I never got to really experience the "old internet"

I feel the same way but luckily there is spacehey. Otherwise would never have known how nice and easy it is to make contact with new people :)

I was born in 2006 so I literally only had YouTube until like 2017

I was born in 1981 and I didn't get fully online until 1997. So I'm literally one of those old guys that goes "back in my day, we didn't have Google. We had to walk 15 miles to get to the library and look things up in an encyclopedia..."

I remember the internet being more like an archipelago back then - a series of small islands, some in closer proximity to each-other than others, none so big they overshadowed all the others.  Some of the islands were closer together (like one cluster centered on Something Awful and another cluster centered on Gaia Online).

Going into an environment in IRC was a bit like going straight down and interacting with a network of mole-people that could pop up through the service on any given piece of land.

Traveling between islands and between clusters, there was an inherent culture shift, and it took time to lurk to be able to integrate.  It really felt like the internet was this huge place where there was an endless amount of ocean to explore and much of it you'd only hear about through word-of-mouth in the inner circles of whichever island you were inhabiting (some islands were better than others for this discovery).  There were dragons.

Actually, I remember being rather anti-myspace at the time, because I felt like having this huge 'continent' would homogenize everything and lead to a situation where there was only one meaningful platform and everyone would coalesce around it, the broad freedom of developing websites replaced with a narrow freedom to ass a CSS styling sheet to a small page on someone else's website.  In retrospect, it was much worse than that.

i feel the same way!! that´s why i try to experience the old internet and use nostalgic sites;;

me too, when i was very little all i remember from the internet was roblox, moshi monsters and youtube. for some reason i feel nostalgic from very old internet stuff even though i didnt really experience it... i think its weird  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

being born in 04 i can only remember me mum having orkut.......didn't have any social media until i was 15 and i completely regret creating my twitter then - i'm hooked to it. the straight up mind control that is used to advertise to us is so fucked up

Same, but at least i got a glimpse of it, and i REALLY miss it.

I was born in 01 and I feel you, I spent a lot of my time on the internet playing online games so I completely missed the window on old social media sites until like 2013 except for forums, which are still around anyway 

I was born in late 05, so I never got to experience the old internet much either. However, it seems so much better than it is now. I know how you feel!!!! At least we can experience something similar here :))))

I was born in 1988. Trust me, there have always been douchebags posting things online for validation. 

Oh yeah the internet as always had D-bags for sure. But, each site was kind of its own community. These days if you see a site with ten posts a day and 100 users a week its "dead", but it seemed less dead back then because it was like being in a room with people that had a common interest. The common interest (the site or its subject) was an icebreaker really. people usually...USUALLY... towed a line of decency if that was the overall culture of the community. If nothing was enforced, or if moderation itself was part of the problem, then they'd lose their community and die out or get overrun but assholes and the site would get a bad rep and new people would either leave or just not join...which did happen. But generally some level of decency was adhered to. 

The good news is, with sites like this, webrings making a comeback, games hosting their own sites instead of just existing on steam. I think there's a good chance the older style internet will make a comeback. But it is important to realize, These sites are never going to be mega huge like facebook or twitter(x?)  but we really shouldn't want them to be. Look what happened to those sites. If you make a forum and there is a dozen users posting a few times a week each, its a success. 

I think what would help such a thing take off is if there were some more visual way of navigating the sites. I know it sounds funny but people have become more visual navigators of the web these days. They're used to just clicking "facebook" or whatever site they're going to visit. I think it'd be a fun project for somebody to work on (that is obviously better at coding that me lol)

i kinda feel da same ....

 i was born in 2001, so growing up i didn't have much access 2 da internet... i was one of those kids who either played w their toys or play outside w their friends, i had a decent childhood. 

i remember my first cellphone being a Motorola, but it didn't have service so i didnt use it much...until the same year around 2010 i gotten a blackberry and would watch youtube on it or record doll videos... i didn't get my first "smartphone" that was touchscreen until 2014. i did also spend a lot of time on the family computer in the basement for online games and chatting in random forums..

 the only "old internet" i was actually active with was the late 2000s/early 2010s youtube.... i wasnt even allowed to be on social media until i was 13, even though i was active on kik (w unsupervised internet usage) nd sites like omegle nd skype..i remember using AIM briefly before it closed down, so yeh :p

I'm 13 so all I ever rlly had close to the "old internet" was Lbp (Little big planet) And yeah...