The Yahoo Chat Incidents | Nostalgia Nerd
Vložit
- čas přidán 2. 06. 2024
- Go to thld.co/zbiotics_nerd22_0922 and get 15% off your first order of ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic by using my code NERD22 at checkout. Thanks to ZBiotics for sponsoring today’s video! ~ Hello Darkness my Old Friend...and by that, I mean Hello Yahoo! Chat my old friend. You see, back in the 90s, Yahoo Chat sprang onto the scene, and it caused quite a commotion. For many, this was their first introduction to the world of chat rooms, and finding yourself suddenly in one was quite an experience. So we're going to take a dive into Yahoo!, Yahoo Chat, Yahoo Pager and, of course, Yahoo Pager to see just what those glory chat days held, and that sadly, includes much of the horror that it included.
nnerd.es/discord
#chatrooms #internet #yahoo
⌚Timings⌚
00:00-02:49 Introduction
02:49-04:11 ZBiotics
04:11-09:46 Yahoo! Chat & Messenger
09:46-15:22 ASL
15:22-19:47 Voice Chat
19:47-23:13 Video Chat
23:13-24:17 Booters
24:17-26:11 The Fall of Yahoo! Chat
26:11-27:17 What Now?
27:17-28:13 Credits
🔗Video Links🔗
Robbie Strike/Weird Walter: / robbiestrike
Nothingtodo.tv: web.archive.org/web/200601060...
Yahoo Booters in action: • me getting booted on y...
"Best Yahoo Booter": • best yahoo booter
Yahoo! 10 Year Anniversary DVD: archive.org/details/Yahoo10Year
UK Spying on Yahoo! Chat users: • U.K. reportedly spied ...
Confessions of an internet addict: • Flashback: Confessions...
Internet Safety PSA: • Internet Safety
BBC News Story: www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology...
Eagle Averro Clip: / hackers-on-eagle
Yahoo! Chat Blog: web.archive.org/web/201212040...
Yahoo! Together Advert: • Introducing Yahoo Toge...
Yahoo! Chat Images: / yahoo_chat_circa_1997 ~ / i_sat_in_yahoo_browser... ~ / i_see_your_msn_messeng...
Chat Room Tales: / cbtpr2n ~ thoughtcatalog.com/holly-rior...
An interesting Creepy Pasta (not used): thoughtcatalog.com/holly-rior...
How the worst parts of the internet helped shape me: finance.yahoo.com/news/worst-...
Booter Images: / booted
More links to follow.
🏆 Support 🏆
Support my channel, get exclusive videos & perks, as well as an ad and sponsor free experience at / nostalgianerd from just $1
🏪 NN Shop & Affiliate Links! 🏪
My eBay Shop: nnerd.es/NerdShop (Now Re-open!)
My Retro Tech book: nnerd.me/HVFtSB (2nd edition is out!)
Desk Shelves for Retro Computers: nnerd.me/RetroShelves (Because you're worth it)
🍻 Share/Like 🍻
If you wish to share this video in forums, social media, on your website, or ANYWHERE else, please do so! It helps tremendously with the channel! Also, giving a thumb up or down also helps with visibility on CZcams. Many thanks!
📟 Subcribe 📟
Click to Subscribe: nnerd.es/2K4TYvX
📱 Join me on Social Media 📱
🐥 / nostalnerd
🎮 / nostalgianerd
👱🏼📘 / nostalnerd
📸 / nostalgianerd
🌍 www.nostalgianerd.com
🎥 Equipment 🎥
Panasonic Lumix G5
Rode NT-1 Mic
Corel Video Studio Ultimate 2020
Corel Paint Shop Pro 2020
📜 Resources 📜
In video links and references are provided where possible. If you believe I have forgotten to attribute anything, please let me know (drop me an email via. the about page on CZcams or send me a tweet), so I can add it here. Apologies if I have missed anything out, it takes time to make these videos and therefore it can be easy to forget things or make a mistake.
Errors and omissions excepted.
Some material in this video may be used under Fair Dealing / Fair Use. Where under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 (UK: Sections 29 and 30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988), allowance is made for purposes including parody, quotation, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, education and research. Fair Dealing / Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. - Zábava
Hey folks. Thanks so much for watching this video. It started out as a documentary about Yahoo Chat, but went a bit deep and dark. Thanks to ZBiotics for sponsoring today’s video! Go to thld.co/zbiotics_nerd22_0922 and get 15% off your first order of ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic by using my code NERD22 at checkout.
hi 😳
Early 80's. CB Radio... Lots of bullying and nastyness.
Mid 90's, AIM/Yahoo Chat, only creep factor turned to 11 and added smut, as Avenue Q claims, the internet is for... Well, remember that 3G stands for Games, Gambling and Girls/Guys/And the other kinks ;)
I actually really want to buy this stuff but it's only available in the US. Devastating lol.
@@HeadsetHistorian No you don't as it has zero studies to prove it does what it says it does.
Yahoo chat went a bit deep and dark
We used to go into lesbian chat rooms as early teen boys and try to get “private chats” with girls. Looking back, they were probably just other young guys.
Ahh the classic G.I.R.L.'s, Guy In Real Life
lol
You mean people would just lie on the internet?
Same haha I was just messing around looking back not cool but still.
@@Tom2404 perish the thought!
Met my husband in 1997 in yahoo chat Sci fi and fantasy room! We're still happily married today! We were 1/2 a world apart!
Oh my...same thing happened to me. We were too young to know how to make it work, but we flew back and forth from U.S. to Germany for a few years trying. Your comment made me happy!
