I Miss the Old Internet...

[@mizuhonova]

Microsoft ditching MSN Messenger for Skype was one of the worst moves they did for their userbase. Almost everyone I knew on MSN Messenger just didn't migrate. Had they kept innovating on messenger, they might have become an earlier discord or slack.

[@CharizardSnyper]

Microsoft ditched msn long before they acquired Skype

[@nickwallette6201]

They don't really _do_ that... Microsoft has always had a more "let's see what everyone else does, and copy whatever is most successful" strategy. They had several messaging services, each clearly modeled on an existing product from someone else, until Teams finally got traction through the magic of "we already own it due to our enterprise agreement."

[@simmonslucas]

then they let skype die....

[@growingup15]

theres a way to use MSN today you have to use the Escargot program.

[@CasperioSs]

MSN was amazing

[@Moondream417]

Good lord I miss flash. Security issues aside, it brought me some good times

[@Clavichordist]

Flash as it was intended as a player was great. Then Adobe ruined it by embedding background processing which allowed a bunch of security holes. Macromedia had some great software and sadly was destroyed by Adobe which stole it for the IP.

[@nickwallette6201]

Flash was definitely a neat product, but bad idea. But then... it was the early Internet. That was a time _full_ of bad ideas. Like ActiveX and Java. Basically anything that fit the "let's just download this binary from a random website and execute it with local admin permissions" theme.

[@Clavichordist]

@@nickwallette6201 When Flash became an integral part of the internet it got ruined by people who had no clue about the implications of what can happen. That happens with a lot of technology, sadly. I agree. Both Flash and Java are fine as long as the developers used them as intended but when they added in code to do things that they weren't intended to do, that's when everything fell apart. Java was written to create a sandbox environment that was both secure and operating system agnostic. When developers wrote code to bypass this and start writing directly to the operating system, that defeated the security. Flash too suffered from the same. As a stand-alone video player and interactive program environment it was fine, but when internet links were embedded into it, that's when it all fell apart. Macromedia had a scripted language and program that I can no longer remember the name of that was used to develop some complex Flash based programs that ran in a standalone environment. A company I worked for looked into it but it was not only expensive but also way too much work to achieve what a turnkey solution to do for a lot less development time and money.

[@CPUGaming]

You should check out flashpoint

[@bowiemtl]

@@nickwallette6201 makes me wonder that despite this history virtualization is still uncommon for programs. I get it, it comes with it's cons as well but for certain programs it makes a ton of sense

[@strouze]

One thing I really hate about the current Internet is being always online. Back in the day you chatted with friends because you were online at the same time. Now you are always connected with everybody and everything.

[@laser4887]

On the money.

[@Matt-so3nm]

Veronica Explains said something similar, how she misses the old “intentionality of the internet”. I definitely get that.

[@dstinnettmusic]

I miss the little bit of time when the Internet was ubiquitous but nobody with authority knew how it worked, but a lot people using the Internet did know how it worked, so that information deficit led to a lot of fun.

[@Bananalnc]

I'm grateful that it still somewhat exists since you can still tell who "gets" internet culture and who doesn't, but those days were the absolute best. It was the era where your parents were afraid of you talking to "strangers" on games.

[@dstinnettmusic]

@@Bananalnc the golden example is “Boaty Mcboatface” No company would be dumb enough to leave a poll totally open like that.

[@FoxBlocksHere]

This is the best explanation I've ever heard. This is exactly how I've felt about the early internet, perfectly put into words.

[@rolux4853]

@@Bananalnc you still sound pretty young with what your saying. Did you experience the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s? Those where the days! Everyone gave Informand software away for free. No paywalling BS! The internet was true democracy, no big corporations had power over the User and everybody helped the others out, just because freedom!

