/late/ - Late Nights

Long nights, sleepy days


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Welcome to the new /late/!


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I miss the old internet, especially the parts I never got to experience. So instead of doomscrolling and letting the algorithm decide what I see, I’ve been spending some of my free time exploring what’s left of it.

It sucks seeing so many forums and imageboards fade away. Some are still accessible through Web Archive, like 420chan and Dreamchan, but a lot, like Late Nights, are just gone forever. Still, I’ve noticed small communities popping up again, which is awesome. We really need an internet built for people, not just for AI and inflated egos.

I miss how simple and full of substance things used to be, so I want to bring some of that back, and maybe even create something new. Even the new communities are lacking of something, it's like they are trying to emulate the aesthetics only (the ones I found until now)

so, anon, got any cool nostalgic websites to share? 

Saw this one yesterday, pretty interesting. The person that made this is really creative.
https://skumsoft.ltd/slimenet/home9a.html
Replies: >>3049
Nice game anon it reminds me of an old flash game I used to play on a now long defunct flash game site in which you travel in an old abandoned factory. The design was just urbex like photos and there was clickable elements and puzzle to solve.
I was very mesmerized when I first play it.
So the one yo shared reminds me a lot this game.
Replies: >>3049 >>3063
>I miss the old internet
I know I don't add anything to the discussion, but I've been hearing this said since the first day I entered internet, so I don't really know what you mean. People have been talking in that vein in 2010 at least already, so do you mean the internet that was in 90s and 80s? I haven't got any of that.
Replies: >>3036
>>3035

Different generations will feel nostalgic about different eras of the internet. Personally, I’m talking about the 2010–2020 internet. but some people miss the even older days.

Yeah, you have a point. People probably said the same thing back in 2010, but these days, it’s undeniably worse, especially with all the AI-generated content and how artificial and vague everything has become.
Well I miss times when search engines worked too.

Every time I need to google something I smash into an AI slop wall, it's unbearable.
Replies: >>3052
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I miss good old forums a lot. 
My English wasn't good enough to browse SomethingAwful or CollegeHumor so I lurked the ones I found on scanlation team websites and even the equivalents of Tom's Hardware sometimes.
I was fascinated by people's candid tendency to randomly overshare or their spontaneous displays of generosity whenever a n00b had trouble extracting a .7z archive. Mind you, I witnessed that at about the same time people shoo'd me out of Unreal Tournament servers because I was a 'gay camper bitch'. 
It seemed like the internet had compartmentalized places to be a dick and places to genuinely share common interests, the same way a healthy society segregates the washroom from the kitchen.

This vid illustrates the spirit of the early internet where people logged in just to have a laugh then leave untouched by the ambient toxicity, and people's desire for expression would consistently win against the apprehension of judgement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZCGBI2SQUo[Embed]
Today's culture of outrage feels like people started seriously replying whenever they hear a dog bark (rules #14 and #20 ffs), when back then people would be invited to hang themself for being so gay 10 times a day and not bat an eye.

The spread of DSL internet boosted the growth of Warez sites and forums, which always had some small chat section for clueless newcomers to beg for help pirating a game and, quite often, receive it. Do you think being partners in crime made it easier to bond ?

I only got into reading blogs and personal websites when it was getting late and everyone was moving to Facebook around '10.
Not having any space to pour one's personality, people would randomly write blog notes about music they liked, drawings, travel pictures and whatnot, making these spaces unique amalgamation of PVRE SOVL

>>3033 (OP) 
>the parts I never got to experience
for me that's newsgroup and usenet
I still got to experience eMule and Limewire in the mid 2k's

>>3034
>it reminds me of an old flash game I used to play on a now long defunct flash game site in which you travel in an old abandoned factory
It reminded me of the Bionicle flash game with the little blue lad.
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>>3039
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take me back ;_;
Replies: >>3063
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>>3034
I'm so glad someone ported Nanaca Crash https://megami.starcreator.com/nanaca-crash/

>>3054
>take me back ;_;
Can I tag along
I feel like I don't know much different from the current internet. I think I've only really been using the internet for about 6-ish years. I mean that in the sense of engaging with any kind of communication or social media. So I unfortunately don't have a frame of reference for what the older forms of the internet were truly like.