My bad luck😢
Using the term “Wild West” is perfect for describing what it was like growing up as the first generation in which every house owned a PC and had at least a dial up connection. I’m a young mom, just 35 with two young teenagers. Unfortunately everything I’ve learned and put into place for internet safety in our home comes from personal experience. Our parents weren’t taught how to safely allow us to interact with others online. It was either complete free reign or total disallowance, both just as dangerous honestly. My parents fell into the total disallowance camp which just taught me how to be sneaky. That all taught me how important it was to allow our kids to have some freedoms with certain safeguards in place to monitor if need be but more importantly reassurance of how if they found themselves manipulated by someone older they aren’t to be blame and won’t be held at fault. This allows them to feel safe to approach us if the unthinkable does happen.
this is *the* correct approach honestly; if you just talk to children about "Older People Bad" and "Strangers Bad" but never explain why or don't clearly reassure that you're safe to approach, then they'll just get sneaky about it, as they think they'll get in trouble for it and don't actually realise why it's bad
This is so true. I'm 34 and like you said, we were the first to grow up with computers in the home with dial up and beyond after. What a time that was - and we're the first gen to know the basis of all tech now when our previous generations didn't know how to deal with it.
tbh im very glad to see ppl parenting their kids properly like this tbh, ur doing an awesome job, let's say that me and my parents arent on the best of terms so seeing stuff liked this makes me very happy
Publish your novel.
I was free reign but I had it drilled into me to not tell anybody my real name or anything about who I was, which is a big departure from how the internet is nowadays. Funnily enough I ended up getting married to my best friend from the AOL chatroom days :)
One of my friends didn't understand why I didn't sign up for facebook since I liked chatting so much. I loved being anonymous. It felt safer
It really was.
Facebook is very much still shitshow and I know very few people who still use it - for the first many years it functioned very similar to Hot or Not (remember that site?), but they have improved the security so you no longer can be easily discovered by weirdos if you don't want to, it's just buried in the settings. Not a fan personally, never was, but we use Facebook Groups at work, so I'm forced to use it :(
You're as anonymous as you choose to be.
My parents met on a Yahoo chat room in 1997. I'm an internet baby.
Incredibly early for that sort of thing, your parents were pioneers in a way.
Using Yahoo Messenger from my phone felt so futuristic for me in 2006.
Same, and I was using a Nokia lol
I was a British nerd hooked on IrCQ... ...I met this really kewl Australian Girl in chat... a few years later, she moved in with me... a few years after that we moved to Australia and we started a family... I would love to say it ended 'happily ever after' ... haha
I was also on IrCQ back in the day. I would hang out in the #Games chat.
Hopefully it didn't end too bad for you.
But at least you got to meet Paul Hogan! "That's not a chat room. This, is a chat room!!!
If I find out she doesn't have a huge dick, I'm gonna be disappointed with this internet love story.
U got cam or pic?🤣
C'mon man. I'm sure invested in your story now I need to know what happened
I miss the MSN Messenger time, it was a simpler, more wholesome and sleazy time.
My wife and I met on the internet and the 1st year of our relationship was long distance over Yahoo chat. My memories of messengers and chat rooms from back then are mostly good ones thankfully, but I avoided the seedier side of things.
That's a wholesome and great story! Wish you many more years of happiness together!
I met my former girl on Multimania.
She lived in Canada and me in France :)
Later we had a house and 2 kids. No dog, sorry.
Never expected to see the mapper of ancient Mars here, but it's a welcome surprise nonetheless
@@planetearth2249 I'm always pleasantly surprised to bump into people who know of my work.
@@Ittiz It still stands out to me even after several years of it existing, truly out of this world. 👌
This video hit me with a heavy dose of nostalgia for an era I haven’t thought about in years. Addictive can’t even describe it. I used to sneak people in to the place I worked at as a young lad because none of us had internet at home in the latter half of the 90s.
I can remember going home from work, having dinner, and taking the bus back into work to spend the night chatting. Funny how we take so much of this for granted now in an “always online” world. I’m glad to have been there to experience it but yeah, not everyone was so lucky.
old man lmao
The days where you could go offline
You weren't a 90s kid unless you got groomed in yahoo chat rooms.
I wonder whatever happened to 1inchtallshinji...
So much grooming
@@skikes3033 Or MSN Messenger. I was such a dumb lesbian back then, all they needed was to pretend to be a cute girl for like five minutes 😩
Yup 😂
So fuggin accurate
This hits on a personal level. My parents allowed me to have a computer in my bedroom with access to the internet. They were very uninformed. They admit they made a mistake but I don't blame them. I'll never allow my kid the same amount of access I was allowed.
Mine didn't put ours in my room, but it didn't stop them from letting me play on it 24/7 from the age of 6. These days I look back and grimace, I used to broadcast my first/last name and age on any site I could get my hands on.
Unfortunately these days kids are thrown smartphones at 3 and given the whole online world before they even know how to read. It's sad. My parents were just unaware, it was 2003. No excuse for parents who grew up with the internet to allow it today.
Yep same here although my parents didn't really make a mistake as I've never intended to have children and I don't ever intend to growing up in the early days of the engine in just knowing you have fucked up the world is I just can't bring a child into it the closest I'll ever do is a stepfather situation but I'm staying out the internet conversation as I remember when the internet was a really fucked-up place and frankly I don't feel comfortable talking about that with young people at all
This was proper nostalgic! I didn’t like the chat rooms for many of the reasons mentioned. I used Yahoo Messenger to chat to my friends. One day I discovered it had a “Members Directory” which could be filtered. The first stranger I connected with via the directory became my wife! We’ve been together nearly 20 years now.
