What's something you miss from the 2000s?

[Unova2]

i sort of miss when communities on the internet were sort of fun. like 10 years ago, everyone in every single circle i knew liked TF2, every community had bronies, every single community had extremely toxic stuffters everyone hated and extremely jolly lads that were unphased by everything. things Happened, and it genuinely  felt exciting being apart of most communities or even simply observing them on a day by day basis.
now it feels like every community on discord is composed of like 4 factory produced white dudes who are ambivalent about everything except for like valorant and don't talk about anything else and people they occasionally play with, or a group of like 5 of the worst people you've ever known and like 50 people they invited because they thought it would be funny. where are the extremely active communities full of extremely differing people who all have their own opinions about things and aren't afraid to express them in explosive ways or sometimes even in unusually proper debate? where are the people who like something extremely niche and try to share it to the wider forum, which in itself is composed of people with vibrant personalities? where's the controversy? where's the collaboration?

[Ad Bot]

[Unova2]

ironically in the pursuit of eliminating cringe culture and homogenizing communities i think we've looped back around to being resistant toward oddities and new ideas while establishing new standards of what's cringe. i legitimately have not seen anyone passionately talk about an indie game that wasn't traditionally appealing or wasn't a direct spiritual successor to some previously popular game with the exception of like, everhood in Years but i can go onto twitter, click on the first meme i see on For You and find a puppygirl page in the comments with 10,000 followers which constantly text posts about milking boys with their pawbs or something. 10 years ago this would be completely swapped and I could go to literally any social media or forum with a games section and see 3 topics about Risk of Terrariaboundtales of Aether Throne Fortress as well as 2 threads on the newest cool webcomic and a thread full of Entomologists and I would only ever see OldManYaoi83 in public when hanging around communities which specifically appealed to them

[Metalliku]

you guys remember sprite webcomics? y'know, the ones where you took ripped graphics from games on a random website like the spriters resource and made comics with them in ms paint or photoshop? yeah! those!. i've been having my fair share of nostalgia for them over these couple of months, revisiting some oldies i used to read and some i made myself. these would vary a lot in terms of quality, you would either have something interesting or entertaining enough to keep you on your seat and keep reading, or you would have something poorly edited made by someone below 13 with "lawl so randum" humor and poor grammar, sometimes they would just use the sprites straight from the games, edit them, or they would just make entirely new stuff from scratch. but regardless of their overall quality there's some charm to be found on them these days, their simplicity, their humor, etc.

some examples i could give:




some of these would be hosted on their own websites, but a good majority of them were uploaded on other webcomic hosting sites, one of the most remarkable for me was smackjeeves.



this site was my stuff back then. sure, you could post your own drawn original works, but back then there was a big number of sprite comics hosted there before other different comics were trending there. some of my favourites there were the ones with a big number of co-authors, where all of their characters would participate in one big story on random places, sometimes it would be an hotel, sometimes it would be a blank void. most of there were a loving mess, but a lot of fun too. one of my small contributions to these comics gave me my own 15 minutes of fame where it became a re-occurring joke sometimes:



eventually the site would be bought by a korean corporation, get a horrible redesign as a webtoon/tapas clone, and get shut down shortly after just to promote their other webcomic hosting site. a good number of these are mostly lost to time due to this, which loving sucks.

nowadays these comics still exist, but you can rarely find them and they are not as active as they once were. it sucks because i've been thinking about making my own recently just for funsies, but as an adult i fear i have better things to do right now.

[ultimamax]

where are the people who like something extremely niche and try to share it to the wider forum, which in itself is composed of people with vibrant personalities?