[@dstinnettmusic]

@@rolux4853 that is before my time and I feel like it was also before the time I miss. That was it’s own golden era. I’m more thinking like….peak MySpace-early Facebook times. When literally everyone was online, just maybe not all the time line today.because 60-80% of people were still in flip phones and candy bar phones Probably like 2007-2014…2015 feels like everything online got a bit less fun, angrier and darker

[@jeffsaffron5647]

Old internet was place for geeks and pc weirdos. Time of forums, messaging apps (MSN, ICQ), file sharing (DC++ and torrents of course). Internet was anonymous wild west without tracking, fingerprinting custom adds. What a time.

[@Aomicplane]

It was a lot more innocent, fun and exciting for sure

[@nickwallette6201]

Like all good things, it changed from an early adopter's playground to a cesspool of commercialization. Makes me want to go back to BBSes. haha

[@LuLeBe]

Forums are still a thing tho. I wouldn't say geeks only, I would say it was used for actually interesting stuff. Most people only used it to look things up. Now most content on the internet is completely dumb (instagram, tiktok etc), which is kinda sad. Of course there were useless activities like TV before but I somehow feel like the amount of time spent on useless internet stuff drastically increased to the point where having hobbies is a strange "geeky" thing these days.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@LuLeBe When was it not? :-D

[@glowinthedark9082]

Fun things become popular, popularity creates business, business creates censorship, censorship breaks creativity. Which makes them less fun. This is why some people think it's better to have a containment zone.

[@finncrisp9900]

I hate almost everything the internet has become. Golden age pretty much ended in 2010-2011, around the time when smartphones started to become widely available.

[@ponraul1221]

The Wild West of the Internet ended in 2013 early 2014 imo. Though I only really started experiencing it in 2007. The difference is massive to modern day though.

[@nickp1987]

Personal web pages proudly proclaiming they were written in Notepad, blink tags, Webrings, animated gifs, 88 x 31 buttons, Netscape Navigator, enthusiast websites that as part of membership would give you a little bit of website hosting space and your own subdomain on the site. Man, I miss all of that stuff.

[@MegaGrawp]

HEY THIS PAGE WAS MADE BY A GENIUS WHO CAN LOOK UP HTML TAGS AND TYPE THEM IN NOTEPAD BY HAND! BOW DOWN!

[@maikatase]

Amazing, the community really delivered and he found the game, I love happy endings

[@MetalY2KMusic]

The internet is no longer fun or interesting. It is just one giant accumulation of businesses. It's like going to a downtown in your home town, that used to be wholesome and small, and now is just a clusterfuck of nowhere to park and quick exchanges, surrounded by people who are buying and doing the same things you are, but you have absolutely no incentive to talk or be friends.

[@bbking006]

It's exactly that feeling - all of the clubs, record shops, venues, places you used to hang out, local businesses, unique shops, all of it has been replaced with condos.

[@HumanTouchArt]

i agree the corporate internet sucks unfortunately 😔😔 miss the old days...this days everything is super toxic and full of commercials on every corner ...

[@LikaLaruku]

Google being inundated with results that have nothing to do with what you searched for, & Google Image Search being loaded to the brim with ads makes it all even worse.

[@archiemisc]

That's called getting older

[@giggleanthropisticon7061]

Bubble Tanks and Bubble Tanks 2. Loved that game. You moved from room to room and sometimes there were high level tanks in a room, but you could run away. If you die, you restart because it was rogue-style. You leveled up and choose between upgrades, like guns or speed, or auto turrets, etc.

[@millionare5446]

thats what im thinking

[@WhereTheGustGoes]

Heli attack and boxhead were amazing. Feudalism series was also great flash version of mount and blade.

[@yaltschuler]

He said it wasn't that specifically.

[@8randomprettysecret8]

MSN messenger had a wholesome experience felt like a local community square with your friends. Felt ahead of it’s time but felt outstanding. Sad they threw in the towel.

[@ottojagenstedt9740]

MSN was so good, and insane for the time. You could just create personal hotkeys for new and custom emojis and use whatever picture you wanted, or created/edited in paint or whatever, or got from someone else and wanted to use it as well, and just be able to use to anyone and they'd see exactly the custom emoji you sent. That would not fly today sadly

[@gianfrixmg]

The problem is that, at least here in Italy, people used to bind characters to images or gifs containing characters. Reading those chats would feel like reading hieroglyphics. I hated that. Oh, also nudges. HATE HATE HATE.