I was big on Geo Cities, and later transitioned to Yahoo Groups. They were both great for special interests, like cycling, gardening, cooking, & a multitude of hobbies. They provided a means of connecting like-minded individuals, on a platform, where ideas could be shared. I do miss those days.
Facebook & other sites now overly micro-manage things. Oversite has become over reach. Such is the world we live. :(
Facebook is so fucking gross these days, absolutely disgusting. I came here to see what's going on in the lives of my friends and loved ones, and instead I have to sift through a bunch of random stupid ass videos that have forced themselves upon my feed like a bunch of content r*pists. It's so gross that I check it maybe once a week at this point. And I'm *FORCED* to use stupid garbage ass Facebook because some of my friends just REFUSE TO USE ANYTHING ELSE TO KEEP IN TOUCH. ANYTHING ELSE. AT ALL. I'd welcome carrier pigeons at this point. I am beyond tired of it. I'm exhausted. I have Facebook exhaustion.
To anyone reading this, please, do the ENTIRE WORLD a favor and stop using Facebook. Use literally anything else, so that people can finally stop using Facebook.
We need to bring that sort of thing back, because the closest mainstream examples of that we have to that now are WordPress and Tumblr and those pages don't even have half the character that old Geo Cities pages did. We should get back into the days where everyone had their own personal websites, rather than a limited MySpace page that became an even more restrictive Facebook "page."
@@AbandonedVoid Neocities brings a similar premise, like the name says it's like Geocities and you build your own site from scratch, it's pretty neat
@@AbandonedVoid TRIPOD and AngelFire are still up and working but Google won't return any results of them...
I miss building websites on Geocities😭
Back in 2000, still dial up, decided to try the voice (VOIP) feature of the chat rooms, heard one person there with the accent that said "Australian" so we chatted, found out we lived near each other, were ASL compatible, lived in the same suburb, ended up hooking up and being together forever since, there were no other Aus accents on any chat room there that either of us heard till the day the rooms disappeared.
I miss the internet being the Wild West.
We were all about ICQ here, and it had a random chat feature and although you mostly got American teens or Indian weirdos, in hindsight it wasn't safe for kids at all. I think we were lucky it was early tech and webcams weren't a thing at the time.
I remember ICQ, chatroom and first million users to use their app back in 97. Mplayer chatroom and MS had a chat program as well back then.
I think Yahoo! is lucky. Otherwise it would end up like any other website that features random cams.
I met my first girlfriend on ICQ.
@@edstar83 sure I think we all did had one of those hahahaha
@@lopiklop Yahoo isn't really Yahoo anymore; they're just an empty shell of what they once were. Most their services are gone and the search engine is Bing, and given then way the world is going it would not surprise me if they shut down completely in a few years.
Chat rooms introduced me to so much new music.
I found out about Napster right after it released from Yahoo chat, user named Shatter told me about it. Downloaded music from bands that I still listen to 27~ years later. Just now I buy their music from them on Bandcamp, or Discogs if they're no longer making music.
I used to love browsing Yahoo chats back in my teenage years (early 2000's), even though it got a bad reputation (for good reason, a lot of the time). You COULD find genuinely welcoming, friendly, and wholesome rooms that didn't devolve into "A/S/L" garbage though. One I used to frequent was a room hosted by a British woman who would talk over a mic and just ask trivia questions. Whoever got it right first got points. That's it. Simple and enjoyable. I miss those days.
I met my wife through Yahoo! Chat/Messenger in 2004. We've been together ever since.
Bro I don’t believe you at all. But if it’s true… what message made you realize she was the one?? Was it this one? 8===D~~ 0:
Same. Yahoo Chat was probably my only link to the greater world in my 1 bedroom apartment at age 12.
Same but IRC.
Met my wife on mirc.. Was more of an ICQ user back then 😜
@@CasualSpud Mirc was the shit for online gaming.
I met a woman my age on the other side of our world in Germany, in the late 90's. We were young, and for some reason got the idea one of us would travel to meet the other. Convinced my parents that I needed to go there and find out if she was for real. I flew from west coast of the U.S. to Germany after saving up. I remember, one of the times she flew over to stay with my family was when 9/11 happened and she was scared to death to fly back. I don't know why I told you any of this...the early internet was innocent as my youth, and then it all went to crap.
I miss the early internet, outside of the horrible connection speeds.
Yahoo Chat and mIRC were where I began my internet social life in the late 90s. So many memories!
For Yahoo, I remember using a client called CheetaChat, which allowed you to customise your username appearance, font style and text colours. In the rooms I hung out in, it really separated the dedicated regulars from the casual visitors and was a bit of a flex (as much as having a hot pink to ice blue text gradient could be).
I was a kid at the time, so Japanese Anime: 1 was my usual haunt, and the user rooms associated with the category it was in. There was lots of roleplaying, arguing and joking around as you'd expect. If you're generally more nerdily inclined, it really wasn't that much different to hanging out on Discord in 2022.
While the negative aspects of anonymous chatting of course shouldn't be ignored, I was a teen girl at the time of using the service myself, and fortunately have mostly positive memories of it. I actually still have some friends remaining from that era of my life to this day.
* IRC, mIRC was a common windows client. And the where would really be the network, ie freenode etc. I was one of the people that used Pidgin/GAIM for pretty much everything by the time messengers proliferated (both on windows and linux), unless i wanted to do voice or vid which was rare.
And yeah it REALLY depended where you went, the nerdier parts of the net were generally run by people who had been round a while and understood netiquette..
