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.
90s Japanese cars.
The internet without megacorps. Ok, the world without megacorps.
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.
Windows XP and 7. Before all the “AI”, bloatware and unnecessary features. Oh and that pinball game that was on xp.
that pinball game that was on xp
This one? Someone made an ad free port of it for android but it unsurprisingly got pulled off google. You can play it here and there’s a link to the git where you can prob get it for android still
the transparent electronics vibe, the whole y2k was a fast and awsome era
y/a answers before i jumpted to reddit, then oracle killed it.
INDEED FORUMS, and glassdoor reviews before the astroturfing, legal threats.’
the golden age of shows/movies pre-2010, everything after that were replications of each other, and mostly filled with boring titles and copaganda militaryganda, funny enough started appearing around P45 first term. sci-fi had a pretty bad streak after 2010s, if any was remarkable enough to be re-watched. the decline of cinema correlated with the rise in streaming.
Dune and Arrival exist during this timeframe and they are amazing. I’m sure you can find smaller productions that are also good. Oh, I also discovered The Expanse during this time.
Obligatory Fuck 45.
Completely disagree on the movies. 95% of movie advertisements are for the big budget, low writing quality blockbusters. More than half of my theater’s current showings are typically original IP (or first-time adaptations) and the majority of award winners are original/first timers. If you’re not seeing the original titles, I don’t believe you’re looking for them
The internet.
Early internet, before everything became monetized, had an authenticity to it that we will never see again.
Beat me to it.
Welcome to the Splinternet fellow countrymen! Please pay $99999 to access “GlobalHumanRightsAdvocacyOrganization.europe”. Thank you for your cooperation!
👊🇺🇸🔥
Democracy
Human rights
Rule of law• The Rule of Law is a myth, and as a result…
• Human Rights is a lie, and as a result…
• Democracy never existed.Americans downvoting you because human rights to them is only what happens in America, not what America does to the world.
It’s either that, or I have a little buthurt fan following me around. It happens here a lot.
Hanging out and house parties after high school let out, with no cell phones
Fuck yes! I miss this. And bonfires! I just miss having a reason to be outside late at night. Now it’s just…. Weird.
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.
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!
Software/Apps costing a fixed, one-time amount rather than subscription models for everything
Digg, reddit
The chive
Friends and I used to be able to throw good DJ parties at clubs. Now corporations make the artists sign non-compete contracts so they cant play anywhere else in the city but with them
Amateur porn.
Now it’s all OnlyFans and Christians doing hate campaigns to shut it all down.
PH AND ITS AFFILIATES sanatized the shit ouf thier sites. of and some old ph material can be found on non-ph sites, at least some of them.
Pokémon Go. Those first few weeks and months were nothing like anyone could have imagined from a mobile game. People were outside and enjoying a game with other people. I remember seeing videos of people all running because a rare Pokemon had spawned somewhere and everyone was helping each other to get to it.
The game itself was a simple affair anyone and everyone could play with no paywalls or subscriptions. Now it’s just paywalled events, Pokemon locked behind those events and it’s just a slog to play now.
I’m glad I got to be a part of those early days.
Reminds me of geochaching. I don’t think the website charged, a GPS wasn’t already in everyone’s hands, and the stuff we hid was good stuff.
Now they have Premium if you want to do it, and it just isn’t the same.
I never played it, but it looked like a good time for people into Pokemon for sure. Unfortunately on the flip side, I know of it being a problem in some specific areas too. A friend in Seattle wasn’t getting any sleep for weeks because idiots were ruining it for everyone by running loudly at 1 to 3 am near his apartment. I hope that if any other big AR game goes live, they enforce quiet hours.
What killed it?
I wasn’t super into the hype but I messed around on it and enjoyed talking to people about it
I am guessing enshittified?
For me, way too much being put behind a paywall. And not just big events. I get a real world event like the Go Fests should be, I even was going to go to one but Covid stopped it. But it got to the point where it seemed every in game event started to have a paywalled part to it. They started putting Pokemon behind them too and community days started to have them too. Was just too much.
My personal opinion is it has only gotten better. Like there wasn’t trainer battles or anything back in the first days. I could go without the new dynamax thing they’re just put out, but you don’t have to involve yourself with it if you don’t want
I remember my entire team going for a walk suddenly when someone realised there was an interesting Pokemon that had spawned nearby.
