Discovering AVGN on YouTube at 6 years old and thinking it was the funniest thing ever.

Windows 95 or 98 and a 56k Modem

 

I primarily used it to download cracks for computer games. I also downloaded the game Dink Smallwood overnight.

Asking jeeves about something history related because I thought a search engine was like an ai chatbot. I must have been <10

tell us how it was, grandpa, witnessing a dawn of the internet

i remember my dad always bought dvds with games on it, mostly educational low poly shit for kids, but he manages to get the game based on local Kommissar Rex series, and then era of flash games, and then youtube...

I don't remember that much.

Since you paid by the minute I usually used it for like 10 minutes everyday and afterwards played video games.

I think I mostly lurked on german forums for my hobbies. I feel like it was way less addicting because the communities were smaller and not everything was designed to keep your attention. It was way too slow to download a whole game yourself so you usually borrowed video games from a fren, burned them yourself on a cd and then just downloaded a crack for it.

 

After I first got dsl a fren told me about youtube and I was confused why anyone would use that site. It was just filled with uninteresting low quality home videos of hobbyists. Lel.

i wish the time could stop here so we can still watch =3 again instead of ai slop, i guess people payed for technology progress with am opportunity to have a quality content, but im just daydreaming

I think modern youtube is really really good.

A lot of youtube shows make better videos than everything tv has ever done. Tv documentaries may have 100000's dollars of production value but are still written by biased IQ89 journalists. You get videos of science youtubers that will give you the scientific consensus on every topic for you. You find all information with tutorials on every hobby you can possibly be interested in.

 

Whenever I do something on my car or at home I can watch a youtube video about it and then do it myself. 15 years ago there would be none of it and I would have to rely completely on the expertise of some random tradesman hoping that he does a competent job and won't rip you off.

Would be cool if YouTube wasn't a tool to make people addicted and extort them for money with ads by big tech

i watched good porn when i was 8

Do you still remember how it is to watch a movie on tv? Tv forces you to watch like 7 minutes of ads every 45 minutes or so. Along with ad overlays during the movie.

 

Even todays youtube with adblocker is still infinitely better than tv was in the last 20 years. The only really bad thing that content creators on youtube do are clickbait titles. But this is something that you can recognize and withstand if you are not a moron.

Also sponsors, everyone has them built in their videos nowadays

We need to go back

Computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, great vidya, also learnt programming in BASIC. Internet I dunno, way later, probably at a pal who had an x86 PC before I had.

We don’t

i remember i saw the video of guy who recorded his internet activity on tape, like browsing youtube, google and playing xbox, can't find it anymore but it was mesmerizing to watch

have you all ever chatted through irc? how it was? did you make your own homepage with geocities?

Yes to both, also had epic adventures in Runescape

The guy who hooked up a modem to my PC back when I was 10 or so showed me yandex.ru for searching stuff. I think the first thing I've looked for was an email provider and then I've registered my first email adress which I thought was super fucking cool. Good times. Fuck me, I've got depression a couple years later and the world has been a very gray place from then on.

do you still have an access to the geocities site? would like to take a look

do u have a wannabe 1999 neocities cite ratmean

of course, https://nicobuterstrasse.neocities.org/

i made one in 2015 because i was in the first wave of late teenagers who thought that the 90s were cool

now i am old

mine was much more complex btw, it's a rather lazy homepage you got there

Then share yours.

more like first ever page self-made on html, so of course it sucks

Being given access to a computer before preschool by my parents, then computer labs in preschool and elementary school. I can't remember what the first time I used the internet was like. It's something I've always been on.