Thread 106276916

How was life without the smartphones?

t. newborn 2006 baby

>>106276916 (OP)
People got so bored that they talked to each other in real life

>>106276916 (OP)
1990 kid here.
Early life I just played outside. I discovered the internet sometime around 2003. For the next 6 years, the Internet I knew was BEAUTIFUL. No smartphones means the internet was gatekept to actual enthusiasts. Fewer people, fewer midwits. Everyone you interacted with was genuine. No propaganda or corposlop telemetry or any of this new age bullshit.

I genuinely feel bad for people who never got to experience that golden age.

>>106276916 (OP)
You were an individual. Your phone makes you part of the hive. As much as freedom and independence are great, having the rest of the hive at your back when your car breaks down or you just want pasta for dinner, far outweigh it.

>>106276947
I would unironically take the popup era back in exchange for what the average non-popup experience is like on websites these days, especially without adblock, but often even with it. I would happily close the windows if the actual websites weren't fucking impossible to use.

>>106276963
This post glows brighter than the sun.
People survived without twitter when their car used to break down, and you used to have just just call places to deliver rather than sending all your money to the Uber founders when you want a delivery. The convenience of IRL killed the experience and people's will to engage with it, just like all the convenience features in WoW did to the game. If it all shut down tomorrow people would be annoyed but nothing catastrophic would happen and in 6 months everybody on earth would be significantly happier. You can say that people can just do that if they want on their own but it's not that, you can't be trying to play a different game than the rest of society, the majority need to be on the same page to see the benefits.

people phones houses not people
it was a crazy time to be alive

>>106276916 (OP)
old man here, we used to play street hockey during the day and then video games at night

it was nice, i liked it

>>106276963
I've never owned a cellphone lol

got a smartphone only after graduating hs in 2021 (born 2003) and well....i still ended up a complete fucking addict

>>106276916 (OP)
>How was life without the smartphones?
inconvenient and private

the smartphones are to blame for a lot but social media combined with internet video are responsible for the worst of everything we are in now

Penis, Lol!

>>106277080
You're such a silly boy! :3

>>106277048
Retard

>>106276916 (OP)
I don't get how "Yap" is a brainrot word now

Am I crazy? Hasn't this always been a word, even if rarely used?

>>106276947
>Everyone you interacted with was genuine.
Come the fuck on now.

>>106277099
nigga fuck you
>>106277093
fag

>>106277132
Holy kek

>>106276916 (OP)
It was nice. The biggest difference is that the Internet is now a constant background noise in your life. Before the smartphone, you had to actually go sit down at a computer somewhere and log in. So if you were online it took some effort and attention, whereas now it’s so integrated into life that you don’t even think about it.

It was more fun to interact with people online back then, maybe for this reason. There were also fewer foreigners

>>106276916 (OP)
you talked and socalized with people, social media was nonexistent in public
>t. born in 2003
>>106276963
>muh car
don't need a smartphone for that
>pasta
go buy it yourself or use your computer.
>>106277048
same, actively trying to get rid of my phone atm.

>>106276916 (OP)
1) I played with a bicycle wheel as a kid. A bicycle wheel that I would use a stick to turn the wheel.
2) I played with marbles as a kid.
3) I played with hopscotch as a kid.
4) I played with hunting small birds/animals as a kid.
5) I grew up seeing nintendo snes
6) I was playing at arcade, mortal kombat/street fighter/dino hunting was extremely popular
7) I would go to a movie theater once a month as a kid
8) I would wrestle with friends in haystack

Millennial here. It was fun.

I think most notably in the pre-smartphone era there were way fewer bots, schizos, and bots programmed by schizos. While captchas did exist prior to it, Recaptcha didn't release until 2007 -- most sites just didn't think it was needed or they could manually handle bots by banning IPs. 4chan didn't even have a captcha until 2010 IIRC in response to this flooding incident:
https://desuarchive.org/_/search/text/flamoot/

If you had a shithead in your community, you could usually just ban him and he'd go away -- or apologize and ask to be unbanned. Ban evasion happened, sure, but not enough to wreck a community or website. There was none of this schizo "oops I got banned, better fire up my botnet of residential IPs so I can keep shitting up the website as fast as possible".

