this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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[–] [email protected] 209 points 6 months ago (14 children)

Nowadays its all about monetization :/

Lemmy is kinda refreshing and reminds me a lot of the early internet/reddit.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 6 months ago (3 children)

This comment is brought to you by Raid Shadow Legends.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Feeling sad from the debt you've racked up paying for digital clothes for your avatar in what can barely be described as a 'game'?

Welcome to Better Help, where you can pay us money to rapidly* connect you with a qualified* therapist who definitely won't leak all of your sensitive health information so that online ads can drain you of even more money and mental stability!

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah me too.

If you liked this comment make sure to annihilate that up vote button, follow my account and subscribe to my patreon so you can get access to comments like these 24 hours early and get a cool role on my personal discord!

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

As the cycle continues the more niche places will continue to have that feel. Always vigilant for the nuttos but comes with it being a non mainstream community. Good and bad.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago

Thats the crux of it all. The a lot of the funniest videos 15+ years ago were just random videos on random accounts. There was no monetary incentive, so a lot accounts were just people who luckily captured something funny and uploaded it. Creative stuff felt authentic too, they were not chasing a trend, they were just trying to show off their original skills. I still love a lot of what we have today, but it is getting buried by trend chasers.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Nowadays...

If there is one eternal constant in human history, it's that every generation inaccurately believes that the problems they face are new.

Human creates thing.

Thing is cool.

Humans exploit thing.

Thing is no longer cool.

Humans reminisce about how cool the thing used to be, and lament the loss of cool.

If Lemmy gets popular enough, it too will be monetized and we'll al have to find somewhere else to go.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Whenever I feel like this, I just visit https://zombo.com and I feel better. Anything is possible at https://zombo.com.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Where you can do anything! I love that this still exists.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)

Back in my day the Internet was better, no video, we had to connect with 56k moderns, the hardware cost a fortune, most people were in AOL, we had to upload both ways in the snow, had to wait for titty pics to load one line at a time, and we liked it that way…

You kids today with your tikky Tok and your faces-book don't understand

[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I remember trying to pirate Doom at some point in the 90s over a 56k modem. It was a 10mb download. I got shouted at by my parents for tying up the phone line the whole evening but I persisted. Turns out it was just the demo for Doom so I didn't even pirate it really.

Good times.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I downloaded dude where's my car over 56k. I'd connect it at the start of the day before leaving for school and then pause the download when I got home so I could play StarCraft online. Took a week to get it, and then it wouldn't play.

Figuring the file just got corrupted during the download, I wrote a program that would break the file up into segments of n bytes and generate a checksum for each segment into another file, then you could take that file and run it against another copy of the original file and find any segments that were different and generate a patch file.

Surprisingly, the guy hosting the file on IRC was willing to run the executable a random user on IRC asked him to (probably noticed me taking that week to download the movie lol), but then his copy and mine were exact matches. Then, he taught me about codecs and I was watching that shitty quality 500MB movie just a little while later.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago (4 children)

had to wait for titty pics to load one line at a time, and we liked it that way…

We really did not like that.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 6 months ago (3 children)

ITT: anon realizes the world doesn’t stop changing for everyone, what once was will soon cease to be

You’ll be alright OP

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago (3 children)

All is temporary. Change is the only constant.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Technically change isn't a constant. Eventually everything will stop changing, because all of the atoms will have drifted too far apart to react to each other, and the universe will just be a thin soup of everything that will never touch anything ever again. Tomorrow is Wednesday, though, so only a few more days until the weekend!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (4 children)

We don't know that for fact, we can't even agree on the age of the universe. Maybe there's a big crunch

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

- Percy Shelley

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)
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[–] [email protected] 68 points 6 months ago

It's a cycle we all go through. My "when the internet was good" was when long-form text content ruled, before memes and videos took over. The kids of today will fondly remember the deep fried memes and TikToks from before the human race became functionally extinct.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago (4 children)

While I'll agree the internet has been overrun by shortform shit, calling internet memes uncreative is such a boomer-ass take. This guy is just nostalgia baiting for points.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 6 months ago

https://neocities.org/

It's basically Geocities in the modern world. You can explore rabbit holes, make your own site, and enjoy the wonders of the web of creativity.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://leekspin.ytmnd.com/

YTMND

Strange this site still exists, thought it would have been well gone by now.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I've been using Protoweb on my 98 computer for some time now. Protoweb is a proxy for a old internet, mainly for old computers. (Not very secure, because http, but it is worth the time travel)

Anyway, it has WarpStream on it. It is basically a Old YouTube recreation, using unusual means to play videos (Flash, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player.) It has what this guy is looking for. Also it has new videos, but mainly from retro computer YouTube channels.

https://protoweb.org/2023/12/10/warpstream-net-video-streaming-for-retro-pcs/

[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago

Lasted about as long as the Wild West.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's why I love lemmy. And now to the sponsor of this comment:

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I've always said the same thing myself: I miss the Internet just there for fun. Now they try to make a living out of it; either in good faith or scamming you.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (8 children)

the darkweb is literally just the old internet, plus or minus some racism.

It's great fun.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I think that's the whole point. But before, it was all just a simple Google search away, no SEO in sight. Being capable of surfing the web properly already was at the time THE test to get in, much like private forums often have some kind of interviewing process. It felt a little more nerdy, and well organized, as you actually had to be both things to contribute. As it always was.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Need that meme play list link.

I'm so over YLYL thread's full of fluigiwiggle shit

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

generic influencer reacting to another generic influencer reacting to tiktoks (sometimes from another generic influencer)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (12 children)

If you want to get really old school: I miss web rings.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The creativity is still there, you just have to look for it. https://youtube.com/@Eltorro64Rus

There was always shit content too.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

Eeyp. If you remembered the stuff that isn't memorable, you'd run out of memory.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The day wasn't good, youth was. Now you're old and everything is shit.

also, remember when /b/ was good?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Eh, 2011 internet was already corporate garbage. The takeover was already finalized by then. The internet died circa 2003.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (4 children)

The internet died when the eternal September started

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Capitalism loves to capitalise....

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I’m surprised I’ve only seen one mention of the good ol’ Stumbleupon.com, I used to spend hours alone and with friends just hopping from one random thing to another. Found some pretty cool stuff too.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago

Time for the industrial webvolution.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Yt turned from video sharing service to a shitty streaming one. Theoretically for free except you are the product.

It’s actually pretty insane that we prefer to watch some celebrity streamer talking than a movie or tv series. I think there was some brainwashing along the way or maybe it’s just a cope for loneliness

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I feel like the last version of this kind of thing was the Important Videos playlist which was 2017-ish, I think

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (4 children)

But do you remember YTMND? Like can you imagine trying to explain those memes to the kids online these days?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

I have such fond memories of the days of rick rolling. I knew these two women who were into amateur choirs and they would come up behind people at parties and rickroll them IRL.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

Wild web still exists. It requires a special web browser though. And it's full of illegal shit.

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