what's something from the 2000s that you want to see again?

[cat]

I want color, nowadays everything is all muted colors or shades of grey or beige and it makes everything look so miserable. The clothes now are so bland compared to what they were in the 90s and 2000s and I hope that cool designs and vibrant colors come back!

[Bumhug]

Something I just thought of was REAL hacking. Aside from Defcon events these days, hacking culture was a lot more fun and it was closer to its actual roots: making electronic devices do cool stuff they weren't intended to. There was also dumb fun stuff like salting vending machines, using dial up networking tricks to bump people off the internet, writing Javascript functions that made your computer automatically open up your CD-ROM tray by itself. The internet was less security conscious so it was also easier to learn how to try some of the more blackhat stuff like hacking e-mail accounts using easily acquired personal data (Yahoo was particularly easy), blind SQL injections attacks, and war dialing and port scanning were basically unknown and easy to do. Nowadays it seems like the closest thing I can get to that is attacking direct print printers to print out warnings about how they need to secure their printers.

Phreaking was still a thing since pay phones still existed. I enjoyed sticking it to Ma Bell by using hacked tone dialers (the old phone systems in the 90s/early 2000s used tones to verify you inserted coins, so you could simulate the tones for coin inserts and button presses so you could make free calls and be kind of invisible). Unfortunately later (I think) they changed the tones, but eventually they just muted the line when dialing or inserting coins and that killed it.

[lakes]

Phreaking was still a thing since pay phones still existed. I enjoyed sticking it to Ma Bell by using hacked tone dialers (the old phone systems in the 90s/early 2000s used tones to verify you inserted coins, so you could simulate the tones for coin inserts and button presses so you could make free calls and be kind of invisible). Unfortunately later (I think) they changed the tones, but eventually they just muted the line when dialing or inserting coins and that killed it.

I actually heard of phone phreaking. Anyone who's curious about it or simply nostalgic for it should go watch "the secret history of hacking (2001)". It's a good documentary on the subculture at the time and it also features Steve Wozniak.

[Cryptozoologist.777]

Spikelets, kandi, loom bands, rubber bracelets, robo dogs, usable cameras, teen friendly spaces (nephews are always stuck inside) and probably less cars. I have my reasoning for some of this but it can mostly be summerised as "all my friends have incredibly depressed younger siblings or i see kids acting like adults"

[MacroNemesis]

I haven't read through the whole thread yet but I wanted to add, god I want translucent housing on electronics please! Or hell color! I miss Neon Green cases for my desktop and laptops. Yes, I know the black, and silver, and the grey can look good (I do own a m2 macbookpro), But man I miss color in designs.

[twpclattycell]

Imaginary WMDs

[rnottelovesowls]

Imaginary WMDs

say what now? i don’t remember that growing up

[Jester of the night]

A fun chaotic internet, a weird sense of mystery and frontier on the internet, and of course FLIP PHONES (i know they still have them but FLIP PHONES.)
Theres other things heres a more weird and personal one.
When I was younger a lot of the shit I had, watched, and played with was old like in ~2017~2018 I was playing with a PS3 which wasnt super old but 5 years is ehhh half a decade so OLD. I also played with segas and weird consoles that illegally had arcade games on them. Anyways The television I watched is strange I watched stuff from the 90s-2000s primary and still watched stuff on VHS because idk. Anyways sorry for the story but I wanted to provide context for what im about to say next. Sometimes I would encounter strange pieces of media that brought me in some ways a warm, cozy, and yet somewhat unsettling feeling, as if I was sitting in the chair in the sky looking at the dawn. Most of that strange stuff (haha you thought was going to say shit well....dang it I said it again!) tend to be from the early 2000s. SO what I want back is strange yet angelic things from that era including cool anime.

[scarfysquared]

bluetooth idog. could you imagine
another thing i guess would be like. Background music in things. like scrolling through the nintendo eshop and it not sounding so desolate but instead something like the wii u eshop or the dsi shop. menu themes (NINTENDO I SWEAR TO GOD-)
i guess also prices from that era because a chocolate bar has no business being 100bs dude what the hell
no ai in the sense of replacing people in creative spaces. to me stuff like c.ai is fine-ish (not good but still not bad) but if it's image generating to replace artists then. yeah. kill.
i cant think of anything else :P

[Belaneura]

People keep mentioning the phones. I strongly agree here, specifically their software/visual layout. I've been dying to get my hands on a functioning Sony Ericsson or what have you (I've unsuccessfully tried multiple times to revive the one that was given to me as a kid, which I did nothing with but write dumb notes and take pictures of whatever ancient version of Minecraft I was playing at the time.) Maybe it's just me liking to decorate tiny, cramped little spaces, but to me that almost transitional-to-smartphones look on a tiny screen feels so personal and comfortable. Also, the way they slid and the way the buttons felt was much more pleasant than constantly dirtying up a screen with your fingers lol


By extension, I miss blackberries. All my family members had these fucking things when I was a kid, but I never see them anymore. Honestly? I'd use one as my personal phone if I could.

Only one of these is a blackberry, but all of them are good to me for the same reasons