>>106277273
wtf is this schizo shit

>>106277262
who knows if it will still be possible when we are like 36, all digital future and shit

>>106276916 (OP)
The world felt significantly larger, because it was. You had to call landlines and leave messages. You couldn't contact anyone that was not near a landline.
Frankly, being able to make calls to people no matter where they are is so much better than it was before. Unfortunately, cellphones came with a bunch of other unfortunate baggage.

>>106277316
I don't even know, man. I think it was just someone who got banned or something so he decided to flood every single board with his IRC logs or something. Real schizo shit

Parties were actually fun

That shit is totally dead now

Clubs too

All went to shit

>>106277379
i see

>>106277123
No you're correct. It's a word that dates back literally hundreds of years in English. It's just that people are apparently retarded and have piss poor vocabulary. So they hear the word get a moderate boost in popularity among some retards and have brainless kneejerk reaction.

>>106276916 (OP)
phones were attached to homes and businesses, not people
so when calling a friend, you'd often end up saying, "hi, Mrs. Ymous, may I speak with Anon?" or "is Anon there?" instead of "sup, Anon"
people didn't expect constant connectivity
i had an answering machine, and if someone left me a message that wasn't urgent, i'd get back to them in a couple of days if i was busy
now people freak the fuck out of you don't respond in an hour
i had a psycho bitch i was talking to who flipped because i didn't respond to her within 90 minutes while i was eating dinner and watching Jeopardy!
during the summer, i'd leave the house on my bike or skateboard at 8 or 9am, and my mom would have no fucking idea where i was until i came home for lunch, and then i'd leave again and she'd have no idea where i was and no way to reach me until i came home for dinner
then it was usually everybody watching TV or a VHS cassette we rented instead of everybody staring at their own phone
in college, i called my mom once a week and usually spoke to my brother on the same line, too
i called my grandparents about once a month
my brother used email, but nobody else did, so those phone calls were the only time they heard from me
there were no dating apps
you dated people you met in real life
i had a freshman class with the girl who ended up being my college gf
in the second semester of our freshman year, we both had an 8am class and a 10am class, so we'd go to my apartment at 9am every day and fuck, then again after dinner
it was generally a better and more chill time
i can't wait for the Butlerian jihad

>>106276916 (OP)
It was shit. When I was a kid in early 2000s I wanted to have a computer with me all the time.

>>106277123
i'm 35 and it's news to me people think it's a new term

>>106276916 (OP)
Fuck off

>>106276916 (OP)
>2006
You must be 18 to post h-
Oh fuck...

>>106277262
>2003
Nigga by the time you started remembering things, smartphones were already common.

>>106276916 (OP)
You actually needed to think and didn't go insane when left to your own devices for 15 minutes.

>>106276916 (OP)
It doesn't feel that different desu. We had early YouTube and quite a few early phones (flip phones and those pre-Blackberry looking Nokias) could play YouTube in the browser. Mostly people would use Facebook and Myspace on browser though, watching a video was more uncommon. But YouTube viewing at home was very popular.

I remember how cool me and a bunch of other kids felt when we managed to save entire videos on our flip phones and would watch them on the bus, even thought the screen was tiny and it would stutter a little.

>>106276967
>I would unironically take the popup era back
same

>>106277478
>So they hear the word get a moderate boost in popularity among some retards and have brainless kneejerk reaction.
it's okay when shakespeare does it

>>106276916 (OP)
Compartmentalized. Mobile internet + subhuman friendly ux + social media has been the complete destruction of the collective consciousness, now everyone is hypersocial and antisocial at the same time.

>>106278819
I'm 32 now. 2020 feels like yesterday and 2015 feels like last week. Why is it all going so fast?

