The early 2000s Internet was the best. Weird and wacky but developed enough that people figured out cool and slick things to do as well. Best of both worlds.
Really a lot of it had already gone south by the early 2000s. But you're right, there was some good shit in the 2000s too. Demonoid was the best torrent site ever.
@@graalcloud yeah back then you might see a dead body instead of today, where you’re constantly at risk of being recruited into a far-right conspiracy theory
people go like "ugh why are websites so simple and all the same now" but turns out all these modern websites have a ton of absurdly complicated code that has no benefit for the user but for the company masked under a formal standard, while the wacky ancient websites had simple coding that did the job just fine and the skill to learn it was at the reach of average internet dwellers with just a bit of dedication
Yeah, the internet used to belong to the people. Now it belongs to an ever-shrinking number of corporations who let us play in their sandboxes. What nations did to the planet corporations did to the Web. Makes the anarchist in me mourn.
Ehhhhhh... There's a lot to be said for the consumer aspect to sites these days. You need a fair amount of stuff for a shopping cart.. or even forms. I tried doing it with html only, but it was kinda wonky and didn't work. If you wanted to you could use some copied code to set up a form but encryption was crap. Then came PayPal, which was ok, and that opened into copiable code which you could then use PayPal for your cart, and it kinda worked like frames as a shopping cart (or you started using the website builders).
About 4 years ago I found someone's Half-Life walkthrough/fanpage that they made when they were young. What I liked was the guy's dad left a message on the website where he said "good job with the website son, it looks really good". I found that very wholesome.
this makes me really appreciate tumblr, a website where you CAN customize every square INCH of your blog as you see fit, and a place where advertisers are actively losing money trying to sell to its userbase. it's one of the last true vestiges of the old web
Also I agree, tumblr is the last sliver of old web left. I recently got a theme that looks like an old geocities webpage for my blog. It’s so fun! It has a bunch of blinkies and gifs all over
When I was a kid, I thought websites were the coolest thing ever. I used to write down every url I saw, from products and billboards, so I could browse for cool websites. I loved them and really wanted to make my own, so I eventually learned html and css by myself. Cut to current time, I am an webdeveloper and I despise making websites now. It's so much work for shit that looks all the same. This video almost made me cry lol I
i dont know why but this specific personal story feels so much sadder than every copy paste doom scroll news story ive read in the past month. hope you are able to find the time to make some nostalgic styled website designs even if its just as a hobby
@@gildedmelody786 I have made over a thousand websites in my life, but only in the last few years, when I move to an angular/react, that it has become so dreadful. Like some other commenters said, there was something so beautiful about pure html/css and I miss it too. But I've move on to gamedev, and I've been having a blast making the website for my game, so don't worry!
Same !! I was obsessed with websites as a kid, i even made a zine (without knowing thats what i was doing lol) when i was like 7 of my favourite websites, (with neopets being no 1 ) now im doing a graphic design internship after a few career hiccups and my boss thinks it’s hilarious/bad how i love this style of old maximalist website and modeled my personal website after old blogging sites. I showed him a photography zine im making which has a page layed out like a 2005 blog site with terrible blingy graphics and he looked terrified 😆High five to you lol!
When I was a kid, we all thought the future websites will be even cooler with 3D animated menus that rotate as you select and option and such stuff. But now everything is just a white list of boxes.
Older websites, despite how clustered they were, were also more intuitive to use than new websites. The need to hide everything in dropdown menus make shit hard for me to look for stuff. You never know whether the thing your looking for is in ⚙️, the three bar dropdown or at the very bottom at the page.
I dont mind drop down menus the issue to me is when you have a drop down menu with just a few options that lead you to another page with a few options that lead you to other pages with a few options that lead you to other pages and thats where you find the one setting you have been searching half an hour for hidden behind multiple pages because they dont want to put too much in front of you at once, feels like im stuck in a maze sometimes, id rather it be cluttered and minimize the number of clicks i have to do to reach things than minimal visually and a pain in the ass to find anything.
But then you try to go to the bottom of the page, and, surprise! It actually has infinite scrolling and your browser gets that much slower as it loads more of what you don't want.
While on older websites, you click a page and now you are completely lost (due to every page on the same website having a completely different design), with the URL being your only guide and it's very likely you ended up just editing the address bar to find your way out. And your opinion about modern designs... You can't say they are bad just because they are often used incorrectly. At least you weren't more lost than on an older website you seldom visit.
@@FlameRat_YehLon not to mention you throw up from the tiled backgrounds and the eye seering clashing font colors. Like I hate all the ads on modern websites but I do not want to go back to the migraine inducing clutter of web 1.0
I used to browse and build websites constantly as a tween. I'd just travel down rabbitholes and web rings. Each fan site was different. Animations on your cursor, midi music, in jokes, weird fonts. The net is boring now. Sites no longer feel like your home, they are like hotels.
Only the hotels are run by shady dealers who are liable to kick you out if you so much as break one of their rules. Very sad what it's turned into now.
I used to love browsing the internet when I was a kid, around 2002-3 it really was a different world. Every website was different and offered something special. Hell, even 2006-08 was still great. I remember the launch of myspace and a lot of early internet website design was present in the user profiles. The internet is no longer a customizable extension of yourself, it's all the same boring corporate, flat, flashy design. It's all the same.
@@maxgamesst1 same as 03 basically, I think Napster was getting big then? I only called out 06-8 because a bunch of social media sites we still use today were starting out around then
I miss being able to set an animated gif as an avatar and post neat and clean transparent .png images on my posts that seamlessly blended with the background by simply pasting a link now, years later when bigger information storage should be a possibility, I can't even use transparent images on twitter without fearing compression won't crunch them down into a mess forced to appear encased on a frame
I think the word you're looking for is "sanitized" instead of "flashy." It is very a bright white a lot of the time, but that's because it's been scrubbed clean of anything artistic.
it's such a vibe to come across old websites like those, only found nowadays through people sharing their links. there must be so many old websites that's been completly forgotten
Funnily enough, all the crochet pattern websites I find online are like this. Some lesser known subcultures do still have these crazy poppy websites, and it's fun. Though I don't like figuring out which "click here for pattern" button will give me a virus and which one is legit
@@fungustheclown666 omg same!!!!! I crochet as well and I remember finding a pattern on this old looking blog, I didn't have to download a pdf or anything, no ads either It gave mega early internet vibes Yeah but some of them have viruses at this point so I'm pretty cautious
When I was a teenager (2000) I created a forum about my school, just by myself. No moderation, complete anarchy, imagine teenage students being able to say whatever they wanted about teachers in complete anonymity for the first time. I created games using flash and actionscript where our teachers were the enemies you had to defeat, It was a complete mess lol, everybody was talking about the site and teachers were furious but luckily they never caught me. Now I'm 38, I've become a chemist but I haven't lost my love for web development. I took a full stack web development training course. Now I know html, css, javascript, es6, python, react, sql, mongodb, nodejs, express, nextjs, etc, and even though I know all that stuff I woudn't be able to create today something as good as that old forum. It is insane how many technologies you need to dominate in order to make a mvp of a website that can be put in production. And all that to make a website that looks exactly like every other site, because you have to play it safe in order to make the site responsive and accesible from a myriad of different devices. I miss those old good days of the amateur internet
The clunky, broken, overly-sanitised redesign of deviantArt felt like losing one of the last bastions of an older time. Maybe the Ui was "dated", but it loaded quick and felt cozy as someone who grew up on 2000s internet. I miss that culture that disappeared with the redesign.
I miss the "remove from notifications" button while going through newly posted art. Now I never go through them anymore because it's a pain to have to go back to press the x for every drawing
Not only were websites cooler, but they were also faster and better made. No overly fancy CSS and JS, no weird animations or panels that display like 1 word and take up half the screen and god forbid you try opening it on a mobile device. Old websites used basic html, made everything clear and simple and were relatively easy to negative. Nowadays it just feels like you're in a corporate hellhole.
@@maxakrman7101 I use those popups to identify sites that are avsolutely not worth my time. (except for privacy and cookies, those are necessitated by law but tbh shouldnt exist in the first place. all my homies despise cookies).
@@Evercreeper Well yeah, as far as I can tell most cookies are used for advertising, since they dont need to ask for strictly necessary cookies. That in itself should have everyone wonder "wait then whats up with all the other ones?" i havent looked into it yet but in germany, since they force sites to disclaim and make customizable what cookies specifically you agree to, theyve started also putting in smth called "Legitimate Interest" which is always on by default, and to me seems like "Okay but heres the cookies anyway fuk you"
All the websites shown in this video used CSS and lots of websites at the time used JS (or PHP) as well. You definitely would not like it if neither of those things existed on today's web. The real problem is that companies value selling you things or advertising on their website over making them easy to use and interact with. Also certain websites will use a ton of JS libraries to do things instead of implementing features themselves which makes websites really slow.
@@zioqqr4262 Cookies are why you don't have to log into websites every single time you want to use them and instead only have to log in once on a particular computer. They have lots of other functions like this that are good, but websites also use them to advertise with you, which is bad. Your best bet is getting a browser or extension that automatically blocks bad cookies (like the Brave browser for example).
I wouldn't be surprised if in, say, 5-20 years we come back to the more creative web looks a bit, while still integrating the info we've learned on how to make websites understandable
@@picklepirate yes, exactly!! and a lot of customization. now everything has to be sleek and samey. eh. even if they used some retro aesthetic, it would be same for every user too. idk what kind of a difference this would make. honestly this sameness pushed me into the coding side of webdev, i dont wanna deal with the marketing bs
Old UA-cam was a mess but in some ways it was better. The customization really showed how it was a site about people making videos and not a terribly safe, bland corporate hellhole that will make you watch 2 unskipable 15 second ads before letting you watch a 4 second video
It's really jarring seeing what trends died and stayed. Being someone who's used UA-cam since its birth it's been a wild ride. The UA-cam episode of South Park from 2008 is super dated in what was popular on the site at the time. A video would stay relevant for months. Memes and jokes lasted months and sometimes years back then. Some memes die in 2 days now.
