20 Things Millennials Did On The Internet That Would Make No Sense To Teens Today
The internet feels depressingly bleak these days: AI slop and bots are all over social media. We all exist in our own little online echo chambers. And as I type this, bad-faith actors are probably tricking your grandma into thinking Tom Cruise is messaging her and needs money for food right away. (Poor Tom!)
Given the dismal state of things, a lot of millennials have been realizing just how good they had it growing up. The web seemed simpler in the late ’90s and early ’00s ― cozier and more close-knit, even, with people using it mainly to email friends and family or to find people with similar interests on message boards and chat rooms.
Of course, dark corners on the internet have always existed, and in chat rooms, most of us probably encountered a creeper asking for our “ASL” in the hopes of finding a kid to groom. (The TV show “To Catch a Predator,” in which NBC host Chris Hansen would ambush adult men who attempted to hook up with strangers they believed to be young children, started in what many millennials think of as the glory days of the internet,in 2004.)
So maybe it wasn’t so cozy after all. But something was definitely different about it, too. In the spirit of nostalgia, we decided to ask millennials (and cusp Gen X-ers) to share what they remember most from those days. Here’s what they said. (As a nostalgic millennial, I added a few myself, too.)
Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Using your burgeoning HTML skills to make fan sites on Geocities or Angelfire
“If you were a fan of something — a movie, a video game, a celebrity, whatever — you didn’t talk about it on social media, you made a website about it. People made fan websites for anything you can imagine. I had one about a Star Wars video game that got cancelled and another one for bucket hats. They always had a guestbook where someone could say something like, ‘You made a website about bucket hats?’” ― Jesse J. Anderson, author of the Extra Focus ADHD Newsletter
Being petty with your MySpace Top 8
“What was the point of having a Top 8 friend category? Teens these days would probably call it cringe, but there was nothing better than removing someone who pissed you off from your MySpace Top 8. We didn’t have to deal with influencers shoving products down our throats on MySpace, it was just pure innocent interactions with your friends. Also, MySpace was unknowingly teaching us coding when all we were trying to do was get a fire background ” ―Ayanna Sanaa Davis, an artist and autism advocate
Waiting for images to load, slowly, line-by-line
“Back in the early internet days, seeing a photo wasn’t instant gratification — it was a patience test. You’d click on an image, and then... wait. And wait. Watching as each line of pixels slowly loaded, revealing your favorite celebrity or that one grainy meme your friend emailed you. Sometimes you’d just give up halfway through because it wasn’t worth the 10-minute investment. Teens today live in the world of instant everything, so explaining how we had to work for our content would blow their minds.” ―Marni Battista, an author
Designing your own website and measuring how popular you were with hit counters and guestbooks
“Before follower counts and likes measured digital clout, we made websites with publicly visible ‘hit counters’ displaying our web traffic. And instead of comment sections, we had online ‘guestbooks’ where visitors could sign their names and leave a message to show their support. Seeing your hit counter tick up or having someone write ‘Cool site!’ in your guestbook was the ultimate badge of honor.” ― Brianne Fleming, the author of “By Popular Demand,” a newsletter about marketing and pop culture
Illegally burning copies of entire albums off of LimeWire and Napster
“Getting a computer virus? Who cares, as long as you’ve got all the songs you want for your CD or the CD your classmate or the boy you liked has asked you to burn for them. I know LimeWire used to hate to see me coming. In 2025, all the music you need is right on your phone.” ― Davis
Chatting with ‘celebrities’ on AIM
“There also used to be forums claiming to ‘out’ secret celebrity handles on AOL messenger — as a teenager I had a four hour conversation with someone who it is now very obvious was actively pretending to be Leonardo DiCaprio, because why would the real Leo be talking to a 17-year-old girl with a top down, high angle webcam photo (even if I was in his under-26 age bracket in a way that was almost appropriate to his age at the time)? I genuinely believed I had a celebrity encounter in that moment and hey, there is no proof that it wasn’t him?” ―Vix Leyton, a standup comedian
Savagely ranking strangers on HotorNot.com
“Again, it wasn’t all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows in those early days of the internet. HotorNot.com is a perfect encapsulation of how toxic the internet could be, even then. The website ― created by two electrical engineers and UC Berkeley grads inspired by their conversations ranking women passing by offline (charming!) ― let people submit photos of themselves to be rated by other users on a scale of 1 to 10. The average ranking you received let you know where you fell on the hotness spectrum. I remember spending entire Friday evenings with my friend Crystal, picking people apart like we were judges on a show called ‘America’s Next Top Definitely Not A Model.’ I’m so sorry!” —Wong
Printing maps off MapQuest
“Before I had a map in my phone, I would have to look up the area on MapQuest, print all the pages, staple them together, and then look at it every time I stopped at a red light like I was reading a book report in the driver seat of my car.” ―Ian Aber, a comedian and writer
“I’d say 92% of my internet usage was just looking up directions on MapQuest and printing them out. My car was full of hundreds of pages from MapQuest just scattered everywhere. If you missed a turn, you drove home.” ―Anderson
Curating and self-publishing AOL zines
“Before I was a reporter or even a school newspaper editor, I was an AOL zine maker. A zine ― short for magazine ― was basically a self-published email newsletter that went out to your ‘followers.’ Unlike, say, Gmail today, AOL email was a very visual format: You could add pictures, graphics, colors schemes and different fonts to your newsletter and toy with HTML so your zine looked just right before you sent it out to your 52 followers.
