Viral Stuff Before Reddit, FB etc

daRobot

Just 'membering the old days of the Intewebs, pre facebook, reddit etc, and trying to think of where all the viral stuff that you'd get forwarded in emails etc was hosted?

4chan is about as far as I can think back, yet that's only started in 2003.

Anyone remember the old sites that went the way of myspace and became extinct/ irrelevant?

Omackeral

I reMembR all Da puRRRRe StunNahs on Bebo xoxoxo PUt meee in Ur toP 16 bbz xoxoxoxoxo

irlrobins

b3ta.com

me_irl

Dancing Baby!

Most of it was probably hosted on GeoCities.

One eyed Jack

Usenet groups?

Boom_Bap

Chat rooms where all the rage. mIRC and CollegeChat were good fun.

ectoraige

Hamsterdance

The original had music too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW9yZhU9ytk

ectoraige

Oh, and memepool.com was a great time waster.

ohnonotgmail

Boom_Bap wrote: »

Chat rooms where all the rage. mIRC and CollegeChat were good fun.

The good ol' days of A/S/L.

biko

HIV was really viral back before the internets

Outlaw Pete

I remember first hearing about the Tommy Lee & Pamela Anderson's honeymoon video in a chat room.

It was the porn star Asia Carrera's chat room... called Asia Chat (here's what it looked like). Was in a somewhat serious accident a couple of years later and Asia sent me autographed photo of herself topless. True story.

whiskeyman

The funnies in Ireland's Own were all the rage.
Cousins from down the shticks would post them up to us jackeens...

o1s1n

First time I ever heard the phrase if I remember correctly was around when the first Blair Witch Project film was released.

Noveight

Wasting hours playing flash games on TeaGames. Gr8 banter.

suicide_circus

Badger badger badger badger Badger badger badger badger Badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom!

bear1

I remember rotten.com - had fcuking nightmares for days after seeing that for the first time.
This would have been around 01/02 I think.
I remember using bearshare as well, would download songs and videos from it, it would take an age though - think a song took the guts of a few hours and a movie would be well into 3 days.
Parents weren't happy with the phone bill..

sureitsgrand

Email forwards.

cml387

I remember when email was being rolled out to more of our colleagues who were then let loose on the interweb.

It wasn't long before we'd get an email warning us about a new virus that will wipe your hard drive, there's no defence and that it was just announced by Microsoft this morning.
Or the "joke" about the British/American/ Russian navy and the lighthouse. Or the technical faults submitted by pilots and the witty reply by the mechanics.

ohnonotgmail

The first email virus is remember is ILOVEU in 1999. The number of people who did a Reply All on that and spread it further was comical.

D0NNELLY

Buzzchat.com

Billy86

and of course, ring ring ring ring ring ring ring... banana phone!

Billy86

bear1 wrote: »

I remember rotten.com - had fcuking nightmares for days after seeing that for the first time.
This would have been around 01/02 I think.
I remember using bearshare as well, would download songs and videos from it, it would take an age though - think a song took the guts of a few hours and a movie would be well into 3 days.
Parents weren't happy with the phone bill..

I remember the first phone bill we got after the internet was put in back in 1999 was something like £300... think it was 6 months later before I had worked it off.

I also remember being delighted at how fast a song was downloading on Napster when it managed get to *drum-roll*... 5 kbps!!

loyatemu

anything is still possible

bear1

Billy86 wrote: »

I remember the first phone bill we got after the internet was put in back in 1999 was something like £300... think it was 6 months later before I had worked it off.

I also remember being delighted at how fast a song was downloading on Napster when it managed get to *drum-roll*... 5 kbps!!

Ahhh napster! I remember the controversy when it was shut down.

For Forks Sake

suicide_circus wrote: »

Badger badger badger badger Badger badger badger badger Badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom!

And for our younger viewers who have no clue what you're on about...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzagBTcYsYQ

me_irl

You're the man now dog!

Mrs OBumble

And before the interwebs, we used to get funny stuff off the fax machine

DanielODonnell

Limewire in early 2000s, you used to download a clip of a football goal and it ended up being a porn clip.

Outlaw Pete

Or more frustratingly... sometimes vice versa :P

Badly Drunk Boy

When I started in university in 1991, I got my first ever e-mail account (well, two of them) and our version of the Internet was the newsgroups. Among my favourites were stuff like:
rec.music.industrial
rec.sport.soccer
alt.music.nick-cave
alt.tv.twin-peaks

You'd get different newsgroups with lyrics of all the songs of your favourite bands, film scripts, football statistics, whatever. I don't know who originally compiled them but they'd always welcome suggestions for improvements/additions.

As far as I can remember, there was very little nastiness.

Outlaw Pete

Badly Drunk Boy wrote: »

As far as I can remember, there was very little nastiness.

Yeah. The most heated thing I ever seen back in the IRC days was when someone posted a funny anecdote and another user, who meant to reply with 'LMAO', typed 'LAMO' instead. Convinced was the other user that what they had just said had been labelled 'lame'... mayhem broke out over 56k dial up.