Sadly, I'm a part of the generation that never got to experience the 2000s internet, but after spending afternoons exploring old sites on the Wayback Machine--I do honestly think it's better. It was wacky, fun, and creative. Now it's all carbon copies of the same format with little ingenuity
@@Dhips. honestly it hasn't really changed now anyways. new websites are filled with javascript and css elements to the point where it takes me a minute to load gmail fully. you would think everything would of gotten faster, but it is hasn't changed that much. going to old pages is heaven, it loads in less than a second.
I was born in a time too late to originally experience websites like these and I wish more websites were designed like this because I rarely see it at all. Every website just looks exactly the same now and you'd be hardpressed to find a website that looks any amount different. Some of it just does kind of look bad, but like it's better than the billionth "modern" website that apparently every website has to be now. I also kind of like the aesthetic of just pure HTML, which you only really see now in obscure things, like for example GCC's website. It's clear, direct, and just has no bullshit or unneeded fancy aesthetics, it just does what it needs to do.
As rookie UX/UI designer...I agree with everyone, I mean I like clean and minimalist style too, but I wish it was acceptable to like these oldies not ironically.
I feel you. Many modern sites are just so same-y looking and spam your screen with large pictures instead of actually giving you information. I don't think websites were always better back in the day, but I agree that nowadays, websites all look the same. I think that has more to do with companies not investing enough resources into their websites though. Many sites look the same because they just use bootstrap and have been told that blending in is what works. Design patterns aren't bad though. Take the top navbar for example. If every site invented its own way of navigating, it becomes a hassle to use and figure out. Some sites do that and it's immediately annoying. But yeah, it's a shame that most online traffic takes place on the same few sites. Barely anyone has their own website, except for showing off your products. It's why I find the lambda generation community site and corridor digital's websites so impressive. Web development and maintenance is a huge effort and creating your own platform will make it much harder to find an audience at first, so I commend their efforts Also page scrolling animations where every item has to fly in for 2 seconds before you can see it can just die
No one has a website anymore because they killed off most of the sites that gave you a space on their server for free. Now there's, what 2 or maybe 3, if I'm being generous, that do that? And they all have the same designs. All to make way for social media.
As a graphic designer, it makes me wonder if it's clever to start going backwards? Like really, if you wanted people to go to your website and you weren't getting a ton of traffic, make your website look like neopets or a kickass pepsi website from the late 90s. Just make it functional and bug free and I think that shit would go viral.
That’s just the problem though. In the 2000s, it wasn’t just the aesthetic, the internet was a free place where corporations weren’t watching you. There were so many niche clubs and groups so disconnected from eachother. It would be so sad to see designers just use the husk of old design to get their click rate up
The cancerous growth of algorithmic content feeds and the concentration of everything into just a few websites has absolutely destroyed the internet. I'm at the upper edge of GenZ so I was too young for the ridiculous 90s web aesthetic, but I still remember the internet being so much better than it is now. In the late 00s and early 10s when I started getting online, there were so many cool forums where you could find real communities of people discussing common interests. You would get to know the people that got on frequently and it felt really homey; the exact opposite of the endless torrent of ever shifting indiscernible noise that is modern online "social" interaction. And the web search experience was orders of magnitude better than it is now. You used to be able to search anything and it would take you directly to useful websites like blogs that were run by real people talking about things they actually knew (or at least cared) about. Nowadays the only reaults are a half dozen big corporate websites and an infinite supply of listicle junk "blogs" that just echo each other and spam out search engine optimized word puke to get ad views. It's basically impossible nowadays to find real blogs where real humans share information meant for other real humans to read instead of low budget "content" meant to feed the algorithms. It's sad and nauseating and infuriating and I don't think it's even possible for it to change except for the worse. Fuck.
I miss the freedom and creativity of the old internet. Did you ever come across the forums on GoToQuiz? That is where I lived as a teenager in the late 00s and early 10s. People got to know each other. It was as you described it.
One thing has improved dramatically: usability and accessability. The spacejam website for instance has red text on a dark background that is barely readable, even if you aren't colorblind.
Yea useability and accessibility are very huge factors behind these redesigns, I still think people need to brainstorm a better system, one where we go back to all the creativity but still keep emphasis in usability and accessibility.
I absolutely hate how websites try to make their browser experience more like a mobile/app design. Those mobile pages were already just mediocre, watered down versions of the browser pages, you are literally just making your page worse for browsers
Well it's done for a reason, cuz almost all trafic is from phones, tell those mfs to use a desktop and web developers would go back to desiging desktop first, cuz right now it just ain't worth it to have a completely different design for the same site on mobile and desktop, one has to take priority
Well its a lot easier to make a mobile site and just have everything scale up on a desktop than making 2 designs. I blame everyone else Im still on my pc browsing the web.
Granted, it is much, much more efficient to build a website for small screens and scale up then the other way around, and the *vast majority* of people will be on a phone. Stuffing a site designed for a desktop onto a phone is hard and rarely goes well. The opposite is easy and the result is tolerable.
Tbf alot of people use their phone much more than their computer since its available on the go. Phones are just portable computers at this point instead of just for calling or to play a game of Sudoku. So although I agree alot of websites downgrade their layouts and what not it's just the reality rn. Gotta go where the average person is going.
Now I want to make a *_FUN_* website. One where you can change the font however you want. Keygen music as well. No website creators. Just pure text editing.
There's this thing (I'm honestly not sure what is is) called ENA, some creation by an artist. His website is based on the old Internet philosophy, and let me tell you its awesome just staying on the site and leaving it on.
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917 yeah, went to search up “ENA”, “ENA websites”, “ENA ui” and got nothing. Your posit is interesting and I kinda wanna look into it more. Since you got a better starting point can you provide a more solid way to find what you’ve mentioned?
Pick up an old how to use html and css book from your local library or used bookstore and make one on neocities! I literally used to build sites like these from when I was like 9, well into my teens. It's much easier to pick up and learn than the crazy stuff being used to power modern website. A lot more fun and forgiving as well.
I miss the old days, the whole aesthetic of it looked magical at the time, and still does now. I miss when people used computers for internet, not phones.
Got to the end of the video when the realization that I haven't clicked the subscriptions button in years hit me; I just watch whatever looks interesting on the home page.
@@99xara99 graphic design can be way more than corporate and ads graphic design is everywhere logos, tshirts, packaging, branding, product design, the list goes on and on if you want to enjoy a field like graphic design all you need is to decide what your target clients are - which you can base on your interests do you like fashion, makeup, video games? graphic design is in a LOT of illustrated media, waay more than you think graphic designers also design websites themselves we can just whip up a website in adobe and export the html - bam you have a (functioning) website (assuming you know your way around adobe software and basic html) the best part is if you still can’t find clients that share your views, you can literally just make your own stuff (ex. clothes, company, literally anything)
The websites for ENA, haunted ps1 demo disk and Neil Cicierega has this type of aesthetic. I hope this kinda becomes a trend, I've always loved highly customizable sites and profiles :)
As a graphic designer by trade, I found this fascinating. It makes sense; in basically every creative field ever, I think it’s commonly agreed that bad is better than boring, but I don’t think I’ve seen that applied to UI design or ads from industry professionals. It totally holds true though, and we’d do well to take notes.
I'm too young to remember 90's internet, but I'm old enough to remember reading html tutorials on Deviantart or scrolling through people's fully decorated Tumblr blogs that played music when you clicked on them. I would love for a comeback for people to start making their own websites where they put whatever they wanted instead of using a general platform. I feel like the internet has moved away from self-expression and leaned into hustle culture, especially with the growth of influencers. Posting used to be fun but now it's work.
@Legacy Cat XP also had the best sound design of any Windows version. There's a reason why those sounds are still iconic, and why nothing from the later versions has achieved that level of cultural stature.
@@tjenadonn6158 To be fair, Windows 7 comes surpisingly close, but it still falls short of xp... Windows xp was/still is the most beautiful looking OS I've seen.... The Luna theme and the bliss wallpaper (which is already a once in a lifetime type of masterpiece photogragh itself) are simply vibrant and were truly a one of a kind design. Windows xp also looks surpisingly stunning in HD resolutions... Interestingly enough.
@@NigelMelanisticSmith It all balances out so the internet never even feels all that much faster, but they cram in all the fucking adware, spyware, and flashy hypnotizing UIs they want.
@@Horsehater500 obviously an individual can make sites however they like however things like the space jam websites are now subject to strict regulations
old websites were built with information in mind where as modern websites are built from a SEO/Monetization perspective because the goal is not to inform people and contribute to culture, but to m ake money. pre-google internet was excellent because you had to put some effort into finding what you were looking for and if you found cool sites you'd build a links page to other sites. It was a great way to connect. I am a 39 year old developer and my personal website is plain HTML because of this exact nostalgia feeling I get.
Not necessarily minimalism: corporatized minimalism. The Minimalist movement within product design, which really experienced it's genesis with the Bauhaus school in the 1910s and 1920s, was focused in making what were once luxury goods affordable to the common people by maximizing their ease of manufacture, while still maintaining good aesthetics and a merging of form and function. What's gotten lost it's that crucial difference between form following function, as in letting how something is used dictate how it's designed, and discarding any form at all in favor of the bare minimum needed to remain functional.
that time period is referred to as web 1.0. Web 1.0s design used icons lot's of pictures of things and not a whole lot of words, primarily because the general public wouldn't know what the word download means at that time so website designers had to illustrate these processes by showing a floppy disk for example so in a way it feels like you're looking at a childrens book. My favorite design element is all the energetic imagery. Like how coca cola ads would invade my screen but the advertisement consisted of a bunch of cool dudes skydiving (yeah idk how it relates to coke either but that was how marketing worked then) and lots of sports stuff, nowadays it's just quirky reddit tier memes being said out loud by some celebrity. Another fun aspect was that some design elements weren't even there to serve a tangible purpose, like how some websites like the pepsi one you looked at would play a song show a gif of a hamster dancing, it was like it was there purely for my enjoyment. Lastly web 1.0's html era was cool because social media didn't homogenize everything, like I could go to a forum for any specific topic and everyone wasn't there to farm likes or karma.
I can't even be too nostalgic about this stuff, wasn't on the internet too much at the time. But man, the old, more customizable and unique stuff was undeniably more interesting. It's what the internet is, or at least was, all about.
What's so sad about this is that technically the internet is much MORE customizable now, but people purposefully don't try to make anything special. You could totally make a genuinely cool looking site with modern software... If you put any amount of effort into that aspect.