[@McConha]

@@gianfrixmg I had literally one different emoji for each character lol.

[@ottojagenstedt9740]

@@gianfrixmg Yeah I absolutely remember people doing that having like 4 letters changed to different styles and the rest normal, it was horrible. As was the nudges D:

[@ottojagenstedt9740]

@@McConha Sorry but you were the worst

[@McConha]

@@ottojagenstedt9740 Nah I get it, I didn't do it because I thought it was cool, but because I thought it was annoying lol. I guess I was a kind of early troll back there.

[@GuagoFruit]

Morale of the story: technology is amazing, ruined by corporate greed.

[@JosephM101]

I remember when surfing the internet was always an experience, because my dad only allowed me on every so often; it wasn't an everyday thing.

[@lcrazy8l]

One that I’ll always be in disbelief was ahead of it’s time was Xfire. Steam and Xbox game bar overlay? Did it. In game chat text and voice? Did it. Screenshot and screen video recording + sharing? Did it. Game stats and hours tracking? Did it. Gaming focused groups ala discord servers like? Did it. Idk how they ended up losing focus so bad so suddenly to Discord and Steam.

[@exer45]

holycrap i totally forgot about that one!

[@luisarriaga6132]

The usual thing, they got bought out and then the new owners wanted to shift away from what made the company successful

[@krizalllid]

Xfire died a long time before discord released.

[@Grimmers]

They kept redesigning the UI to be worse and worse and were massively behind on their streaming tech which was pure CPU software encoding and would plummet your game framerate. They were also massively behind on adopting mobile. Eventually they just fell too behind as a 'do everything app' that the competition outpaced it within their specialties. Teamspeak took it's clan groups, twitch took it's streaming, steam took it's hour tracking, and discord took it's community chat.

[@wnxdafriz]

i miss the internet being mostly educational documents etc...... basically most of the internet is ads now

[@nickwallette6201]

Back in the day when many sites were funded by some dude with a fast Internet connection and a spare PC.

[@jonnoMoto]

I have fond memories of going down rabbit holes by hyperlink hopping around personal sites. Doesn't happen anymore

[@loreaver3882]

The ads became self aware

[@mackado]

ICQ was my jam. I was pretty disappointed when MSN started getting more popular. Definitely hopped on Trillian and Pidgin for multi-protocol support so I didn't need multiple chat programs

[@nickwallette6201]

mIRC + ICQ alumni here. :-D Click the nose and it squeaks!

[@extendoduck]

Pidgin was where it was at Also basically necessary unless you wanted like four different chat programs installed since there was NO consensus...

[@gallactorme]

ICQ was my thing, the “Oh-o” and I’ll always remember how astonished I felt the first time I chatted to someone overseas in real time! That was crazy back in 1998

[@Akkbar21]

mIRC on DALnet

[@GregoryVeizades]

Oh my god.... Trillian! Pidgin! Memories unlocked!

[@OLBarbok]

I know exactly what Tank game Linus is talking about he just unlocked one of my memories but I couldn't think of the name either.

[@rhyswilliams4893]

MSN was basically every teenagers life for while and it was a great time. Having a user name and message you could change constantly, adding colours and changing the font while also being Able show what songs you are listening too. An amazing thing I'll always remember

[@emulationemperor8924]

Always funny when Linus goes to a website and the entire chat just blows up the server all going to it at once

[@ivoryowl]

I remember spending countless hours playing MSN mini-games against my mother. I was in my PC, she was in hers and it was FUN all around! The emojis were pretty cool too! When I moved to Skype I hoped it would have the same features, alas, they dumbed it down and since then I've never found another chat service that had the same feel as MSN...

