TheRainbowegoSweet007
27869
882
6
Jan 23, 2026 7:41 AM
TheRainbowegoSweet007
27869
882
6
vystral
TBH a lot of these are pretty messy, visually speaking. Jam-packed with information. But I can definitely appreciate the relative lack of ads.
LicensedAdHominem
And we liked it that way.
SnarfyMcSnarferson
I was there Gandalf
meheezen
I was there 3.000 years ago
Willk95
#12 I ‘member!
onepinksheep
Nothing makes me feel older than seeing Millennials — kids, basically — talk about the early 2000s as if they were so long ago. I was there, Gandalf. I'm pre-Search Engine. Web Directories was how you got around, back in the day, and everything was basically word of mouth. You'd learn about a website from someone or from a web directory, you'd visit the website, and usually that website would have page dedicated to links to other websites, and so on. It was fun discovering new sites.
FractalShoggoth
Dude, I've come to appreciate that I'm still "just a baby" and have plenty of life left, but:
I'm fucking 40. My joints hurt. Young'ns utter strange phrases, giggling like fae casting a hex. My pocket computer has no buttons and I'm still upset. My childhood looked like Stranger Things.
But even if none of that moves the needle for you, then also know that I've paid for WinRAR.
The point is, I think there's far less a divide here than you might think. You have my respect and sympathies.
Default87
we used to be a proper country.
HonestCommentFarmer
Newgrounds still, mostly, looks like that.
HeadJamistan
You know the best part? The early gaming site www.bluesnews.com STILL looks like that. They got a logo and css upgrade once tho.
randomzash
www.yahoo.co.jp still looks like this too
HeadJamistan
Wow!
irisewithredeyes
#19 Damn, son... how much memory did this guy have on his PC to have so many games installed.
Evenmoreuselessname
I dunno, but I recently reinstalled UT GOTY on my machine and I'm playing through the single player tournament and it's... still just as much fun as the last time I played it ~23 years ago. Maybe I'll set up a lan party. People can just bring their laptops nowadays.
Whatdoyousaytoanicecupoftea
#15 if you were on MySpace and saw a thumbnail like this...90 percent chance of life threatening injury video
TheGreatAtomsk
woah, i totally forgot about miniclip.
Marrok1174
I showed my kid these, he just looked at me and called me old.
FreePalestineAndTheWorldFromIsrael
Back before the Great Enshittification
shorey66
I miss forums.
CBadger
There are still forums though. You can go on forums...
getthismanabeer
Pool's closed
ElbowDeepInUserSub
I remember my first time going to ebay and immediately thinking "wow what a piece of shit it looks like a scam site it will never go anywhere". >.>
Sandwyrm2
This is exactly why Google's home screen was so refreshing. Everything else was a mess of over stimulation and ads.
Emjayen
A lot of this is hardly early 2000s. Club Penguin? That shit was for little kids; I was paying bills by that time.
Badprenup
That Minecraft website screenshot is from November 2013. Only the first 2 early release versions came out in the 00s, and both were in 2009.
kamikaye
Newgrounds still going strong. Looking remarkably similiar.
l4ngos
I miss the 0 to 5 star ratings on youtube. If we still had those, the world would be a better place.
Kotarisu
The biggest thing I miss is pagination. "Infinite scroll" which is everywhere just sucks all the gerbil booty, I particularly despise trying to go through Patreon posts with it.
AntiProtonBoy
JavaScript ruined everything
Jarjarthejedi
Yes. Pagination /with the page you're on in the url/ is infinitely better than infinite scroll.
CBadger
Old youtube was 4:3, what's this square video nonsense doing in there?
loldongs10000
Imgur in 2009
eathotdog
Looks like all the rule 34 sites
Radar2400
💔
shorey66
Pretty sure they're still using that server.
tavisno
Honestly, for as tacky as the 2000s were things were alot more unique, every website has that kinda weird website minimalism and less creativity than a typical myspace page
JemIsTrulyOutrageous
No its depressing, yeah some are a bit garish and bright but the shit we have no is minimalist, ugly, and most of it doesn't fucking work on a phone without a million popups or auto playing videos. And they all just steal from each other. The internet is becoming unusable.