@@kidwolf0015 Yeah, there's so much cool stuff you can use now. I can understand preferring the culture of the 2000s, but I wouldn't want to travel back in time there.
I would guess it's because there was more freedom, anonymity and remoteness to the internet back then. Nowdays, it's become very corporate-ized. It's just covered in branding, ads, and soulless redesigns of old systems.
I miss the old stuf too. I remember a Zelda website you could navigate it like if it was a game. The internet was so much more fun back then. Now everything's just one corporate template with that "We like to have fun around here at this office" zing sprinkled in.
Once I heard the death of Geocities and the free websites/servers, I knew it was gonna be all downhill from there. What allowed the Internet to be so varied and amazing was that the average user didn't have to pay anything to give coding a spin. Your website could be both an expression of yourself _and_ a fun project. Now it's all corporate and even the act of blogging feels like a job. Like I'm supposed to feed my data to these corporations day in and out. It's all about keeping things slick and pretty so your zombie brain doesn't think and just clicks. I hope a parallel internet happens one day so we can go back. We need to go back.
I checked your profile and saw you joined UA-cam 16 years ago, which proves you were around to see the old internet. Nobody makes a website anymore because for many it’s too much work. They’ve also been brainwashed into thinking a social media profile is what you need, not a website you made on your own. I’ve been on the internet fairly regularly since 2001 - 2002, with rare exposures to it back in 1997 - 2000 using slow dial up. What the internet is now is nothing short of a dystopian hellhole. And the corporations have a lot to do with this steady decline. Google at one time used to care for the people and you used to get very good search results on their search engine. Now you just get the same 5 - 6 corporate websites and the algorithm sites that are basically all the same. We do need to go back. But we need a community that is actually willing to revitalize what made the internet great.
But for real, I've always hated modern UI design philosophy, and I genuinely don't think it's about nostalgia. Especially considering I didn't grow up in the old era, I'm genZ. Yet, I still use apps to change my Win10 start menu interface to the old Win98. Not because I have fond nostalgic memories of it, but because it's just more practical. That's the big difference. UI in the early advent of Internet and Personal Computer technology, was all about being compact, informative, and useful. It gave you everything you needed right there in front of you. It didn't look fancy, but it didn't need to, because it gave you everything you needed and then some. Somehow, the new 'minimalistic' and 'optimal' designs of the modern era, respect your time and screen space *less* than these old UI's. By showing you less, in order to look more 'sleek', it's making you waste more time clicking through menu's and sub-menus to find what you need. Either that, or they just cut it out entirely, actively keeping you in the dark and withholding information or options from you. Ignoring the direct disadvantage to functionality, the design aesthetic itself isn't even good. It's some obsessed with 'looking sleek' and 'modern' that it completely disrespects your screen space. I don't want to have to scroll past a just one full screen of a giant image, and a bunch more smaller ones with a little bit of vague text, until I finally reach the part with actually useful information and options. I don't care how 'modern' it looks, your empty page with giant squares on it, is just wasting unnecessary space.
I think what’s even worse is how UIs in general have just gotten worse in this regard, ie: when looking at what apps you have installed on a chromebook, you could very easily double the amount of apps on a single screen that google without even making the apps smaller, the space is just utilized so so terribly
OH GOD THIS, even my dad who's worked with computers since the first modern ones agrees with this. I recently discussed with him how absolutely ridiculous Windows 10 SETTINGS are. I should not have to click through 5 vague submenus when you can give me a old computer panel that has it all in one window. What sparked the discussion in the first place was that I had to go through 2 different menus to find access to a panel I was unaware of to modify my calendar week to start on a Monday not a Sunday.
I can tell you how the distinct difference occurred even as a layman. Software isn't ever complete anymore because of updates. The work/funding just isn't allocated to the production of a good end product anymore. They didn't have another chance to get windows 98 right. The way things are done now is basically the digital equivalent of a disposable item. I couldn't imagine being a gamer these days. I almost feel bad that your generation doesn't all sit in the same room to game together. It's all just so sterile, isolating, and inefficient.
Right on! I wish we coud move away from this trend of choosing sleekness in detriment of functionality. The current tendency to do away with functionality or hide it underneath inscrutable submenus might have made sense with touch devices, but has since encompassed desktop-only environments and programs.
Back in 1999 at the tender age of 12, I decided I wanted to be a web designer. I had played around in Angelfire and Geocities and loved making quirky, interesting designs - experiences, journeys. I'm 35 now and I've been a web/digital designer since I was 21. Although I love the advances in technology and the more universal browser support for design tools, I also really miss the spark that older websites brought with them. Flat design and simple user interaction may be aesthetically pleasing, familiar, accessible, legible, and all these other things we have to consider during design phase, but it's getting increasingly boring to work on. Remember full Flash entrance pages to websites? I'm glad they're gone, but I also sort of mourn them, it felt like websites were unique and interesting. Thanks for putting this together, it was a fun look back at things.
Seeing the old UI of UA-cam makes me melancholic because I used to talk to a lot of online friends through the inbox feature and the channel comments. I miss all the designs I and my friends would make for our channels.
I really relate on that end point man. Ive had a notably difficult time as of late, these past few years, with search engines because of how modern websites cater to their algorithms. So instead of finding, for example, a recipe for a certain food, I will instead find a page that talks all about said food but never mentions a recipe at all. Its painstakingly annoying to find information that I want now and even a bit of dorking doesn't help all that much.
I agree, despite all these algorithms, finding relevant information gets more and more difficult as algorithms continue to cater to lowest common denominator. The slow subtle push of ad-subsidized web content inevitably leads to the extinction of content too niche to finance itself with ads.
@@faunatide If it's something I can reasonably expect to be in the public domain I skip Google entirely and go straight to Wikimedia Commons. Say what you will about Wikipedia and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation, but at least they've stuck to what works and not tried to fix what was never broken. It's nice that the Web has something that stays basic, dependable, and untrendy in all the best ways, like the Internet equivalent of a black cup of coffee.
Your commentary at the end really hits hard. The modern internet is so much more dystopian than I ever imagined it could become. The first website that I ever remember being like the modern internet was probably Digg. I had a friend who thought it was awesome that he could have his browsing tracked and then be fed more of the same content by an algorithm. I never used it, but admittedly back then it sounded like a neat concept. I've never used social media, so these days my internet usage pretty much just consists of: UA-cam, Gmail, and Amazon. It is, of course, still useful for looking up information as well when the need arises.
The wierd thing about all of this is how everything changes to this minimalistic asthetic, look at goddamn fashion, even architecture, probably most of people shitting themselfs that the discord logo changed live in white-cyan "modern" houses yoinked form minecraft tutorial. Im sure that kids born in 2020s when they will be in their 20 everything is going to be over the top again, they will look at this asthetic and praise it for its elegance and simplicity, thats how the world works why anybody does not point this out ??!??!?!?!?!?! great vid btw :>
It's almost like aesthetic has trends and cycles and everyone thinks the thing they grew up with is best even though at the time they thought it was boring. Basically no matter what people who make retrospectives say it's always tied to nostalgia.
man, i remember being a tiny kid in the 2000s-early 2010s with a bit of internet access (my parents used it for learning websites for little kindergarten me) and i LOVED just clicking around on silly websites and playing flash games. probably a bad thing in retrospect to have internet access from such a young age but it was great
Old internet had way more customizablility. Each person truly had a unique experience. Now the UIs are so bland and predictable but I guess it keeps people hypnotized for longer so it makes sense?
I haven't "browsed the web" in like a decade, I really miss it. I've forgotten how to browse without the help of a search engine. If you can't be easily found on a search engine your site may as well not exist. What am I gonna do just enter random combinations of words as a website? Search engines have gotten worse and worse about that as well, great for finding specific info you're trying to find, but good luck discovering anything unique or new. Does anyone have like a big list of websites? I really want to go back to exploring the web instead of being told what I should want by a bunch of soulless corporations.
As a webdev myself, i agree with this video. I like the modern UIs, but the old UIs feel so innocent and unique. The modern, simplified, mobile-like UI was forged by corporation on the internet, and the old UI of the web was forged by the users, and it was just all about having fun ynow
It’s because everyone uses templates now. A lot of artists and designers (mostly artists) will get more wacky with their web design if they know how to code html and css themselves
Knowing how to code is not enough. Clients are the ones that want sameness and at some point front-end devs just stop trying and take easy money (no shade I'm a part of this)
I was around the web when sites still looked like this and I genuinely miss them too. everything tends to be cyclical in trends so I hope that as we all collectively get sick of the fact pretty much every media today is just one mass regurgitation (all websites look the same, everything looks like a mobile site, every movie/tv/artwork is just a soulless reboot of something that already existed) of oversimplified, corportate husks that we can break out of it and bring back some of the older aesthetic to make something new, with the advantages of newer technology.
I totally miss the old interwebs a lot. I had the best, flashiest web page ever. Searching for things was so much fun. Now...pft. I feel like we are all in a rut.
during the first web design class i had at uni my teacher would not stop shitting on the old space jam site. was really disheartening knowing that the rest of the semester we’d be tasked with creating a site in line with the current boring corporate design style and not something creative
I'd love to see newer websites made like this. Maybe it's just because im obsessed with making 2000s art, but if i ever need a website im definitely making it like this
I think modern design actually still allows for a lot of creativity. Its just different creativity. If you look at two websites made by different people, they look nothing alike. In my opinion the actual issue is corporate web. If you look at facebook or twitter or google, it all sucks. Modern design is supposed to be easy to use, have a fast devcycle, and not hurt your eyes after looking at it for more than a minute. Imagine actually using the websites you showed daily. Complete sensory overload before you finish your morning coffee. Its better to use small doses of creativity to elevate the look of a website than to just slap as much text in disorganized boxed as possible
You're missing the point. It isnt different creativity, its a lack of it. Its not that old websites would give you sensory overload, its that modern day websites give you no sensory anything. Theyre bland. You see it all around you. Every day a company changes their logo to a shittier less detailed version. Mcdonalds takes away playplaces. Stop trying to justify your big corporate overlords ruining everything and wake up, things ARE shit now
@@blorglord I am a web developer, I see lots of website every day. I am also not justifying any actions taken by corparations, which you would know if you had read my comment
@Oklomsy Actually, these days, we have really fast frameworks! I recommend trying svelte, super fast and not that bloated. But yeah, its important to put effort into it
This!! Most of older websites was like looking at an artwork and finding new bits and pieces wherever you look. If the purpose was going treasure hunting - this would be perfect. But if the purpose is various functions that you have to navigate between, it would become like a labyrinth. Newer sites usually focuses on the consistency to make it easier for the user, which in turn loses a lot of the potential for creativity. I wish newer web design had more easter eggs though, otherwise browsing the website feels like eating plain bread in comparison to eating a sandwich.