[@GoHerping]

never heard of tankpit but just hearing the words Seek and Destroy brought back some serious nostalgia

[@AmrEhabKamel]

There is an ongoing project that revived MSN Messenger somehow. Ofc it is not on Microsoft servers and doesn’t login using MSN/WLM usernames, but STILL it is really cool and heartwarming. It is called Escargot MSN or Escargot Chat.

[@coffeefuelsme]

I miss the old internet.. The age of gold internet Social goals internet Chatting around the globe internet Forum-based internet Myspace'd internet

[@toshineon]

I read reports from some people that worked on Facebook and Instagram that say they regret helping turn the internet into what it is today.

[@Nightenstaff]

The Palace was the most engaging chatroom at the time. The different rooms (which was just different backgrounds) had such a different vibe which lead to different conversations. If you didn't use computers during the ICQ or mIRC era, it's a hard concept to explain, but The Palace made chatting with strangers very engaging.

[@seeibe]

We actually use something like that for our remote work. A virtual office (2D sprites) where you have a little avatar you can move around and talk to people. I prefer it a lot to just Slack, because it has some advantages of chatting to people you pass by, or seeing at a glance who is working alone and who is discussing in which groups right now.

[@tharealmb]

What's it called? Sounds cool!

[@Hooorse]

Is it Workadventure or the other one I forgot the name of?

[@seeibe]

@@Hooorse Yeah I checked workadventure but didn't like it as much. The one we use is called gather.

[@bluegizmo1983]

There's lots of things I miss about the old Internet, but I think one I miss the most (which technically isn't even "the internet" lol) is BBS Boards. I used to love dialing into BBS Boards and poking around to see what I could find, and finding hidden BBS Boards to poke around in as well. I also had lot of fun back in the day when 99% of early internet users had no idea what a virus or Trojan horse was lol. I never did anything destructive, but I remember having a few laughs making people think their computers were turning sentient and speaking to them 😂

[@Clawthorne]

I miss being able to have custom font per-user. It made group chats SO much less annoying since you could easily distinguish each user based on their text color and style.

[@RetroZelda]

trillian was my friends and my jam back in like 2004-2006. the emoticons they had were soo good

[@GamingDad]

Oh I hated the Trillian GUI so bad... I rather had multiple chat software clients running.

[@RetroZelda]

@@GamingDad yeah looking back on it, it was terrible. we didnt know better at the time.

[@hepcecob]

Used to play that game (Used to be called battlefield), at the local public library. We'd all take the entire circle of computers on the 1st floor and coordinate between ourselves. Good times.

[@mind-of-neo]

There are SO MANY great features that we used to have on the internet that we have given up for no good reason. We shouldn't be moving backward as a society by no longer having things we used to have...

[@DijaVlogsGames]

The reason was that the couldn’t make money with them.

[@KratostheThird]

@@DijaVlogsGames True.

[@DanielLavedoniodeLima_DLL]

Both MSN Messenger and Orkut were really popular in Brazil during the 2000s. I remember that people used to go to Lan Houses, pay to use the PC for 1 hour and use it for games and browsing Orkut. It had a different vibe back then, when the social networks were more like "forum with friends" than the algorithm-based infinite scroll that we have today. Unfortunately, that's the natural evolution to social networks, because the old "ads on the sidebar" model failed and now they create artificial and obscure barriers to make companies pay to get in your way

[@mchipelo]

I miss MSN Messenger. I sent thousands of hours talking with friends after getting home from school..good times. The internet was far less toxic than what it is now.

[@Vismajor01]

Remember the rush felt when the little notification window on the right appeared that the ONE come online!!!!

[@wikwayer]

They can't manipulate you if you are not angry 🧐

[@toshineon]

I also miss not being online 100% of the time. When at the computer I'd gladly chat to people, but it felt nice to just leave that when you went outside.

