I remember the rise and fall of icq. I laughed from the real internet as you kids played, knowing it was a fad wouldn’t last, not worth taking seriously.
I played online before the internet, when it was scattered individuals, or when you needed access to separate telenet and arpanet, when you could keep in your head all the accessible nodes, when the building blocks you take for granted were all new and exciting ideas
Now get off my lawn
Bragging about how long you have been on social media is like bragging that you are the coolest kid in a special needs classroom.
And for people who might be impressed, a 7 digit ICQ number proves they aren’t really old school.
I’m a bit older, but this reminds me of back when people used to shame people with 8 digit SteamIDs, because they were obviously noobs, compared to 7 digit people, and of course the 6 digit people.
Bwah, my 7 digit one starts with a 0, yours starts with 8, [insert various slurs]!
And now the entire format has been through I think like 3 total revisions or something?
What about my Fark account number being a low 6 digit number (It would have been lower, but I just lurked for a year first)?? Or how far I got in various MUDDs on my local BBS?? I need someone to recognize my internet clout!! My gmail account is my name with no numbers.
I played YAHOO! Games, god damnit, and used Dogpile to search Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Excite, HotBot, and AltaVista!!!1!!!
My ISP (run by a jerky company) kept its BBS running until the mid-90s just for us still playing the MUDDs.
What about my 5 digit Slashdot uid number? Does anyone remember Slashdot?
I do. In fact as part of the reddit exodus, and the shut down of hardocp, I found myself going over there more often as part of my “scan of the internet”.
six digits here , loooooowwww six digits.
Oh yeah, mines 6 digits, but the first 3 are 101. I started using it more when Reddit enshittified too much.
I do.
https://slashdot.org/~ender (edit, since it’s not super obvious - #79)
Nice. Too bad Slashdot doesn’t show the date an account was created. I would like to what year I made mine, Around 30,000 so I know it’s pretty early, but would that be '98, '99,or '00?Don’t know. My Fark profile was created 2002.
I would bet 98-99? I have no real insight into the numbers, just a guess. Fark frontpage days were pretty 👍
All depends on what that first digit is.
Oh hey, did you watch “Waiting…” recently, and decide to mold your identity thru that piece of cinema?
Wow, still taking shots at disabled kids in this day and age.
The kids are in fact not alright.
also they were like 20something when myspace started anyway
Old man yells at the Cloud.
I’ll stop yelling at the cloud when it stops tripling my electric bill!
I regret nothing.
Have some damn respect old man helped build cloud while you get excited because your IPad is blue
Oh, you think the darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written.
I came here to make this exact quote. Good job bro!
I’m not trapped in here with you. You’re trapped in here with me!
Bazinga!
These pretzels are making me thirsty!
That’s nothing. I was on ebaumsworld
I looked up “They’re taking the hobbits to isengard” the other day for no particular reason. I felt old when I saw it was 19 years old. Then I remembered it was on ytmnd before that.
Badger Badger Badger Badger
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
Everyone loves magical Trevor!
I used telnet talkers! No web browsers existed.
Shit… you’re all pups…
I was on whatever the hell the network was between Stanford and the elementary schools in Palo Alto in the mid 1970’s and cut my online teeth on an IBM Teletype 33!
(Now we’re talking “old school.”)
Guilty as charged… What’cha gonna do about it!
ISCABBS?
I See Crabs Are Back Being Salty?
Lol. Iowa Student Computer Association Bulletin Board System. Still online, apparently.
I See, Computer Association BBS’s Be Serious.
I couldn’t join facebook cuz I no longer had my .edu address. also, it was on a vax machine…
but i still remember it.
Friends, hear my story…
In the days of old, the days where 300 baud modems were bought by us, the Early Adopters, there were meetings in dark places where code was exchanged on cassette, to be loaded from our tape drives, to create a new BBS, and you - yes you, dear reader - could be your very own SysOp. A king! Let them fall before you as you interrupted their email to live chat. Behold a world where encryption dare not tread, and you, My SysOp, could read the thoughts of all your subjects! Enter a universe where mom picking up the phone downstairs, only to be greeted with digital screeching, turned your conversations into garbled, alien characters before your eyes!
This is where it began. This is where I began. And thus shall I endure, today, tomorrow, and all tomorrows. The lore is mine and mine alone to carry.
Post on, dear friends. I did all this for you.
pfft. ive cut better lines than yours before.
It’s surreal to think about how genuinely good Facebook used to be, before they added the algorithm. It made our social lives better instead of replacing them. You could go on Facebook to peruse events in your area, having an idea of who would be there before you went.
Before Zuck hired Joel Kaplan to specifically cater to right wing interests.
It was kinda nice yeah.
Ive been around the internet since early dial up days, and while I haven’t used every social platform that appeared, Facebook was the one where I saw everyone was really just posting their projected self, the world is amazing fake lives. I dont think it necessarily started immediately like that, but it quickly became that. Its the first place I saw it anyway.
rofl tell me you do not understand how FB got started without telling me…
That shit’s been a privacy nightmare from the beginning.
Zuck has been selling personal info from basically day 1. He’s been abusing people since day 1.
The day people realize convenience does not equal good is the day humanity grows up from a petulant child to a moronic teenager… Too bad it’s looking more and more like we’ll never make it past, “petulant child”.
It was 2002-ish.
A much younger korazail saw how my friends were leaving highschool, going to different colleges and foresaw they would continue to spread out after that.