I like modern designs but looking at those old websites, I really feel like something's missing. Also they made me remember how half the family got together to watch as we ordered something from ebay back in the day, because it was a pretty big deal for us.
LINGsCARS' website is absolutely sick. I remember at one point they had a live feed into their office, and a page which would parse text commands to control a life-sized dalek figurine in the office. You could spend hours making that dalek bump into the employees and shout profanities at them. Good times...
I remember being a kid in elementary school during the early-mid 2010s and being in the computer lab and just going through all the cool and fun little websites that weren't blocked by the school administration. Those were the days
probably the only modern social media site that still has the customizability and many perks of the old intenet today is Tumblr. You can completely customize your blog with html, and unlike other more popular social medias, there are no celebrities, no influencers, none of your family/coworkers are there, you can be anonymous, the feed is cronological, and even the few ads you get are fucking bonkers.
I remember the jurassic park website, where it was just the door and sounds of rainforest ambiance, bjrds, and occasional dino stomps and bellows. When you opened it, the music playes and you had access to behind the scenes readable content and factoids. It was so cool
The time websites actually loaded quickly and everything felt more like a community. Now everything feels the same because I believe designers are following very similar guidelines everywhere.
Even though I was born in 2001, I got to see a lot of sites like these since I was into computers at age 4. All my parents had was a PC that could run Windows 95 too.
I have been trying to find the Audi website from 2007 era. I loved how car websites actually had cool music playing as you scrolled through their websites. Volvo had it too. I miss those times. They really put lots of creativity in websites back then.
correction: web 2.0 would be early internet forums, basically from when message boards became the standards to when facebook overtook myspace. after that, it's web 3.0 (which is what you're referring to when you call out the plague that is material design)
@@graalcloud web 3.0 being the blockchain was coined by cryptobros, we've been in web 3.0 for years. web 1.0 was non-interactable html pages, with the occasional guestbook and rudimentary messageboard. web 2.0 is where user-side usable websites became the norm (forums, flash portals, etc.). web 3.0 was when social media became the norm, streamlining the web and bringing in it's own design philosophy with it. the people calling nft and blockchains web 3.0 are goofy, and also cryptobros so they're goofy times 2
@@zodismegalame we taught in our class only Web 1.0 to 3.0, 1.0 for non-interactive websites, 2.0 for interactive websites and user-created contents, and 3.0 for decentralization and crypto stuffs
We learned how to make a HTML websites in IT class, mine was neon vomit with Ginga Densetsu Weed x Okami opening slapped in the middle, around it were random magic wolves taken from random deviantART pages. And I made quite a lot CSS frames for an old text based MMORPG about dragons.
I just want my fucking blackberry back, playing the three pre-installed mobile games all day, constantly on the look-out for wi-fi spots, not being able to contact anyone on vacations. These were the times.
this is why i'm redesigning my website myself. i'm tired of all these modern websites. with my vo tech dropout level of education in web design, it looks exactly as early web as i want it to be so far meanwhile even shit like carrds, while highly customizable, aren't quite cutting it everyone should revert back to neocities. and consider joining mastodon and similar decentralized social media sites. scatter everything.
I feel bad for being born in 2007 and basically being in this in-between state when it comes to the internet. Too young to really grow up with the old internet or understand it, but just old enough to remember or be around the old-ish internet long enough before it became mainstream. I remember being 4y/o, my older siblings giggling and shit, bringing some shitty laptop to me and showing me "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME" and me getting annoyed at it. Those "sonic shorts" parody videos, like the one making fun of the tail's doll and getting scared by it, the Windows93 website where most of the apps don't work anymore (rip trollbox), or just playing with the purple palace (only the cake mini-game lmao). Like I pretty much grew up where everything was transitioning out of the 90s/00s and into the 2010s, very awkward
I miss the old youtube layout, ofc I was only about 4-5 in 2012-2013 but I still remember it like it was yesterday, I remember going on one day and it was all big, on the sides it was no longer slim videos, it was as large as the Home Screen ones, but anyways, yeah, I miss the old youtube.
i really just want a mix between the professional user experience of modern websites with the wonderful charm of early internet sites also, i really want customizability options back. i’m tired of everyone’s page looking the same
These new websites look good but it just feels souless most of the times and makes me feel like im using the same site while the old ones were ugly, but they had so more soul and charm, you could feel that the person who made that chat had fun doing that site while the new ones feels like they are generated by a robot or something like that and they are so damn minimalistic like holy crap
then there was the age of flash shortly after, also with websites with icons morphing into the next page when clicked or anything u can think of then make out of tweening and AS3, really i miss those days too, man great inspiration, thanks for sharing also your outro music is pure fire and u put the credits in the vid so I could find it easily bless you sir
I was a kid when websites looked like this, and I did not even know how to read and write, but I used to click on every link I saw. I had a lot of fun just clicking and staring at different websites.
Super thanks for reminding me that meat spin exists
cake farts and lemon party
The isaac guy who shocked himself with a dog collar :0
Did the live stream do well?
don't forget goatse and tubgirl
😭
I did not know you could superchat thru the comment section
The early 2000s Internet was the best. Weird and wacky but developed enough that people figured out cool and slick things to do as well. Best of both worlds.
Definitely one of the pinnacles
Really a lot of it had already gone south by the early 2000s. But you're right, there was some good shit in the 2000s too. Demonoid was the best torrent site ever.
Also extremely dangerous
@@graalcloud yeah back then you might see a dead body instead of today, where you’re constantly at risk of being recruited into a far-right conspiracy theory
Old newgrounds was the shit
Can't wait for web 4.0, which just turns the entire internet into one website with ads embedded into every square inch
I'm sure they are working on that.
I mean the LaLiLuLeiLo will have much easier time controling information and inflluencing collective consciusnes that way
Can’t wait for internet 5.0 when they just put a computer chip in our brain
every pixel*
@@krsmanjovanovic8607 i've just imagine they put the said chip in a nerd's brain and then the supercomputer server things just explodes lol
people go like "ugh why are websites so simple and all the same now" but turns out all these modern websites have a ton of absurdly complicated code that has no benefit for the user but for the company masked under a formal standard, while the wacky ancient websites had simple coding that did the job just fine and the skill to learn it was at the reach of average internet dwellers with just a bit of dedication
Yeah, the internet used to belong to the people. Now it belongs to an ever-shrinking number of corporations who let us play in their sandboxes. What nations did to the planet corporations did to the Web. Makes the anarchist in me mourn.
True, a fucking ton of "useless" cookies, just to fuck you with adds and tracking
Ehhhhhh... There's a lot to be said for the consumer aspect to sites these days.
You need a fair amount of stuff for a shopping cart.. or even forms. I tried doing it with html only, but it was kinda wonky and didn't work. If you wanted to you could use some copied code to set up a form but encryption was crap. Then came PayPal, which was ok, and that opened into copiable code which you could then use PayPal for your cart, and it kinda worked like frames as a shopping cart (or you started using the website builders).
Honestly I remember coding was so simple. Just drag this code and drop it in
Looking at you react
About 4 years ago I found someone's Half-Life walkthrough/fanpage that they made when they were young. What I liked was the guy's dad left a message on the website where he said "good job with the website son, it looks really good". I found that very wholesome.
Wholesome, do u still have the link?
@pungus7 I can't find it anymore, this was like 6 years ago.
@@rubz1390 Dammit, man!
this makes me really appreciate tumblr, a website where you CAN customize every square INCH of your blog as you see fit, and a place where advertisers are actively losing money trying to sell to its userbase. it's one of the last true vestiges of the old web
i used to download and screw around with tumblr website layouts lol i wanna do that again now
amino is even more customizable! Cant say the same about the ads tho 😔
that was the only thing I ever enjoyed about that website, designing my page and learning new ways to do stupid shit like have a scrolling text bar
@@CloyMush you can use Adblock on your laptop and it gets rid of tumblr ads on desktop :) sadly not on mobile
Also I agree, tumblr is the last sliver of old web left. I recently got a theme that looks like an old geocities webpage for my blog. It’s so fun! It has a bunch of blinkies and gifs all over
When I was a kid, I thought websites were the coolest thing ever. I used to write down every url I saw, from products and billboards, so I could browse for cool websites. I loved them and really wanted to make my own, so I eventually learned html and css by myself. Cut to current time, I am an webdeveloper and I despise making websites now. It's so much work for shit that looks all the same. This video almost made me cry lol I
i dont know why but this specific personal story feels so much sadder than every copy paste doom scroll news story ive read in the past month. hope you are able to find the time to make some nostalgic styled website designs even if its just as a hobby
@@gildedmelody786 I have made over a thousand websites in my life, but only in the last few years, when I move to an angular/react, that it has become so dreadful. Like some other commenters said, there was something so beautiful about pure html/css and I miss it too. But I've move on to gamedev, and I've been having a blast making the website for my game, so don't worry!
@@voltsm_ let us know when you release it! :)
Same !! I was obsessed with websites as a kid, i even made a zine (without knowing thats what i was doing lol) when i was like 7 of my favourite websites, (with neopets being no 1 ) now im doing a graphic design internship after a few career hiccups and my boss thinks it’s hilarious/bad how i love this style of old maximalist website and modeled my personal website after old blogging sites. I showed him a photography zine im making which has a page layed out like a 2005 blog site with terrible blingy graphics and he looked terrified 😆High five to you lol!
bro :(
When I was a kid, we all thought the future websites will be even cooler with 3D animated menus that rotate as you select and option and such stuff. But now everything is just a white list of boxes.
yooo that's SUCH a cool ideaaa I can see it in my head fr
yo i remember having a cd like that with animated menus for selecting scenes and other stuff
i wish they did do that :(
But there were 3D rotating gifs back then, according to Strong Bad…
Older websites, despite how clustered they were, were also more intuitive to use than new websites. The need to hide everything in dropdown menus make shit hard for me to look for stuff. You never know whether the thing your looking for is in ⚙️, the three bar dropdown or at the very bottom at the page.