@@mycosys unfortunately I don’t remember where I used to hang out using mIRC so I couldn’t name drop it! I know it’s a client and not a chat service of its own. Apologies for my unclear sentence.
@@LadyGagarin87 dont apologise to grammar nazis, its like feeding pidgeons you only encourage them! Reading ur original Post, Reminded me so much of me, anime room are where i discovered weird and distant things like inyuyasha and evangelion, before they ever aired in my country it was like some mystical secret club that you felt priveledged to be a part of, and I frequented many an RP server back in the day! Tried talking bout them with friends at school once and they were like 'wtf?!' So its nice to see I wasnt the only one who visited these strange parts of the web and called them home!
why are ladies on facebook way more stuckup than they were on yahoo? I met a fair amount of ladies in real life from the yahoo chatroom. I think I've never met up with anyone from facebook who I hadn't already met in real life..
@@strikingmachine2975 Because we're sick and tired to get hit on by internet perverts. The proper response to ASL was 99/none of your fn business/somewhere
I started chatting on my Dreamcast in the old IRC sega chats. A short time later I got on MSN chats. That is where I met my wife to be. :D Shortly after 9/11 2001. We are still together to this day & she's the greatest joy of my life. :)
Hey, I was very surprised to see that you show Kimberly Young! I knew her somewhat well, I was a student of hers in undergrad and then later on worked with her at a different University.
I just wanted to let y'all know that sadly she has passed on but she was a pioneer and a wonderful person.
I'm impressed by the amount of screencaps you were able to find. I remember the days of staying up all night as a middle schooler. Interesting to learn that AOL bought ICQ -- I wonder why they kept AIM and ICQ seperate? I remember having accounts on Yahoo, AIM, MSN, and ICQ.
So did I. I used Yahoo the most though. Had a few friends from school on AIM and MSN, had no one to talk to on ICQ. Also used IRC quite a bit.
They probably kept it split because AOL didn't exist outside the US, so turning ICQ into AOL would alienate millions of users and drive them to a different client because they didn't want to use AIM. In the end days of ICQ they were effectively the same thing and you could chat to people on both platforms, right before they killed ICQ completely and told people to use AIM, but by then most people had moved on to MSN and Skype.
@@thesteelrodent1796 AOL certainly did exist outside the US. At least all civilized parts of the America's had it; Canada & South America for sure. I recall installing AOL Canada on one of my machines as a kid (for god knows what reason) but It had a nice maroon tint to it rather than the traditional blue. I assume anywhere in the world where it wasn't reasonable to call the service America Online - They'd just use the CompuServe name.
I remember every room had someone blasting barely audible music (static) over the microphone.
I met my first girlfriend in Yahoo chat in 1997.
I also had a friend that I would play MMOs with where every time I'd talk to her I'd start out with 'a/s/l'. I'll still do it every once in a while 15 years later.
Met my wife on IRC and first gf on a BBS.. Old nerd flashbacks
@@CasualSpud It's funny that he mentioned ICQ. When we started dating we moved off Yahoo chat straight to ICQ.
Ironically i went the other way - had been using usenet/IRC etc for a long time but started using Yahoo! messenger for a girlfriend when we were apart. She also gave me arguably the first 'smartphone'. And my first 'camera' phone (the camera plugged in).
Probably more ironically - we met the 'old fashioned' way, in a bar lol.
I married the girl I met in 1999 on yahoot chat. We are still married. three kids
How did we go from this, to the "Never talk to anyone online!" of the mid-2000s, to where we are now? Has everyone forgotten how dangerous all this web stuff is?
And yet, it isn't that dangerous at the same time. One simply must know what they're doing.
We went from, "cool new thing!" to "OH MY GOD PANIC" to "oh this is fine" so damn fast. It's so weird...
coming from a zoomer, i wish they taught us more about internet safety beyond “don’t click on suspicious links!!!”, because that wouldve helped me avoid so many weirdos that ive been friends with in my 15 years of living
90s: don't tell anyone online your info
Now: tell everyone your day to day life, order strangers to your home via your phone
People are a afraid of spiders. I can't blame them.
Oh the chat rooms of the 90's... a wonderful, horrific, and magical time.
Never used Yahoo chat rooms, even as a kid/teenager I thought they were weird and kinda creepy.
However I did use Yahoo Messenger to talk to friends and classmates, as this was by far the most popular IM app in my country. But I think it quickly declined after 2010 as everyone shifted to Facebook chat. I remember when I went back after a few years, curious to see if there was anyone around, it was basically a ghost town.
I loved this dive into the early era of the internet. It really was wild back then! I remember the Lycos Chat Ship - a cruise themed chat room filled with the same interesting characters and… not so nice people. Terrifying how as a young teen you had so much unbridled access to the internet, yet it just seemed like the most amazing thing ever. Another great video, thanks for all your hard work!
Lycos chat is still there it's called the world's biggest chat now it's full of assholes
Yahoo Chat existed in a time when the Internet was actually fun.
It was mostly pretty boring, that's why most people didn't interact with it before social media. But if you had a bad home life or were trapped in suburbia, it could be an escape. If you had money, getting a GPU unlocked higher quality interactions with wealthier people who were mostly there to game instead of rape.
I miss Yahoo's games. I'd change my region to play that one drawing game and freeze up when people tried talking to me in Japanese. Good memories. :(
What are you on about? If you liked awful websites and terrible internet speed then. Ok it was fun? These days there are much better apps. 5G and fibre connections. I pay 25£ a month for 900mb fibre. And can access the internet at anytime on my unlimited Vodafone 5G iPhone 13 Pro. I wouldn’t trade that for the 120£ a month I paid for an ISDN line and a mobile the size of a brick I couldn’t even go online on
@The Unforgiven yea. I had a 33.6K modem on my first PC. Damn that was slow. Took hours to download one single song in mp3 lol
@@Insectoid_ What provider are you with For £25 a month, you in UK I'm assuming ?