He had an idea of building a website to help keep track of friends so we could keep in touch despite physical distance and enable networking; a blend of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I was a CS major and built a forum and database architecture that my local friend group used for a little bit to chat, but we were all still mostly local and it didn’t seem super useful, and while always on Internet was a thing, I didn’t have it and my server needed to be online to use my application.
A few years later, Facebook.
I wonder sometimes how the world would be if I’d promoted my idea, figured out how to host it outside my bedroom, etc. I might have also just been a Myspace or live journal, but maybe I’d have gotten there first…
I don’t think I’d be a megalomanic asshole, but I can’t prove it.
Back when I was booking shows it was great because you could blast a small event and know it was reaching a lot of people. Bands would share it, every band member would reshare it. But then I noticed the growing discrepancy between the amount of people who claimed they’d attend online and who showed up. Like so much on FB, the illusion of being a part of something became more important than actually being a part of something. But yeah, for a brief moment there was a bit of “social” in social media. Then came the yelling.
Couldn’t disagree more.
Prior to fb, there was dedicated forums for the music scene I was in to in my area. Everything was in them. Finding what was on was easy as all the promotors used them.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
Fuck META.
Then fb came along, the forums slowly faded and finding events became unreliable in fb’s chaotic algorithm bullshit. Now some things are not on it, some are insta only etc.
It gets worse on the mobile app because there’s much less control and so much slop, versus accessing FB on a browser with a Violentmonkey script applying custom filters getting rid of unwanted suggested pages.
Used to be. There was a time when forums and facebook both existed and worked well in their respective niches.
I like how they specified before the algorithm and you cite the algorithm for why you disliked it
Let me clarify.
Before the algorithm when both fb and forums coexisted was still annoying.
Some events would be on forums.
Some on fb
Some both.
Occasionally I would miss out on early bird tickets or tickets all together.
There was never a point where Facebook made anything better on that front.
Don’t even get me started on the fuckery that fb marketplace is vs what we had.
It’s nice that your area had that. Mine didn’t until Facebook, or at least nothing a somewhat tech savvy 15 year old new about.
Discord is (unfortunately) filling the gap now. Why have a bbs when you can have a shitty chat platform with shitty search and conversations that are impossible to track?
I’ve never used discord outside of multiplayer online gaming. And not for years now…
It has IRL event promotion on it now?
They have events that can be scheduled with RSVPs. I was in a local meetup that used those to stream the IRL meetings with the virtual crowd.
Events was what kept me on the site for far too long after they went bad. Being able to organise events with friends so easily was incredible. I can track the decrease in my social activity along with fb making their system worse and it makes me sad
My ICQ number was 737916. A hacker stole it 20 years ago because I thought, “why would anyone want this?” and used the password “buddha” for some reason.
I loved that platform. Those were innocent days by comparison.
Wish I could have gotten that number back.
6 digit ICQ number is actually worth bragging about, it means you were one of the early adopters. Everyone who joined later had a lousy 7 digit number, like OP.
My brother had a 6 digit starting with 9, he barely made the cut.
I tried to get into it on the relaunched site a few years ago, but it didn’t work. I might have used my university email account as the recovery email, and that account is long gone.
But…why? I doubt anyone else that I know is using it…
Apparently strings of numbers mess with Lemmy. I don’t see my icq number at all in the app I use, Boost. For you it formatted badly. Very strange.
Are they not escaping text input adequately? Because that shouldn’t happen…
no issues on voyager
Cut off on Voyager iOS:
I think they are turning it into a HTML ordered list, and the Lemmy CSS isn’t set up for that.
A bit of browser inspection, and I can basically guarantee it’s because the
li::markerCSS is sized for no more than 3 digits.So we should report a bug to the lemmy developers?
If the bug doesn’t already exist / is included under an existing bug scope, yes.
I don’t think I will, but I probably should.
It breaks alexandrite.app a bit. It’s outside the frame of the post.
1576488 checking in; still burned into my memory from 30ish (fuck) years ago.
I can remember mine too, 4170129. I just can’t remember why I remember it. The numbers I tend to remember are the ones that I actually had to use often. For example, I remember some phone numbers because to call someone I actually had to punch in (or dial) their phone number. But, did we have to type in our IDs from memory when logging in or something? That seems like it would be a terrible UI, and surely by the mid 90s nobody was still doing that.
If you wanted to find someone when I signed up for ICQ you had to know their UIN.
I still don’t think that would be enough for me to remember it. It would mean I’d have to give it out to people. But, I didn’t do that so often that I’d have memorized the number and remembered it for 30 years.
Stop…PLEASE!!! …i can only get SO erect!
I’ve known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been on university work terminals and back… frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of Usenet bound for Mosaic with sweat in my eyes watching Netscape Navigator fight on the shoulder of the internet… I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding Lynx off of monochrome monitors and seen usegroups burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it…!
Like ASCII tears in a digital rain
Time to dial
The true measure of your worth: do you prefer amber, green, or true B&W?
Pretty sure the first C prompt I ever encountered was amber. Will always have a soft spot for it.
We have a winner!
My terminal used to be set up such that local terminal usage was green & black and remote was amber.
So, that was a PC, or a color terminal? Either way, you’re probably a young old fart.
bye
I have usernames older than you.
I turned off those modem noises.
I still have a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the beautiful aluminum case.
Facebook, Myspace, etc. all came after I finished grad school.
I had a crappy phone line back then, so I needed those sounds to diagnose connection issues.
I can still tell the difference between an AOL handshake and a Prodigy one.
8833052
2845383
4469182
I suddenly want to play Ultima Online!
