Old Web Nostalgia

Copy/pasted this from my fedi account, cuz I posted it unlisted but it got too much shares for my liking :P I do wish there was an option to disable shares for public and unlisted posts!

Summary: I have fond memories of some of the late 90's/early 2000's internet, but I'm glad we've made SOME sort of social progress in 2025. Some people just think old web was all good though, and everything about the current internet sucks. Those people may not have been on the receiving end of the meaner aspects of that time. Lots has changed (censorship and surveillance as EVERYONE is on the internet now vs a smaller subculture back then), and lots (cyberbullies, random people getting fixated on you to the point of e-harassment) hasn't.

⚠️ There will be mention of bigotry like homophobia, transphobia, racism, etc. I will paraphrase bigoted language.

You can tell when someone's an internet noob cuz they'll be like “omg it was so much better in the old days!!” whether they're talking about fandom or art or whatever. You think it's hard to post gay fanfiction nowadays, do you guys remember the general culture being so homophobic you'd get a bunch of ppl screaming at you for posting gay fanfiction outside of your specially designated “yucky gay zone”.

Or how about when it was the default culture for people to “spork” or otherwise publically make fun of ppls art and fics for being cringe or bad grammar or whatever. And if you didnt like it, the oldheads would go like “boohoo you stupid kid you should be GRATEFUL for my unsolicited “critique””. You can still hear those oldheads around ao3 or dw complaining about “kids these days” or sometimes using “puriteens” as a blanket term for wokelets…

Or do you remember when half the “shock sites” that people would send under the pretense of being EW GROSS were just gay and trans porn. Like meatspin was supposedly SO NASTY NEED EYEBLEACH but its just a girl with a wiener twirling. Or lemonparty being oh so BARFO But its just three naked old dudes. A lot of that survives to this day, like channer memes that were Just Gay Porn like gachimuchi or kuso miso tech, versus the equally cringe straight porn equivalent theyd jerk off to. There's like a thousand heterosexual lolicon animes with very disturbing premises, but for some reason Boku No Pico was the one gay one that became the one to send to people for shock value… tinfoilhat.jpg.

Or do you remember when faggot was just the default insult for everything, and every single show on mainstream TV just said faggot (derogatory) casually no bleeps. Even gollum said faggot at the mtv awards or whatever! If you were in polite company you could substitute faggot with “gay” or “homo” as an insult though… And lets not even talk about the common racist and ableist slurs on like any web forum lol forums were NOT paradises of the web despite what some folks want to say

Idk what my point was, i autoplayed a video about now-defunct shock sites yesterday and they made the salient point that half of them were actual real murder and the other half was just “gay and trans = gross” and people considered them equivalently “shocking”.

I'm halfway thinking “how could these shock sites navigate the current internet being moderated by government and laws and corporations and payment processors and whatever?”. And of course all the shit with Current Politics on the backswing back to gay/trans stuff being taboo again. Other half of brain being like “well at least theres more public support for gay/trans stuff and people say to each other maybe you shouldnt say the r slur or the n word and stuff”. I dunno, this should have been a blog post 😝 but i have 3000 characters and i am going to use them!!

Mainly, i really dislike net nostalgia in this way i guess? I love old shit like boomer rock and 50s doo wop and the way windows 98 looks, but I don't exactly want to time travel back to internment camps and casual wife beating yknow. Yeah whatever

Please don't reply to my post about my own personal thoughts saying “acktually you're wrong because this is not MY own personal experience”. As I said above, maybe you were not on receiving end of the meaner aspects of that time. Maybe you thought it was fun actually to be on Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. IDK. Go make your own post!!!!