I dont mind drop down menus the issue to me is when you have a drop down menu with just a few options that lead you to another page with a few options that lead you to other pages with a few options that lead you to other pages and thats where you find the one setting you have been searching half an hour for hidden behind multiple pages because they dont want to put too much in front of you at once, feels like im stuck in a maze sometimes, id rather it be cluttered and minimize the number of clicks i have to do to reach things than minimal visually and a pain in the ass to find anything.
@@WadWizard this looks like a sonnet lol (not 14 lines tho)
But then you try to go to the bottom of the page, and, surprise! It actually has infinite scrolling and your browser gets that much slower as it loads more of what you don't want.
While on older websites, you click a page and now you are completely lost (due to every page on the same website having a completely different design), with the URL being your only guide and it's very likely you ended up just editing the address bar to find your way out.
And your opinion about modern designs... You can't say they are bad just because they are often used incorrectly. At least you weren't more lost than on an older website you seldom visit.
@@FlameRat_YehLon not to mention you throw up from the tiled backgrounds and the eye seering clashing font colors.
Like I hate all the ads on modern websites but I do not want to go back to the migraine inducing clutter of web 1.0
I used to browse and build websites constantly as a tween. I'd just travel down rabbitholes and web rings. Each fan site was different. Animations on your cursor, midi music, in jokes, weird fonts. The net is boring now. Sites no longer feel like your home, they are like hotels.
Only the hotels are run by shady dealers who are liable to kick you out if you so much as break one of their rules. Very sad what it's turned into now.
Hotels who observe and analyze your every step so they figure out how to make you book that expensive special room next 🤓
anyone who misses the classic Internet NEEDS to play Hypnospace Outlaw right now
it faithfully recreates that era and is super nostalgic
First noobs (joke)
Can you give us a link?
@@swgclips03 seriously bruh can you not just Google it? You have to be spoon fed a link?
@@MoltenbramleyI agree, if someone doesn't know a word they'll just assume it's meaning
Yo what’s up Vail
I used to love browsing the internet when I was a kid, around 2002-3 it really was a different world. Every website was different and offered something special. Hell, even 2006-08 was still great. I remember the launch of myspace and a lot of early internet website design was present in the user profiles. The internet is no longer a customizable extension of yourself, it's all the same boring corporate, flat, flashy design. It's all the same.
What about 04 and 05?
@@maxgamesst1 same as 03 basically, I think Napster was getting big then? I only called out 06-8 because a bunch of social media sites we still use today were starting out around then
flashy?
it's the polar opposite of flashy
I miss being able to set an animated gif as an avatar and post neat and clean transparent .png images on my posts that seamlessly blended with the background by simply pasting a link
now, years later when bigger information storage should be a possibility, I can't even use transparent images on twitter without fearing compression won't crunch them down into a mess forced to appear encased on a frame
I think the word you're looking for is "sanitized" instead of "flashy." It is very a bright white a lot of the time, but that's because it's been scrubbed clean of anything artistic.
it's such a vibe to come across old websites like those, only found nowadays through people sharing their links. there must be so many old websites that's been completly forgotten
that's so crazy to think about...
/music plays
Funnily enough, all the crochet pattern websites I find online are like this. Some lesser known subcultures do still have these crazy poppy websites, and it's fun. Though I don't like figuring out which "click here for pattern" button will give me a virus and which one is legit
or like cs dept professor's website lmao
@@fungustheclown666 omg same!!!!! I crochet as well and I remember finding a pattern on this old looking blog, I didn't have to download a pdf or anything, no ads either
It gave mega early internet vibes
Yeah but some of them have viruses at this point so I'm pretty cautious
We should petition for a retro day where all the sites have to switch back to their old formats.
It would be sick, by the way, in Sarawak Malaysia, there's actually a retro day but it doesn't retronized internet
When I was a teenager (2000) I created a forum about my school, just by myself. No moderation, complete anarchy, imagine teenage students being able to say whatever they wanted about teachers in complete anonymity for the first time. I created games using flash and actionscript where our teachers were the enemies you had to defeat, It was a complete mess lol, everybody was talking about the site and teachers were furious but luckily they never caught me. Now I'm 38, I've become a chemist but I haven't lost my love for web development. I took a full stack web development training course. Now I know html, css, javascript, es6, python, react, sql, mongodb, nodejs, express, nextjs, etc, and even though I know all that stuff I woudn't be able to create today something as good as that old forum. It is insane how many technologies you need to dominate in order to make a mvp of a website that can be put in production. And all that to make a website that looks exactly like every other site, because you have to play it safe in order to make the site responsive and accesible from a myriad of different devices. I miss those old good days of the amateur internet
you know what fuck phones
I'm sorry if this is a dumb question but is it still up?
The clunky, broken, overly-sanitised redesign of deviantArt felt like losing one of the last bastions of an older time. Maybe the Ui was "dated", but it loaded quick and felt cozy as someone who grew up on 2000s internet. I miss that culture that disappeared with the redesign.
THANK YOU! I loved the simplicity on the old site and how it just feels a lot more… tangible? Maybe I was just used to it though.
The thing I hate the most about new DeviantArt is that I cannot filter my main page by "newest to oldest" anymore.
I miss the "remove from notifications" button while going through newly posted art. Now I never go through them anymore because it's a pain to have to go back to press the x for every drawing
@@gircakes Also half the time the messages don't even send
literally most of the people i knew that still used deviantart quit when they changed the design since it’s so shit
Not only were websites cooler, but they were also faster and better made. No overly fancy CSS and JS, no weird animations or panels that display like 1 word and take up half the screen and god forbid you try opening it on a mobile device. Old websites used basic html, made everything clear and simple and were relatively easy to negative. Nowadays it just feels like you're in a corporate hellhole.
@@maxakrman7101 I use those popups to identify sites that are avsolutely not worth my time.
(except for privacy and cookies, those are necessitated by law but tbh shouldnt exist in the first place. all my homies despise cookies).
@@zioqqr4262 cookies are just local variables stored on pc, its advertising cookies you wanna despise
@@Evercreeper Well yeah, as far as I can tell most cookies are used for advertising, since they dont need to ask for strictly necessary cookies.
That in itself should have everyone wonder "wait then whats up with all the other ones?"
i havent looked into it yet but in germany, since they force sites to disclaim and make customizable what cookies specifically you agree to, theyve started also putting in smth called "Legitimate Interest" which is always on by default, and to me seems like "Okay but heres the cookies anyway fuk you"
All the websites shown in this video used CSS and lots of websites at the time used JS (or PHP) as well. You definitely would not like it if neither of those things existed on today's web. The real problem is that companies value selling you things or advertising on their website over making them easy to use and interact with. Also certain websites will use a ton of JS libraries to do things instead of implementing features themselves which makes websites really slow.
@@zioqqr4262 Cookies are why you don't have to log into websites every single time you want to use them and instead only have to log in once on a particular computer. They have lots of other functions like this that are good, but websites also use them to advertise with you, which is bad. Your best bet is getting a browser or extension that automatically blocks bad cookies (like the Brave browser for example).
I wouldn't be surprised if in, say, 5-20 years we come back to the more creative web looks a bit, while still integrating the info we've learned on how to make websites understandable
God I sure hope so
I think companies will totally try to capitalise on this nostalgia. For better or worse
Maybe we should start a movement and start doing it now. Everyone could go out and make one wacky old school html website each.
@@Noelciaaa right, it wasn’t even about the aesthetics as much as all the niche groups. The aesthetics told you that were in the club
@@picklepirate yes, exactly!! and a lot of customization. now everything has to be sleek and samey. eh. even if they used some retro aesthetic, it would be same for every user too. idk what kind of a difference this would make. honestly this sameness pushed me into the coding side of webdev, i dont wanna deal with the marketing bs
Old UA-cam was a mess but in some ways it was better. The customization really showed how it was a site about people making videos and not a terribly safe, bland corporate hellhole that will make you watch 2 unskipable 15 second ads before letting you watch a 4 second video
It's really jarring seeing what trends died and stayed. Being someone who's used UA-cam since its birth it's been a wild ride. The UA-cam episode of South Park from 2008 is super dated in what was popular on the site at the time. A video would stay relevant for months. Memes and jokes lasted months and sometimes years back then. Some memes die in 2 days now.
I remember the days of watching bootleg anime in 3 parts
It seems they removed a lot of features along the way, imagine if they added them all back... I think most people would like it, honestly
Sadly, I'm a part of the generation that never got to experience the 2000s internet, but after spending afternoons exploring old sites on the Wayback Machine--I do honestly think it's better. It was wacky, fun, and creative. Now it's all carbon copies of the same format with little ingenuity
One of the few things I don't miss was speed. It was awful waiting for shit to load.
@@Dhips. honestly it hasn't really changed now anyways. new websites are filled with javascript and css elements to the point where it takes me a minute to load gmail fully. you would think everything would of gotten faster, but it is hasn't changed that much. going to old pages is heaven, it loads in less than a second.
@@Dhips. the speed would be crazy fast if we had the same type of simple websites, but with today's hardware
I was born in a time too late to originally experience websites like these and I wish more websites were designed like this because I rarely see it at all. Every website just looks exactly the same now and you'd be hardpressed to find a website that looks any amount different. Some of it just does kind of look bad, but like it's better than the billionth "modern" website that apparently every website has to be now.
I also kind of like the aesthetic of just pure HTML, which you only really see now in obscure things, like for example GCC's website. It's clear, direct, and just has no bullshit or unneeded fancy aesthetics, it just does what it needs to do.
Hypnospace outlaw is a pretty good way to experience this sort of aesthetic in a strange kind of way.
One site I found that kinda hits that raw HTML nostalgia is the SCP wiki.
