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Given the Team Sneed logo being a fat orange pepe clone in a red trucker hat and the existence of previous games by the same person with names like “Cuck Simulator”, it definitely seems like the intent is racist.

On a side note, it’s crazy that the same people who love to shout about there only being two genders will also classify men into 100 distinct categories related to gender expression and sexuality. It’s almost like they can’t count.

Same. It’s a bit silly.

So is the ISP you’re using a scam? Your electric company? Your own job? The place where you get your food? Your doctor is a scammer? The people who maintain the roads?

How am I meant to take an article that opens by claiming the entire economy is based on scams and gambling seriously?

Java applets were definitely in heavy use in webpages. They just kind of sucked. It was absolutely prolific, though.

And don’t forget Quicktime!

There was also a period from like the 00s through the mid 10s where search was much better than it is today. The AI generated slop in results that we see now just wasn’t a thing at all.

Be a decent person!

It was neat. There were a lot of new sort of experimental things going on in the 90s and most of them weren’t huge. There were a lot of websites that were independent or owned by small companies that featured their own little communities with chat rooms and forums. Two of my early favorites were Palace and Cybertown/Colony City.

Palace was this 2d avatar chat with different rooms you could hang out in. Each room would be a single screen and people would make an avatar from a 3x3 grid of images called props linked together. You could wear 9 props at a time, and could edit them with this really janky and super basic editor that was part of the program. You could either get props from other people or you could make your own by importing images, but there was this weird 255 color palette so you’d end up with all these greys and pinks for any pixels with incompatible colors that you’d need to fix or your avatar would look bad. There were also scripts in this language called iptscrae, which had backward notation. So like, rather than 5 + 5, you’d do “5” “5” +.

There were a bunch of different servers and you could run your own, though the official South Park server was the biggest. You’d have all these different styles of avatars that became popular and people would edit them to add variety and customize them. The rooms themselves were basically just a bunch of people hanging around, placing their avatars where they want on a background and chatting. When you typed something there would be a speech bubble that would pop up over your avatar like a comic. The scripts made it great for roleplay, because you could make die rolling scripts with little custom messages. I ended up getting really into White Wolf, playing on some small personal servers with friends.

Cybertown or Colony City was a 3d VRML (virtual reality modelling language) chat. Basically you’d have these sometimes reasonably large but very basic 3d spaces you could hang out in with other people with a chat client strapped to the bottom of the page. You could use one of the standard avatars provided by the site, or you could use a custom avatar that you modeled or got from someone else. It was, again, largely just people hanging out. There were a bunch of different areas that were just linked 3d instances, and you could get your own room.

These were all before anything like MMOs or much in the way of online multiplayer that’d come a few years later, so they were some of the first places you could hang out in an actual visually represented virtual space with other people. It was neat.

One of my favorite places to hang out, though, was just a simple little D&D java chat called Kenderchat. It was set in Dragonlance and consisted of 4 rooms: a tavern, the outside of the tavern, an arena, and a cave system. It was just text D&D roleplay, and it was awesome. I spent a huge amount of my time in high school just playing different characters here, and as a medium it honestly couldn’t have been simpler.

Most chats on the internet in the early days were more like Kenderchat than they were like the Palace. Even Cybertown also had some just regular text chats. Socializing on the internet was largely between these and the slightly more corporatized but still very loosely controlled chat clients like ICQ, AIM, and YIM. ICQ even had a rudimentary voice chat client, though it wasn’t super reliable and the audio quality wasn’t great. Of course there was also IRC, which was a little more complex but also completely independent. Anyone could and still can run their own IRCD.

The funny thing is, AOL was trying to do something like modern social media, but it was largely seen as sort of the kiddie pool of the internet. It was contained, centrally controlled, and only available to AOL subscribers.

There were also a lot of independent websites where people would just post their thoughts, their art, or goofy things they came across. I remember spending a lot of time reading Hostess comics on Seanbaby’s website.

Things got a little more sophisticated in the early 00s, and you had sites like Newgrounds becoming super popular and the rise of online gaming and voice chat clients like Teamspeak. We also had shoutcast, so you could put out your own radio station that people could listen to using Winamp. All of this stuff was based on privately hosted servers that anyone could put up. There were still a lot of independent websites, chats, and forums.

The thing is, this stuff didn’t like go away exactly. There are still loads of IRC chats out there, though most of them aren’t as busy as they might once have been. There are still independent websites and weird quirky little communities with an independent vibe, you just have to find them. That’s sort of always been the case. The difference now is that most people are on the modern equivalent of a half dozen or so AOLs and aren’t really sure how to go beyond that.

Today the thing I see as the closest equivalent to these communities tend to be things like discord servers and independent game servers, though the fediverse is also pretty close. The difference with the fediverse is that they’re networked together, so it does sort of feel like a big social media network, and discord has kind of a similar vibe. There are absolutely still smaller communities out there, though, and if you go looking I’m sure you can find some independent communities centered around your interests.

I will say, roleplaying communities seem to me to do a better job of connecting people these days than other general interest-based communities. Maybe that’s just down to me and my interests, but they are by nature focused on community and connections between people. No big company cares enough about such a niche audience to really try to capitalize on them, and they seem to be a good way of making lasting and genuine connections.

Basically, if you want to get a feel for the old independent internet, stop using big sites like Facebook and X, and maybe even focus a little less of your time on networked fediverse sites. Find forums with communities that speak to you, or some smallish discord servers, and dig in. Get to know the people so they aren’t just names next to posts. If you find a community where everybody knows each other, you’ll have a taste for how things used to be. You won’t really find a single community with millions of people that feels like that, because the smaller size is what makes it feel more intimate in the first place.

He mentions in an interview that he was frustrated to not have been offered to take part in it.

Oh wow, I didn’t realize MTV kept him out of it. That’s kind of brazen to make a spin-off with a character and not let the creator be involved. Good show, though.

Honestly Mike Judge’s worst show. Watch Daria. Also Common Side Effects. King of the Hill isn’t bad either.

Would be kinda funny if Digg consumed reddit’s userbase after so many people having come from there in the early days.

A discord alternative with functional voice chat and video streaming would be nice, but it’s sort of an AIM in the 90s situation. If the people you want to talk to are using the platform as their primary means of communication, it’s still kind of necessary. An alternative wouldn’t just have to be close to discord, it would have to actually be better so people use it.

Where’s the “play weird football” or “make friends with a satellite” option? 🛰️

Fines in general for large companies need to be adjusted to their profits rather than just being unrelated big looking numbers. A $1 million fine looks like a lot, but if the company made even $3 million from the behavior that landed them the fine, they’re still incentivized to play dirty. If the fine if is a tiny fraction of the profits, as they so often seem to be, it’s even less effective.

Want an effective fine? Figure out how much being crooked made them and charge them double. Create an actual incentive for businesses to be fair in their practices. They’re definitely not going to do it out of the kindness of their hearts.

Better yet, start going after C-levels if the behavior is egregious enough.