I met my first wife on there. I'm from the UK, she was from NJ USA. At the time I used to work in a computer place keeping the email servers running, so had a lot of time on my hands. So good things did happen on there.
I fondly remember the friends I made on yahoo chat. Funny how back then we were often mocked for wanting to talk to strangers online. Now it's all a lot of us do.
So true! A lot of my friends didn't understand the appeal. And then one tried it and was hooked.
I was teen back then. I was using Yahoo chat rooms to talk to adults because I didn't feel very connected to kids my own age. Whenever I look back on those days I think about how dangerous it was.
This brought back memories. I got bored around 2004, but the earliest days were great for meeting interesting people around the world.
Initially thought this was going to be a jolly trip down memory lane of using yahoo chat. You took a far darker dive! I do have a lot of nostalgia for yahoo chat. Our college had to ban it, along with Hotmail as all the students were using it rather than talking to one another. It absolutely destroyed our college's network bandwidth.
My place of work used Yahoo Messenger for communication, and I deeply enjoyed being able to chat in real time with people around the world, even after I left that job. I still miss the old Yahoo Messenger emoticons, like the furiously studying guy, the egg flipping guy, the creepy clown and the green alien bug. Yahoo revamped Messenger and replaced those emoticons with bland versions or got rid of some altogether, and made the service less reliable. I ditched Messenger for Google Hangouts not long after this change occurred.
The glory Yahoo! Chat were slightly before my time online in the early 2000's but I too have nostalgia for IRC and ICQ/MSN.
Always felt like being left behind with the rise of Facebook as traditional chats and forums seemed to have died out.
Luckily Discord is there nowadays to cover this hole and I love it.
now you need to cover BBS, HTML chat rooms, ICQ and MIRC. the bots really killed it. Booting makes me think of MIRC war scripts.
I grew up on the internet in the early 90s. My mom was always terrified that every person I met online was going to be a creep, but I made some of my best, lifelong friends through IRC in the early digital era.
I met a pedo - nothing happened because I brought a friend and we took off, but I had said I was 14 and this guy looked like he was in his 30s at least.
Definately not the nice 14 year old I thought I'd been chatting with.
MSN Messenger was huge here when I was a teenager. I have some great memories of this. Thanks for this nice video.
Oh the Yahoo fight rooms. My goodness the internet was fun back then. We all knew what room we were going into and knew what we should expect.
I would say that one thing I felt should have been given a mention in the retrospective is “the one that survived”, IRC. It not only survived, it is older than the main topic here, and it still have some relevance to e.g. open source collaborative support. And it obviously was a major inspiration for services such as Discord and Guilded, including nomenclature with virtual “servers” and associated channels being some of the most glaring examples.
Cheers
Hi Pete this was a banger of a video, it takes me back the late 90s early 2000s. I remember as well the messenger system on Napster, I met so many people through that.
I helped in creating Yahoo boot programs back in the day. Yahoo's coding was so exploitable back then. It basically involved using Yahoo sound that you would type in the chat. By typing , you could either boot people with the code or embed images or videos in the chat rooms. At one point, it even allowed you to delete someone's hard drive by linking the DELTREE command. Most of the boot code was just basic HTML and you didn't need the software to boot. If you knew the code you could just put it in someone's message and it would boot the person plus it would lock up your messenger. And back in the day a lot of people knew who I was. Back then you'd get known quick if you knew how to code and tons of people were using it.
When you would type something inappropriate the infamous, "Good-bye" when Yahoo would kick you off 😂🤣😂🤣🤣
The booting scene was unreal; I remember there being boards for people to post their booting logs onto, the logs would go towards a scoreboard and various skiddy groups would compete for the top spots. Incredibly active at the time yet almost entirely forgotten now, along with the rm monkey scene.
The booter wars were awesome. Fun times. I miss the real internet. We can never have it back.
I was guilty of being a booter.
never heard of the booters but I had plenty of fun in IRC with nukes and other stupid things like tricking them into pressing ALT+F4
I started learning software to make booters as a kid... I'm now a software engineer with a great career... Yahoo, just like everything, has its positives and negatives.
How about cracking?
Excellent vid - feels like you’re carving out a nice niche in retro investigative journalism
the first year i had the internet in my own room was like 96 or 97... i found aol chat rooms, and would be online well into the night. it was the only place i felt comfortable talking to people i didnt know, because im an introvert. i remember feeling the excitement of talking to people, and how badly i missed it when it all started to go away. now i feel bad for the people who were taken advantage of by creeps. i had no idea at the time as it didnt happen to me.
When I first heard the term "ASL?" from Someone talking to Me, I assumed It was some kind of E-mail provider so I just answered "I don't have one... I used My Sister's.".
I got a "..." In response and never heard from Them again.
One of the many big mistakes I have made in my life was a result of meeting someone on ICQ or Yahoo chat (don't remember which it was now). I was living in Oklahoma City ath the time, and the person I met was in the Milwaukee area. We hit it off pretty well. I travelled up to meet her a couple times. Everything was great at that point. On my 2nd visit, we talked about getting married. A few months later, I moved up to Milwaukee. After being there for a few weeks, things didn't seem right. I couldn't visit her at her place anymore, because her roommate, "didn't want any guests over". Then she ghosted me. After not seeing or hearing from her in almost a year, she called me at work one day. She told me she was six months pregnant. Well, obviously, it wasn't mine. I never heard from her again. If only I could erase that chapter in my life...