@@Neondarkness72 Absolutely, I'd highly recommend it for anybody born after the year 2000 who missed most of the "wild west" of the early internet
I've heard that the websites on ipfs are kinda like this
As rookie UX/UI designer...I agree with everyone, I mean I like clean and minimalist style too, but I wish it was acceptable to like these oldies not ironically.
I feel you. Many modern sites are just so same-y looking and spam your screen with large pictures instead of actually giving you information. I don't think websites were always better back in the day, but I agree that nowadays, websites all look the same. I think that has more to do with companies not investing enough resources into their websites though. Many sites look the same because they just use bootstrap and have been told that blending in is what works. Design patterns aren't bad though. Take the top navbar for example. If every site invented its own way of navigating, it becomes a hassle to use and figure out. Some sites do that and it's immediately annoying.
But yeah, it's a shame that most online traffic takes place on the same few sites. Barely anyone has their own website, except for showing off your products. It's why I find the lambda generation community site and corridor digital's websites so impressive. Web development and maintenance is a huge effort and creating your own platform will make it much harder to find an audience at first, so I commend their efforts
Also page scrolling animations where every item has to fly in for 2 seconds before you can see it can just die
I’m a design student and they literally teach us that simplicity/minimalism in design is a current trend. I hate it personally.
No one has a website anymore because they killed off most of the sites that gave you a space on their server for free. Now there's, what 2 or maybe 3, if I'm being generous, that do that? And they all have the same designs. All to make way for social media.
i appreciate your style and content and i love tv kid, thanks for the content:)
As a graphic designer, it makes me wonder if it's clever to start going backwards?
Like really, if you wanted people to go to your website and you weren't getting a ton of traffic, make your website look like neopets or a kickass pepsi website from the late 90s. Just make it functional and bug free and I think that shit would go viral.
That’s just the problem though. In the 2000s, it wasn’t just the aesthetic, the internet was a free place where corporations weren’t watching you.
There were so many niche clubs and groups so disconnected from eachother.
It would be so sad to see designers just use the husk of old design to get their click rate up
The cancerous growth of algorithmic content feeds and the concentration of everything into just a few websites has absolutely destroyed the internet. I'm at the upper edge of GenZ so I was too young for the ridiculous 90s web aesthetic, but I still remember the internet being so much better than it is now. In the late 00s and early 10s when I started getting online, there were so many cool forums where you could find real communities of people discussing common interests. You would get to know the people that got on frequently and it felt really homey; the exact opposite of the endless torrent of ever shifting indiscernible noise that is modern online "social" interaction. And the web search experience was orders of magnitude better than it is now. You used to be able to search anything and it would take you directly to useful websites like blogs that were run by real people talking about things they actually knew (or at least cared) about. Nowadays the only reaults are a half dozen big corporate websites and an infinite supply of listicle junk "blogs" that just echo each other and spam out search engine optimized word puke to get ad views. It's basically impossible nowadays to find real blogs where real humans share information meant for other real humans to read instead of low budget "content" meant to feed the algorithms. It's sad and nauseating and infuriating and I don't think it's even possible for it to change except for the worse. Fuck.
Mood😩
I miss the freedom and creativity of the old internet. Did you ever come across the forums on GoToQuiz? That is where I lived as a teenager in the late 00s and early 10s. People got to know each other. It was as you described it.
One thing has improved dramatically: usability and accessability. The spacejam website for instance has red text on a dark background that is barely readable, even if you aren't colorblind.
Ah my favorite combo on AOL im
Yea useability and accessibility are very huge factors behind these redesigns, I still think people need to brainstorm a better system, one where we go back to all the creativity but still keep emphasis in usability and accessibility.
and god forbid you open that in a phone or screen reader
@@Slashx92 Or try to navigate it without a mouse
last i checked, my screen reader doesn't read all this terrible code, its gone backwards.
I absolutely hate how websites try to make their browser experience more like a mobile/app design. Those mobile pages were already just mediocre, watered down versions of the browser pages, you are literally just making your page worse for browsers
true tbh, if i wanted a mobile experience i'd be holding my phone and not a mouse
Well it's done for a reason, cuz almost all trafic is from phones, tell those mfs to use a desktop and web developers would go back to desiging desktop first, cuz right now it just ain't worth it to have a completely different design for the same site on mobile and desktop, one has to take priority
Well its a lot easier to make a mobile site and just have everything scale up on a desktop than making 2 designs. I blame everyone else Im still on my pc browsing the web.
Granted, it is much, much more efficient to build a website for small screens and scale up then the other way around, and the *vast majority* of people will be on a phone. Stuffing a site designed for a desktop onto a phone is hard and rarely goes well. The opposite is easy and the result is tolerable.
Tbf alot of people use their phone much more than their computer since its available on the go. Phones are just portable computers at this point instead of just for calling or to play a game of Sudoku.
So although I agree alot of websites downgrade their layouts and what not it's just the reality rn. Gotta go where the average person is going.
Now I want to make a *_FUN_* website. One where you can change the font however you want. Keygen music as well.
No website creators. Just pure text editing.
There's this thing (I'm honestly not sure what is is) called ENA, some creation by an artist.
His website is based on the old Internet philosophy, and let me tell you its awesome just staying on the site and leaving it on.
@@jasonfurumetarualkemisto5917 yeah, went to search up “ENA”, “ENA websites”, “ENA ui” and got nothing. Your posit is interesting and I kinda wanna look into it more. Since you got a better starting point can you provide a more solid way to find what you’ve mentioned?
@@afenvec Look up Joel G and you'll find it, that's the artist name & website name
best way to hot a website is neocities but angelfire is also slick for some reason
Pick up an old how to use html and css book from your local library or used bookstore and make one on neocities! I literally used to build sites like these from when I was like 9, well into my teens. It's much easier to pick up and learn than the crazy stuff being used to power modern website. A lot more fun and forgiving as well.
I miss the old days, the whole aesthetic of it looked magical at the time, and still does now. I miss when people used computers for internet, not phones.
they wanted to be able to use it at the toilet.
Got to the end of the video when the realization that I haven't clicked the subscriptions button in years hit me; I just watch whatever looks interesting on the home page.
I used to be a graphic designer, but my style didn't jive with this current homogenized style we all see today.
I wanted to become one but I grew to just despise advertisements. And corporate design & ads is basically what graphic design is today.
@@99xara99 graphic design can be way more than corporate and ads
graphic design is everywhere
logos, tshirts, packaging, branding, product design, the list goes on and on
if you want to enjoy a field like graphic design all you need is to decide what your target clients are - which you can base on your interests
do you like fashion, makeup, video games? graphic design is in a LOT of illustrated media, waay more than you think
graphic designers also design websites themselves
we can just whip up a website in adobe and export the html - bam you have a (functioning) website (assuming you know your way around adobe software and basic html)
the best part is if you still can’t find clients that share your views, you can literally just make your own stuff (ex. clothes, company, literally anything)
adobe? seriously? @@nabnab8222
The websites for ENA, haunted ps1 demo disk and Neil Cicierega has this type of aesthetic. I hope this kinda becomes a trend, I've always loved highly customizable sites and profiles :)
Same. Certain old webcore and Y2K tumblr blogs too
As a graphic designer by trade, I found this fascinating. It makes sense; in basically every creative field ever, I think it’s commonly agreed that bad is better than boring, but I don’t think I’ve seen that applied to UI design or ads from industry professionals. It totally holds true though, and we’d do well to take notes.
Thank you for reminding me of the EPIC SUPER THANKS FEATURE.
I'm too young to remember 90's internet, but I'm old enough to remember reading html tutorials on Deviantart or scrolling through people's fully decorated Tumblr blogs that played music when you clicked on them. I would love for a comeback for people to start making their own websites where they put whatever they wanted instead of using a general platform. I feel like the internet has moved away from self-expression and leaned into hustle culture, especially with the growth of influencers. Posting used to be fun but now it's work.
I miss when logos were cool and 3D looking
@Legacy Cat XP also had the best sound design of any Windows version. There's a reason why those sounds are still iconic, and why nothing from the later versions has achieved that level of cultural stature.
@@tjenadonn6158 To be fair, Windows 7 comes surpisingly close, but it still falls short of xp...
Windows xp was/still is the most beautiful looking OS I've seen.... The Luna theme and the bliss wallpaper (which is already a once in a lifetime type of masterpiece photogragh itself) are simply vibrant and were truly a one of a kind design.
Windows xp also looks surpisingly stunning in HD resolutions... Interestingly enough.
Apple’s Quicktime Player was my favorite.
look up skeumorphism and frutiger aero
Fuck cooler, old websites were smaller too. I miss when websites were measured in KB rather than MB
If you ever get booted from 4G to 3G, you'll see how huge even simple stuff has got, what a shame.
@@NigelMelanisticSmith It all balances out so the internet never even feels all that much faster, but they cram in all the fucking adware, spyware, and flashy hypnotizing UIs they want.
@@izzyj.1079 100% agree. I guess some things have changed.
fun fact: you can still make old-styled websites.
It is actually illegal to build a website that doesn't download 50MB worth of JavaScript libraries every click.
@@adud6764 yes. It's a crypto-felony! Written in 1984
@@adud6764 I mean in terms of aesthetics.
Not really, there are standards for accesibility now
@@Horsehater500 obviously an individual can make sites however they like however things like the space jam websites are now subject to strict regulations
old websites were built with information in mind where as modern websites are built from a SEO/Monetization perspective because the goal is not to inform people and contribute to culture, but to m ake money.
pre-google internet was excellent because you had to put some effort into finding what you were looking for and if you found cool sites you'd build a links page to other sites. It was a great way to connect. I am a 39 year old developer and my personal website is plain HTML because of this exact nostalgia feeling I get.
Great video, loving your vids lately
Minimalism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Not necessarily minimalism: corporatized minimalism. The Minimalist movement within product design, which really experienced it's genesis with the Bauhaus school in the 1910s and 1920s, was focused in making what were once luxury goods affordable to the common people by maximizing their ease of manufacture, while still maintaining good aesthetics and a merging of form and function. What's gotten lost it's that crucial difference between form following function, as in letting how something is used dictate how it's designed, and discarding any form at all in favor of the bare minimum needed to remain functional.
Which is ironic because we are over saturated by social media, youtube , Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
But not minimal techno!
@Aixa Mercado it always has. If money is the root of all evil, what does a system that places money above everything else say about it?
