What the internet felt like before algorithmic curation
How we experienced the early days of the web, and how it shaped today's Internet.
The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s felt like a wild, experimental playground. There were bizarre Flash animations and crude memes on sites like eBaum’s World and Albino Blacksheep, and a feeling that anything could happen online. This was before algorithms decided what we see. It was a time when you sought content out of curiosity and often found yourself delightfully surprised (or shocked) by what you found. The web was largely user-driven and community-curated, and it had a “lighter” and more freewheeling character. Those early days had a spirit of play and novelty, with both creators and users testing the boundaries of humor, shock, and creativity in new digital mediums.
Widespread home internet access was still new, and broadband was just emerging, which meant limited bandwidth and basic multimedia tech like Adobe Flash Player. Flash became the lingua franca of early web entertainment, letting anyone with patience and creativity make cartoons, games, or interactive “toys” for the browser. The result was the internet’s first “folk art”: weird, wonderful creations by amateurs, sitting alongside professional content with hardly any distinction. There were no hard rules about aesthetics or format. A personal website might autoplay a goofy song or feature a neon-colored animation of squatting badgers on loop, simply because it could. The anything-goes environment gave us a generation of internet-native humor that was absurd, irreverent, and often deliberately low-brow or surreal. It also nurtured niche subcultures. Nerdy interests like gaming, anime, and sci-fi that were once fringe were suddenly converging in a global melting pot online. Outcasts and oddballs had a space to pour all their weirdness in, and in doing so, that space quietly seeded the memes and slang that would eventually leak into mainstream culture.
Meme Factories and Creative Communities
A handful of user-driven entertainment platforms rose to prominence and profoundly shaped internet culture. Each had its own flavor and community, but together they formed an ecosystem of humor, identity play, and early meme distribution.
Something Awful (est. 1999)
Originally a humor blog by Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, Something Awful (SA) grew into notorious forums where a certain breed of cynical, creative misfits gathered. Users were self-proclaimed “goons,” and they developed an esoteric, dark sense of humor that could be fiercely original but also insular and vicious. SA became a crucible for early internet memes and in-jokes. Many staples of meme culture (like the classic image macro with white Impact font captions) trace their ancestry to SA. Ironically, the SA community itself frowned on low-effort “meme reposting”; moderators would ban users for parroting catchphrases instead of contributing something original. SA’s ethos meant that it incubated memes and tropes for the internet at large, even as it tried to keep its own culture weird and fresh. The site’s influence is hard to overstate. As one account put it, “much of the slang, references, and group identities” of internet culture in the 2000s started on SA.
Newgrounds (est. 1995 as a site, popularized in early 2000s)
Newgrounds was the hub of Flash animation and indie games on the web. Founded by Tom Fulp, it became “a haven for fostering the greats of internet animation” and a place where many creators cut their teeth long before YouTube or social media existed. Newgrounds was essentially a user-generated content portal divided into categories (Flash “Movies,” Games, Audio, Art). Users would upload their creations and face the judgment of peers, with the community rating new submissions, and low-scoring entries getting “blammed” (deleted) while quality ones survived. The peer-review system brought with it a strong sense of authorship and merit. Talented animators and developers built reputations on Newgrounds, and many later became professionals in gaming or entertainment, having first gained a following there during this “distinct time in gaming history”. In the early 2000s, visiting Newgrounds felt like being in an arcade of home-brewed creativity. You could watch a hilarious stick-figure battle, then play a fan-made Mario parody, then listen to user-composed techno, all in one place. Flash was the driving force of the site, so as a user you also felt in your own small way part of a tech subculture, learning to update plugins and tolerate long loading bars. Newgrounds enabled meme distribution through viral animations (think of classics like “All Your Base” or “Numa Numa” video) and brought community formation via its forums and portal reviews. Regulars developed a shared identity through icons, inside jokes, and even multi-animator collabs that brought users together on big projects.