Women are the worst, bro. But, hey, at least she wasn't a dude.
@@makaveli087 Yeah, that would have sucked in a different way. On the other hand, I wouldn't have made a second trip or considered moving there.
That wall of wonderful boardgames had me mesmerized, amazing selection you got there!
And of course great video, it's important to remember that the internet wasn't and isn't the clean place we're often shown these days. A lot of these issues were given more attention back then, but even nowadays you can find private chat rooms in places like WhatsApp and Discoed, and especially Telegram where child pornography gets shared, and where children are exposed to things they shouldn't, and people they shouldn't, all of us who grew up with unsupervised access to the internet have unfortunately some experience related to that to tell.
Nonetheless, I miss the MSN messenger days from the early 2010s!
I used to go to the politics rooms, I'd be about 19/20 at the time. There were different politics rooms and a lot of arguing mostly Americans (I'm from the UK) but there was one specific room I was shocked to see, a White Power room. I'd go in there and wind them up by saying say my boyfriend was black, I was Jewish, just sit back, and laugh at how offended they got, and laugh at their claims of what would happen to people like me when they were in charge of everything. Then one day I met a guy from the States, I can't be sure think he said he was from Baltimore, anyway we got talking, and we had completely opposite opinions and World views, but he seemed intelligent, or at least able to talk without having to throw out threats and insults, and we'd talk every time he saw me online
In the main room he defended me when people saw me in the room and would start with the name calling and vile insults, we got talking seriously about politics and our points of view, exchanged photos, talked a bit about our life, I can't remember anything really about what was said only that his opinions were highly racist but he was at least willing to discuss them, and we exchanged out point of view. At some point we'd spoken about me visiting the States, and meeting him and his wife, and he'd offered to put me up for a few days as their guest. His yahoo user name was rridgway.
A couple of years later, I saw that same guy, it was on the news here that he had been arrested for being the Green River Killer, I swear on my daughters life, it was the same guy Gary Ridgway. That has really bothered me for years.
I got access to the Internet for the first time in January 1998, at the age of 18, when I started in a boarding school. Being a very shy person, I immediately got hooked by the anonymity and being able to chat with anyone anywhere around the world. I started my chat journey on mIRC. I don't know when I first used Yahoo, but I never really got hooked by it.
Back then everything was text based. No emoticons of any kind back then. I clearly remember the first instance of getting a wink sent to me in the form of ;-) and I had no idea what it meant. I asked her, and she responded with "it's a wink", but at the time I didn't know what a wink was, so she told me to tilt my head to the left, but I still didn't understand.
I fucking LIVED and LOVED Yahoo chatrooms (as well as playing hours of Yahoo pool).
Yahoo Pool was the shiznit
It's funny to me that vrchat's favorite SFW activity is also pool
Yea i loved pool on yahoo plus you could chat to who you were playing.
I'd love to see similar research into the old C-U-See-Me chat rooms. That was some crazy crap. It was chat roulette long before chat roulette was around.
I completely forgot about that site! It absolutely was!
White Pine software. I take the fifth. lol
A huge indicator of how Japan appreciates the nostalgia of the "Better Times" is how they preserve the old Yahoo Interface and navigation scheme (down to the Yahoo Mail navigation). of course the site is running under modern HTML and JavaScript Standards but, it's like going to the past.
I just found this channel then saw the "done" video so I was sad, and you uploaded!! I have so much content to go through yay!
I was introduced to the internet via AOL over dial-up. I would frequent the chat rooms to waste some time. One of the fun software toys back then were PROGs. They were stand-alone programs with custom interfaces that allowed you to do a number of crazy things in chat rooms and their private messenger setup. PLEASE do a video on them!
all we need now is a video about Punters (IM Bombers), Anti-Punters, and other early tools of Yahoo and AOL chat and that era of griefing/trolling other random users by spamming them or knocking them offline or even crashing their PCs with those apps/tools.
Also these tools were handy against those early days of online creeps, people who would act dumb in chat, you could just punt them.
what i also remember is the punting wars you'd sometimes have where you encounter a random person who tried to punt you but your anti-punter prevented you from being disconnected, so you retaliate with your own punter only for their anti-punter to save them from the retaliation, so you both would launch other punters, as each one seemed to try to achieve the same thing but in different ways or methods, until ultimately you use just the right one that their anti-punter(s) were unable to protect against and you get that sense of victory of knocking another "hacker" (griefer) offline.
One of my favorites i remember back in those days was one called Antichrist punter, use to play Marilyn Manson's 1996 (~1:37 to 1:59 of the song) as an introsong and some graphics as you launched it, but just remember it was a good punter that bypassed alot of anti-punters at the time.
God, I remember these things. Ahhh, good times. I mustve been like 11 and would get into a chatroom, im then or they im me, then punt then for no reason. 🤣
I thought I was winning or something. Good times.
The internet back then was filled with sick content, I remember seeing literally videos of people being assassinated and cut into pieces 😱 unfortunately cannot be unseen
oh god this brings back memories of irc in the late 90s and the unstoppable deluge of "salut, asl plz" private messages.
The main problem with many of these chat rooms is not that users could be anonymous, but that there was no moderators. Nobody guiding the chat, keeping it on-topic, cracking down on spammers and other abuses. And major companies like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft just simply refused to pay people to do that. They would turn a blind eye to it all and say they didn't know it was happening, but they knew the truth.
