How did you get on the internet?

Lumeinshin

Somewhat in contrast to @Theory_of_Everything 's thread.
What was your earlier memories of using the web like?
What did you use it for primarily?
Did it coincide with learning about PC's?

Poll note: Answer in terms of when you started using the web a lot. I segmented them off the top of my head, may not be 100% accurate 😆.

agoraoptera

Lumeinshin
I straddle the 2nd and 3rd option.
I have a poor memory, but my early era was marked by dial-up noises and funky flash games was a great time. Honestly, I didn't know what much of what I was doing as a kid.
When I had a slightly more developed brain, I had a cringy as fuck blog. Good times. Remember everyone embedding a music player into their blog and showing off how cool you were with your special music? That, like ringtones, faded so strangely. I rarely hear custom ringtones these days.
I remember emailing my friends a lot. Well, two friends, really. One of them I even kept up the habit when we went to different schools, but... things changed.
Forums. I spent a lot of time lurking on Scrolls of Lore, a WoW-based forum. Much later, I got into an ARG forum and became quite active there.
I think I was on the tail end of MySpace kicking the bucket. Honestly, things changed when Facebook and the first iPhone came around. I'm just glad my chuuni years were had in the early days of Facebook and I didn't end up broadcasting all that teenage angst over Twitter, Instagram and whatever. Well, I did broadcast angst over Twitter, but that was with a private account with zero followers, so it was basically a microblog.
About a decade ago, I scrubbed my social media accounts out of embarrassment. No regrets on that front. It's too easy to get Internet-addicted even WITHOUT social media, I don't know how normies handle it.

Nuda

Lumeinshin
My dad set me up with Speed Racer's The Great Plan on shockwave.com. that game was the shit, and so was that game engine.
I saw there were more games in the sidebar, and went off to town, then very soon after discovered Roblox and YouTube and Minecraft, and all the bullshit that came with them. Probably ruined my life, ngl. Worse than 4chan did, later.

Lumeinshin

I had used the family PC to play games when I was a weeeee lad, and was allowed to use my sisters laptop sometimes.
My earliest web years were on sites like TheSpritersResource for pokemon sprites to edit. I wasnt very good at it really but my sister and I enjoyed it. From there I used RPGMaker and the advanced map tools to make really crummy pokemon rom hacks that I never finished. I also enjoyed using Scratch a lot during my sonicfag days. Bit of a weird bunch they were.
After that I was watching retro games and movie reviewers and stuff like that, which sorta morphed into where we are today. Used to use skype and then discord, now im still on discord but only for old school friends who wont move on.

I have a fond memory of a lot of older sites from when I was younger but I think I was definitely quite quick to move onto the hellscape the net is today. I think it was the allure of things being sleek and the features they offered.

friffri

Lumeinshin
I was much like you as a kid, except I was into Super Mario and used Game Maker instead of RPGMaker.
Instead of pokemon rom hacks I made crappy platforms and top down shootem ups.

I've never been much a social guy on the internet but I did use a few forums at the time, play a few of those old browser games like Travian.
I also used MSN to talk with a few relatives and friends.
We had a shared computer, my older brother always had priority so I could only use it when he was out.

Murderbunny

I picked the 3rd option because that fits when I was old enough to start using computers but idk how accurate that is cause I never really used any of those sites listed. Dad really did his best to limit our internet use when we were kids, like we had one family pc in the living room with the monitor facing the corridor and had a bunch of parental locks/tracking on them and we could only have dumbphones untill 16. I used to hang out around on Doom World a lot and at around 14-5 i started developing an admittedly unhealthy obsession with stuff like mass/school shootings and true crime (my older handles were always some variation on Columbine Kid). I started hanging out on my brother's room who was old enough to have his own unmonitored pc and just browse the web freely, mainly going to /b/ (which was how i got started on 4chan, later mostly /out/ and /vg/) and starting/participating on school shooting threads sharing footage and stuff but I was rather uncomfortable with all the porn in /b/ so I migrated to dedicated myspace and yahoo groups (literally nobody I ever talked to even know what those were lol) which were mostly abandoned and unsupervised services so these topics weren't actively suppressed. Later I got into LoL and TES and shifted from violent subjects to gaming, hanging out on /vg/ etc.

Porter

I mostly used the family PC to play games and I dont think I really did anything with the internet besides use it for flash games until my early teens (late 00s). For a long time my only real presence online was on the WoW forums and my guild's Ventrilo server (although I only got on that for raids), and then some fanfiction sights a bit later. I eventually got a Skype account in high school because I volunteered to help an author I liked with grammar and spellchecking and he wanted to chat in real time. That was... like 12 years ago? And we're still friends. That connection is responsible for forming most of my online friend group, although I don't have the Skype account anymore.