[@Wizardess]

BTW - the tank game you talk about may have been Microillusions' "Fire Power" written for the Amiga and ported several other places in the late 80s. (It had a viscerally satisfying sound when you ran your tank over an enemy soldier.) {^_^}

[@Wizardess]

@@ADIC2004 Roberta Pournelle (Jerry's wife) even loved the game. There was something emotionally satisfying about it. {^_-}

[@SurgStriker]

i miss a lot of the old chat programs. I used MSN messenger, yahoo messenger, AIM, and ICQ a LOT back in the day, would just do some random searches and make friends around the world. These days i think most don't have the same options for meeting total randos (barring a few things like chatroulette if that's still around), though it probably would be bad to do that. Would be constantly flooded with scammers and adult site bots.

[@CRneu]

Old applications and services were massively better because they weren't tracking every little thing you did. They didn't use analytics to track user engagement so they played around a lot more. This wound up creating a lot of unique features that we don't get today. There aren't a ton of really unique ideas anymore that make it to market because analytics say nobody will use it.

[@toshineon]

This goes far beyond software too, unfortunately. I mean, I can't think of the last time a smartphone was exciting to me, for example.

[@CannibaLouiST]

and ZERO CENSORSHIP

[@SeraphimKnight]

MSN was the premiere way to communicate when I was in junior high. I also used skype but for completely different purposes and when they merged it basically killed the userbase. Honestly I just miss open web chatrooms that you'd get into. I remember spending an entire summer obsessed with a particular one that I made friends with in. It was a european chatroom so I started staying up later and later... I think that's when my night owl tendencies developed 🤔

[@tharealmb]

MSN was awesome. But I also loved Lycos Chat. It had different rooms and you could have actions. Like one room had a chandelier that you could push. And if it fell the one that pushed it got extra actions. /kiss @username would write different weird sentences. Like "X kissed y, but accidentally kissed a rock". I loved it as a kid. And I'd never trust my kids how to go to a mostly unmoderated chatsite like that

[@Redpaperrose]

I think lycos chat still exists... it may have become / been yahoo chat at one point (can't remember which way around it was). I remember the chandelier, in the ballroom.. was all pirate ship themed I think

[@hrq007]

WLM/MSN Messenger was absolutely amazing. The only things Skype did better than MSN were Audio and Video. They should have just integrated the Audio/Video component of Skype into MSN and called it a day. Trying to migrate MSN Messenger users into Skype was absolute madness. MSN had so much stuff, and Skype was a desert. Migrating to Skype we lost not only the emoticon set (because Skype's lacked a ton of the standard ones), but the custom/animated emoticons, audio messages, custom FONTS (miss you purple verdana), the built-in online games, background pictures, on-screen media sharing (you could see pictures together and stuff)... Skype was a calling app and that was it. MSN did everything, and it did it very well.

[@toshineon]

This might sound ridiculous, but I've lost contact with a lot of people because MSN Messenger shut down. The few of us that migrated to the same service mostly kept in touch, but there were quite a few people I never heard from again.

[@akastixx]

I used MSN Messenger as a security camera. I set an account to always answer video calls from me on my computer with the webcam facing the living room, and then used my Windows Mobile phone with another account to access it. $0 besides the cost of Internet.

[@ittadakimaho]

I was an absolute fanboy of MSN messenger .. but the older versions where you could insert custom emotes, totally customizable skins and alikes. Of course i generally miss the internet before the social media stuff .. when everything out there started to turn into fake. When the internet was not full of ads and trackers everywhere. When websites did not try to make all decissions for you. When search engines returned actual results instead of 'thing you probably might want to see based on some magic nonsense we think applies to you' When your browsers were actually choices in features you wanted to have. Everything that is webkit/chromium is just cancer to me. And nowadays i just use browsers with the 'least worst offender' policy .. Its funny and interesting, that the more i think about it, the internet I got to see back then felt much more well rounded than todays state of it. *Old man ranting

[@paulcarmi8130]

I miss when the internet wasn’t controlled by weirdos on twitter.

[@dotcomboom]

Escargot's a pretty neat MSN re-implementation, supports up to WLM 09. I use it with some of my friendos.

