I would still be using 7 if ransomware wasn’t a thing.

I went back to Mint instead.

You pay how much to be told no?

Windows 9x was low-bullshit.

NT and 2000 were corporate enough to be no-nonsense. They belonged to the administrator, but the administrator can be you.

ME was a mistake.

XP was not yet online enough to be properly skeezy.

But from Vista onward, yeah, it’s been an escalating shit-show that’s difficult to miss.

“How do people manage to play and chat online with random people?”

Fuck every form of this. Website: you deliver the document, and I decide if it works.

InfoWarriorRides / SchizophreniaRides, for pictures of cars with batshit crazy messages on them.

100YearsAgo could be mirrored here via bot and not miss much.

Other subs were great for their discussion more than than linked content - Civvie11, GunnerkriggCourt, DresdenCodak, QContent. Not so much DumbingOfAge because it devolved into a hatedom sub. I guess most of that should be lumped into comic and game-video communities. I could “be the change” and start posting speedruns willy-nilly.

LinkIsCute is here but pretty dead.

Polandball, holy shit!

This is a good point. Reddit originally had no communities. Then there were maybe a dozen, all picked by the admins… and already /r/Atheism was one of them, because that’s how the userbase went. People who don’t understand why such a community was necessary do not remember living through 90s / 00s American culture.

Mt. St. Krakatuvius is not having a good day.

Wow, does that site design suck.

How hard is it to deliver ten JPGs?

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark sure the fuck isn’t a cuddly-looking bait-and-switch, but it is plainly aimed at a younger audience. Basically a collection of standard campfire stories and spooky e-mail forwards… with nightmare-fuel watercolor illustrations.

Bridge To Terabithia goes a step further.

Honorable mention to all Newbery Medal winners, AKA the Dead Dog Award.

Guru Meditation red.

Alternately: yellow-and-black ASCII approximating Evangelion’s ALART.

“AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

Google already was?

I’ve been here the entire time and I have never been thrilled.

See Flash websites ripping each other off for five years on either side of Youtube’s introduction.

See Bittorrent moving more video than Netflix until like 2012.

See twenty years of web-based P2P experiments. Weirdos with fat hard drives (hi) will always be happy to seed.

Or - crazy thought - services could cost money. It would not take much. Youtube’s not getting ten bucks each time you watch a video. Bandwidth and storage keep getting cheaper. Nor are they paying for content, unlike Netflix and so on, and those fuckers are also considering ads.

It was called Firebird in late 2003, and earlier that year it was called Mozilla.

Advertising is poison.

We could just ban it.

Only fashion victims thought that.

Companies happily obliged them, bumping the price of phones that break much more easily.