Did anybody else play Kids Next Door Fusion Fall?
I’m sympathetic to the “Why does everything have to require a fucking login?”
But come on. So many of those games were just inferior reskins of classics. If you want to play Pac-Man, then play Pac-Man. You don’t need to go to Lays.com and play Cheeto Crunchers, where a giant Chester Cheetah floating head chases snack foods through a maze.
I doubt this will be the catalyst for social change, but I agree. The idea that society owes nothing to the average person, but ownership class members are entitled to public resources, is exactly what will cause heads to roll, if we get to that point. This is a silly little microcosm of that situation, and I do miss those days.
For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.
Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.
So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.
I loved their Dexter’s lab Flash game back in the days. CN and Nick lost their charm
The Lego website had a huge collection of games.
You can still find a lot of their games on the various flash game collection websites. I lived on Lego and Cartoon Network games.
I’ll forever miss playing that Galidor Quest one though. Haven’t found a place to replay that, think someone said it needed backend stuff that wasn’t ever made public. 😭
I liked running around the movie studio just exploring.
You can still do that on newgrounds.com
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Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There’s no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that’s really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers
Edit for clarity: I didn’t mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that’s not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them
what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely.
Or less safely. You have to try a lot harder to see someone crush a glass jar in their anus nowadays.
what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely
Uhh… my largest grievance with how the Internet has been designed is that it was never safe for children to be on it, yet children were thrust onto it en-mass long before adults even really understood what it was. And still people are ignoring the massive problems it continues to cause, specifically for the healthy development of children, as society is circling the drain.
You’re right, the word safe there was a poor choice lol. But I still do think the internet was at least better for children when there were designated sites/communities for them with appropriate moderation, instead of children being on social media. Though of course the ideal would be for them to be playing outside but that’s a whole different discussion
I believe the problem with children-oriented sites and communities were that the spaces provided a false sense of security for children and parents which led to at least the social spaces being prime targets for predators.
While these communities would have strict moderation as well, I think there were some cases where some community moderators were abusing their position which can happen in any social spaces, but children’s spaces are held to a much higher level of scrutiny for obvious reasons.
Then there’s the issue of scaling and regulations. As Internet usage continued to explode, it would’ve become much harder to scale up the amount of mods needed, which becomes much more expensive when it’s a full time job. Then I believe a good number of large/influential countries also moved in on regulating how companies maintain data for child accounts and I think restricting targeted advertising for children specifically, which would have made it much harder for companies to make money while also dealing with increasing expenses in moderation and hosting upkeep.
It doesnt explain everything completely, but I think that’s why these places disappeared
I think a more accurate statement is that the internet was never safe for children, but online content was never monetized and targeted to various audiences for nefarious purposes the way that it is now (including towards children).
I would also make a tangential argument that interacting with the internet used to foster a degree of technical ability, critical thinking, and reading comprehension that just isn’t necessary when “going online” can just mean downloading an app and mindlessly scrolling through an endless short-form video feed. On a macro level, today’s internet is dumbing kids down, while yesterday’s internet required (or at least encouraged) some understanding of how systems and technologies work.
While it frustrated me as a kid, I think Poptropica’s method of players speaking to each other through prewritten dialog options was the safest option to keep things from getting weird or contact continuing on another platform where the site creators can’t keep kids safe anymore.
Nice shitpost
yeah naw, I was flirting with pedophiles in chat rooms at like 12, it absolutely was not a safe space. Maybe not as harmful of a space, but the internet has always been poison to children. It’s why parental supervision is so important.
Is it a sarcastic post? Internet was not safer before, it’s just much more accessible to kids nowadays, the good and the bad, thanks to wireless connections, small portable computers and easy UIs.
Not sarcasm just a poor choice of words haha. You’re right in that the internet wasn’t safer, what I was trying to get across was that at least when there were sites for children they had a curated space where they wouldn’t be exposed to anything inappropriate, whereas now they’re on sites that don’t cater to children (and nor should they!) where they’re exposed to lots of things they shouldn’t be exposed to
Oh, you sweet, sweet child.
I’m just going to say I’m very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.
Idk man I discovered some pretty entertaining flash games, and never got into IRC. But them AOL public chat rooms, holy fucking shit how did we not all disappear
Ah, not being American AOL wasn’t much of a thing, on account of the A part. Same principle, though.
Homie, the porn was right next to the flash games on Kongregate.