I'm probably too young/got in too late to experience the 'wild west' phase of the internet. In highschool I got into meme culture when ragecomics and stuff like Bravery Wolf were all the rage. Spent a lot of time on IHazCheeseburger and Imgur. I generally regret wasting time on Imgur, although I still have an account to use as an image repository, since Tabletop Sim needs an external source for images used as custom tokens. Eventually I moved on to Reddit which I basically used as a megaforum for videogames. I didn't like any of the big subs and eventually scrubbed all the default ones from my account, but there was a niche sub for any game I played at the time which made discussion easy to hop into. Around 2016 I got onto 4chan because the /tg/ board was the only viable place I could find to talk about tabletop gaming (and later guns on /k/, when I could afford to buy my own).

These days I want out of the big sites completely. I'm still on 4chan occasionally but way less than I used to be. I have a Discord I use for hanging out with friends, which takes care of most of my wants for online interaction. I have a Youtube feed that has basically taken the place of cable for me but I'm trying to use that less too.

gemisthon

My father loves computers and never cared about parental filters, so I have pretty much always been online, though the really early stuff is a blur. I mostly remember things like Homestar Runner, "Ding Fries are Done", Weird Al anime AMVs, that sort of thing. As a child my interaction with the internet was more passive. The turning point was definitely 2005, when I was 12 or so. Before this, my mother had at least tried to severely restrict my electronics usage, but for whatever reason, when we moved to a new house that year, my father purchased a mac mini for my brother and I to use, then placed it in the most remote part of the house where no one went and my mother also backed off entirely. Since then I’ve had unrestricted, unmonitored access to the internet.

My brother got into 4chan around that time and I also went there, but my main place online for the rest of the decade pretty much was the “R&P”, Myspace’s religion and philosophy forum. It was kind of the perfect balance of serious discussion (mostly on the philosophy sub-forum) and reckless shitposting and trolling. Amazingly, Squarecircle’s wikia page is still around, which documented a small sliver of the forum’s culture and power users:
https://myspace.fandom.com/wiki/Religion_and_Philosophy
Unfortunately my memories are vague for most of this stuff, though I remember Wayne and Squarecircle, and especially the copypasta we'd throw at people who wrote too much:
https://myspace.fandom.com/wiki/Anti_Wall_of_Text

Gigachad

I remember downloading game demos (jazz jackrabbit was my favorite of them) from the wsu bbs. I had a MySpace. Honestly believe Jewish influence of zuckerborg beat out Tom because MySpace was better in every way. Every other social website was better. All facebook had was the poke. Geocities/angelfire websites were cool. People.miss them because they were individual sites. Custom made for their owner and not from a template (that didn't exist yet). Web 1.0 was better in that the internet felt like a mystery. You could actually explore it fairly easily and there was an intelligence barrier to entry.

Everybodies memories of the early flash shit like ding fries are done, elf bowling, and frog blender really bring back memories. Is there like a third world section of the internet where all this shit just hasn't taken effect yet?

Williwizard

I was raised on flashgames and Roblox. I got Minecraft before the Adventure Update. I had a great time on Roblox, but like many people outgrew it, sadly. With my friends perpetually off-line I don't feel called back to it.

I first saw ~~porn~~ when I was 11, boy has that been a bumpy ride ever since.

gingermilk

My experience is quite unique here. I was anti-tech before the age of 12 despite having a computer and a phone with absolutely zero restriction. Because I lived at China back then and had no interest in technology, I didn't care enough to learn how to bypass the GFW so I was mostly stuck on Chinese forums in my early days. Even after I moved to the US, I was still only active on the Chinese side of the western social media for a while. 4chan might be the first English site I browsed regularly, but it was already on its downfall back then. After that I just jumped straight into the rabbit hole with small forums and decentralized social media.

Merulox

gingermilk Hey, sorry to be off-topic, but I wanted to ask how common it is for people in China to bypass the firewall.

gingermilk

Merulox It is more common than people might think. Many people only bypass it to watch porn or follow celebrities, but there exists large Chinese communities on Twitter and Reddit. You can rarely spot one though since they are quite isolated from the English speaking communities.

kurisu

It started back around 2008, when I was about 5, my grandma taught me how to use her computer. I used to browse the net with her, check her emails, check the weather, find and play flash games, find answers to questions on indexed forums...

Then a friend's dad showed me youtube when I was like 6, I browsed around and checked out some songs and videos that were popular at the time, but not much more. I didn't browse the internet too often back in the day, but I do remember exploring around the computer, desktop, file system and the net as a kid.