>>106276916 (OP)
video games, indoor games, watching TV which was superior back then to today's junk. playing outside, talking with others.
I remember when smart phones started being more wide spread. gatherings would be people whom you used to talk to just staring at their slabs made of glass. social media was a mistake

>>106278819
picrel

>>106276916 (OP)
I had to print out turn-by-turn directions on Google Maps to go anyplace new and far away

>>106276947
The golden age was life before the internet

Being on the internet felt like being a cowboy, and much like the actual cowboys, civilization has come and put up fences and set up shop. Freedom lessens every day, and there's nowhere left to go.

>>106276947
It also took like 3 minutes to load a high res porn image and this was while I was going through puberty.

I used to cum before the pussy even loaded

>>106279158
>Dat Wifi Wild West
There was about a 5 year time frame in the early 2000's were 90% of the population didn't password their wireless routers. Free Internet everywhere.

>>106279170
It took a while before DSL became a thing in my cunt but we could already watch porn or hentai on pirated 8-in-1 DVDs which you could easily acquire unsupervised
I still have my old shoebox full of them

It wasn't that much better. Things are so shitty now that people treat each incremental thing (mostly brought on by tech) like it's the downfall of humanity. It's like a bottle of booze. Are you going to tell the next man he can't have one because you can't control yourself? My phone hasn't taken over my life. If it takes over yours that reflects on you, not everyone who chooses to have one.

>>106277856
I've used yap one time just to mean "noisy chatter" and got bitched at by what I presume are a bunch of ESLs. I had to explain that it's not some kind of neologism.

>>106280097
I was too young/poor to be able to buy pirated porno DVDs/VHS tapes, so I had to make do with Victoria's Secret shopping magazines that came in the mail lol. I was responsible for getting the mail so it gave me an opportunity to snag those and hide them before parents came home.
By the time I got old enough to buy pornos, we got internet and I became a hopeless coomer.

>>106276916 (OP)
>How was life without the smartphones?
It was heaven.

Through elementary school we'd bring our Bionicles and RP our silly stories. We'd build those Lego racers and race them through school hallways.

Later when we all got GBAs we'd play Mario Bros 4-way multiplayer. Around this time we'd play YGO and trade CDs as well.

Through middle school we played and shared MP3s through those Nokia/Sony Ericsson bricks. If there were any available computers, it was playing flash games on the school library. If not, then it was football or basketball.

In high school we mostly socialized just talking about dumb shit while sharing earbuds with our iPods. After school we'd have band "practice" (mostly just fucking around with our instruments).

I went to a couple of parties at the roller disco through the years.

Even when everyone got a dumbphone, we mostly interacted face-to-face. Chatting was mostly relegated to the night. When we wanted a big chat with several members through MSN, it was a big event we'd coordinate at school.

>>106276916 (OP)
I was born in 1995, here are some tech related differences that I can remember:
>it was completely normal to not be reachable for hours at a time, you'd call someone's household on their land line and if the person wasn't in then tough shit, you were not reaching them that day
>cellphones existed but not all kids had them, if you were lucky you might inherit one from an older sibling but they were mostly just good for playing snake, texting and calling cost money, occasionally if you went somewhere as a group of kids you were given one cellphone so that an adult could call you if they needed to
>internet was pretty slow before broadband and it also cost money to be online so you had to ask your parents for permission to go online
>cgi/video game graphics that look like hot shit today looked like magic back then
>content creation on sites like newgrounds was done by passionate community members who loved creating and sharing stuff, there didn't seem like there was much of an attempt to profit (either through fame or money) from their creations
>in the early days of youtube production quality would vary wildly because there wasn't an established meta with 'streamer setups' with good cameras, halo light rings, good microphones etc, if people recorded game footage it was most likely choppy 30 second FRAPS segments spliced together or the good old UNREGISTERED HYPERCAM watermark gracing the screen
Oh, and probably the biggest difference of them all, meeting people online was such a novelty and cool thing. It felt surreal to play Runescape with so many different people and at the dinner table you'd tell your parents that you talked to someone from a different country earlier.