its weird because the internet completely exploded the monoculture, which you would think would make people more interesting and unique in general, and it kinda did for a while. but now media, both social media and traditional media, is very cliquey and compartmentalized by age, political beliefs, and class, but within those subcultures it also feels like everybody is similar. the combination of smartphones/social media and the pandemic gave everybody NEET psychosis for 3 years, we're more neurotic and self-absorbed. so in some ways we're all more similar and more predictable to one another than we were.
the vibe i get from a lot of people my age, particular the ones who have a consumer-based identity that they express with fashion/music/etc, is that they all fit into surface level archetypes. those kinds of identities used to be grounded in participation in some kind of real world communities but they're increasingly less so. for example you can dress like a skater or a DIY music guy without being active in either of those scenes and you wont even be called a poser because stuff like that just naturally diffused throughout the culture. and all of this stuff kinda stems from the ability you get on social media to carefully curate your "personal brand" via your profile so that you appear exactly how you want to. its 0 risk to claim some subculture or identity that you dont really participate in outside the internet

and in like 2007 it sorta felt like people had not necessarily good, but unique lives outside of the internet and that just made them feel like live wires, but now we're all more similar and too familiar with eachother because almost everybody is on the internet now.

also to be fair everything just feels more novel and vibrant when youre like 12 years old, thats definitely part of what youre feeling

you guys remember sprite webcomics? [...]

yeah and it feels like nobody is tapping into the nostalgia for these. probably because they mostly sucked in hindsight

[Snaffle J. Bean]

i miss online pc games having a proper server browser instead of being strangled by developer-maintained matchmaking aids.

another thing i miss is nightcore being all over YouTube and just early 2000s weeaboo stuff, i think i originally made an anime megathread years ago at the peak of being a weeb online.

i've been having a growing fixation on anime from the 2000s and i think this might be the root of it; even lesser-known series i had absolutely no awareness of back then still have that nostalgic kick to them simply by virtue of being birthed from the same era-specific otaku ooze i inadvertently stepped in as a kid or something idk. tl;dr watch sketchbook full colors

[Metalliku]

yeah and it feels like nobody is tapping into the nostalgia for these. probably because they mostly sucked in hindsight

i mean i couldn't really say they're gonna or could make a resurgance anytime soon beacuse as i said, these were very varying in quality, and people mostly remember those that would be considered the bad ones. but i still felt worth remembering myself of these for the friends i've made back then that i still talk to this day and for the "chaotic" fun i've had reading and making them, oh well.

[ultimamax]

i mean i couldn't really say they're gonna or could make a resurgance anytime soon beacuse as i said, these were very varying in quality, and people mostly remember those that would be considered the bad ones. but i still felt worth remembering myself of these for the friends i've made back then that i still talk to this day and for the "chaotic" fun i've had reading and making them, oh well.

every other kind of nostalgia is shamelessly capitalized on so its just surprising it hasnt happened yet, as ppl our age get further into their media careers maybe itll happen

[Goth77]

I didn't even know Saturday cartoons still existed at all

i kind of assumed fox box / 4kidz was like the last of them lol i used to get up every weekend at like 7AM so i could watch the entire 4kidz block

which kind of reminds me of old anime dubs... they have a certain kind of cheese to them you don't really see anymore

It was fox kids, which had beetle borgs, captain planet, goosebumps, all that cool stuff - and then it was fox box which had like one peice, TMNT, fighting foodons, ultimate muscle and shaman king - some of those great cheesy dubs you mentioned - and then it became 4kids tv which had....almost nothing good (fricken hated viva pinyata) when the saturday morning cartoons on fox were done I'd have just enough time to catch power rangers on the abc kids channel

and yeah as far as I know they don't air saturday morning cartoons anymore, of course I haven't watched actual TV in like a decade - but for traditions sake every saturday I put on some classics for my kiddos to watch. it's not always something that was on one of those channels but just some classic cartoon I remember watching as a kid. this past weekend we watched daffy ducks fantastic island, something I haven't seen since I was like 6 years old - I couldn't even remember the name, had to google "that looney toons movie with a wishing well" lol

Adventure Quest

Ironically u can still play AQ and AQ worlds but now they have their own "Artix Launcher". That is one thing I find extremely annoying nowdays every game developer making their own "game launcher" it's so redundant - launch a launcher to launch a launcher to launch the game. anyone who has RDO installed through steam knows what I'm talking about

you guys remember sprite webcomics? y'know, the ones where you took ripped graphics from games on a random website like the spriters resource and made comics with them in ms paint or photoshop? yeah! those!

oh man those were super fun, I loved reading those back in the day and would occasionally make my own. seeing the websprite comics also makes me remember all the great flash games I used to play - mainly the escape themed point and click games like Exmortis and Dead Case. thank goodness lots of them were preserved - but many of the ones that were on misc/unpopular flash websites are gone forever

when everything had its own website, be it a game, a game server, or just a community based around a topic.

