Humans.

You could find more relevant and better information on google in 2015 than you can in 2025. Stumble upon was fantastic. Facebook is so far from good and what it was now that the only reason I don’t delete it is because of how much it’s used in daily life.

Everybody talks about club penguin but why does nobody talk about animal jam?

Social media and big companies took over and now everything is aggregated AND heavily curated. Before 2010 social interaction on the internet was mainly on forums; places on which you shared a common interest with other members. Now it's everything everywhere all at once and god forbid you have an interest in something specific because that's bad for traffic.

Everything is race and gender rows these days by design

Except for the slow connections, the internet was way, waaaaay more fun in the 90s/2000s. The Zuckerturds and Leon Skums of the world ruined it since then.

The answer as always is beancounters.

Anyone else here remember Ebaum’s Worl? Hands down the greatest website of that era and foundation of my relationship with the internet. Easily made up 98% of my entire browser history for the first 6 or 7 years, and my favorite memory with all its hilarity, horror & humorous oddities. It was literally a handbook of human nature captured in Java & Flash. And OP is right about having to search for these hidden gems, but it was fun & I miss it! It was also a badge of honor if you were the kid in school who always found the funniest shit cus fyp didn’t exist! RIP Ebaum & the interwebs.

Think about it, it hasnt just effected the internet. Stores, fast food restaurants, if youve seen creativity as a complete whole is dying. Theres no color, no soul, nothing unique that stands out for things now. Its not even about ads being everywhere necause they were just as fluent then as they are now. I persomally think a big part of it is our quality of life has gone down so much its affected our surroundings. The work fatigue, brain fog, amd depression.

The death of Flash🪦😢 Flash sites full of interactions and animations, flash games, flash webseries. That’s what I miss the most.

the answer is monopolies and capitalism

Am I only one noticing the wrong grammar title?

I remember when people used to make fun of the internet for letting people showcase their personalities with customizable features. Now we miss those days. We shouldn't have been so hard on each other about that, because now it's gone and the world is a little worse because of that.

Because it used to just be nerdy men. Once women got in they wanted it sanitized and safe.

25:21 Execept it's not easier to navigate at all? The minimalism from 2015-2019 was way different and much more tolerable than 2020-2025 which is somehow even blander with bloated UI, supposedly this is done to make it easier to use for phones and yet I always select an older version of the website when given the option because they intentionally make their websites janky on mobile to force you to get their app instead, Also everytime I see this horrendous live love laugh minimalist slop at 15:48 i wanna rip my hair out, so basic and tacky yuck!

For me it just feels like it's all about money now. KZbinrs aren't making fun passion projects anymore, they're focused on money, women aren't showing their stuff for fun anymore, they want your money, and will advertise literally everywhere, flash games haven't been a thing for a while, mobile games are almost always lazy cash grabs, anything free to play just nickle and dimes you for every little thing, forums aren't really around. Social media is literally designed to upset you, showing you things you either get annoyed by or don't care to see, so they can get more money, obtrusive ads are everywhere and even things that look like product reviews are just ads. Anyone to loves the old late 90's internet, try out Hypnospace Outlaw, really fun indie game that's an amazing recreation of the internet of that time

I really miss the early days of Newgrounds. Animators made animation just for the sheer joy of it, without any algorithms or expectations of getting paid. The community was just awesome back then. NG was my daily haunt years before KZbin was a thing. Not to mention GameFAQ's, ytmnd, Yahoo and AOL chat rooms.

22:03 is it just me or are forums kinda useless nowadays? I asked Google, reddit and chatgpt the same question. Google gave me the wrong answer chatgpt or more specifically bing chat/ copilot gave me the right answer and reddit after mocking me for being stupid answered a question i didnt ask then gave me the wrong answer. If i have a question that i think theres a forum on already chatgpt is the clear winner vs getting mocked on reddit constantly by sweats😂

we SHOULD be at our worst era of the internet now

I liked when people made their own webpages because you never knew what you would see. They might be in a web ring about one topic, but everyone had different coding abilities or just used Geocities. People had the freedom to place chatrooms or games on their pages and unite people in their common interests. The popular pages in fandoms became hang out spots. Aspiring web page designers were all so different! Maybe they liked MIDIs and gifs or maybe they had designed astounding artwork and phenomenally crafted their own page without need of anything else. The internet SURPRISED you. The internet has now been stripped of self expression and confined people into different boxes, destroying our ability to ENJOY THE INTERNET TOGETHER. Don't like Tumblr? You miss out on some of your fandom. It's just sad now.

the bots pushing a person with a narative into the mainstream was the HUGE issue in Europe with Romania's elections in 2024 when Russian Bots pushed Georgescu into the top 2 runners for the office. VERY BIG ISSUE

Internet is definitely more corporate and less human. AI bots will be the only Internet users soon. Win XP and MacOS X Aqua UI were the best!