>>106277479
thanks for the good post

>>106276916 (OP)
You're only going to get millennial answers due to the nature of this board, so I will answer as somebody older.

America peaked in the 1950s and it has all been downhill since then. The people nostalgic for pre-smartphone internet, or pretending that 2000-2010 was some kind of golden age are looking at the world with rose colored glasses, because that was the era they were either kids or teenagers in. The truth is, the place was already fucked by then. The world turned to shit in the 1960s. People now wish for an internet free from brown/black people. Back then, you could have full on real world businesses free from them, via the magic of the "Whites Only" sign.

>>106277132
he's just parroting the same bullshit everyone says about the old internet. Yeah the internet was more interesting but people were still gigantic retarded dicks.

>>106276916 (OP)
80s boomer here. We used to ride our bikes around the neighbourhood, calling on all our friends and basically just hanging out at parks every evening until the street lights came on. We used to play soccer and tag at the local park. No one was distracted by checking their phones every 2 seconds. We would get a scolding if we came home too late, but that was always an option - our parents had no idea where we were. It was true freedom.

>>106276916 (OP)
My fingers hurt less

>>106276916 (OP)
I remember being significantly happier pre-2012

>>106277479
Not responding in the middle of an ongoing live/instant written convo *is* a shitty move though, smartphones or not

>>106280683
>immigration reform act of 1965
>civil rights act
>loss of the gold standard/invention of the 100% fiat petrodollar 1971

I wonder who could have been behind these things?

>>106280683
>America peaked in the 1950s
Source?

>>106280683
>The world turned to shit in the 1960s.

>>106277132
genuine compared to endless bots, shills, and third-worlders maybe

>>106281871
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>>106276916 (OP)
>How was life without the smartphones?
everything was better back in the day
everything

>>106277273
my memory of it was captcha was added to 4chan after an image that could be transformed to a self replicating program took off. there was this strange looking image with the text on it "Download, save as image.hta, double click, shit bricks."
Then when people did it, it ran as a program just spamming the image on all boards, and it just went crazy taking over everything.

>>106280683
holy fucking based

>>106280683
>so I will answer as somebody older

>>106276916 (OP)
The internet was better when it was limited to desktops and not all over the damn place

>>106276916 (OP)
right before smartphones (late 2000s) was an awful cultural time. everyone thought Bed Intruder was the funniest fucking thing, everyone was dancing to Soulja Boy, and everyone was getting on Facebook. this is the beginning of people no longer going outside because parents thought outside was unsafe.
early 2000s was Google (first major internet search engine, before this was library searches), the Iraq war, Britney Spears, "Faux News" debates and Rage Against the Machine liberalism, Myspace stupidity, and Apple product hype + anti-hype.
late 1990s society was conquered, everyone believed the narrative and loved food dye ice pops and skateboarding and no one cared about anything anymore, and hadn't noticed the beginning of mass illegal immigration.
early 1990s was the death throes of KISS druggie culture because the CIA didn't need those tools anymore to pacify dissent and justify endless wars in the middle east.
1980s was probably the peak of america, where you could still find factory jobs and good women and good products and cops would leave most people alone and the Cold War was ending, but the cars were horrible, and that was a big signal that it was the beginning of the end.
1970s was entering the peak of america, lots of freedom and strong culture, but television became a thing highlighting the horrific Vietnam War convincing the public to to gut all veterans of it as criminals, and everyone was still freaking out about the Cold War.
1960s was the Vietnam War and hippie culture and the end of racial segregation and space travel, a very contentious and degenerate time where every parent was a druggie or a drunk and most people lived in poverty unthinkable today.
the time before the 1960s is so different from today that it's not even describable in simple terms.

the reason why boomers and gen X are reverse-mortgaging child-abandoning retards is that they witnessed and assisted the end of America and could not stop the beginning of something else.