today everything is just centralised onto a subpar social media platform like discord, and we all complain about it when they do something stupid for the 20th time this year. but nobody is willing to get off these platforms and start something of their own, free from the stuff we have to put up with when using a big name, out of touch, buggy platform.
twitter's stuffshow is proof that no matter how bad it gets people will never leave their collapsing platform, but will absolutely continue to moan about it and threaten moving to whatever alternate platform is being developed at the time, of which a few will do for a week then come crawling straight back once they realise nobody else moved over with them.

the real kicker is that we used to be able to do this - digg fell catastrophically when they began loving up which gave way to reddit, and now that reddit is loving up they're still standing strong as the alternate platforms that popped up return to obscurity.

always thought twitter was a piece of stuff, deleted my account back in 2012 and never looked back - honestly surprised it's lasted as long as it has. I can understand where your coming from though it's like nowdays every game has it's own facebook, twitter, reddit, steam forum, steam group, discord server, etc. it can be a headache trying to find support in just one of these many places when back in the day it was as simple as posting a question on the forum or contacting developers through a support ticket on their website. the only thing I'll say is that discord is pretty handy for real time discussion - I've been able to get a hold of friends and fellow developers there more easily than any of the above options - not saying it's perfect (far from it) but imo better than the other options out there

[Alyx Vance]

It was fox kids, which had beetle borgs, captain planet, goosebumps, all that cool stuff - and then it was fox box which had like one peice, TMNT, fighting foodons, ultimate muscle and shaman king - some of those great cheesy dubs you mentioned - and then it became 4kids tv which had....almost nothing good (fricken hated viva pinyata) when the saturday morning cartoons on fox were done I'd have just enough time to catch power rangers on the abc kids channel

I actually got the ass end of fox box when it first became 4kidz, they still aired one piece, fighting foodons and TMNT but also had winx club and sonic x (which is what i was mainly there for) and OOOOOOOOOOOOOH GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD the 4kidz flash microsites and games are such nostalgia to me

i actually am weird cause i loved the stuff out of viva pinata but that was probably only because i had the game on DS and wii (full circle to my virtual pet affliction)

but i remember watching it degrade and half their shows got put on other networks and once sonic X ended, 4kidz had nothing worth watching so i got bored and moved onto toonami

I also kind of remember catching a digimon show on TV but idk if that was toonami or 4kidz.

and yeah as far as I know they don't air saturday morning cartoons anymore, of course I haven't watched actual TV in like a decade - but for traditions sake every saturday I put on some classics for my kiddos to watch.

i actually did the same thing when i was babysitting my siblings every morning, would put on all kinds of goofy kids anime :p

i dont have my own kids yet but i've began to make preparations and will probably force my own kids to watch 4kidz stuff

i miss online pc games having a proper server browser instead of being strangled by developer-maintained matchmaking aids.
i've been having a growing fixation on anime from the 2000s and i think this might be the root of it; even lesser-known series i had absolutely no awareness of back then still have that nostalgic kick to them simply by virtue of being birthed from the same era-specific otaku ooze i inadvertently stepped in as a kid or something idk. tl;dr watch sketchbook full colors

i miss those big dopey eyes. of course anime girls still have big eyes but they just... had a look to them





>o<

[Mr. Bones]

twitter's stuffshow is proof that no matter how bad it gets people will never leave their collapsing platform, but will absolutely continue to moan about it and threaten moving to whatever alternate platform is being developed at the time, of which a few will do for a week then come crawling straight back once they realise nobody else moved over with them.

I don't understand how people use twitter regularly and maintain an account, every time I've tried to do it I CBA after a week tops. I'll look at it rarely to see a funny argument someone sent to me and that's about it, but this is coming from someone who can't even be arsed to regularly post to Facebook/Instagram. I don't know how people regularly maintain a presence on multiple platforms.


On topic, I miss gaming in the 2000s. Roblox, Adventure Quest, Neopets and Wizard 101, etc. Obviously ROBLOX is still around but it's not the simple sandbox game with Lego inspiration it was back in pre 2008. I log on every now and then still mostly for nostalgia purposes but the game has lost all the charm that captivated me as a kid.

