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.
Public health and the general belief that vaccines work.
I’m back in the 70s and 80s we had but we called the dime store. Where a lot of the products were only a dime and then they raise the price to quarter and then raise the price again to 50 cents. And then eventually we ended up with dollar stores. But I mean overall they’re all the same junk some good some really really not. But I know when I was younger and poor the dollar store was always fantastic for whatever I needed. Hell even now for things that I can use I still go there and pick it up even though some stuff is $1.25 or more. It’s still less expensive than a lot of other places.
hrm. times change. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z-aVQtN1eBA
Democracy.
Democracy
There was a brief moment when broadcast television networks just put their shit on the internet for free. Like you just had to go to their website, and then like the whole catalog of Scrubs or something was just there to watch.
I heard about that in the 2000s when they did that.
And that was a solution to the piracy ordeal they were fluffing about. But then they got rid of the shows being put online, just so they can bitch about piracy years later.
Inbox by Gmail
Having hope for the future. Believing it would be better than the present.
So much this. Please let politics be boring again.
Instead of trying to make idiocracy happen faster than previously believed to be possible.
I really miss having the delusion that MOST people were good, just more susceptible to media influence and bullshit.
Fuck, I really miss that. What a good response, thx!
There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times” is a curse.
Though I’m not sure the current times are really that interesting. More like terminally stupid.
Wow I hadn’t actually realised this had changed, but of course it has.
I remember watching “beyond 2000” as an 80s kid. A TV show about the inventions and stuff, what life would be like, it was so amazing.
Now we all know the future will just be more oppressive than it is now.
I remember Beyond 2000, it was great.
Reality was quite a disappointment after that, I must say.
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.
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.
I hate cliffhangers. Especially since new seasons aren’t guaranteed.
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.
Xbox 360 Multiplayer
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
Gaiaonline, before it became overrun with men’s rights morons, alt-right slimebags, and libertarians.
Gaia Online needs to just shut down by this point. I can’t count how many times that place has had chances to bring itself back up on its feet, but they don’t listen. Lanzer allowed the site to be bought out a few years by some corporate shithead between 2013 and 2017, before getting it back. It’s been 8 years since Lanzer has had it back and not a lot of shit has happened.
They worried more about getting flash games working, that barely ANYONE played anyways, than rebooting the economic system they had going. They preferred being politically correct by listening to like some 3 people who had issue with an item because it reminded them of Nazis. Granted the item in question was Nazi-related, but it was a tie-in movie item that had Nazi Zombies being killed. It wasn’t about promoting or supporting Nazis but sure lets listen to these 3 snowflakes and go through the trouble of re-tooling the items.
Than say, doing the hundreds and thousands of community-requests that are far more worthwhile.
The community has devolved into people coming back from X amount of years and expecting everyone to roll the red carpet out for them everytime. Redundant nostalgia posts. Boring posts. Troll posts.
I’ve been on the platform for 18 of its years, I’ve seen its best and its worst. I feel it is time to put it out of its misery.
The internet’s creative centers pre YouTube algorithm.
Now, not just to make it big, but to get popular, you need someone talking for 10 minutes every week to draw attention - maybe even every day.
That forces hundreds of creators to consider what content can be made lazily with no effort, rather than with skill over the course of a few months. Rewind back to the better days of Flash animations and even my own hobby of Garry’s Mod / Source Filmmaker animations to see a lot of what I mean.
Yugoslavia. Party scene. Some relationships.
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.
People who weren’t online at the time can’t possibly imagine how truly awesome the Internet used to be.
I miss separate websites.
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
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
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!
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.
Remember AOL Keywords?
