written out a whole short story about a dragon couple who were helping this young wizard fight some evil adversary. It ended with the husband dragon dying and his mate being left alone with that grief, even though they had won the battle.

I would say that the internet definitely had a wild feel to it pre-social media and I stumbled across a lot of personal sites as a kid, but that doesn't mean there weren't central points for some people. Neopets was one of these, so was Serebii and their forums, so was Gamefaqs, and Newgrounds, and for my social circle at the time it was Weebls Stuff.