Google search results suck now.

Remember when windows played start up sound. Those systems had souls, not like corporate garbage nowdays.

Every generation in recorded history all the way back to the 1300s thought things were better "back on the day." You can either adapt to how things are or you can spend the rest of your life complaining about it. Complaining is the real reason the internet isnt fun anymore and theres big incentives for people to create complaining content. Anger and frustration get attention easier than anything creative and the more eyes on the crap the more money on the creator. Look at how many views this video gets and look up how much per thousand views a creator gets paid. Theyre profiting off your misery and continued views of the content only gives them more incentive to create it. In the 90s we all wanted it to be like the 70s and now everyone wants it to be like the 90s. No one is making you view media on the internet and despite all the criticism you will continue consuming it like a dog eating poisoned salami

We went from fairies to pixies because the internet grew up. (Fairly Odd Parents reference)

the 3 c commercialization, centralization, censorship

Because we grew up.

Y2K was a massive engineering success story!

Little note for people watching this; the Y2K thing was known about for quite a few years before 1999 even started its year, and while older computers like Commodore Pets and Apple ][s weren't really designed to understand this, the banks and governments had spent a few years by 1999 fixing the "bug" here there and the other to make sure systems knew what was going on and to account for it. At least one I remember reading (I can't find the sauce anymore, this might just be my concious hallucination) said something to the effect "I just told the computer Anything before 50 is in the 2000s. That's their problem in fifty years."

because the normies joined in

Mods and Jannies

For me its that there is less creativity. WinAMP will always be one of my favorite programs ever. Not just because it helped expand my music tastes, but the community did a fantastic job on making skins. Nowadays if you edit software its deemed "malware" or you're just going to get sued. Also commerce is exceedling down, if not worse. Everything now is one of the big corporations, or verified second hand stores like ebay. Back then it was literally whoever opens a webpage, registers it on search engins and word got around if they were reliable or not. This lead to better prices and direct contact with people instead of some incompetent AI that can't understand that I need to return a package.

SOMEONE BRING BACK FLASH!

How exactly flat design "gets the job done"? Maybe at selling a new design to shareholders but that's about it. For example, MS Office, the most productivity focused thing to ever exist, has switched from colorful icons to monochromatic ones. Why, just why? It's much harder to tell the icons apart by the shape alone. Takes longer to do the same task. But looks cool in presentations I guess. Same thing in Android (but luckily it's an opt-in feature). Many people, me included, distinguish apps by color, like Spotify is that greenish blob, and so on. We never really spent time looking at cool fonts and shadows and stuff, but colors are important and always will be

Great video! i remember the crazy days of the early 2000's internet, when the entire family gathered around my 21" CRT monitor to see the latest funny things I found on the internet. My system needed to be reinstalled multiple times a year to get rid of all the viruses I had downloaded. I have spent thousands of hours on forums that were buzzing with life, some of them are still around today, but almost completely dead. Facebook groups just don't have the same atmosphere.

Flash isn't dead it was renamed. Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator)

I can’t say the N word freely anymore

I’m actually surprised there wasn’t a single mention of GaiaOnline

I wont answer to my actions if I see someone fanboying over 2010s. Ever since the 2000s it’s been shady AT BEST, shi’s going down…

I remember when nearly every website had a section at the bottom with lots of links to other websites (all of which were hand-placed and recommended by the person who made the website you were currently on). Browsing those links used to be THE main way to explore the net and discover new sites.... I miss that.

What about Neopets!? That was my jam in 2004

As someone who grew up with early internet... It wasn't beautiful, it was garish and clunky. Finding what you needed or wanted was often an exercise in trial and error and computer-crashing viruses were EEEEEEEVERYWHERE. I honestly don't miss it.

I use to design my own website using notepad and gimp and having no idea what I was doing and it making it my own, I would get lots of people visiting my website and signing up to my phpbb froum and engaging with me and the site.

8:20 jezus I see where GabeN got his inspiration for steams ui...

everyone is trying to sell you something and ai is sucking the humanity out of everything

It’s funny listening to this when meta just announced they’re generating millions of ai accounts to populate meta 💀

(pre-watch, sorry) Because we are growing up and have adult things to do with take up more of our time and drain us mentally so we can’t enjoy what we see as much.