What do you remember?

  • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Not a site but a feature: web rings

    You’re on a site about radio control toys, at the bottom is a ring control go to a thematically related site, maybe find your way around the ring to it’s start

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      i ran across a web ring not that long ago. took me back—way back.

      edit: do NOT go to webring dot org. domain is owned by scammers. dot com isn’t the old thing either.

    • VirtigoMommy@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 day ago

      Oh man, you just unlocked memories of a handful of cryptid and urban legend websites I used to crawl as a kid that were all linked together.

      Used to spend hours trying to be quiet in the living room reading weird nosleep-style stories. Fuck I miss the early web. Web 4.0 sucks.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 days ago

    Two games, likely flash, but possibly just JavaScript and stuff. I remember accessing through dedicated webpages.

    One was a puzzle game that had a planet and a bunch of items to place on it. The game let you place each item only once, and the items would have different interactions depending on which order you placed them in. So if you use the seed before the water, it would grow. But if you placed the fan down before the water, it would create a storm which would make the seed grow even more…or something like that.

    The other one was a game where you leveled up like an RPG with stat points, but the stats were just how long or wide your sword is. Power too, I think. Your character followed your mouse cursor, and clicking would swing the sword. You could choose different areas where different monsters with different stats would appear, chasing you, and you could kill them for more experience. Almost a proto Vampire Saviours, I guess

  • Tess@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    sixdegrees.com

    It was one of the very first social networking sites. I met my partner through there in a random chat room.
    It was based on the six degrees of separation thing. You could see from any user if you were connected and through how many degrees.
    I don’t remember much anymore, besides it being a place where you could meet people.

    • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      2 days ago

      The innocence of the old internet…

      Back then it was “wow! So cool that they know how all of us are connected!”,

      now it’s “NOOOO! nobody should have this kind of info in me! Who are they selling it to???”

  • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    There was a japanese website where you would type peoples names and it would morph the characters into swords, dicks, and anuses. You could type two names and it’ll turn one into a weenie and the other into a butt and see how well they fit together.

    It was amusing. I can’t remember the name. I am sadness.

  • 58008@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.

    spoiler

    rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today’s standards though.

    steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.

    When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.

    One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡

  • unfortunate_ferret@piefed.caEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Early 2000s: The Mech Madness forums, for discussing Armored Core, BattleTech, Gundam, and all other things mech and mech-related. It was a decent-sized community, for the time.