There were guides. Its just that nobody knew them. They would boot people out of the room if they got too vile. And they could ban accounts. I know this because I was a member of hacking groups back in the days of Yahoo Chat, and we used to hack Yahoo Guide accounts and boot people off and kill their accounts.
That's what the booter savvy people were for. People would ask us to show the assholes the door. As long as they weren't running Yahelite with the hardened settings, we usually could.
it is still happening. SnapChat has become a haven for sex workers. SC can deny it is happening all they want but 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of Premium Snapchat is sex workers selling illicit content
Before I got into online gaming I was one of those who would frequent “fantasy” room for a while. In this context it was more of a place that you created an online persona and play pretend . It was a way to go and be whatever you wanted and chat with other eccentric people. I always found this interesting as there wasn’t any way to tell who someone was other then what they told you. As far as I knew I could be talking to a sentient toaster. Of course, being a teenager, sometimes one thing would lead to another and suddenly your parents are questioning you about a phone charge to a person in a different country you talked to for hours at 1am 😅
This was a neat nostalgic trip! Always wondered what happened after I gave up the fantasy worlds of Yahoo!
Friend of mine did dnd like stuff kinda cool
Hey Pete. Been subscribed for a while and wanna say your vids still kick ass, this is a great vid. Keep on keeping, you do it like no one else does 👍
I don't remember ever being on Yahoo chat, but I discovered IRC in 1999 and from that I discovered bots that were put into the channels to assist. I became quite fascinated with them and what they could do, and what they could potentially do.
At work last year I discovered that Microsoft Power Virtual Agents was installed on the network, and I've made my own bot to assist the members of my team. It contains prewritten information about various things, as well as scripts to look up information from spreadsheets and other systems, and send various clerical memorandums on request. I'm really quite happy to have come full circle on this! :)
Oh man, I remember the days of using Yahoo Chat, (later Messenger as this video reminded me of), and MSN Messenger. Because of those services, I learned a lot about Internet safety. It saddens me that back then, you didn't use your real name, didn't really speak about your true location, etc. Nowadays? Hell, go to Facebook and I bet you've got at least 1 person that has their full address open to the public! My Facebook (when I had it) had my real name, and just state I resided in, and sitting back thinking about was stupid for having my real name on there (but it was for friends to find me easily, and that' show they get ya!)
moderation has gotten alot better, basically.
The User created rooms were where the nightmares lurked. Luckily, Yahoo shut those down in early 2005. But yet all the twisted ppl found their way into the Yahoo Chats. I used Yahoo Messenger the most between 2003-2006. I used the Teen chat then because I was 14. My favorite chat room was the music room called Rock 4. I miss the Yahoo Audibles, especially the Contender audibles. I stopped using Yahoo Chat much after 2006 thanks to the Booters. Luckily, u could get a 3rd party Yahoo program to block booters.
What was your sn?
I sooo miss Yahoo Chat!
I had so many fun times in there. Going to so many diverse rooms with so many people. The ability to change your font size, colors among other tweaks made the experience awesome. The ability to talk on the mic and create a music room etc. Not to mention also there were games you could play with your friends. It was such a great experience which nowadays don't exist sadly. The only other chat program I know of that's decent is Paltalk but the options are soooo limited compared to how Yahoo Chat was that I hardly use it and it's just plain boring.
I wish Yahoo Chat can come back with all it's nuisances fixed. It can be the most fun online experience one could ever have!
Boy: Hey! ASL
Girl: Replies with link
End of story
I was a IRC guy. Never messed with Yahoo chat. Lol
I still hit up IRC to this day. Its always fun to go troll the gorean losers ;p
Of course, IRC was the slightly nerdier version of HTML chat rooms. Amazingly, it’s still thriving, mostly among tech types using Libéra Chat for FOSS projects.
We protected our chat room and booted out bots and weirdos with a program my mate coded. Everyone hated us and it was grand indeed.
The reason why something like Discord works so much better than Yahoo Chatrooms is because they're moderated constantly and have set rules that are enforced usually almost instantly.
Bring back IRC!
I actually used IRC from 1995 to... 2010? maybe slightly later. Thinking back it was no place for a kid or a young teen but we didn't mind all the creepiness, it was the internet and the internet was amazing.
There's no need to "bring it back", it's never gone away :-)
IRC is still alive, so no need to bring it back ;-)
IRC hasn't gone anywhere though
Looking forward to watching this! Every one of your videos are always fascinating. You always capture the spirit and even the mystery of the subject, no matter how seemingly mundane, no matter what the era, be it 70s, 80s, 90s. I used to love Yahoo chatrooms. It kind of felt like the wild west. The absolute nutters you would meet on there. I guess I was one of them. But I also met some fascinating people from around the world, some of whom I am still friends with today!
lol
@@Wagoo rotflmfaoqia+ ;^=
Love these kind of videos . Chilling an watching, thanks
If I remember correctly, it was around 2005 and I had just bought Monty Python and the Holy Grail on DVD. I put it in the disc tray of my HP, went to yahoo chat and picked a random room. I locked my mic and started the movie and not even 10 mins in, the room was at capacity. I was amazed that the chatroom was full through the entire movie. If a troll got on the mic people would boot them.
I had such fun - and a few hairy moments - with yahoo chat. I was a young teenager, and used to frequent web design:1 and programming:1 .. I reversed engineered the protocol with someone I met on there and we made some of the first bots (they were 'good' ones - offered trivia games and internet lookups and such). Also made a couple of programs that would register accounts en-mass and one that would brute force logins against a wordlist; the security was really really bad.
Also figured out that if you registered a name that started YCHT, it would kinda fuck with the protocol and made you appear like an admin in the chat rooms. That, combined with finding people's passwords, made for some excellent trolling.