My approach to internet culture definitely started with Flipnote Hatena, when I connected my DSi to the internet about a year before Hatena shut down. Memes, touhou, music, anime... It was like a mini version of the internet which was probably mostly controlled by 4chan at the time... And I loved it! Of course I still used to play flash games, send emails to some friends that had it, watch a bit of youtube... But it was mostly Hatena for me!

I started of super young, I know, and I actually do regret letting the internet raise me at times, especially when it went out of control back when I was about 12. No, with that I don't mean that I got on /b/ or anything of that sort, in fact, I never did. It's more of an obsession that I started having with the online world, online friends, y'know all that stuff, it was way too early for me and I'm glad I got out.

But honestly? At the same time, I don't regret entering here so early, because I got to have a taste of the early internet, and I loved that place of chaos, and I'll keep it in me forever.

shanice

I was active on what I like to call the pre-multimedia era of the internet. Back then the prevalence of videos and images wasn't as great as today's time. Now Tiktok Youtube and Instagram are the most popular apps on the internet and they all revolve around audiovisual content.

Atom

I'm a zoomer, so personally speaking, the very earliest time I remember being online was 2011. The most notable things from that era for me was atheism and My Little Pony being very popular.
Besides that, I mainly stuck to using Youtube and 'fan creation' sites like deviantART, fanfiction.net, AO3 et cetera. I was pretty proficient at using a computer in relation to my peers at the time, but I don't think I really began to have an intuition for computers until about middle school and early high school.

av1videocodec

My first innanet experiences were on YouTube. It brings me nostalgia to rewatch generikb's 'HermitCraft' series, or TREY the Explainer's videos on dinosaurs and creepy topics. The day before 8th grade I had finished watching all of TREY the Explainer's videos. Not that I watched them all in one day, I had just finished watching the last few on that day. I stayed up late to watch one on 'Dimetrodons', a gay type of dinosaur; I can recall exactly how I felt that night. The first day of 8th grade our teacher talked about Dimetrodons, but she mispronounced their name. Each time she said 'Dimetrodon' I'd quietly whisper to the person next to me the correct pronunciation. I did not know this person, and they probably did not care or maybe even hear me. I have severe autism.

Sadly the website I started using after YouTube was r*ddit. Even at 12, I was disgusted by the low intelligence low compassion vermin who populated the site. When I was 14 I found bluelight, a small forum. I remember spending two hours reading and entire thread; the opening post was about the eight stages of methamphetamine use, and how it is the drug you learn to hate. Recently, seeking nostalgia, I tried to find the thread, but it has been deleted. You ever sit back and think about how fun these sites used to be? I cannot take a break from imageboard, but atleast I can limit my time on them. They're genuinely amazing if you only use them occasionally. Can you imagine spending two hours reading an entire thread? I hope to take such a long break from imgboards that I read an entire two hour thread in one sitting again.

I've also come to realize real life interaction is superior to online interaction, and I hope to find friends and maybe even a girlfriend so I can have real life interaction. Society is very sick, and sometimes the true ills of society are addressed, whether in articles, or posts on places like this, but I notice things that I don't often see other people point out. Its not ok to have forced social interaction. I'm not a 'conservative', but I recognize that civilizations of the past have found ways to reduce social exposure, lower than would be in the wild. 'Traditional marriage' and 'the family unit', that conservatives often talk about are ways of reducing social exposure. School was one of the big violators of previous reduced social exposure. No other society before 17th century Britain and America organized an education system with so much unnecessary social exposure, that it likely surpasses what humans would experience without any form of civilization. Sorry, this third paragraph has been a tangent, but its for a purpose: the internet is the greatest violator of the attempts to limit social exposure, and I feel a lot better when I don't use it so much.

Taka

One day, my mom let me get on the family computer. The rest is history.

Fantasy

I can't remember my exact first time on the internet. But I can remember my neighborhood having an AOL chatroom of some kind. No websites in particular. Just stuff related to AOL. Early sites I can remember using are stickpage, gamefaqs, albinoblacksheep. I got into a lot of Maplestory related forums too but that was a bit afterwards.

Merulox

gingermilk Ooh, I see.

Zergface

My first time on the internet was on a hand-me-down Gateway PC and 56k dial-up when I was 8 years old back in 1999. I don't really remember what I did back then, but soon after (2003-2004ish) I got into my first online games (Counterstrike 1.6, Deus Ex, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3). Also around that time was when I started posting on forums, mainly ones for said games for I could find good maps and mods.

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