Itch.io game devs unite! There’s still hope. I miss Ebaumsworld, New grounds and Miniclip too but I think there a small part of the Internet that still has this charm.
Here’s my game dev contribution:
And on Nintendo’s website, there was an elevator sidebar that’d take you to different levels, each one having some other function like upcoming releases, tips, and stuff.
One was labeled “secret” or something, and opened on a black screen. You’d think it was a broken page. But if you moved your cursor around, you’d find a hidden link that’d take you to their secret page. I can’t remember what was there, but I sure remember feeling like an elite hacker at 10 years old when I did it!
We used to get video games in the captain crunch box or in exchange for tokens on the crunch boxes or something to that effect… anyway that was essentially just a flash game but equally if not more interested. Got a lot of mileage out of that crunchwrare game in the 90s
I miss the era where most pages didn’t have ads.
I was browsing a manufacturers product website the other day, for a billion dollar company that makes industrial products.
Every page had fucking pop Up ads. Wtf!
When was that? I’ve been using the web for as long as it has been publicly available (1993), and I remember ads were always a thing. Hell, it used to be a lot worse.
In the 90s there were endless popup ads that would block the entire page, and used javascript exploits to literally move around the screen to avoid your mouse, so that you couldn’t hit the close button. Not even killing the process worked cause they would just come right back the moment you closed them.
And don’t forget about those sneaky pop-under ads that you wouldn’t even notice until you were about to close your browser for the day. It’s the reason why I was an early adopter of the original AdBlock when it first launched back in 2002 (I use Ublock Orgin and NextDNS these days.)
Ads aren’t nearly as obnoxiously today as they were back then. At least the close button works. And they don’t open in a new window anymore cause pop-up blockers are included in every browser now and have been for about 2 decades. And thankfully browsers have also disabled the ability for javascript to control window position and size.
What were the ad blocking methods available? I didn’t really use the Internet until early 2000s and I can’t remember when I started using ad blocking extensions.
In the 90s? There weren’t any. You just had to put up with it.
Wikipedia says the first Adblocker was released in 1996, but I never heard of it, nor did I know of anyone who was blocking ads back then. I didn’t hear people discussing Adblockers until the mid-to-late 2000s, when AdBlock Plus first became popular.
I used ABP for many years until I learned that they sold out to the ad companies, and thus switched to Ublock Origin sometime in the 2010s. Not to mention that I got tired of having to manually update my ad filters. UBO made adblocking simple with its auto updater.
Yeah I meant the 90s Thanks, your timeline makes sense to me. I wonder if that ad blocker from 96 even did anything. I know they sold software that “doubled your ram” and other impossible things.
I’ve been using the web for as long as it has been publicly available (1993), and I remember ads were always a thing. Hell, it used to be a lot worse.
I too started using the web back in summer of 93 NCSA What’s New era. At that time, the idea was that if a company just put a web page up that was their ad, but the most exciting parts were people just putting up information for free. Link ads and banner ads started in 1994 but they weren’t too bad. Pop-up ads started in 1997. They were pretty bad, but most browsers got popup blockers pretty quickly (especially Netscape Navigator iirc.) Adblock 0.1 was written in 2002 and the cat-and-mouse started. But generally the web was a great place to get information. Then the social media companies came forth with false gifts, speaking lies.
Most of those were actually malware that I stalled in your computer and infected the browser, not an actual ads.
Ads back then were mostly static banner ads that lived at the bottom of a website. They started getting worse in the early 2000s.
Like 1986?
Because in the 90s population ads were REALLY bad. You’d open a page and 30 new windows would open up with ads, and closing each one caused 3 more to open, and you eventually just had to turn off the fucking computer.
And this was on dial-up, so they also destroyed your bandwidth.
Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.
I would argue today’s internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there’s some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it…this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.
It used to be a whole weird wide world. Then the corpos got a hold of it, and now it’s 5 giant spyware websites filled with screenshots of the other 4. Say what you will about the old web (NO HTTPS!) but at least it was human.
I grew up in the wild west of the internet and I do miss it. Things were so much more interesting, but that was probably becuase I was a kid and the internet was new, so having all this content was not usual.
People were happier. There was still hope back then.
The old internet was like the wild west. Who’d have thought it would meet a similar fate to it too?
We referred to it as the wild west even back then, and we knew eventually civilization would catch up.