Albino Blacksheep (est. around 2000)
Albino Blacksheep was another beloved Flash content aggregate. It wasn’t so much a social community as a repository of the internet’s most nonsensical and viral Flash content. If you wanted a quick laugh or something totally random to share with friends, AB had you covered, from the “Badger Badger Badger” looping cartoon to funny mini-games and songs. It gained a reputation for quirky animations that spread through email or AIM links. Albino Blacksheep’s role in meme culture was as a distributor of viral hits. It’s where the infamous “Scary Maze Game” prank and the epic animated music video “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” gained notoriety. As Flash’s popularity grew in the mid-2000s, sites like Newgrounds and Albino BlackSheep were set up purely for sharing games and animations made in Flash. They were enablers of participatory culture, a place where anyone could submit content and potentially reach millions, even without a YouTube-style algorithm.
eBaum’s World (est. 2001)
eBaum’s World was the grand aggregator of internet humor in the early 2000s. If Newgrounds and SA were subcultural spaces, eBaum’s was more of a chaotic public square. It was a one-stop shop to find the latest viral videos, Flash cartoons, crude photoshops, and prank soundboards lifted from all corners of the internet. People came to eBaum’s to watch absurd Flash animations, play with silly soundboards of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Dr. Phil, and marvel (or cringe) at the latest meme-worthy video. In a way, “eBaum’s was the Reddit of the early 2000s,” surfacing viral content before Reddit existed. The broad popularity came at an ethical cost, as eBaum’s was notorious for posting other people’s content without credit, often adding its own watermark on images and videos. It was hit with multiple content theft controversies throughout the mid-2000s. Eric Bauman (the “eBaum” himself) and his team took memes and media from sites like Something Awful, Albino Blacksheep, YTMND, 4chan, Newgrounds, and others, usually without permission or attribution. This led to a kind of culture clash, as the tight-knit communities of creators on those other sites despised eBaum’s for profiting off their work. In 2006, eBaum’s World reposted a popular YTMND animation of Lindsay Lohan without credit, and the outrage from YTMND users was so intense that eBaum’s eventually pulled it down. That same year, eBaum’s lifted images from SA’s forums while cropping out SA’s watermark, and there was open warfare between SA’s “goons” and the Bauman camp. SA responded by inventing more aggressive watermarking tactics to counter future theft. In another notorious incident, eBaum’s decompiled a Flash animation (“Animator vs. Animation”) that had been hosted on Albino Blacksheep, removed the creator’s credit, and rehosted it on eBaum’s World. The creator, Alan Becker, and Albino Blacksheep’s webmaster threatened legal action, leading eBaum’s to hastily pay Becker a small sum and secure a dubious “apology” letter from him. These dramas highlighted early debates over authorship and ownership online. Despite (or maybe because of) these controversies, eBaum’s World remained hugely trafficked. It was a gateway for many casual internet users to experience viral media, even if the content often originated elsewhere. Years later, eBaum’s would try to rehabilitate its image. Today it relies on user submissions, with a monetary point system called “eBones” to reward contributors, and often just embeds YouTube videos instead of hosting stolen files. But in the early 2000s, it was a symbol of the copy-paste free-for-all of the time, a site that captured the internet’s anarchic energy and the Wild West attitude toward intellectual property.
There were plenty of other influential platforms too. YTMND (You’re The Man Now Dog) in 2004 let users create looping meme pages, and was itself an incubator of viral jokes and a chief antagonist of eBaum’s. Fark (1999) pioneered community-moderated, funny news sharing. Early Flash cartoon series like Homestar Runner (2000) became cultural touchstones on their own. But the sites above – Something Awful, Newgrounds, Albino Blacksheep, and eBaum’s World – show us the spectrum of early internet entertainment, from insular forums to creator communities to open aggregators. Together they enabled new forms of humor, identity play, community formation, and meme distribution that set the tone for digital culture.
These communities taught a whole generation how to be online. They normalized the idea that you could have an alternate identity, a username, an avatar, a persona, and gain respect or infamy through your contributions. On Newgrounds and SA, users became minor celebrities within the community for their animations or editing skills. Identity play was common. You could be a fearless critic, a goofy animator, or a sarcastic shitposter, all behind the safety of a screen name. Pseudonymity encouraged people to experiment with their sense of humor and viewpoints, sometimes to the point of embracing very edgy, offensive comedy. It also fostered camaraderie. Subcultures like SA’s Goons or Newgrounds’ animator circles formed strong bonds and shared reference points, even though members were scattered around the world. Each of these sites was a petri dish for a different strain of emerging internet culture, and they cross-pollinated heavily. A meme might be born in SA, incubated in a YTMND page, amplified on eBaum’s, and then end up as a reference in a Newgrounds cartoon. It was chaotic, user-driven distribution at work.