The internet now sucks. When I first heard about the dead internet theory, I didn't belive it. But the more I've used the internet and learned about how networks operate, the more I believe it. Seeing videos of Chinese bot farms didn't help in that regard, either. I find the use of algorithms, tracking, and now AI generation exhausting. People just eat whatever slop is served up to them. It baffles me how little people consider what the algorithms do to their brain. They literally target low-intelligence, easily digested, addicting bullshit. I hate that every website I visit now is some corporate controlled hellscape. Everything either tracks you, or tries to trap you with an addicting dopamine loop. Generally, sites do both. Long gone are the days of browsing and finding personal sites, now everything is centralized.

Everything feels sterile and taken too seriously. "The internet is serious business" used to be a joke, now it's true. I call someone a faggot online and now they try to ban or arrest me, instead of laughing it off and moving on with more important things.
I feel like this is coming across like an old man yelling at clounds. But I genuinely believe the current form of the internet sucks. Not including small, sheltered places like this.

Some things I've used to escape algorithm/AI slop
Searx
Invidious
Firefox + Ublock Origin
deleting social media accounts
Replies: >>3066 >>3073
>>3065
Well, you're at least on the right track even being aware of the issues and some of their underlying causes, Anon. I'll spare you my own take on the past Internet b/c it would be likely to quickly-devolve into a "back in my day, Sonny..." -style blackpill rant. And no one needs that heh.

Suffice to say that small, out of the way places like Trashchan specifically, and the WebRing generally, are still very nice enclaves with real engagements. There's still a few boards around that are in effect truly uncensored free speech zones. Ofc the kike+their pets (troons & glowniggers [but I repeat myself], etc.) still try to destroy such places, but thus far most plugs have still remained in their walls, and the power bills remain paid. Let us here all pray this continues!  :)
My first BBS was TOTSE, around 2003, not long after graduating from high school.  Kind of like a chan, before 4chan, except everyone was namefagging.  You'd see threads about John Titor and Timecube, people talking about doing drugs and dumpster-diving, and referring to themselves as SWIM someone who isn't me as some sort of legal prophylactic.  The site the BBS was attached to was a sort of archive of '90s conspiracy theories, religion, esoterica, drugs, and outdated documents about how to defraud payphones.

It was apparently popular enough to have spinoff/revival sites, which I imagine is amusing to peruse if you've never read about "better living through chemistry" and such.  It's hard to see the point in such an endeavor; people now give themselves over to mind-viruses, and everything triggers a canned reaction to whatever sort of "wrongthink."  Even if they're not bots, they're not really any better.

I spent a lot more time on a BBS called "frostcloud", of which no trace remains.  We mostly shot the shit about politics and philosophy.  There was the resident anti-semite, who made absolutely every topic about jews.  A canadian politician bantered with the guy and got canceled because his opponents construed something he said sarcastically as his actual view.  There were mystics, musicians, cops, shitlibs, high school kids, a married couple of retirees in Britain.  An affable "frottage" enthusiast— a western chikan, basically.  You'd occasionally get blindsided by some turboschizo accusing you of being a jacobite and killing Angel Babies.  A girl studying philosophy in the Phillipines complained about her professor demanding sex for grades.  A junkie in Indiana got a mail-order husband from bumfuckistan who beat the shit out of her and, I presume, her daughter.

There was a healthy skepticism of the internet, which I imagine is pretty foreign to anyone born after 2000.  The internet was for nerds, you're not really going to spend your time there, much less give a shit about what anyone thinks, right?  It's the internet; it's not real.  Then the internet was convenient for business, and facebook let you keep in touch with whoever the fuck, and then it was a necessity, and now you're born into this.

I remember a thread where we discussed what you think people sound like, based on their personalities in text and their avatars.  It seems like that's the sort of thing that doesn't happen anymore— things shut down, you migrate to reddit or chans, and there aren't any avs and you the pool is so much bigger that you have to be really invested to recognize people from day to day.  And even then, what "voices" do they have?  Would you even want to know what some tiresomely web-savvy dweeb from reddit sounds like?  It all homogenized and declined to the lowest common denominator.

