>>666
perhaps it was a good thing in the end but i pretty much had a bad time. a family member had gotten addicted to the internet and exposure to certian things led me to watch porn and i was the unlucky retard who got caught. i remember getting promised for days on end that when i got older i would be allowed to take my computer to my room and that was swept away forever. meanwhile the aforementioned family member got away with it and even got a phone amd involved in several internet communities. i was pretty much isolated from the internet so i guess i didn't know things and people would rib me for it or just pretend i didn't exist so i was kind of down emotionally. then again i guess i dodged a bullet by not becoming a degenerate and focusing on my studies. around like 2013 or so is when i got a phone for the first time and thus more internet exposure and i pretty much watched a fuck ton of cat videos, wikipedia articles, read shitty webcomics and whatever youtube videos. i guess i had a mediocre time but i did learn a few things.

mediocre is an interesting way of putting it. i mostly think of the internet as traumatizing, and i had the opposite experience growing up. my parents didn't really care about monitoring or controlling my internet usage.

>>666
Played some flash games as a kid. Got unrestricted access at 13 and got into programming. At 15 I stopped using the internet to learn and started mindlessly watching youtube. At 17 I discovered 4chan (and soon after 22chan), and I admired it for the anonymity, creativity and pursuit of the extreme in all things. A few years later I understood that the website was worthless and that any second spent there was wasted. I couldn't leave.

A sampler of my experience:
>Robotic emergence: my favorite flash game
https://www.kongregate.com/games/robscherer123/robotic-emergence
>How to become a hacker: an article about the values and skills of "hackers", not the ones stealing credit card information, but the people who enjoy solving difficult programming problems:
https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
>E;R - Star Wars: The Farce Engorges
>An entertaining review of the first star wars sequel by an edgelord
https://youtu.be/sg29Sa6QFes [Play]
>Bill Wurtz - La de da de da de da de day oh
>Unique musician and video artist
https://youtu.be/V0HCZ4YGqbw [Play]
>A collection of fun /mu/ threads, including one dedicated to editing album covers to make them about ordering pizza
https://desuarchive.org/mu/thread/86651864
>world's end girlfriend - 100 Years of Choke
>the type of music that I could only find on 4chan
https://youtu.be/IEFsBYlXI3A [Play]

>>670
(Ruffle seems to struggle with the game, you should download the flash file and use the projector as opposed to playing on the site)

>>666
when I was a kid the internet to me was just whatever flash browser game I was playing at the time and nothing more.
When I was a teen the internet was something mysterious and magical. Something to be explored with many cool sekrit websites with sekrit cool clubs to discover.
Now as a young adult just like you OP the internet feels largely dead to me. The novelty and magic is gone knowing that most of the internet is just meaningless bot traffic, retards flinging shit at eachother in meaningless arguments always trying to have the last 'gotcha' reply or online influencers/ecelebs trying to sell you some trash or waste your time with meaningless often faked 'internet drama' or pointless shit like 10 minute videos where they just recite some twitter screencap or stupid 8hour long 'analysis' videos where they just repeat the plot of <insert media> without adding any meaningful commentary. It feels like there's barely anyone genuine left. People figured out that you can make easy money online and since than grifters have taken over

>>672
I can relate to this post. Grifters are probably the most obvious sign the internet isn't what it used to be. You know grifting is bad when e-begging is no longer shamed. I can understand giving creative people money, but there should be humility, not greed. Greed ruins so many things.

>>673
It seems that things always go bad once money gets involved. I guess it was inevitable that things would end up like this

>>672
>novelty and magic is gone
exactly. there's this essence of authenticity that is harder to find nowadays. you look at old forums and people had more character, more interesting and novel things to say, and were less jaded. online propaganda and bot spam is demoralizing and it's hard for authenticity to get the traction it needs to sustain itself.

it feels like people are more pressured to fit in and demonstrating creativity is punished or not rewarded as much as it should be. no one was as judgemental back then as they are now on the modern internet, at least based on what i observe.

>>675
I get that being a wage slave sucks but the internet needs to be selective of who they reward with internet fame. The way total hacks are reward for mediocrity really shows me how normalfags outnumber non normalfags.