>>106277393
Wonder how many divorces those girls have now that they're in their 50s.

>>106283638
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ml3nyww80
'83

>>106283638
It's easy to detect anons who never got over their parents buying them a PlayStation instead of the Xbox they wanted.

>>106283773
ps1 came out 7 years before the xbox

>>106283791
Oh, sorry, didn't realize you were retarded. I'll translate for you:
It's easy to detects anons who never got over their single mom buying them a console from the PlayStation line instead of the console from the Xbox line they wanted.

>>106283773
we had enough money for all game systems, the kids got xbox, playstation, and nintendo, all the top of the line games. even a home movie theater for their friends to come over and play. i am routinely disgusted by self-serving parents that let their children rot on the games rather than limit their time and get them involved. most young adults i know are going nowhere in life, and fast.

>>106277393
boomer get out, 4chin is zoomer space now

>>106283877
? the ps line was better though

>>106281888
Shut up commie faggot. Men turned their hearts away from God in the 50s because of their technological advances and superior knowledge. The 60s are when the fruit of this change appeared.

>>106276916 (OP)
The internet was not controlled by today mega corps. I remember searching "how to make a bomb" and Google would just give you literal terrorist websites with instructions. At the time I did use them to make TATP for fun and it worked. I still remember the formula, roll and I give the instructions as a haiku if you dub. Then all the terrorist attacks happened and it was much more monitored. It's hard to understand how different it was back then. It was also much harder to code for example because you had to read documentation and visit forums to get help. Roll and I give the instructions as a haiku

>>106276916 (OP)
Smartphones allowed me to actually leave the house instead of spending every second at my computer shitposting.

>>106276916 (OP)
Lived in Tx & midwest. Graduated HS in 2003.

You could say, "gay" in school w/o getting expelled. That & "faggot" were often used among friends. Had a teacher tell a friend, "That's unmanly". We all laughed.

Calling on a landline was definitely "a thing" pre-911. Cell phones existed, but plans cost more; so we still used the home phone. You'd get a busy signal if the person (house) you called was on the phone (or, later - online) and didn't have, "call waiting". If they did have it, then they'd hear a beep & could hold the current call by clicking (effectively, the "end call" button) over to your line. If you called your girlfriend, her parents could answer (we'd RUSH to that phone 1st, or have a particular time to call so they'd be ready). Most houses used 1 line, so you could have a whole bunch of people in 1 home, in different rooms on the same call with another person (old split-screen tv trope). More importantly, it meant your call could be listened to by a parent. You could almost always hear the click when they picked up another receiver, but had to be careful. If you both picked up at the same time, then you'd not know it, unless you heard them/their phone was old/noisy/crackly.
Kids near me didn't have cell phones, in high school.

FLIGHT was waaaay easier. You walked through a metal detector & put your bags on the belt w/ x-ray. NO TSA. Airport security did that stuff. Bags were RARELY opened. Instead of seeing ~10ish people with bags, shoes, and belt scattered, it was MAYBE 1 person w/ just an open bag while you went through. Sometimes someone would get another swipe with the handheld metal detector. My dad had a bullet (clearly drilled through & empty) on his keychain & they wouldn't let him take it to the gate where I was dropped off. We were shocked.

1/2

>>106288022
Cops were still niggers, but it was less known. Those faggots profiled the hell out of folks in my mostly-white neighborhood. No local beatings we knew of, though; just constitutional rights being violated... The Rodney King beating only surprised ignorant fucks. Police niggardom isn't new - it was just finally being filmed.

It is rare that I experience the excitement & immersion that I once did for video games (play Noita...). Maybe that's cuz they suck, now (more of the idess were original, then). Could be older nerds being disagreeable & stubborn.

The middle class wasn't being squeezed quite so hard. Medical costs (murica) sucked, but are worse, now. Afghanistan war made heroin a bigger thing. I didn't see folks falling asleep in their cars in my neighborhood, til fairly recently.