[@ShR33k]

MSN Messenger was ace. Clean design, simple, responsive. Microsoft messed up buying Skype and killing off MSN Messenger. They've made a hash of Skype to a point nobody I know uses it now. They made a balls up of the merging of accounts, so if you logged in with your Microsoft account you got one set of contacts, but if you logged in with your Skype credentials - you'd get a different set of contacts, DESPITE accounts being merged. I don't use Facebook but I have to have a Facebook account just to use Messenger as that is the main dominate chat program now. Discord when gaming! MSN Messenger was ahead of its time. Video, voice calls, emoticons... seems daft saying that nowadays, but it was built to do one job, and it did that EXTREMELY well without any bloat.

[@kaitlint3987]

My dad's favorite emoticon was titled "working" it's the stick figure smashing his head into a keyboard into a bloody pulp

[@hydro_storm4527]

There was/is a flash game website that had around 1000 flash games that actually tracked high scores, and it wasn't blocked on our school's network so we all played games on that site. This was circa 2007. I'd love to see it again and see if I can still handle the game that was 3 consecutive games of Tetris 😂

[@williammcentee2068]

cool math games was always the place to go to play games in school that weren't blocked back then.

[@jameswymer1011]

I miss the old school (Windows 95) version of Tank Wars. The side view version where you could use the multitude of weapons to erode the terrain below your enemy. I remember there was a Christmas version where the tanks were replaced with reindeer and snow kept falling on the tanks. If you waited long enough, your enemy's tank would get covered in snow and it would block their shot.

[@GeneralNickles]

MSN messenger was my jam back in the day. I remember they added the ability to play some built-in games and I would play minesweeper with my friend all the time. It was great. Single player minesweeper is boring, but competitive minesweeper is a ton of fun.

[@Alex-jk2qy]

Kinda miss it too

[@DarioDAversa]

I feel Linus here. The good ol', golden days of using mIRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger to chat it up, watch cool vids on Newgrounds, get your news on Digg, use Roger Wilco to talk with friends while playing games like Unreal Tournament. I don't care if this makes me sound old, it was just BETTER back then. There's no way of explaining the "why" without sounding old and bitter, so I won't go there, but... it was just better.

[@KratostheThird]

We’re talking the late 90’s, early - mid 2000’s.

[@MikeHarris1984]

out of the entire MSN software features they had, Messenger was the only one worth anything. I remember when they tried to push the MSN Network, the browser that was a skinned IE, but full of bugs and constant security issues... The MSN app that was basically a launcher for shortcuts.

[@Kitteh.B]

I remember MyCoke, it was a coke-themed knockoff of Habbo Hotel that you could get items in by turning in coke points from caps/boxes. I loved that game so much, you could design music clips from samples in it, chat, decorate rooms. Though it wasn't as full-featured as Habbo, I felt it had a nicer visual appeal. Also, Plus! Messenger to go with MSN Messenger.

[@AlexSchladetsch]

Holy shit you just unlocked a core memory. I remember making beats using MyCoke!

[@Kitteh.B]

@@AlexSchladetsch haha were you around when they shut down and transferred to "There!"? That is what got me in to Second Life for a brief stint. Became a DJ and that encouraged me to study Audio Production in college. Sadly that degree didn't get me anywhere lol

[@AlexSchladetsch]

@@Kitteh.B I wasn't there for that, but I was in Habbo Hotel for the infamous "Pool's Closed" incident.

[@Jayme]

Some random guy who's probably paying $5/m to host tank pit must be freaking out right now with all the traffic. Lol

[@Spluckor]

Used to be a game called Infrantry, it was top down and had a capture the flag mode. Had different classes who could buy different kind of weapons. I loved the game so much.

[@ericandruszko7563]

AIM, MSN messenger, AddictingGames, and tons of others... Man I miss those days. Linus said it, they were just feature complete and while not worth much financially, they were just good services. I know there's the preservation group that backed up all of AG, though, so at least that's safe; as are sites like it. But AIM and MSN just had all the shit we wanted with none of the bloat we didn't. I also miss when stuff like Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Xfire, etc... were the norm. Hosting your own private server was solid, and let you directly moderate everything yourself. Nobody uses them today, even though they still exist, since Discord is just easier. But I miss using my private chats like that.