Vortain
Tacky but useful. I love that so many tried to cram as much info as they could so you didn't have to scroll or dig as much. Busy and messy, for sure, but now it's two ads for every one item you want on many sites, with lots of pointless scrolling.
NoCapForRealForReal
Websites used to be bespoke, because they had to be. There wasn't twitter bootstrap or angular, wordpress was in its infancy - frameworks for building websites. Now everything uses the same foundation.
lsnasty
Websites have been analyzed and hyper optimized to death by marketers. There is zero room for creativity and fun left.
nclu
And the weird (laudatory) internet is still out there, but you don't see it because they don't rank in search algorithms. The content we see is so uniform because it caters to those algorithms and not the kind of niche community matching of that early wild west.
Goldensands
Examples?
tavisno
Its always the money men and marketer analyst that basicly ruin everything. Theyre like the sad beige moms of business world.
kiefpant
I completely forgot how intense Apple's obsession with bevels was back then. Frightening stuff.
Caboune
Now it's the same, but all those icons are now advertisements instead of actual links to the website.
TheBigBadBonerBiter
#10 Man, I miss CP.
ThatQuietlySmirking
abcdefg912
Tenugui
Late 2000's. 2001 is a whole different ball game.
MegatronMustBeStopped
So true. 2001 was basically the late nineties. And 1997 was the mid nineties. And 1994 was the early nineties. Anything before that was the late 80s. Or you can just go Cowboy Bebop, The Mummy, Golden Eye, Rockos Modern Life, aaaand boom, how the hell did I wind up back in the 80s.
worldrecordstudios
some of these are early 2000s, but the funny thing is according to the young crowd, 2000-2009 is all early 2000s
madjo
I know, I was there.
When you went to all sorts of different sites, when search engines could lead you to someone's Geocities page who had mapped out all of Morrowind by hand.
When StumbleUpon was still a thing (though Kagi has something similar now called "small web", it's awesome)
Sangueffusor
CloudHiker is essentially a modern StumbleUpon
l4ngos
When you could type in a made up URL and find something interesting, or a small accounting firms webpage in Minnesota.
Slugsie
I loved StumbleUpon. I'd spend hours just Doom Stumbling. Never heard of Kagi, might have to check it out.
madjo
Kagi is a paid search engine.
ScottNapalm
I remember finding one of the earliest builds of Minecraft with stumbleupon. It was just a bunch of grass blocks in the middle of water and you could only break blocks but not place them. I messed with it for a little while, found it a few more times with incremental updates added like placing blocks and once when it had zombies, then forgot about it for years until my friends all started talking about this new game and I immediately recognized it
Zeddicuszull
Same here I remember minecraft when there were no mobs and you just wandered around picking up blocks.
certainlynotaserialkiller
JustaguyfromNH
look at mister fancy here with a Super VGA screen! (I sadly remember when these were new...)
certainlynotaserialkiller
dont forget your pills.
Kotarisu
Ah, the good old days of not needing to be online and use a launcher to play something single-player!
mikeatike
Cathode Ray Dude recently had a video on the "non standardization" of power supplied from that era, its wild.
MichikoTheJungleFox
I kinda miss the old internet tbh. I wish we could go back to pre-enshittification internet but with the same internet speeds and stuff that we have now. Like I'm not going back to dial-up lmao.
LicensedAdHominem
Javascript never should have been.
squirrelgirl86
I'm literally having a conversation with friends right now about creating a super old school social media site. No ads, no algorithms, no ai. Just a feed of things your friends have posted in sequential order. Photos have to be taken by your camera. We're debating rules about links - maybe none at all, maybe you have to pick from a list categorizing what it is and it tells you off if it's not either fun or informative.