Still gotta say that shit was bonkers, there used to be things up on the internet that was so batshit, real dark underbelly of the world type of stuff like webforums for cannibals out in the open, podcasts from 2010 that was unfiltered with the most batshit insane discussions. Webcomics too, most of them shit but honestly it's part of the experience. I remember reading a (now gone) webcomic of a young artist and it was a diary of damn near hourly stuff of him doing whatever and it was fucking crazy because it was totally uncencored like him recounting information like him stumbling into his dads computer and finding pedo shit and like way later the guy also recounted how he cheated on his girlfrend and there was a flamewar after his girlfriend discovered his webcomic diary and its like a peek into another person's private life, was it worth reading a persons literally daily life that was like 10 years long? maybe not but it was weirdly addicting.

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Everyone has a Patreon now. Some guy does a review of a minecraft mod where he does no prior research and just kinda fucks around for maybe 30 seconds missing most of the major features? Patreon. Shitty meme where audio from some movie or show is played over JPEGs of popular characters from google images? Patreon. Subpar voice acting over someone else's comic or even a motherfucking greentext!? Patreon. Don't know when I became a hater but this pisses me off maybe even more than TikTok or Instagram watermarks.
Everything has a discord server. Want to use some utility or mod? Having trouble finding documentation for something? Fuck having it on Github, gotta join the Discord server. Then you have to wait 15 minutes to prove you're not a bot and agree to the retarded rules of this server of retards that you're never going to talk to like your presence is a liability. Feels like going through airplane security. Guess what retard idiot baka, that liability wouldn't exist if you just put your shit on github or something. Offering tech support/bug reports through discord is one thing but access to the project should never be locked behind a discord invite. It isn't just annoying, there's going to be a lot of lost media because of this trend.
Bullshit censors like "unal*ved." It's done for the sake of dodging bans or demonetization but these idiots, these imbeciles can't seem to understand how dangerous letting these hypercentralized corpos control language is. In the end it stifles the voices of the oppressed. Need to share a story about some injustice? Sorry you have to talk like a care bear. Good luck maintaining your dignity when you have to play linguistic twister to discuss issues involving violence or abuse. Child corn. PDF file. It just keeps getting worse.

>>928
I hate it where instead of youtubers making content for themselves or other youtubers or people in the comment section the focus is on whatever fucking discord server they made and which they shill in their own videos and the you can tell the quality drop super fucking low when they adopt discord.

>>928
I hate when the YouTuber has a Patreon, and they also had paid ad reads in the same video. The quality of the videos from these YouTube usual is comparable to mediocre. It is also obvious a lot of YouTubers out there are just trying to make money first and not make good qualities.

>>930
Oh no don't remind me of the unskippable ads they added inside of the video specifically so the addblocker won't block it

>>931
It is one of the most annoying problems on the internet. The blatant grifting and content farming these youtubers do. The youtuber pads out videos a lot of time to begin with and on top it they spend a minute promoting garbage. It is pure pain.

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>>932
>>931
I find it kind of absurd when the "spend a minute promoting garbage" part for example happens while you're watching a serious documentary about human rights violations in China and the host shifts gears to promote NordVPN, a fully automatic wallet, sketchy cryptos or mobile games, right after he shows footage of a truck crushing school children, but honestly before we get further into that I just wanted to tell you about this amazing project I recently found out about, an undervalued asset called the 22chan Token! Understand that this isn't financial advice but I truly believe this token has a lot of potential. With a team made up of fully anonymous CATs, a revolutionary roadmap that promises catnapping where you let your tokens sleep to earn more, fish farming because obviously cats need a steady supply of fish, and even a potential metaverse cat café where you can pet NFT kittens-LISTEN!!! this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get in early before the fat cats start accumulating. The best part is that this 22chan token isn't just another meme coin but it's backed by real utility that is set to disrupt the entire Web3 landscape by introducing a new paradigm of decentralized feline content creation. Whether you're a indie gator artist, a water-melon farmer in the digital economy or just a nigga who loves trading cat-themed JPEGs this project is tailor-made for nyuu! Some say it could even rival BTC in the coming years!

>>933
https://youtu.be/OJDmhLlvQNU [Play]

>>933
i will physically cut off both of my legs and sell them on the black market for 22chan token