@@tjenadonn6158 yes!
that time period is referred to as web 1.0. Web 1.0s design used icons lot's of pictures of things and not a whole lot of words, primarily because the general public wouldn't know what the word download means at that time so website designers had to illustrate these processes by showing a floppy disk for example so in a way it feels like you're looking at a childrens book.
My favorite design element is all the energetic imagery. Like how coca cola ads would invade my screen but the advertisement consisted of a bunch of cool dudes skydiving (yeah idk how it relates to coke either but that was how marketing worked then) and lots of sports stuff, nowadays it's just quirky reddit tier memes being said out loud by some celebrity. Another fun aspect was that some design elements weren't even there to serve a tangible purpose, like how some websites like the pepsi one you looked at would play a song show a gif of a hamster dancing, it was like it was there purely for my enjoyment.
Lastly web 1.0's html era was cool because social media didn't homogenize everything, like I could go to a forum for any specific topic and everyone wasn't there to farm likes or karma.
I can't even be too nostalgic about this stuff, wasn't on the internet too much at the time. But man, the old, more customizable and unique stuff was undeniably more interesting.
It's what the internet is, or at least was, all about.
What's so sad about this is that technically the internet is much MORE customizable now, but people purposefully don't try to make anything special.
You could totally make a genuinely cool looking site with modern software... If you put any amount of effort into that aspect.
@@kidwolf0015 Yeah, there's so much cool stuff you can use now. I can understand preferring the culture of the 2000s, but I wouldn't want to travel back in time there.
I would guess it's because there was more freedom, anonymity and remoteness to the internet back then. Nowdays, it's become very corporate-ized. It's just covered in branding, ads, and soulless redesigns of old systems.
I miss the old stuf too. I remember a Zelda website you could navigate it like if it was a game. The internet was so much more fun back then. Now everything's just one corporate template with that "We like to have fun around here at this office" zing sprinkled in.
Once I heard the death of Geocities and the free websites/servers, I knew it was gonna be all downhill from there. What allowed the Internet to be so varied and amazing was that the average user didn't have to pay anything to give coding a spin. Your website could be both an expression of yourself _and_ a fun project.
Now it's all corporate and even the act of blogging feels like a job. Like I'm supposed to feed my data to these corporations day in and out. It's all about keeping things slick and pretty so your zombie brain doesn't think and just clicks.
I hope a parallel internet happens one day so we can go back. We need to go back.
I checked your profile and saw you joined UA-cam 16 years ago, which proves you were around to see the old internet.
Nobody makes a website anymore because for many it’s too much work. They’ve also been brainwashed into thinking a social media profile is what you need, not a website you made on your own.
I’ve been on the internet fairly regularly since 2001 - 2002, with rare exposures to it back in 1997 - 2000 using slow dial up.
What the internet is now is nothing short of a dystopian hellhole. And the corporations have a lot to do with this steady decline.
Google at one time used to care for the people and you used to get very good search results on their search engine. Now you just get the same 5 - 6 corporate websites and the algorithm sites that are basically all the same.
We do need to go back. But we need a community that is actually willing to revitalize what made the internet great.
You could use 000webhost to make websites for free.
I know this is an old comment, but check out Neocities
@@ermwhatdaheck That's the second time I heard of it... I will, thanks!
Check out neocities!!
The internet used to be art. Now it's a corporate wasteland.
Granted there were also a ton of pop-up ads back then.
But for real, I've always hated modern UI design philosophy, and I genuinely don't think it's about nostalgia. Especially considering I didn't grow up in the old era, I'm genZ. Yet, I still use apps to change my Win10 start menu interface to the old Win98. Not because I have fond nostalgic memories of it, but because it's just more practical. That's the big difference. UI in the early advent of Internet and Personal Computer technology, was all about being compact, informative, and useful. It gave you everything you needed right there in front of you. It didn't look fancy, but it didn't need to, because it gave you everything you needed and then some.
Somehow, the new 'minimalistic' and 'optimal' designs of the modern era, respect your time and screen space *less* than these old UI's. By showing you less, in order to look more 'sleek', it's making you waste more time clicking through menu's and sub-menus to find what you need. Either that, or they just cut it out entirely, actively keeping you in the dark and withholding information or options from you. Ignoring the direct disadvantage to functionality, the design aesthetic itself isn't even good. It's some obsessed with 'looking sleek' and 'modern' that it completely disrespects your screen space. I don't want to have to scroll past a just one full screen of a giant image, and a bunch more smaller ones with a little bit of vague text, until I finally reach the part with actually useful information and options. I don't care how 'modern' it looks, your empty page with giant squares on it, is just wasting unnecessary space.
I think what’s even worse is how UIs in general have just gotten worse in this regard, ie: when looking at what apps you have installed on a chromebook, you could very easily double the amount of apps on a single screen that google without even making the apps smaller, the space is just utilized so so terribly
OH GOD THIS, even my dad who's worked with computers since the first modern ones agrees with this. I recently discussed with him how absolutely ridiculous Windows 10 SETTINGS are. I should not have to click through 5 vague submenus when you can give me a old computer panel that has it all in one window. What sparked the discussion in the first place was that I had to go through 2 different menus to find access to a panel I was unaware of to modify my calendar week to start on a Monday not a Sunday.
I can tell you how the distinct difference occurred even as a layman. Software isn't ever complete anymore because of updates. The work/funding just isn't allocated to the production of a good end product anymore. They didn't have another chance to get windows 98 right. The way things are done now is basically the digital equivalent of a disposable item. I couldn't imagine being a gamer these days. I almost feel bad that your generation doesn't all sit in the same room to game together. It's all just so sterile, isolating, and inefficient.
recently went from a windows 7 to a 10. could really do with an app that makes the UI functional again
Right on! I wish we coud move away from this trend of choosing sleekness in detriment of functionality. The current tendency to do away with functionality or hide it underneath inscrutable submenus might have made sense with touch devices, but has since encompassed desktop-only environments and programs.
Big fan of these recent chill discussion type vids, keep em up
Back in 1999 at the tender age of 12, I decided I wanted to be a web designer. I had played around in Angelfire and Geocities and loved making quirky, interesting designs - experiences, journeys. I'm 35 now and I've been a web/digital designer since I was 21. Although I love the advances in technology and the more universal browser support for design tools, I also really miss the spark that older websites brought with them.
Flat design and simple user interaction may be aesthetically pleasing, familiar, accessible, legible, and all these other things we have to consider during design phase, but it's getting increasingly boring to work on. Remember full Flash entrance pages to websites? I'm glad they're gone, but I also sort of mourn them, it felt like websites were unique and interesting.
Thanks for putting this together, it was a fun look back at things.
Seeing the old UI of UA-cam makes me melancholic because I used to talk to a lot of online friends through the inbox feature and the channel comments. I miss all the designs I and my friends would make for our channels.
I really relate on that end point man. Ive had a notably difficult time as of late, these past few years, with search engines because of how modern websites cater to their algorithms. So instead of finding, for example, a recipe for a certain food, I will instead find a page that talks all about said food but never mentions a recipe at all. Its painstakingly annoying to find information that I want now and even a bit of dorking doesn't help all that much.
trying to find art references or the original source of an image and all you get is fucking Pinterest
I agree, despite all these algorithms, finding relevant information gets more and more difficult as algorithms continue to cater to lowest common denominator. The slow subtle push of ad-subsidized web content inevitably leads to the extinction of content too niche to finance itself with ads.
@@faunatide If it's something I can reasonably expect to be in the public domain I skip Google entirely and go straight to Wikimedia Commons. Say what you will about Wikipedia and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation, but at least they've stuck to what works and not tried to fix what was never broken. It's nice that the Web has something that stays basic, dependable, and untrendy in all the best ways, like the Internet equivalent of a black cup of coffee.
@@faunatide I felt this in my soul. Every. freaking. image.
Try looking on page 99?
Your commentary at the end really hits hard. The modern internet is so much more dystopian than I ever imagined it could become. The first website that I ever remember being like the modern internet was probably Digg. I had a friend who thought it was awesome that he could have his browsing tracked and then be fed more of the same content by an algorithm. I never used it, but admittedly back then it sounded like a neat concept.
I've never used social media, so these days my internet usage pretty much just consists of: UA-cam, Gmail, and Amazon. It is, of course, still useful for looking up information as well when the need arises.
The wierd thing about all of this is how everything changes to this minimalistic asthetic, look at goddamn fashion, even architecture, probably most of people shitting themselfs that the discord logo changed live in white-cyan "modern" houses yoinked form minecraft tutorial. Im sure that kids born in 2020s when they will be in their 20 everything is going to be over the top again, they will look at this asthetic and praise it for its elegance and simplicity, thats how the world works why anybody does not point this out ??!??!?!?!?!?! great vid btw :>
It's almost like aesthetic has trends and cycles and everyone thinks the thing they grew up with is best even though at the time they thought it was boring.
Basically no matter what people who make retrospectives say it's always tied to nostalgia.
man, i remember being a tiny kid in the 2000s-early 2010s with a bit of internet access (my parents used it for learning websites for little kindergarten me) and i LOVED just clicking around on silly websites and playing flash games. probably a bad thing in retrospect to have internet access from such a young age but it was great
"I don't see ads because I use adbl-"
*ad appears because I'm watching on my iPad*
Old internet had way more customizablility. Each person truly had a unique experience. Now the UIs are so bland and predictable but I guess it keeps people hypnotized for longer so it makes sense?
I, sadly, did not grow up with a lot of these websites. I'm only 19 years old, but I do remember a not-as-old Cartoon Network website and UA-cam.
Every time I see old websites it takes me back to a simpler time when everything wasn't overly corporate
I haven't "browsed the web" in like a decade, I really miss it. I've forgotten how to browse without the help of a search engine. If you can't be easily found on a search engine your site may as well not exist. What am I gonna do just enter random combinations of words as a website? Search engines have gotten worse and worse about that as well, great for finding specific info you're trying to find, but good luck discovering anything unique or new.
Does anyone have like a big list of websites? I really want to go back to exploring the web instead of being told what I should want by a bunch of soulless corporations.
Thanks! Just found your channel, awesome!
