Internet Slang of Yesteryear

[Yukari]

I used to call it "avvie" even though it's only one letter shorter than "avatar". This was back when Avatar: The Last Airbender was really popular, so I think that's why.
I also remember "awesomesauce" being a thing. You could just say "that's so awesomesauce" and people would know what you mean xD

[ttaxyy]

Idk if it's "slang" but I remember a lot of people would type "(L)" or put them in their facebook selfie captions. (L) was what you wrote on messenger to send a heart emoji!

Another more recent thing is :V (mentioning since I saw xD and stuff). It defintely was super popular on latin america thanks to la grasa and their memes. I also saw alv and ahre a lot. (alv = a la verga)

^this makes me think about internet slang from non english speaking cultures

[PurpleHello98]

also, remember when we used to attach the -ie/-y suffix to everything online? signatures were Siggies, affiliates were Affies, links got called Linkies—user A would say "i found this cool website", and user B would say "linkies?" to mean can you share the link? on Neopets, it was a common thing for people to keep a gallery of screenshots of funny or weird things they saw around the website, and even the word "screenshots" became Screenies. everything had to have that cutesy little suffix on it. can't say i miss that, i always thought it was annoying hahaha

some other ones that were once super common, but i never see anymore:

• OMGWTFBBQ: "oh my god, what the fuck, barbecue". it basically just meant a particularly excited "OMFG", and it was often used in the same way as ZOMG, to make fun of people who would overuse OMFG.
• jaggies: this one was used a lot in pixel art spaces. jaggies are extra pixels that make the pixel art look jagged and are/were considered aesthetically unappealing. i'm working on a pixel art piece right now so that's why i was thinking of this one :p
• w00t: it's like woo! yay! yippee! hurray!
• pwning: this was back when people used to say "owned" to mean, like, someone got one over on you. you're playing Smash with your school buddy, he wins, he says i just totally OWNED your ass! but online, in the heat of the moment, people would typo owned as pwned, and because typos are always funny, it became its own slang word!

i love the phrase Information Super Highway, it makes the internet sound so radical and cool lol

I also like information superhighway! It represents the seemingly infinite information and possibilities of the Internet, and all about it that's so fun! Honestly, I like the -ie suffixies—I think it's pretty fun. I remember when I used Scratch all the time as a kid, and there was the running joke on the Scratch forums that evil kumquats would eat your siggy. I can't say I've ever heard "linkies", though, which might get on my nerves if I heard it for a long time.

I think another piece of slang is "netizen". I always kind of liked that.

I prefer Internauts myself, although I do like netizens a lot. Actually, for whatever reason netizen is still a popular term in k-pop spaces—I think it's still the popular word in Korea.

[wygolvillage]

My art program of choice actually uses the word "jaggies" in one of the settings, so it has lived on...

I miss when OCs were called "Charries", it's cuter 

[j]

I do like netizens a lot

took me far too many years to realize that .net domains were originally .network, not .internet!

[grubbyfox]

i just realized "hotlinking" is a term i still use that is extremely dated (i feel). xD

[Absentmind]

Not sure if this existed outside of where I lived, but I was texting my cousin the other day and they replied with PMSL which stands for "Piss myself laughing" and I recoiled in horror as I was bombarded with memories of MSN and Bebo. Glad it's not something people still say (apart from my cousin of course)

[bear]

we also used to write ~lels~ and similar instead of lol, like lels, lolz, lol, preferably with like a ~ here and there. and "kewl" instead of cool. It was kinda in an ironic fashion, but not in a "i'm better than it and just using it ironically." But more like...idk? Just for fun? We def didn't think we were COOL/kewl doing it, haha, but it was just funny. We would also say/write things wrong, like pr0n, and we'd say "pron" instead of, well, ya know, haha.

we also loved writing stuff like.... instead of typing a heart like <3 we'd write "less than three", and writing something like "less than thre!!!1!!one!!" was completely normal, ahaha.  good times

Oh god, I did this all the time. Seeing a tilde still makes me feel like I ran face-first into a brick wall. We were so ~quirky~. I've actually started saying "kewl" again on accident, just to spice things up when I'm choosing between stock responses.

I also used to use LAWL/lawl--idk if someone has mentioned that already, maybe my eyes glazed over while reading this thread...

The thing that I still do that makes my younger friends look at me like a crazy person is referring to exclamation points ! as "bang" and the number sign # as "pound" or "hash". I won't ever stop, though. I will also never call it a hashtag.