Life Before Algorithmic Feeds
One of the defining features of this era was the lack of algorithmic feeds. There was no Facebook News Feed, no YouTube recommendation sidebar finely tuned to keep you scrolling. You found content through forums, front pages, and friend-to-friend sharing. This had a profound influence on what it felt like to be an internet user at the time.
Forums and Community Hubs
Discussion boards like the Something Awful forums or Newgrounds’ message boards were the heart of these sites. Content was often surfaced by way of threads started by users, or by site administrators featuring something on the front page. You’d log in and see what the community was talking about today, maybe a funny new Flash game or a crazy story someone posted, and you’d join the conversation. The experience was highly participatory. As a user you weren’t just a passive consumer, you were expected to comment, rate, remix, or contribute in some way. There was a sense of shared culture. Since everyone in a forum saw the same thread titles and posts, sorted chronologically or by popularity, but not personalized to you, there was a collective consumption of media. We all watched the absurd “Chicken on a Raft” animation because someone shared it in a thread, and it became a running joke. Unlike today’s individualized feeds, early web communities were more cohesive, like being in the same room with others experiencing the same joke. It also meant stronger moderation and norms within each community. As alluded to before, SA’s moderators actively enforced etiquette and originality by banning worn-out memes, which in turn shaped the kind of humor that flourished there. Each site was a little kingdom with its own rules.
Flash Technology and User-Generated Content
The ubiquitous use of Adobe Flash shaped how content looked and felt. Flash content was often short, looping, and byte-sized by necessity (given bandwidth limits), which lent itself to punchy humor and quick gratification. All those stick-figure fight animations or 30-second parody cartoons…they were the memes of the Flash era, easily sharable and endlessly remixable. Flash also allowed interactive media, so internet entertainment went beyond just watching and included playing and experimenting. Users gravitated toward exploration, as you’d click around Albino Blacksheep or Newgrounds for hours, never sure what weird game or cartoon you’d find next. The unpredictability was exciting. Flash also lowered the barrier to creation. A teenager could learn to make a simple animation or game and upload it. There was a democratization of creative expression, as everyone was an amateur, and the weird creations of small independent users sat right alongside content from bigger studios. “In those days, everyone was an amateur,” and the web’s “rough surface” made it hard to tell professional from hobbyist. Users had a sense that anyone could contribute to the culture, which was deeply empowering and fostered a participatory mindset.
Discovery by Default
Because content wasn’t served up based on your profile, you often stumbled upon the unexpected. You might visit eBaum’s front page and find a bizarre new viral video that you’d never have searched for, but there it is catching your eye. Or you’d scroll through Newgrounds’ “Under Judgment” section to help blam/protect new submissions, and suddenly witness a brilliant cartoon by an unknown creator. The internet felt more like a digital adventure than a controlled feed. Today’s web, optimized by algorithms and polished by UX designers, rarely delivers that kind of surprise. But back then, stumbling was the modus operandi, and it made the experience oddly more memorable. You actively navigated and foraged for cool stuff, often encountering delightfully pointless sites, like a single-purpose joke website that existed for no reason other than someone’s whim. The “wanderer” mode of browsing could be chaotic, but it also meant broader exposure. You weren’t bubble-wrapped in a recommendation silo. You were seeing whatever weird or wonderful thing bubbled up from the community.