As a webdev myself, i agree with this video. I like the modern UIs, but the old UIs feel so innocent and unique. The modern, simplified, mobile-like UI was forged by corporation on the internet, and the old UI of the web was forged by the users, and it was just all about having fun ynow
they are not modern, just contemporary.
It’s because everyone uses templates now. A lot of artists and designers (mostly artists) will get more wacky with their web design if they know how to code html and css themselves
But learning is hard :(((((
@@sparklesparkle3370 indeed, but what you gain in accessibility you lose in creativity. It’s a double edged sword.
Knowing how to code is not enough. Clients are the ones that want sameness and at some point front-end devs just stop trying and take easy money (no shade I'm a part of this)
Brings back memories of when the only thing I had to worry about was getting home from school fast enough in order to get on the computer first
I was around the web when sites still looked like this and I genuinely miss them too. everything tends to be cyclical in trends so I hope that as we all collectively get sick of the fact pretty much every media today is just one mass regurgitation (all websites look the same, everything looks like a mobile site, every movie/tv/artwork is just a soulless reboot of something that already existed) of oversimplified, corportate husks that we can break out of it and bring back some of the older aesthetic to make something new, with the advantages of newer technology.
i'm watching this on my phone and the ad placement at 8:00 has got me in tears, well played
Same lol
IGN's site in the 2000s is beyond beautiful. Still the best looking website design of all time. You can still see it through the wayback machine.
Kind of weird coming out of you sonic doesnt IGN wanna fucking bury you alive.
I don't know what that does but I have 2 useless dollars in my google balance
I totally miss the old interwebs a lot. I had the best, flashiest web page ever. Searching for things was so much fun. Now...pft. I feel like we are all in a rut.
this is why i make my websites look old-school
during the first web design class i had at uni my teacher would not stop shitting on the old space jam site. was really disheartening knowing that the rest of the semester we’d be tasked with creating a site in line with the current boring corporate design style and not something creative
I'd love to see newer websites made like this. Maybe it's just because im obsessed with making 2000s art, but if i ever need a website im definitely making it like this
I think modern design actually still allows for a lot of creativity. Its just different creativity. If you look at two websites made by different people, they look nothing alike. In my opinion the actual issue is corporate web. If you look at facebook or twitter or google, it all sucks. Modern design is supposed to be easy to use, have a fast devcycle, and not hurt your eyes after looking at it for more than a minute. Imagine actually using the websites you showed daily. Complete sensory overload before you finish your morning coffee. Its better to use small doses of creativity to elevate the look of a website than to just slap as much text in disorganized boxed as possible
You're missing the point. It isnt different creativity, its a lack of it. Its not that old websites would give you sensory overload, its that modern day websites give you no sensory anything. Theyre bland. You see it all around you. Every day a company changes their logo to a shittier less detailed version. Mcdonalds takes away playplaces. Stop trying to justify your big corporate overlords ruining everything and wake up, things ARE shit now
@@blorglord I am a web developer, I see lots of website every day. I am also not justifying any actions taken by corparations, which you would know if you had read my comment
@Oklomsy Actually, these days, we have really fast frameworks! I recommend trying svelte, super fast and not that bloated. But yeah, its important to put effort into it
This!! Most of older websites was like looking at an artwork and finding new bits and pieces wherever you look. If the purpose was going treasure hunting - this would be perfect. But if the purpose is various functions that you have to navigate between, it would become like a labyrinth. Newer sites usually focuses on the consistency to make it easier for the user, which in turn loses a lot of the potential for creativity.
I wish newer web design had more easter eggs though, otherwise browsing the website feels like eating plain bread in comparison to eating a sandwich.
Nah, the old designs are still better.
The early 2000’s was peak internet,
Mp3 blogs, Weird software that was self developed, video sharing sites for independent creators.
Gold days.
I like modern designs but looking at those old websites, I really feel like something's missing. Also they made me remember how half the family got together to watch as we ordered something from ebay back in the day, because it was a pretty big deal for us.
LINGsCARS' website is absolutely sick. I remember at one point they had a live feed into their office, and a page which would parse text commands to control a life-sized dalek figurine in the office. You could spend hours making that dalek bump into the employees and shout profanities at them.
Good times...
I wasn't an internet user in early 2000's/90's but i love the aesthetic of old web. It's so cool!
also forums seem like a more healthier and fun alternative to Shit platforms like twitter.
@@Roskaa agreed
Anyone know the ending song?
I remember being a kid in elementary school during the early-mid 2010s and being in the computer lab and just going through all the cool and fun little websites that weren't blocked by the school administration. Those were the days
Yep, I remember playing all the flash game sites in the mid 2010s. Although, those weren't old quirky sites. Still nostalgic tho.
probably the only modern social media site that still has the customizability and many perks of the old intenet today is Tumblr. You can completely customize your blog with html, and unlike other more popular social medias, there are no celebrities, no influencers, none of your family/coworkers are there, you can be anonymous, the feed is cronological, and even the few ads you get are fucking bonkers.
yeah but fuck tumblr amirite
if only it didn't suck people might use it
I remember the jurassic park website, where it was just the door and sounds of rainforest ambiance, bjrds, and occasional dino stomps and bellows. When you opened it, the music playes and you had access to behind the scenes readable content and factoids. It was so cool
The time websites actually loaded quickly and everything felt more like a community. Now everything feels the same because I believe designers are following very similar guidelines everywhere.
6:42 This is one of the most out-there observations I've heard in a while 😂 "I'm lubing up the metal right now" Made me giggle
Even though I was born in 2001, I got to see a lot of sites like these since I was into computers at age 4. All my parents had was a PC that could run Windows 95 too.
These old sites are the best places to find info on obscure or old specific stuff. They’re a lot of fun to navigate too
I have been trying to find the Audi website from 2007 era. I loved how car websites actually had cool music playing as you scrolled through their websites. Volvo had it too. I miss those times. They really put lots of creativity in websites back then.
Something a miss about the old UA-cam ui is how you could watch someone’s videos while staying on their channel page. Great for binging
correction: web 2.0 would be early internet forums, basically from when message boards became the standards to when facebook overtook myspace. after that, it's web 3.0 (which is what you're referring to when you call out the plague that is material design)
Actually, we're still in 2.0
@@mr.skeltal8687 no we ain't we're in 4.0 at this point considering NFTs and shit have (d)evolved shit
You're wrong. Web 3.0 is a blockchain-focused decentralized internet. The plagued internet you refer to is most definitely referred to as "Web 2.0".
@@graalcloud web 3.0 being the blockchain was coined by cryptobros, we've been in web 3.0 for years. web 1.0 was non-interactable html pages, with the occasional guestbook and rudimentary messageboard. web 2.0 is where user-side usable websites became the norm (forums, flash portals, etc.). web 3.0 was when social media became the norm, streamlining the web and bringing in it's own design philosophy with it.
the people calling nft and blockchains web 3.0 are goofy, and also cryptobros so they're goofy times 2
@@zodismegalame we taught in our class only Web 1.0 to 3.0, 1.0 for non-interactive websites, 2.0 for interactive websites and user-created contents, and 3.0 for decentralization and crypto stuffs
"You probably don't, because you're fifteen"
Me: *"Emotional damage!"*
We learned how to make a HTML websites in IT class, mine was neon vomit with Ginga Densetsu Weed x Okami opening slapped in the middle, around it were random magic wolves taken from random deviantART pages. And I made quite a lot CSS frames for an old text based MMORPG about dragons.
I just want my fucking blackberry back, playing the three pre-installed mobile games all day, constantly on the look-out for wi-fi spots, not being able to contact anyone on vacations. These were the times.
this is why i'm redesigning my website myself. i'm tired of all these modern websites. with my vo tech dropout level of education in web design, it looks exactly as early web as i want it to be so far
meanwhile even shit like carrds, while highly customizable, aren't quite cutting it
everyone should revert back to neocities. and consider joining mastodon and similar decentralized social media sites. scatter everything.
they are not modern, just contemporary.
link to website?
can you link your website when you're done?
I feel bad for being born in 2007 and basically being in this in-between state when it comes to the internet. Too young to really grow up with the old internet or understand it, but just old enough to remember or be around the old-ish internet long enough before it became mainstream. I remember being 4y/o, my older siblings giggling and shit, bringing some shitty laptop to me and showing me "IT'S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME" and me getting annoyed at it. Those "sonic shorts" parody videos, like the one making fun of the tail's doll and getting scared by it, the Windows93 website where most of the apps don't work anymore (rip trollbox), or just playing with the purple palace (only the cake mini-game lmao). Like I pretty much grew up where everything was transitioning out of the 90s/00s and into the 2010s, very awkward
ouch sorry for being born a bit late ig
@@thegoldenblob69 He is right.
@@KratostheThird i disagree
@@thegoldenblob69 Because a 15 year old like yourself is fully aware of the old internet. One that was almost gone by the time you were born.
the window xp aesthetic will forever be held close to my heart
ultimate childhood nostalgia playing 3d space pinball on it
I miss the old youtube layout, ofc I was only about 4-5 in 2012-2013 but I still remember it like it was yesterday, I remember going on one day and it was all big, on the sides it was no longer slim videos, it was as large as the Home Screen ones, but anyways, yeah, I miss the old youtube.
Ling's Cars, a small car rental firm in England, is very much keeping this tradition alive.
i really just want a mix between the professional user experience of modern websites with the wonderful charm of early internet sites
also, i really want customizability options back. i’m tired of everyone’s page looking the same
There is also a design philosophy known as Frutiger Aero. It has bright glossy colors and is very optimistic.
These new websites look good but it just feels souless most of the times and makes me feel like im using the same site while the old ones were ugly, but they had so more soul and charm, you could feel that the person who made that chat had fun doing that site while the new ones feels like they are generated by a robot or something like that and they are so damn minimalistic like holy crap
then there was the age of flash shortly after, also
with websites with icons morphing into the next page when clicked
or anything u can think of then make out of tweening and AS3, really
i miss those days too, man
great inspiration, thanks for sharing
also your outro music is pure fire
and u put the credits in the vid so I could find it easily
bless you sir
I was a kid when websites looked like this, and I did not even know how to read and write, but I used to click on every link I saw. I had a lot of fun just clicking and staring at different websites.
The scroll block UI was the worst "development" of the third millennium