[@arkachoudhuri]

I have a similar story about a flash game. I even remember the name - 'Team Work'. Have never been able to find the game anywhere. It was an isometric puzzle game where you had to collect strawberries.

[@Edaurd]

I was surprised hearing Linus say "Habbo Hotel" as someone who still plays it every now and then it makes me feel some sort of way, Linus, please log on once for us :D

[@donaldholden2090]

YES!!! Battlefield! It was called Battlefield when I played it, not Tank Pit. I was trying to remember the name of it the whole time I was watching this clip until they finally found it. I spent SO much time playing this game and always blamed the lag on my dialup internet. I think the highest rank I ever got to was Captain. I believe my older brother made it to Major once.

[@Aomicplane]

Anyone remember the games you could play with friends in chats on MSN messenger? Like tic-tac-toe and the mine game? Yea I miss MSN to :D

[@elfelganor]

I played a lot of Gaia online and IMVU back in the day. Traditional chat system wise would be MSN( hated the nudge system ), and yes.... Yahoo.

[@jobro724]

I miss good old flash games that I would spent playing on mini-games or newgrounds. Also good old web-based Runescape and Battleon.

[@r.daneel.90]

So many awesome flash games, gone, lost in time, like tears in the rain.

[@CyberDragon10K]

I miss MSN Messenger's auto-away feature/setting; you could set an amount of time to idle and then the app would automatically change your status to away or busy. Why don't modern apps have shit like that!? I miss old Flash games too, the freeware ones you'd see on Kongregate and Newgrounds where you'd piss away hours playing when you were a teen with nothing better to do than procrastinate on homework. At a glance TankPit looks neat.

[@weeveferrelaine6973]

Discord has that automatic away status feature. I imagine a lot of modern apps have it too, they just bury the settings so hard, that it's easier to find by opening a file directory with a text editor. Modern design principles of making things more streamlined for "the experience" suck

[@Voltaic_Fire]

I miss MSM messenger too, I do use screen sharing and voice calls regularly though so it wouldn't be useful these days.

[@rollerskdude]

I miss the old Disney based art website. I have a very vague memory of a Lion King featuring art website likely used Adobe Flash and you could get all these 2d art colouring sheets you had to colour in. Rafiki and the Meerkat and the Water Buffalo guided you through using their voices. There was also a Lego Indiana Jones website with games that you could play like run away from right side of the screen from the boulder and the stuff from the other Indiana Jones movies. Ahh, good times.

[@JeanSamyr]

Oh boy, i used MSN messenger so much when I was kid. The Winks was dope, and the personalization of the chat window.

[@JoeCnNd]

Sites I miss Stickdeath, Rotten, aol chatrooms. There was another that had text based adventure games. I played that in the mid 90's at the library.

[@supernenechi]

I miss Hyves. It was a Dutch social media platform that competed with Facebook here back in the day. It had all sorts of cool features and you had a lot of control over your homepage, a bit like how Tumblr let's you style your entire homepage. It even had unique emoticons (also called emoticons) before emoji's really took over. Ultimately, the entire world including Hyves got taken over by the Zucc's almighty lizard power. I remember that out elementary school class made a Hyves group to keep contact. Shortly after which Hyves died and we all lost contact xD.

[@obiromaniankenobi1136]

On the MSN Topic: You could turn on the option to show people what Music (Song and Title) you were listening to. So instead your status, people you were chatting with, were shown your current song.

[@TheJjcczz]

MySpace for the sheer amount of customisation and features

[@vj.joseph]

I miss it too. The old ui/ux of windows and also of the internet browsers is so nostalgic.

[@AbrasiveCarl]

Anyone ever use Trillian back in the day to pile all the messengers into 1? Speaking of.. Wonder if it's still around

[@AbrasiveCarl]

Looks like they tried to rebrand as like a health service messaging system. Nice to see they're still around though.