Anonymity and Identity Play
The early-2000s platforms largely did not tie accounts to real-life identities. MySpace was an exception in social networking, but on humor/content sites, you were known by aliases. People had freedom to play with identity and humor without real-world repercussions. It was common to use edgy or absurd humor precisely because you could separate it from your real name. On SA, users reveled in a collective cynicism and wit that might have been “too weird” or socially unacceptable in their offline circles. The down side is that anonymity also amplified toxic behaviors at times. Trolls, flame wars, and offensive content were rampant, since there was little accountability beyond each site’s moderation. Still, for many of us, those forums were a social laboratory, a place to try on new personas, crack jokes, or share art and see how others reacted. Now, as the internet has grown more attached to real identities (Facebook’s “real name” policy, for example), people have become more self-conscious and hesitant about what they post. In the 2000s, online personas felt more detached from our offline selves, and that detachment encouraged wilder experimentation in how we expressed ourselves.
Piracy and Remix Culture
That era also had a relatively lax attitude toward intellectual property, and a culture of remix and (often) piracy. Users gleefully shared content, ripping flash games, copying funny images, sampling audio clips to make soundboards, etc. It was understood that much of the media was unofficial and “borrowed” from elsewhere, but there was a collective shrug about it. This norm fueled creativity (you could make a music video or a parody remix without lawyers breathing down your neck) and created a sense of commons, an assumption that whatever was on the web was fair game to tinker with. It also produced friction, as seen in eBaum’s World’s clashes with content creators. Early platforms grappled with where to draw the line between enthusiastic sharing and exploitative stealing. For users, though, the reality was that the internet felt like an open buffet of memes and media. If you saw a funny animation, you’d download it, maybe mash it up with something else, and post it on another forum. Credit was often an afterthought. The free-for-all environment was intoxicating but unsustainable as the internet matured into a serious creative economy.
Curation and Centralized, Sanitized Platforms
As the 2000s progressed, the rowdy web began to calm and centralize. New giants emerged in the form of YouTube (2005), Reddit (2005), and Facebook (opened to public in 2006), and they fundamentally changed the tone and structure of internet culture. The shift from the niche, independent platforms to these big networks was rapid and dramatic by the late 2000s.
Centralization and Scale
Suddenly, instead of dozens of quirky sites run by hobbyists, millions of users congregated on a few mega-platforms. YouTube absorbed the video/animation audience, and many Newgrounds animators moved their content to YouTube for the larger reach and (later on) monetization opportunities. Reddit became a kind of uber-forum, with specialized subreddits replacing independent forums like SA. Facebook and later Twitter brought everyone, not just nerds, into the online social fold, with real-life friends and family joining the conversation. The centralization meant mainstream norms started to overlay what had been fringe internet culture. Content that was once the domain of insiders on SA or Albino Blacksheep now appeared in the feeds of ordinary folks on Facebook. Inevitably, the culture sanitized to appeal to a broader audience and to comply with corporate and advertiser standards. The edgy, chaotic energy of the early web got partly smoothed over by a “professional veneer” as startups turned into giant corporations.
Algorithmic Feeds and Endless Content
Along with centralization came the algorithmic feed. Instead of manually surfing from site to site or checking forums, users relied on Facebook’s feed or YouTube’s recommendations or Reddit’s front page to show them content. As we’ve come to know, these algorithms are superb at maximizing engagement, but they also tend to reinforce our existing tastes. The whimsical serendipity of stumbling on bizarre content has been largely replaced by a steady stream of things the platform thinks you’ll like. Content consumption is more efficient and personalized, but the collective experience has arguably been narrowed. Two people’s Facebook or YouTube feeds might have little overlap, whereas in 2003 two users on eBaum’s World probably laughed at the same new viral video on the front page. The algorithmic era also ushered in the “endless scroll,” the never-ending feed that can lead to passive, almost trance-like consumption, very different from the active hunting-and-gathering feel of the earlier web. Users went from being explorers to being constant consumers, spoon-fed by the feed. And because attention is now a prime commodity, content also became more homogenized to keep people hooked and not offend them too strongly, as controversial or overly niche content might be down-ranked or removed by algorithmic moderation.
