6 Famous 2000s Things (That Were Actually Awful)

6

LimeWire Was Intentionally Made to Be a Cesspool, and It Landed Innocent People Under Arrest

Back when peer-to-peer networks flourished, those too cool to pay for their music library found an answer in LimeWire. Any movie, album, or video game you could imagine free for the taking, as long as you could stomach the glut of extremely dubious mp3s that sounded like they were recorded on a wax cylinder.

But along with this veritable cornucopia of Hoobastank and Jimmy Eat World tracks was an absolutely comical amount of malware. Unless you opted for the subscription version (thus defeating the entire purpose of pirating stuff) adware/spyware was automatically installed on your computer, tracking browsing history, and possibly hijacking your homepage and spamming you with ads.

Navy Blue/Wikimedia CommonsFree, aka, "Password Stealer Edition."

An inevitable chunk of downloaded files also contained viruses, Trojanware, or other illegal stuff. Yes, "that kind" of illegal stuff. Peer-to-peer trading programs don't have any method of confirming the file is the exact thing you typed in, only scrounging for matching keywords. You could wind up downloading files others never intended to trade, or vice versa. The unlucky faced prosecution, and at least one man was sentenced to life on a sex offenders registry for child porn he claimed was unintentionally downloaded and immediately erased in horror. The LimeWire people likely knew but did nothing to stop it. Metallica was right to warn us?

5

Borat Is a Sleazy Exploitation Movie Posing as Social Commentary

One of the most grating parts about being alive in 2006-07 was being bombarded by terrible Borat impressions every waking second, inspired by the Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary of the same name. The human race subjected to a non-stop, six month, international publicity tour, where Cohen -- remaining firmly in character -- repeated the same exact five scripted jokes verbatim again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again ...

Zscout370/Wikimedia CommonsSometimes fifteen minutes of fame is fourteen too many.

4

Owning An Early iPod Was A Pain In The Ass

iPods were the must-have 2000s accessory for the fashionably aloof music aficionado. They were also planned obsolescence gone mad. You see, Apple's newfangled technology had a glaring flaw. The battery, promised to last the life of the device, never came close to fulfilling that obligation, thus leaving users shelling out for a replacement battery that was half the price of the $200 music player, with batteries rarely holding a ten-hour charge as advertised.

Enterprising owners tried to find workarounds, busting the things asunder to dislodge the battery, which oh-so-conveniently voids the warranty. The average life of the iPad's battery was estimated at about 18 months. The warranty, as you already guessed, only applied to machines under 12 months old. Apple refused to acknowledge the issue until the Neistat Brothers initiated a guerrilla marketing campaign shitting on the iPod as a $200 brick. No amount of Steve Jobs spin could solve this.

Ed g2s/Wikimedia Commons"The sleekest, most aesthetically-pleasing paperweight on the market."

3

GTA San Andreas Is an Ugly, Clumsily Designed Game (Even By 2004 Standards)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas remains a gaming classic. Remarkable, as it's built on a geriatric engine laughably out of date even back in 2004. While games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, and Thief: Deadly Shadows were pushing the boundaries of available technology on a fraction of the budget, San Andreas featured awful lighting, firearm sound effects that sound like a stapler, lousy AI, blocky models, and nonexistent physics. See if you can spot the difference compared to the original Far Cry.

Ubisoft

Rockstar GamesOur working theory is they wanted it to be backwards compatible with a Sega CD.

2

The Company Behind the Snuggie Screwed the Real Inventor Out of Half a Billion Dollars

The Snuggie was an oversized backwards bathrobe that shocks you with static build up. Unbeknownst to the public, it is extremely difficult to safeguard a patent on clothing or textile designs, and with better intellectual property laws and a passing tinge of conscience, the Snuggie wouldn't exist.

David Shankbone/Wikimedia CommonsAll the style of a tarp with the moral implications of cheap labor.

The Snuggie is a rip-off of the Slanket. Gary Clegg invented the it back in the 1990s while living in a freezing dorm room with crappy heating. Within a few years he developed a modest business from the bottom up. In 2008, he realized that Snuggie had swiped his $400 million idea and with it the majority of the marketshare, leaving Clegg shit out of luck with no recourse to sue.

1

Paris Hilton's Sex Tape Was Revenge Porn and We All Blamed Her For It

Paris Hilton achieved mainstream fame on reality TV. Most of us didn't care until her sex tape, One Night in Paris, debuted on the internet in 2004. Filmed by her then-boyfriend, Rick Salomon, the video turned her into a running joke. The details make this more creepy than funny. Hilton was eighteen at the time. Salomon was in his thirties. She wasn't old enough to legally drink for another three years, implying that Salomon illegally supplied her with drinks. The only bad decision she is guilty of is trusting her boyfriend.

Hilton claims she was drunk at the time, which makes Salomon's choice to film her all the more scummy. Hilton, as a court found in her favor, never authorized the tape released and never counted on it making it big as an amateur porn star. Journalists and social critics back then uniformly ridiculed her, claiming that she deserved to suffer because she got famous.

But she didn't need the tape to be famous. She already was, with her own reality TV show (back when that meant something), a successful modeling career, and a cameo in Zoolander as herself before the tape hit the web. Between the way society treated Hilton, Monica Lewinsky, and Britney Spears, what the hell was wrong with the past?