Wasn't quite so fun when I went in to hacker:1 and asked for hacking tools though. That was a learning experience 😂😂
Oh no! Some young girls felt uncomfortable. The horror!
@@andymerrett I think the problem is that the world is now made up mostly of pussies.
My first chat experience was on something called Internet Gaming zone in 1996. Some weird separate app where you could play card games. Didn’t care about the games but loved the chat! Being able to chat with random people from the US was crazy!
Did a trick where you could write a long sentence and type someone else’s nickname in brackets so it appeared on a new row. That way you could get other people banned for cursing!
It would look something like this:
so, how is everyone?
F*** this game and f*** everyone in here!
hey, I didn’t type that!
victim, no cursing in chat!
6:00 interesting immigration article.
12:50 I used to talk to Eagle.
14:26 Eagle voice clip. Never thought I'd hear that again.
I wonder what happened to him. I recall him going on about balancing cam shafts. "Why are all these idiots drilling holes in perfectly good cam shafts!? To balance them!"
He was undoubtedly smart.
As teenager at the time, it was fun in the late 90's chatting to people around the world, some areas were proper dodgy though. Personally I stayed with the games section loved Yahoo Pool and Blackjack.
It's unfortunately the case that humans are in general pretty detestable and for most the only thing that keeps a civil tongue in their heads is cowardice. Take away the threat of immediate retaliation that physical interaction brings and most display their true colours.
That's not to say on line communication is inherently bad but we still haven't gotten the hang of civilised communication over distances that prevent immediate retaliation. Indeed, this habit of incivility has become so ingrained that many can't manage it under any circumstances.
@Nostalgia Nerd
Thanks for the edutainment as usual.
Friends and I used to love the "vent" or fight room with a microphone; nowadays bans are handed out much easier compared to then.
I was in UK1 then London Global 1 from 97-2002. Still in touch with loads of people I met in those rooms on and offline. Real nostalgia trip seeing the change in interfaces. Remember they were wow moments. Not everyone was a nerd :)
Bit weird mIRC wasn't mentioned.
Can't say I ever bothered with Yahoo, we (plenty of tech people) were rather snobby about it.
The channels on the various servers that I frequented on mIRC were quite protective about their users and we stepped in when things got out of hand. We had all kinds of people so it was important to have a nice space to chat for everyone.
It probably helped that most of us where either in technology/science or studying in that direction (aka a bunch of geeks).
id actually be pretty disappointed if he didnt leave that one out so he can dedicate a whole video to it. i know thats why i wouldve
Well IRC would need to be a whole video in itself, even without dealing with the various clients like mIRC. Also unlike most of the messenger services it isn't dead yet. So hard to get nostalgic over a protocol that's older than half the users.
Yeah... IRC mostly didn't have any of these problems because it was moderated by the community that used it, not by some faceless corporation. Of course there was plenty of seedy behavior on IRC, but you had to actively look for it to find it. If you started to act pervy or predatory in most of the main channels or even niche channels with an active wholesome community, you'd get a ban immediately. Even if there was no mods online, the users themselves made pretty efficient bots to keep things clean. It was a level of self organizing that puts to shame most corporate attempts to implement public chat rooms, forums or even comment sections. IRC still exists actually and since geeks love nostalgic technology, I bet it will survive all of us...
Yeah, IRC and ICQ kid here. I have fond memories of both. The IRC channels were remarkably usable hangouts. I had mIRC scripts a mile long to provide remote access to files and trigger commands. It was great. :-)
ICQ was the next best thing to being able to text any of your friends anywhere, any time. At least if your crew were a bunch of computer nerds ... which ... you know, if you were using it, that was probably the case. Haha :-D
I would love to see a whole episode on IRC. It's been a while since I have been there.
I wonder if you will ever do a follow up with IRC and talkers ;)
Great walk down memory lane, and reminded me why I avoided so many of the places back then.
Discord is basically IRC all grown up.
@@ChildovGhad I refuse to accept that... And I shall stand here stomping my feet until you accept that.. nah mwah bah !
@@Scadanet True, it does seem like mostly a bunch of little kids streaming Roblox half the time lol... I'm just there for Politics & War
AOL chat forums and IRC were my jam. Back when the Internet was fun.
Love these internet history videos of yours!
I loved Yahoo chat! I actually made life long friends, and I met my first girlfriend there. What really hurt it was how badly it was infiltrated with bots. You would enter a full room and you would be the only human in there.
I used to go on yahoo chat when I was a kid. I remember telling somebody I was 11 and he thought that was old enough to start sending me sexual messages. I was just a kid so I only laughed at him but looking back there was way too much of this sort of thing on chat rooms. I'm sure this hasn't changed, only switched platforms.
I was 14 - you're not alone.
I used to live on Yahoo voice chat and mIRC from 1996 - 2005 or so. I loved every minute of it. Watching this video brings back a flood of awesome memories.
Thank you once again for the quality output
Any company that thinks they can stop horned up teens is telling a joke with a very delayed punchline.
@@andymerrett Even better
I also remember Lycos chat, that was fun.
Ahh how I remember Yahoo Chat. I started around 1997 on good ol Win 3.1 computer on a 586 PC. I remember sometime along the way I had some sort of app that would make rainbow text that would amaze every one in a chat room, and I loved it when someone would hijack a chat to play some crummy hardcore rap. I do miss the untethered, unregulated internet of the old with cheesy, but yet helpful Geocities pages. I do wish the "Dark Web" was more of a throwback to the wildwest of the internet rather than the utter trash that it currently is.