I miss forums

Back in the day when we ran random exes, good times
- Remembering the good old days of eSheep.exe and my dad freaking out that "It's a virus!" because he saw "a black sheep come running up to the other one and hit it! It started bleeding!"
  Dad, that's a ram... The other sheep's not bleeding. It's blushing!
  
  Embarrassingly recently a load of people were i worked (including me) downloaded from some sketchy website and installed a snow effect and christmas tree generator on our work PCs just added christmassy overlay over what you're doing.
  I shudder to think of it now
  
  That's an adorable story.
- I remember I used to be subscribed to a mailing list for a programming language. A friend of the lead developer set the mailing list up for them at his university, and then went off and did his own thing. It was completely unmoderated. Some kid sent a "neat little proggy" his friend Dieter wrote. If the extent of my Internet usage wasn't limited to free email through Juno, my entire hard drive probably would have gotten deleted that day lol
- There used to be this thing going around on pre-smartphone phones (via Bluetooth, I assume) that showed a pocket watch closing and when it was fully closed, the phone shut down. We all thought it was hilarious to send it to as many people as possible and watch them panic. I don't even know what format it was to look like a normal gif or video and do that. I certainly didn't even care back then.
  
  My guess is it was an actual gif that exploited some flaw in how the OS handled gifs and thus was able to execute code.
  
  Or Bloover(?) The Bluetooth hacking app that could copy someone's texts and call log
- Back in the day it was innocent fun. I miss those days.

Our parents, 10 years ago "Don't trust anything you read online!"
Parents, today: "I do my own research online!"
- We were not prepared, as a species, for a device that let us come up with any opinion at all and find validation for it.
  It used to be that when you had an opinion that was wrong, you’d say it out loud a number of times, and you’d notice that everyone around you would call you an imbecile and ridicule you. It would make you reassess yourself and grow as a person.
  Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
  That was an integral part of growing up and maturing. We don’t have a solution for it.
  
  That's why rather than trying to change people's mind on the internet, I've resorted to just ridiculing them instead.
  
  It's not that they aren't challenged for any given opinion, If you go into the wrong place you still get lambasted but then you'll just say "oh that's because I put an insert group here idea in an insert opposing group forum and thats why I got downvoted. The problem is how easily you can put yourself in a bubble online, compared to real life where unless you work/shop/live in the same community of like-minded people you'll be forced to eventually come to grips with the fact that you're one of many POV's.
  It's hard to tell how popular or unpopular your opinion is in terms of the average person, now. Since it's all just chatrooms online with vague numbers of subscribers, etc.
  
  This exactly. I think theres a saying that goes “our technology far outstrips our actual intelligence”. Surprisingly smart phones & arguably the internet as well are both technologies that we are unable to manage responsibly as a species. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug
  Back in the 90’s & early 00’s, if you were running around ranting about Jewish space lasers or kids being dissected in the basement of your local Pizza Hut, you’d be shunned, ridiculed and likely catch a visit from your local police department haha
  
  Of course, sometimes those ideas being ridiculed were "I don't think our king, who claims Primae Noctis and whips anyone who looks at him, was actually chosen by God to rule. Gramp said he remembers when the king murdered the old king and skull-fucked him. Maybe we're just victims of an inherently violent system?"
  
  I see the Internet getting blamed for this shit and i want to offer a counter-opinion: the tech is different but the problems we have now are the same as we've had before: deregulation and corruption.
  The Internet is incredible. Even good ol' r was just as great a tool for learning about other perspectives as it could be an echo chamber. I learned so much about other people just by joining their /r/ and lurking, because I'm the type of person who's interested in people. The Internet gave me the power to do what i do normally with people but on a larger scale. Perhaps the best critisism of the Internet is also it's greatest strength, to give more people more range to do what they were doing anyway, for good or ill.
  I believe though that when we criticize the Internets current state we are looking at a symptom, not a cause. I believe what we're looking at is actually the fallout from the media deregulation and consolidation following the telecommunications act of 1996.
  Ever since that time the people have increasingly been getting their "news" first in the form of ~~propaganda~~ opinion pieces, otherwise known as otherwise known as VNRs. These press releases, written by increasingly larger, increasingly right-wing corps are designed to sway public opinion rather than inform, and they are very successful at their craft.
  The underlying problem in my opinion is that people are exposed to these lies and vitriolic ideas first from these sources. Combine this with a dearth of credible news sources so even one with the critical thinking skills of sherlock would have a hard time finding objective truth?
  Well here we are, flailing about in the dark. Some people, when searching for answers, find themselves in echo chambers filled with other people who came to the same conclusion. I don't blame them. When there is no objective truth, where do you find yours?
  
  Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
  I agree with everything you said except for this. Opinions are never wrong since they're subjective, they're just fucking stupid.
- Ironically, that mindset predates the internet.
  "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
  Isaac Asimov
  He died in 1992.
  
  One year after the World Wide Web was made public. Coincidence?

I remember downloading what I thought was a no-CD crack for some game from Kazaa.
It was an app that locked my screen, opened a window, and systematically deleted every folder in my main C: drive before crashing. Then the screen went black and a message popped up that said "Thank god it's only a game."
The exe was an ad for some indie Doomclone FPS game where the levels were your computer's file structure and the walls of the rooms would be decorated with the images stored in your folders. I shut down my machine after that. I was shaking for the next hour.
If anyone knows the game, I'd love to learn what it was all about.
- Here's a video of that .exe running:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIgpWGVvfjA&t=203
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=iIgpWGVvfjA&
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Fuck. I've been looking for that for so long. Had the same experience. It fucked me up.
- The game it was advertising is called "Virus: The Game" pretty sure danooct1 made a video on the advert & game.
- I think that was called "We're All Going to the World's Fair" or something.
  
  That's the name of a recent, unrelated horror movie, not the game in question.
  It was a pretty good movie, if you're into horror.
- I vaguely remember seeing a news article about something like that. I think it was a game where killing enemies caused files to be deleted from your computer. It was portrayed as some kind of artistic statement about digital possessions or something.
  Someone in the forum where it was being discussed sarcastically said they developed a live action version called "playing baseball inside."
  
  It was a space invaders clone with files being the aliens?
- The game's called "Virus The Game", if I'm not mistaken
  
  Bingo! Thanks!
- Did it actually delete everything
  
  No. It was only a game.
- That sounds awesome
- This reminds me of Operation: Inner Space

Internet absolutely was better 15 years ago. Everything is paywalled now and there's constant disinformation. Algorithms feed you bullshit and people all post outrage bait to get attention. Not saying that stuff didn't exist 15 years ago, but it's absolutely become the dominant experience online.
Hardware has gotten better though!
- Hardware has gotten better though!
  Can't even tell cause software has gotten so much worse
- You can't even Google shit anymore, it's all AI written articles. I used to use Reddit for that with site:reddit.com but I wonder how long we will be able to.
  
  People suggest using other search engines instead like Bing or DuckDuckGo, but the fact that they no longer support the "-" operator in search is annoying.
- You forgot clickbait
  
  Ι remember back in early 2010s with clickbaits enforcing you to Like on their Facebook Page in order to read the clickbeat post :P
- I fucking hate the Internet outside Lemmy, Mastodon, and select discords.
- And you can get rid of anything you hate, meanwhile porn loads in seconds.
  I wouldn't go back

When you see "Account created: 1997".
"These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones."
- When you see "Account created: 1997".
  "These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones."
  I have boots older than some people that are posting on Lemmy today...

When I first started my career I was in tier 3 tech support and to troll a colleague we put an mp3 in the startup folder on Windows. Every time he booted the computer to troubleshoot he lost his s*** trying to figure out why the music was playing. The dude ended up formatting C:
Precious memories.
- I went to an internet café once. I opened regedit and went to Win98 colour settings. I swapped top and left border colours with bottom and right ones to make all windows and buttons look debossed. I left. That PC was "out of order" for two weeks afterwards.
  
  That's genius. I was always more of a screenshot-your-desktop-then-set-it-as-wallpaper-and-hide-taskbar-and-icons kinda guy but that one is so damn subtle it probably just leads to people thinking everything works normally except that it feels ever so slightly off, but they can't put their finger on it. I like it a lot.

I used to wonder why my mom mistrusted online banking so much but looking back at the free programs I downloaded plus limewire it makes sense

I like how you would download a totally random executable and run it. Not suspicious at all!
- Oh we still do, we still do.
- Only time I ever got a virus that crashed my PC was from an old-school forum that apparently was hacked to include a drive-by download of some type that infected my PC just from loading the webpage. The shit wouldn't even boot and I didn't try to recover it, because I had just imaged the hard drive a week before luckily.

Forums aren't gone. They just were never really big to begin with. Reddit eclipsed all of them to the point that most forums were irrelevant unless they were highly specific (not like, a gaming or show community) or couldn't be on reddit (straight piracy with linking, other stuff we won't talk about)
They're not even gone, just the communities that want them are fewer and far between.
- We're on a forum right now!
  
  Technically, yes!
  
  Without signatures or badges or big enough avatars or different sections for posting specific things or threads coming to top whenever someone posts in them or people who've know each other for years via username...
  But sure, we're on a forum.
- One thing that happened since I joined the feddieverse is that I've spend more time on the underbelly of the internet. Like, the other day I found someones blog. Not their tumblr or anything, their own personal blog.
  It looked like shit and was filled with pointless entries but it was the internet in it's rawest form
- Yeah, specific forums for games or apps are still here, they're just pretty empty unless there's a big community for them. Some companies intentionally make forums their first and best place to get info, honestly.

