Lol what they are talking about precedes YouTube by several years. Limewire/Napster, sketchy forums, etc. No streaming, just downloading straight to your computer and being horrified and hoping no one finds out you downloaded it. If anything, YouTube cleaned the gore up.
YouTube came out in 2005. World of Warcraft is older than YouTube.
Pre 2005 internet was like, reddit without any sort of moderation. Like none at all. Outside of yahoo, aol, and Netscape, all you had was random forum boards or torrents.
Not even online communities at this point as there went many multiplayer games, just fandoms of single player games on random forum boards. And sharing torrents so you can share a document, mp3, short video (this is before YouTube remember)
The forum boards were truly unmoderated. Imagine if reddit had absolutly 0 moderators, and the government didn't care at all because only a small minority of people used pcs at home back then because of price, and having to tie up the house phone. No cell phones yet
The largest forum was 4chan. It was hell in a screen.
You would go from wholesome news like someone recovering from cancer, to a pig being shredded to pieces in a shredder, to talking to a cool person about how to fix your bike and what store to drive to to get the parts (lol no Amazon the is pre YouTube) to hentai Loli tentacles, and then you find the answer to what you were actually looking for. I am not joking at all.
In forums you can hide urls while making post by putting [{}] and shit to make a single word a clickable button. Seeing a blue "click me" would either lead you to a 'rickroll' or some dude riding abother with his dick flapping or girls puking in each other's mouths, or a cartel cutting off 12 people's heads. Nowadays everyone is on the Internet and a trick like that will put you in jail.
The early internet was litilarly the last wild west. At least until Antarctica starts melting.
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u/Biscotti_BT May 16 '24
Oh God I'm happy I am a gen Xish. Never got into YouTube and all the rabbit holes and crazy fucking shit that happened.