[Mr. Bones]

i miss online pc games having a proper server browser instead of being strangled by developer-maintained matchmaking aids.

You only really see this stuff in indie titles or sandbox genres of games anymore, which sucks. It's also been made worse in the past few years with skill based matchmaking. We need to normalize more games being a fun passtime activity and not a bullstuff skill-off. Not only are all games sweaty tryhard stuff now but the SBMM has also made it harder to make online friends. Rather than playing with everyone you're only really playing with a fraction of the games community around your skill level. Also got rid of the mysticism of there being that one guy in the lobby who's stuffting on everyone, I miss that.

And it gets worse: most modern games with competitive aspects have a curated competitive mode which has SBMM, which is fine - as a competitive mode it should, but a lot of the time the SBMM is in the casual modes too. Casual fun in gaming is dead.

[Alyx Vance]

On topic, I miss gaming in the 2000s. Roblox, Adventure Quest, Neopets and Wizard 101, etc. Obviously ROBLOX is still around but it's not the simple sandbox game with Lego inspiration it was back in pre 2008. I log on every now and then still mostly for nostalgia purposes but the game has lost all the charm that captivated me as a kid.

I still mess around with neopets but the theme is absolutely hideous and the games are broken

supposedly the website creators want to fix these issues and create "a new era" but really i hope they just fix the games, forget mobile and go back to that old layout

if you still like stuff like neopets i really, really, really recommend marapets.com

it started as a guild on neopets and became its own site with games and its own mechanics. The layout is really clunky though

then you have stuff like chickensmoothie 

[Refticus]

-snip-
eventually the site would be bought by a korean corporation, get a horrible redesign as a webtoon/tapas clone, and get shut down shortly after just to promote their other webcomic hosting site. a good number of these are mostly lost to time due to this, which loving sucks.

nowadays these comics still exist, but you can rarely find them and they are not as active as they once were. it sucks because i've been thinking about making my own recently just for funsies, but as an adult i fear i have better things to do right now.

if you're still up for that kind of content, the successor to smackjeeves is comicfury from what i know.
you can still find weird comics made by one guy in a afternoon on there.

I don't understand how people use twitter regularly and maintain an account, every time I've tried to do it I CBA after a week tops. I'll look at it rarely to see a funny argument someone sent to me and that's about it, but this is coming from someone who can't even be arsed to regularly post to Facebook/Instagram. I don't know how people regularly maintain a presence on multiple platforms.

they're addicts, that's what all these big social media platforms today aim for.
they want you to get addicted to that feeling of seeing your latest stuffpost getting attention and likes so you'll stay on their site for longer, share more info about yourself, and click the tailored advertisements.

[Drydess]

i sort of miss when communities on the internet were sort of fun. like 10 years ago, everyone in every single circle i knew liked TF2, every community had bronies, every single community had extremely toxic stuffters everyone hated and extremely jolly lads that were unphased by everything. things Happened, and it genuinely  felt exciting being apart of most communities or even simply observing them on a day by day basis.
now it feels like every community on discord is composed of like 4 factory produced white dudes who are ambivalent about everything except for like valorant and don't talk about anything else and people they occasionally play with, or a group of like 5 of the worst people you've ever known and like 50 people they invited because they thought it would be funny. where are the extremely active communities full of extremely differing people who all have their own opinions about things and aren't afraid to express them in explosive ways or sometimes even in unusually proper debate? where are the people who like something extremely niche and try to share it to the wider forum, which in itself is composed of people with vibrant personalities? where's the controversy? where's the collaboration?

To me it seems like you just struggle to make connections with people in their preferred environment regardless of the internet

[Sheepocalypse]

Honestly it felt like it was just August of 2010, literally time has flown by so fast. Its funny how fast time has passed, at least for me. Like it seems like last week I was just chilling with all my friends at high school, having the time of my life. Or playing Blockland with my friends on Bedroom, hunting for Renderman, back when I was 11. Honestly, thinking back, its kind of sad how fast time flies by and how my life is just going by lol. Idk if its gonna get any slower but its not getting any better lmao