I can't imagine such a thing existing again, not because the technology doesn't exist, but because people now are too conditioned into retard ideologies, with egos so frail that they can't encounter dissent without having a meltdown.

We got kinda close to an "old internet" feel in certain parts of Voat.  There was /v/thedinnertable, where people tried to behave less like internet ghouls, which happens to be more similar to that aughts period, albeit in a self-conscious and semi-ironic way.  It's hard to tell in hindsight what killed Voat: active subversion by those who didn't want to allow any escape hatch from reddit (which in 2014 had become fully converged) or the hyper-vigilant gatekeeping necessitated by the subversives.  Either way, it wasn't conducive to the early aughts milieu.

Though, if the winged ape internet brigades have had their funding cut, maybe something like that could exist again.

8chan and Voat were killed off at about the same time, but have their sequels in 8moe and poal.

WinMX was a post-Napster P2P clients around the same time, in the early 2000s.  It had what I guess was an integrated IRC server, where people made rooms about all sorts of weird shit.  Even in the general rooms you'd encounter dudes who profess to be in a romantic relationship with a radio station, consummated by hooking his nuts up to the electrical lines.  I feel like even perverts and weirdos have been reduced to the LCD of dog-rapists and child-groomers, lol.

I guess I'll also mention marginalia.nu, because it's probably the best way to find "web 1.0" documents.  Not very stimulating, I know, but useful if you want a snootful of writing from twentysomethings who are now in their 50s.
Replies: >>3068
>>3067
>8chan and Voat were killed off at about the same time, but have their sequels in 8moe and poal.
<blacked.gov is the sequel to 8ch
But that's wrong you double-nigger. The WebRing -- not that fed glownigger honeypot -- is the spiritual successor to Freddit's babby.
>>3065
That's what I'm talking about, internet becoem an A.I slop land and dopamine addiction trap, people are too stuck on this addiction to realize how bad it is, and I'm too fighting against it. 

>I call someone a faggot online and now they try to ban or arrest me, instead of laughing it off and moving on with more important things.

That's sad, people are losing their career because of a simple comment or joke, I myself had problems with the law because of a simple joke I made in a chat with a friend. It was really traumatizating.

Internet it's really not the same anymore, I already use firefox and Ublock origin but I will starting using the other tools you mentioned, and yeah, definetly need to delete my social media.
In a way it just became the way real life always has been. You must always be careful and never speak or act "wrong" in public. Internet hasn't so much died as it was remade in the image of real life. Definitely not the best thing since sliced bread.
Replies: >>3078
>>3074
'You must always be careful and never speak or act "wrong" in public.

This is obvious, nobody here is talking about being free to post bad things online. Most of the times you can get in trouble for a bad joke in a private conversation, which is ridiculous because that wouldn't happen in real life It's not normal, A.I slop doesn't happen in real life, it's not normal. Hyper sexualized content wasn't too normal in real life too. You clearly didn't read everything people here are saying.
Anymore I just dial in, get what I need, then log out. Now that everything we post gets slurped up for AI training everywhere - even people I work with are eating this AI nonsense up (and they should know better, they lost thousands on turdcoins last hype cycle). 
But not to be too much of a downer, real life is pretty great so I'll be spending my spring/summer outdoors!
But I do remember BBS access in the early 90's - video games on 386/486 PCs, finding out what anime was (Maison Ikkoku and Kimagure Orange Road), colleges had the goods!
Regular message boards and personal web pages were neat in Web 1.0. My parents made me buy my own dial up account because I was a net junkie and using up all the hours. 
Gnome darts was my favorite flash game, it vanished when Flash cycled out. Foamy / Ill Will Press was my jam for flash animation - they still have it on youtube but the new stuff looks like AI tinkering... plus I'm not in college anymore so it's probably not funny like when I was 21 and drunk. 
I dunno, just glad I checked out on Web 2.0 for the most part - I don't have socials haunting me and the people I did interact with were the real deal. I'd almost argue the Facebook/Instagram era was even worse than the short form video and Discord push right now. I don't envy kids trying to navigate any of it though. It reminds me of when videogames and movies switched to CG 20+ years ago - it was ROUGH for a while there; yikes.
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