[@casedistorted]

My friend and I were users of The Palace. Good to hear it’s creator is still alive! I wonder who he is..

[@Yodagamer1]

I miss yahoo online games. I played the hell out of them.

[@Mr_Ashley]

MSN pre MySpace and yahoo launch (music videos) pre KZbin, was how I spent most evenings if not out. Good times.

[@OhadLutzky]

This is as good a place as any to point out that emoticons and emoji are only coincidentally similar-sounding. Emoticon is from English "emote icon", whereas emoji is from Japanese 絵文字 "e mo ji", literally "picture letter", nothing to do with emotions.

[@ethan91002]

Back when every single aspect of every single action you could do wasn't monetized

[@TooSmalley]

I miss the heyday of webcomics when I would check my google reader once a week to see who had updates. That ended around the time google killed RSS reader.

[@bryonhulcher851]

used to use icq aim yahoo msn .. all of em. Icq's group chat back in the late 90s was mind blowing for the time. Deadaim to keep your chat logs ...

[@sudokode]

Remember when the best video search used to be Dogpile? Still around, but 20+ years ago, you didn't have the luxury of popping open Google (much less KZbin) and finding any video. You had to really hunt, and dogpile was one of the only search sites that had the ability to search for only videos.

[@DijaVlogsGames]

Back when finding entertainment on the internet was the greatest thing ever. I spend hours looking at the dumbest gifs and websites.

[@kidcowdy1231]

Most importantly with MSN there was the option to nudge... it was always good when your friends pc was cack

[@RKTBOX]

I miss X-fire and absolutely everything about it. In-game chat. In-game recording. In game streaming (eventually). Game hours tracking. Community focused video hubs. I'd have taken Steam as a distribution platform and then used X-fire for everything else, even now in 2022. It was fantastic.

[@Vaarel]

He's looking for ARC, attack retrieve capture. It was on tencent and something else before that. Lots of custom maps, for capture the flag or vs or even races.

[@GamingDad]

MSN video chat was superior to Skype. I used it to talk to people in Japan.

[@YOEL_44]

OMG so many time spent in the good old Messenger and Tuenti, when I had friends...

[@JonThysell]

Former MSN dev here enjoying the love.

[@baboonaiih]

I knew Linus was talking about TankPit but I also forgot the name. Crazy maybe it was a Canadianism

[@danieljensen2626]

The person who remade that game is going to be so confused about the influx of traffic

[@itcheebeard]

HOLY SHIT as if someone actually remembers the Palace! That place was my life back in 2001

[@Light-Rock97]

I call these kind of things my pending reunions, stuff I remember from way back that I just have to revisit. There was this 3D dragon game I played from one of those software CDs, it was just a demo, the dragons moved side to side in platforms that looked like a Smash Brothers stage.

[@CalgarGTX]

There are 3 games amongst hundred of others I've played, that I have never been able to find again, that I had found on demo CDs and whatnot and don't know the name of. Now and then they come back to mind and it makes me mad/depressed...

[@adnanerochdi6982]

The vocal harmony at 10:54 !! 😍😍

[@gblargg]

The old Google where you could search for technical things and find them.

[@Blubatt]

I miss Windows Live Messenger, Piczo, TV Forum, and my old Primary school website

[@overdev1993]

ah yes the good old days the flash game Robot Rage where you can build your own fighting vehicle with weapons and play against other players over the world in 3d, you can still play that (without using flash) ICQ back in the late 2000s was also really good and had a ton of features

[@fenix7167]

Msn with msg plus and the mess patch was SO good. I remember putting hours tweaking my msn to the perfection. Version 6.5 to 8.5 where the best, sadly they went backwards with Windows Live Messenger 2009 that was horrible.

[@Alien_Enigma]

You know what game I used to love playing that many don’t remember…Subspace, continuum

[@oliverearnest7081]

Its nice how the whole community helped Linus find tankpit.