There was a zine for nearly every subculture and interest: ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ fandom, video game news. For many preteen and teen girls ― myself included ― zines tended to be of the J-14/Teen Bop variety, filled with girly things like outfit ideas, polls, cute little pixel dollz, and advice columns we had no business writing.” ―Wong
Sending chain mail
“Part of the beginning of the internet was also the beginning of email and it was full of chain letters, and you believed them. If you didn’t forward one to 10 people, you would have bad luck for the next seven years!” ― Courtney Carini, an ADHD coach
Having to use your desktop to visit Facebook
“There was a time when Facebook wasn’t at our fingertips — it was tied to our desk. You could only log in on a computer, so replying to messages wasn’t instant. You’d wait until you got home, open up Facebook on a clunky browser, and then respond to that cute guy’s wall post. Teens today can’t imagine not having 24/7 access to their social lives. Back then, socializing online required both strategy and patience.” ― Battista
Subscribing to email digests
“A lot of people subscribed to email digest groups back in the day. It was like a message board that was refreshed TWICE A DAY — all done via email. I was in one for the UK band Catatonia. You would send your message to be included in the ‘digest’ and you would get the full compilation in the morning and the evening. There were whole conversations and fandom arguments that took place at a snail’s pace, like Twitter in Matrix bullet time. You didn’t know anything about the other digest subscribers beyond what they shared. This was 26 years ago and I am still friends with someone I met there now. We actually communicate on Instagram DM now, which is probably only slightly quicker. On account of how busy we are.” ― Leyton
Sending covert messages to your crush through your screen name
“Back then you’d subtly include your crush’s code name in your Skype/MSN status in hope they would see it and be *incepted* into liking you back.” ― Katie Wu, a fantasy author
Reading X-rated stories about ‘Lord of the Rings’ characters on Fanfiction.net
“I remember reading smutty fics on Fanfiction.net before WattPad/AO3 (and before it was socially acceptable to be a loser).” ― Wu
Finding community through WebRings
“Teens probably don’t know about WebRings. Since search engines like Google were so barebones, just in their infancy of existence (or not even in existence yet), you’d point a visitor to another friend’s website to try and increase traffic (which was calculated with a visible Traffic/Visitor Calculator at the bottom of the page to show how popular your website was; no secret visitor engagement charts like on IG). Having a website was like building a cabin deep in the woods, and you needed to build a dirt road, and the road had to connect to the street in order to even be discovered. Hashtags and algorithms weren’t a thing yet, so stumbling across interesting websites was largely via linking to each other as a community at the bottom of a website.” ― Herbst
Waiting by the computer for an instant message from your crush
“Before smartphones made us perpetually online, we had to literally sit at our computers waiting for someone to message us. You’d leave AIM open, hoping your crush would log on, and listen closely for the telltale ding. Miss it, and you’d just sit there wondering if they logged off before you could say hi. It was basically real-time emotional whiplash. Teens today would probably wonder why we didn’t just text. (Because we didn’t have unlimited texting until later — thanks for reminding us, Gen Z.)” ― Battista
Visiting that site with the weird dancing baby
“Teens will never understand the dancing baby/Oogachacka Baby taking over the early internet. Somehow, a poorly designed graphic of a baby simulating the cha-cha went viral before we understood what going viral meant.” ―Jodi Meltzer, author of “Your Face Lights up the World”
Not having internet service or texting because your parents said it was ‘not on your phone plan’
“In the early 2000′s you couldn’t text without either pressing a number multiple times to get a letter (hence the evolution of shorthand like BRB, LOL...) or if you had a fancy Blackberry, and it was ridiculously expensive. I got my first phone as a senior in high school and my parents definitely said texting was out of the question because it wasn’t in our plan. No one I knew with a phone had access to the internet ― I didn’t get Twitter until college, and also couldn’t have it on my phone because it was way too expensive for my data plan.” ― C.B. Lee, an author of young adult and middle-grade fiction including “Minecraft: The Shipwreck”
Putting your graphic design skills to the test while making your own gifs
“Long before Giphy existed, we all had to create our own GIFs. That sounds like the digital equivalent of ‘we had to walk 20 miles uphill both ways to school in a blizzard,’ but sharing GIFs was so much more labor-intensive back in the day. I taught myself to create GIFs in Photoshop, which was a whole ordeal.
In this new era of co-creation it’s all about Stitches, Duets and Remixes of videos to create memes, but long before short-form video was a thing, we’d manually clip and share GIFs of TV shows, YouTube videos, sports games, you name it. GIFs now are much more of a reactive content format, but even 10 years ago we’d GIF everything. Kids will just never understand or appreciate the effort and energy that went into making GIFs.” ― Lia Haberman, a creator economy expert and the author of the ICYMI Substack
Spending way too much time crafting away messages
“Before social media, before smartphones, and when text messages had immense limitations (can’t believe we used to pay PER TEXT MESSAGE, or had only 100 texts per month included on a phone plan), friends would leave an ‘away message’ on AIM, just leaving their desktop computer on all day everyday, which could be read by anyone in their Friends list. Mostly basic ‘out with family, bbl’ or ‘come visit me @ the mall’ notes if it wasn’t a cryptic song lyric or poem. (Because what else would teenagers leave up for others to find?) You wouldn’t have instant access to the messages like texts or app notifications, it was only after you got back to your desktop computer to read everything you missed.” ― Kim Herbst, an illustrator
“Imagine being ‘away’ from your devices. Not only that, but others are looking for you and instead are greeted with a mysteriously decorated Fall Out Boy quote. Could that quote be about you? Who is this mysterious girl, and why can’t I reach her? Suddenly, you’re thinking about her all the time. Now our socials leave little to the imagination, as I live-tweet my dentist appointment. But then, there was something thrilling about leaving a trail with your away message, like the scent of a perfume: ‘SuGaR We’Re GoInG DoWn SwInGiNg.’” ―Maggie Mae Fish, an actor and comedian