Fun fact, the forum post is now 17 years old.
- "What colleges have you applied to?"

When I was a teenager, a bunch of my friends online were tossing that around. I found a trojan and started sending it around as cupholder.exe but making it look like I wasn't the one who sent it... and just immediately logged in and opened their CD tray. Then started fucking with their system in silly ways.
Ahh the good old days when even malware wasn't that bad. Or maybe I was just a really stupid kid. At least I password-locked the trojan and removed it when I left.
- Sub7 was the one, so many scripts at the click of a button
- 🤯

I view forums as the middle era of the internet.
Th early era was chatrooms, the middle era was forums, and the late era, which we are in now, is all social media.
I miss the middle era of the internet. Forums were a blast. You could really build a community with those things.
- BBS predate chatrooms and are proto-forums.
  
  BBSes predate the internet.
- Agree to all. How would you define the format of what you're reading right now, some derivitive of a forum?
  
  Social media.

I am still active in several forums. They are great and have even more of a sense of community them they used to. People talk about the subject and even meet in person around the world.
I also host a forum for a different group. No ads either cause fuck that shit.
- My wife called them invisible friends, even after we all met lol
  
  She needs to get her eyesight checked

More like 20 years ago
- Nah, man, 2000 was like 10 years ago.
  
  Nah, 10 years ago it was 1990.
  Right, guys?
- Yeah, I definitely wasn't downloading and running random exes to see what they did 10 years ago. But I probably would have 20 or 25 years ago.
- This image itself is almost 10 years old at this point.
- I'm pretty sure we had this joke app in the mid 90s. I vaguely recall the joke would reference coke or similar.

Haha I remember this one, it was Coca Cola themed. It'd eject your CDROM tray 😂

A random EXE that does exactly as it says? That was rare even during the frontier fort days of the internet.
- I look back to how many "fake virus" exes I used to download and wonder how I never actually got one.
  
  I tried sending on a fake virus I coded myself in pascal to a teacher I hated in 2000. I don't know if she opened it, but she did get demoted from head of science.

25 years ago. I remember.

Forums are still around. If you really missed them, you can go find them. I don't think it's forums you miss.

Good luck finding a cd-rom drive these days
- I had to buy an external one recently to get some expensive MRI data off a CD-ROM, as none of my computers or laptops have optical drives these days.
  Now I can be introspective by looking inside my head.
  
  Those make terrible cupholders though.
- Wait I have an .exe file to fix that for you right here somewhere!
- I still have my first computer in the attic.
  6MHz/12MHz turbo, 40MB internal drive, 5.25'' floppy drive. Not sure about RAM, I think it had 64KB.
  
  We need turbo buttons and MHz displays back on our computers!
- What's a CD-Rom drive?
- I just replaced my wife's desktop. Pulled the optical drive out of the 6 year old box I was replacing.
  Connected it up and it works seamless. She'll use it once or twice in the next 5 or 6 years.
  
  That stuff was just built differently
- Had to scroll pretty far to find this comment...
- Just mount the iso/dmg file as a virtual drive

They're still around! Discourse, phpbb, etc make it super easy to set up and administer. You don't even need coding knowledge. I'm part of a forum that's been going since the early oughts myself. Old Ocremix forums diaspora.
Think of it like a bookclub. You've just got to find some folks and get cracking

I remember back in the day there was a virus where a random cat would show up on the screen and slowly chase your mouse cursor. Once it did, it would crash your computer. I think I got it from a random .exe from a site called happypuppy or something like that.
- Hah, Happypuppy. That was cool site for a while.

should be easy to write like a forum skin UI for lemmy, no?
(thinking like https://old.lemmy.world or https://a.lemmy.world but made to look like a forum)
- They have one, though it's still incomplete and experimental.
  
  Lmao this is great
- technically yes, copied interface the like of vbulletin, xenforo, phpbb and such
  by someone that much more proficient in creating them, of course

I used to run a forum for my friends. On my own hardware for a while too. I too miss forums. I may look into doing it all over again, just cuz!

Take me back

still many out there. attachments are less dangerous

It was 2006 or 2007 when I sent a girl from my class a funny pdf.exe on ICQ, which simply restarted her computer when she started it. I didn't know that she would lose a whole day's work that way, but eh what are you gonna do if programs don't have autosafe.
Also, anyone remember "dialers"? Fun times.

I just recently moved my super old Mc server off reddit to a custom Discourse insane, and I've got to say it is lovely