Content Moderation and Tone
The big platforms enforced stricter content policies. Graphic violence, explicit sexual content, hate speech, etc., gradually got more regulated, both by platform rules and by automated filters or community reporting. Early internet culture, by contrast, had a wild west reputation. Offensive humor and shock content were common. SA’s forums had few limits on dark humor, and Newgrounds hosted very violent or raunchy animations. As the audience widened, there was pressure from advertisers, media, and users to clean up the internet’s act. We saw a shift in tone, with sites like CollegeHumor and Cracked (which were somewhat in the same genre by late 2000s) producing more polished comedy articles and videos, in contrast to the raw user-made gags of earlier sites. Reddit, while it inherited some of the old forum edginess, instituted rules and banned some extremist communities over time to appear more palatable. Facebook became notorious for its “real names and clean conduct” ethos, nudging people to present their best selves. This all contributes to what can be called the sanitization of internet culture. The creative anarchy of Flash portals and forums gave way to the more “family-friendly” or at least brand-safe environment of social media. And we lost some of the soul in the process, that unpredictable, chaotic flavor that made the 2000s internet so memorable.
Community Fragmentation vs. Monoculture
Centralization had a dual effect on communities. On one hand, it created a kind of internet monoculture where huge numbers of people engage with the same handful of platforms. On the other hand, within those platforms, communities reorganized around subreddits, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, etc. The difference is that those sub-communities are all under the umbrella (and rules) of the larger platform. The autonomy that sites like Something Awful or Newgrounds had to set their own culture is constrained when you’re just a subreddit that could be banned if it embarrasses the admins. Some early internet denizens lamented this and fled to even deeper niches. As Reddit and Tumblr became mainstream, many “weird internet” users retreated to 4chan or closed Discord communities. The rise of normie users “pushed certain subgroups deeper” into more obscure corners. We can see a lineage where “normies” moved from MySpace to Facebook to Instagram, while “nerds” moved from Something Awful to Reddit and then some onward to more secretive platforms. The culture clash between those who wanted the internet to remain an irreverent playground and those who wanted it polished for mainstream consumption created real tensions in the 2010s. Meme pages on Facebook would often steal jokes from obscure Tumblr or 4chan users, akin to eBaum’s stealing from Newgrounds. But now the stakes were higher, as memes had become big business and political forces. A meme like Pepe the Frog went from innocuous on Myspace to controversial globally via 4chan and mainstream social media.
The Professionalization of Creation
In the early 2000s, if you made a funny Flash cartoon or a meme, you did it mostly for internet kudos or for your own amusement. There were few avenues to earn money or formal credit, and your work would often get re-posted across the web without your name attached. By the late 2000s and 2010s, that changed. YouTube’s Partner Program, and later Patreon, Twitch, etc., allowed talented creators to monetize their content and build careers. This was a double-edged sword for the culture. It vindicated the early creators, as now you could get paid for making the kinds of videos or games that Newgrounds and eBaum’s once hosted for free. But once money and branding entered the picture, creators had to play by the rules of platforms and advertisers. Content generally became more polished, less wild, because creators were now competing in a market and worrying about demonetization or DMCA strikes. The economy also consolidated. eBaum’s World today is owned by Literally Media, the same company that owns Know Your Meme and Cheezburger. It’s essentially a single corporate umbrella managing a big slice of meme culture. The anarchic days of a lone teen like Eric Bauman running a meme site from his bedroom are over. Now it’s venture-backed startups or media companies running the show. To a certain degree, the memescape got corporatized. That professional veneer isn’t just about tone. It’s literal, as memes are now marketing, and viral content is a career path.
Evolving Creative Norms
Early platforms forced the community to confront questions of credit and content ownership head-on. eBaum’s World’s content theft spats rallied entire communities like YTMND, Albino Blacksheep, and Something Awful around the cause of respecting creators’ rights. These incidents signaled a cultural shift. Creators began demanding attribution and fairness. After the 2006 Animator vs. Animation debacle, many Flash artists became more outspoken about copyright, and some portals implemented rules to prevent stolen content uploads. By the time YouTube rose, the norm that “credit is due” was stronger. Content theft still happens, but at least YouTube has ContentID to identify reuploads. The introduction of Creative Commons licensing, the growth of communities like DeviantArt (where art theft was vigilantly policed by users), and the rise of KnowYourMeme (documenting meme origins) all contributed to a new ethos. Online creative work may be free to enjoy, but the creators deserved recognition and control.
