Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.

Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.

24/7 Wal-Marts

It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.

Video Games that were shipped in complete versions

Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.

  • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
    93·
    5 days ago

    The pre-algorithm internet and social media era of about 2000-2014.

    I remember when Instagram was just pictures of my friends cats, hikes, and thrift finds. It was great and fun.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
      7·
      4 days ago

      When Facebook status windows automatically had an “is” following your name. So posts would start with “Mary is” and you’d fill in what you’re doing or how you’re feeling.

      When Twitter used SMS and you could use it just to follow your favorite band, so whenever they posted it felt like you got a text from them. That was pretty cool.

    • cobysev@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      5 days ago

      I barely got grandfathered into a pension program with the US military. They went away in 2015. I had served over a decade at that point and they still let me retire in 2022 under that program. The new program is a sort of 401k type system, but I didn’t have enough years in service to contribute to it for retirement, so they didn’t even give me the option to switch over.

      Granted, I retired after only 20 years served so my pension is not very big. But it’s money in my pocket every month for the rest of my life, so I’m not complaining. I’ll never starve or go without shelter.

  • whelk@retrolemmy.com
    31·
    5 days ago
    • Dollar menus at fast food places
    • Firefly
    • Halloween neighborhood roam trick or treating
    • Calvin & Hobbes but I’m glad Watterson ended it when he did
    • Angular car design (yeah down with car centrism but those angles looked cool)
    • Internet 1.0 and the separation of offline and online life
    • The Beyond Taco at Del
    • Personal privacy
  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 days ago

    Freedom? Democracy? An Internet before the eternal September, SPAM, marketing surveillance, and ads everywhere?

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
    34·
    5 days ago

    TIL that Walmart aren’t open 24hrs anymore. I thought it switched back after COVID, but I guess not.

    I haven’t tried visiting a Walmart after 7pm in a very long time.

    • Ryoae@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      17·
      5 days ago

      I think the covid thing happening was their excuse to seize doing that. They were 24/7 right around that period. But I could also see other reasons why they stopped. I mean, overnights were poorly staffed and it’s wal-mart, everyone is going to be getting away with tons of shit like stealing and customers getting rowdy.

      Personally, as an overnight worker, I’m glad it ended. I miss being able to shop peacefully but, better safe than convenient.

      • redsand@infosec.pub
        1·
        3 days ago

        There was a golden time when you could ride the gocarts and mini bikes around the store at 1 am and the 2 people on shift couldn’t be bothered so long as you don’t break anything or steal

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
        1·
        4 days ago

        It probably got expensive to keep all those overnight workers to handle the few customers they had. And those that are still left, and stocking the shelves for the next day, will be replaced by robotic stockers before too long.

  • WanderWisley@lemmy.world
    7·
    4 days ago

    Early internet 2000-2011ish.

    Physical buttons.

    Watching sports without a subscription.

    Keebler pizzeria chips.

    The News.

    Physical media.

    Video games releasing finished without a day one patch.

  • Strider@lemmy.world
    28·
    5 days ago

    When one still could have the reasonable impression that everyone is the same before the law.

    • Ryoae@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      We need politics to be boring again.

      I’m tired of living in “interesting” times. Because whats interesting, is detrimental to everyone equally aside those benefiting.

      • Strider@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 days ago

        I know this is a rhetorical question. Still.

        Maybe childhood as turtle answered, but also before this whole US downturn with openly proven criminals and still nothing happened.

        From outside of the US it started for me with the impeachment of Trump.

        He’s not the first of course. But before that at least an effort was put into the appearance.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
    10·
    4 days ago

    Ah 24/7 Walmart, that’s how I bought my first stuff for experimenting with femininity, waiting until 2am and going a town over to ensure nobody I knew saw me…

    And to answer your question the wild west internet. There was freedom and rebellion there. A whole new world with every weirdo, freak, and nerd at your fingertips. A place where you weren’t alone until you found a person who could recommend a place, but instead you could just look it up and find out where your kind of freaks were chatting and they’d even tell you if there was a place irl. Ironically I’m noticing a shift back to needing to know a person to find a place, but that place is a discord server more often these days.

  • 1dalm@lemmings.world
    263·
    5 days ago

    It’s funny to me to see people mythologize how perfect video games were before they could be remotely updated.

    Sure, game developers rely on fix-it-later updates much more than they should today, but games had bugs back then too.

    • TeamAssimilation@infosec.pubEnglish
      26·
      5 days ago

      It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.

      I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.

      Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.

      My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.

      • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
        10·
        5 days ago

        My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise.

        You know what’s interesting? I see footage and images from the previous few fallout games, all of them, in so many different contexts - people love those games and they talk about them, A LOT.

        But I have never seen any footage from fallout 76.comparitively nbody seems to think it worth celebrating, in the same way as the other few fallout games.

        That’s how you can tell a series fell off. You can apply this to TV and movies too - i see less ‘House of the Dragon’ stuff than i saw ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff

    • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.

      now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.

      it’s lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB

          • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            I thought that seemed a bit high, but you’re right. Halo 3 was around 6.3GB and Reach was closer to 9. Genuinely thought they’d be way smaller than that.

          • ElectricMachman@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            Which should be optional, especially for consoles. If you’re playing through a TV, using the inbuilt speakers and sitting a couple of metres away, there is no advantage to uncompressed textures and audio.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.

        Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.

        • AskewLord@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          4 days ago

          SA had 50-60 devs. in 2025 that’s a small dev team. The original gta3 had 25-30. SA only has about double the devs of GTA3

          GTA6 dev team is over 6,000 people. Most dev teams today are to 400-500 people for AAA games.

    • Ryoae@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      31·
      5 days ago

      Well, yeah. There’s a meme I actually saw that demonstrates how developers were back then compared to now. Developers back then, really did care about how to make a game at its best with like…2MB of cache or very little video memory or what little of bits they had to work with.

      Today and for a while, with technology as to where it is at where sky is virtually the limit, we’ve got games that are so poorly optimized, it makes you wonder.

      • 1dalm@lemmings.world
        4·
        5 days ago

        I was guilty of that very thing once. During my first programming class back in college, I wrote an Asteroids clone as a project. My professor kept sending it back telling me to fix it. I really racked my brain trying to figure out what he was sending back to me (he wouldn’t tell me, I was supposed to find and correct the error). The game ran just fine. Finally a gave up and asked him to tell me the answer of what my code was doing wrong. He showed me that I had one line of code that was basically making a new instance of the entire game for every screen refresh. (I wrote it in Java, so Java was just correcting it for me in real time.)