Asssfags started to get mad, if you weren't 100% all in on all the people murica was down to kill. Patriotism/nationalism had its worthless folks here & there, but they were out in force, after 911. They were loud & down to try and publicly shame, if you didn't share their stupid views.

Perhaps my bar was higher, as a kid; but new technology that is available to the public seems pretty boring, now. I'll never gush over a smartphone or tablet. I'll never ask to see someone's new mobile device, cuz it is nothing new. "I can link it to my phone!?" Don't care. Seen it. Sky Map (app) was the last thing that moved the meter.
Your info online was less secure, but fewer people seemed to be grabbing it. There was no "web identity" compiled from your activity online, unless you were a 'uge security threat. Google hadn't built profiles on most of the world's population.

There were way fewer Indians. Like maybe 1 in my high school.

Repeat of old post complete

>>106283638
This poster is a faggot & a liar. This is broken clock syndrome, at best. They clearly weren't alive before the 90's. Prolly '02

>>106279059
Experience new things.

Repetition becomes more common, as you age. Your familiarity causes your mind to cut corners.

>>106277262
"Speak with the confidence of a 15 who has smoked weed once, explaining drugs to a 14 yr old who has never smoked weed"
Nigga, age.


There was zero fear of being tracked via phone. No tags to hide in someone's car. That was Superhero cartoon stuff. We'd sometimes go for drives on the weekend, cuz gas cost about half as much, shortly before you were born. Joyriding like that has dropped off, but even if you did have a phone, the signal was ass-to-non-existent out in the country.

10+ yrs ago, people were called crazy for saying that their phones were listening to them. Now, my phone shows me ads for constipation remedies pitched by SE asian women in pikachu suits. Asian women in targeted ads also tell me to use Grammarly, as if my language is bad. This is because my generation of suburbanites spoke/speaks like poor black folks for comedy's sake. The younger generation seems to do so, in a serious manner.

Because I like to drop a lil Spanish from time-to-time, I will occasionally get ads in spanish. I also uber/lyft, which means, I pick up/take home folks from the local gay bars, on the weekend. Because of these 2 factors, my fucking phone shows me ads for an AIDS medication that say "Tomo mi Prep" ("I took my PreP"). That shit didn't happen even 10yrs ago. Targeted advertising has gone off the rails


Reference was harder; but so much of it is inconsequential, anyway. We really didn't need to know the 2nd fastest swimmer, among pelagic vertibrates.

If a family member has any war stories, ask if they are willing to tell you. Propaganda will destroy the truth & it seems equally possible in a digital world.

I used to knock at my friend's doors randomly in the afternoon and ask their parents "can Cody and Chris come out to play?"

>>106276916 (OP)
'85 here, I used to have a six-pack when I was 10. We did nothing but run outside and climb every three and rock we found. Shit went downhill when the internet became a thing. Though those early years playing Counter-Strike and Ultima Online with my buddies were pretty sweet.

>>106280342
>Oh, and probably the biggest difference of them all, meeting people online was such a novelty and cool thing. It felt surreal to play Runescape with so many different people and at the dinner table you'd tell your parents that you talked to someone from a different country earlier.
I think younger people dont appreciate how insane this felt to do at the time, especially as an American where most of us live so far from any other country that even speaking with a Canadian would be noteworthy and rare. I had a very good friend from Finland named Jouni who I met in 2007 or something and my family was shocked I was able to talk to someone that far away.

In those days even Europeans spoke notably shittier English. A South American you could actually understand at all was super rare, and the biggest national menace was Brazilians because they came in large numbers and didn't speak English. Not a chinese hacker for a thousand miles. Also furrows were really really annoying, it was a self replicating system of annoying loser freaks being open to anybody, meaning more annoying loser freaks joined, so on and so on.

>>106288028
>There were way fewer Indians.
I miss those days more than you can believe.

I'm glad I'm old.
Good times.
Some bad too, but that's life.

>>106280683
You weren't alive in the 1950's, larper.

>>106276932
That sounds like something cruel and unusual