Economically, creative norms evolved from a gift culture (make stuff for fun and for the lulz) to a platform economy (make stuff to build your brand or revenue). Some early creators navigated this transition successfully. An animator from Newgrounds might become a YouTube star, carrying over their fanbase and maybe even monetizing old Flash cartoons by porting them to video. Others lamented the change. The pressure to churn out content for algorithms or to sanitize your unique humor for monetization felt like a loss of creative purity. The goofy internet artist can now get paid, and that credit is more likely to stick to the original author, but it’s easy to miss the odd authenticity of when people made things with zero expectation of profit or fame.
The concept of authorship itself also got complicated in the meme age. Memes by nature are iterative and collective. Who “owns” a catchphrase or an image macro? In early forums, nobody cared. Authorship was often effectively anonymous or pseudonymous. As memes hit mainstream, though, we started seeing brands and influencers trying to claim them, and legal questions about copyright for viral content. The eBaum’s battles were an early harbinger of these issues. The resolution of those battles, with eBaum’s ultimately declining and the original communities surviving, affirmed a principle. The crowd values the creator’s contribution. People sided with Albino Blacksheep and Alan Becker over eBaum’s exploitation, and that was a moral stance about creative labor that carries into today’s debates about everything from fan art to remix videos.
Legacy and Reflections
eBaum’s World and its contemporaries fundamentally shaped internet culture. They introduced a mode of humor, surreal, satirical, sometimes offensive, that has since become the default tone of online discourse. They pioneered the meme as a unit of culture before we even had the word “meme” in our daily vocabulary. They also demonstrated the internet’s power to form communities out of shared interests and laughter, foreshadowing the social networks to come. These platforms tapped into basic human social impulses like the desire to belong to a group (even an anonymous one), to exchange jokes and stories, to gain status through creativity or wit. They also were a massive experiment in sociotechnical interaction, where the technology (forums, Flash, broadband) created new possibilities that in turn shaped how people behaved (learning image editing to participate in a meme thread, tweaking an animation to please Newgrounds voters, etc).
The tools and the culture evolved together. The presence of forums gave rise to new social norms, like SA’s disdain for repetitive memes. The capabilities of Flash gave rise to a visual gag-oriented humor style unique to that medium. And when the tools changed, when YouTube and algorithmic feeds took over, the culture shifted accordingly toward video blogging, influencer personas, and more passive scrolling. It’s a reminder that the medium shapes the message. A Flash cartoon on Newgrounds in 2003, a GIF on Tumblr in 2013, and a TikTok video in 2023 might all be trying to get a laugh, but the format and context channel the style of humor and the social dynamics around it.
We can also acknowledge that not everything in that early era was rosy. Those communities had a dark side, with gatekeeping, harassment, rampant misogyny and racism in jokes, etc. Much of it was brushed off under the banner of “it’s just the internet,” which we now recognize as an inadequate excuse. The wild freedom let marginalized voices find space, but it also allowed a lot of toxicity to fester unchallenged. The move toward more moderated, accountable platforms had the positive effect of making the internet a bit less of a hostile environment for some, though moderation is always imperfect. The early internet was a fertile but unruly jungle, whereas today’s big platforms are more like cultivated gardens. They’re easier to navigate, but they might be missing some exotic species.
Many of us have a deep nostalgia for the era when the web felt like an underground carnival, full of freaky sights and delights that you had to explore to find. That era is gone; and “a professional veneer has been smoothed over the once rough surface of the web — perhaps at the expense of something more spontaneous.” The fact that we no longer stumble on sites that don’t look like all the others is a real change. But the legacy of these early platforms lives on in many of the memes we share and the weird internet trends that blow up. The modern internet is in many ways built on the infrastructure those sites created, with viral content, user-generated laughs, niche communities, and the blurring of lines between creators and audience. Even as we go through our endless algorithmic feeds, there’s a bit of that early chaos lurking, in absurdist TikTok videos, in the resurgence of GIF memes, or in the dark humor of certain Reddit threads. The weird and wonderful will always find a way online, even if it’s harder to come by now.
This idea started in my brain, was hashed out with AI, and then heavily edited by yours truly.