I made my Neo-living as a junk trader. I had people send me their unwanted shitty items in bulk for nothing, then I individually sold them at my store as cheaply as possible. By the time I stopped playing, I had a million Neopoints in the bank, about 20 paintbrushes, and had tricked all my neighbors into giving me their passwords. If you know what the the hell I'm even talking about, then you know I was a fucking God of Neopia. Now my pets are probably all dead.

Twitter.com/Neopets

So as you can imagine, it was quite a shock when I learned that the site's investment group were actually diehard Scientologists. A guy named Doug Dohring bought the company in 2000 and implemented a series of L.-Ron-Hubbard-based organizational structures that supposedly were used trillions of years ago, called the Org Board.

In case that sounds sinister as fuck, it was! One of the site founders, Donna Williams, was just as startled, and explained in a Reddit post about how Cruise & Co. actually bounced plans around to implement Scientology teachings directly into the site. That plan was shut down, because for some reason, Williams felt compelled not to expose millions of impressionable children to a cult (other than Disney). She even said that new hires were forced to answer strange questionnaires about which lines looked "friendlier" and weird shit like that. This must have caused some internal tension, because all of sudden in June 2015, the moderators stopped policing the forums and the profanity filters broke down, which likely resulted in more than a few awkward parental conversations about furries.

While this revelation is certainly creepy, I take some solace in the fact that apparently Scientology's super-secret structure of organization which has been passed down for millennia involves turning your homepage into one of those spammy sites that you get redirected to after accidentally clicking on a flashing banner ad.

Neopets

Before Facebook ate it, Myspace was the de facto social media site of the early aughts. One of the appeals (and detriments) of the site was its personalization, which Facebook strictly forbade. Myspace users spent hours uploading photos, writing brooding poems, and agonizing over who would make it into their Top Eight. Pages and pages of personal memories. And the site removed it all without telling anybody.

Myspace

In 2005, after stumbling through rebrands, Justin Timberlake bought Myspace and tried to turn it into a predominantly music-based platform. 2013 saw a formal relaunch with a focus on music discovery almost exclusively. The old profiles and stuff basically got folded into the mix: All the site's blogs, videos, photos, and posts vanished. Users had no warning.

For some people, this probably came as a welcome purge of "the emo years," but a lot of people in my generation came of age on Myspace. Those were real, personal memories and irreplaceable photos. Imagine if Lisa Frank waltzed into your closet and just tore up your journal. Understandably, people were a little miffed at the news.

Myspace

Myspace's official response was "tough luck" for a while, but they eventually released tools with which you could download HTML versions of old blogs and photos ... assuming you still have access to your 10-year-old X420XBlaze@hotmail.com email address. If not? Cry Justin a river, because it's gone.

Myspace even ended up screwing over the very industry that was sort of keeping it afloat. Before this 2013 relaunch, Myspace was a fairly popular place for bands to host their fan pages and upload music. Unfortunately, the redesign forgot to include things like "fans," and popular bands had to start over from scratch. Huge stars like Britney Spears (and, incidentally, Justin Timberlake) went from millions of friends ... to zero.

Myspace

Today, Myspace is just a shittier version of Pandora that no one I know uses. You'd think a major internet company would know not to stick to a brand name that everybody knows is shit, right?

I'll never forget the day I figured out I could just download any song I want in a matter of ... well, at the time, hours. Suddenly, my hard drive was crammed with albums I didn't even know I wanted, and I could fill the room with the beautifully-crafted croons of Evanescence at the touch of a mouse click. And because literally everyone and their grandmother were committing crimes, it was all fine, for some reason. Napster soon became the poster child for the RIAA's harsh anti-piracy measures, which, after years of extensive lawsuits and bad PR, only succeeded in making the world hate Lars Ulrich again.

Napster

Napster was shut down in 2001 by the courts and quickly relaunched as a legal download service. But it never caught on, mostly because none of the tracks worked at all on iPods and had other strict usage restrictions. That would be like Netflix not running on Windows. However, in 2008, Best Buy, of all people, bought the service for a paltry sum. (Grammar disclaimer: Corporations are people, so we're good.) Interesting, because Best Buy was probably one of the biggest companies most affected by declining CD sales. Their idea was to focus on deliverables beyond music, and they thought the deal would secure them cred with record labels somehow. What, did they expect a ransom payment from Sony or something?

They chugged along a bit under the radar until 2011, when Best Buy sold Napster to its direct rival, Rhapsody. The plan this time was for Napster to be folded into Rhapsody's music service, but as of today, that still hasn't come to fruition. In fact, if you go to the site, it says that the opposite is happening -- that Rhapsody is becoming Napster. Which is extra weird, since Napster had about a quarter of the subscribers that Rhapsody did at the time of the sale -- a loss of half a million under Best Buy's ownership. It's not exactly clear why these companies are so reluctant to dump what is obviously a tainted brand name. Especially since at this point the market is so saturated with better services that don't evoke the word "lawsuit." Is there anyone even left willing to drop another $9.99 on another music thing? I guess they just figure that hey, after 19 years, what's another "soon?"

Napster

Back in the early 2000s, LiveJournal made it socially acceptable for boys to keep diaries, and was a precursor to today's "share everything" culture. It basically let you keep a public journal online. And just like your real journal, no one would read it or ever care. At it's peak, it had 2.5 million active users.

Today, it is the 150th-most-visited site. Not bad, but that's a bit behind. However, in Russia, it's the 12th-most-popular site. And it doesn't exactly have the Putin Seal of Approval.

Russian Presidential Press and Information Office

Why the lopsided popularity? In 2001, a Russian lecturer named Roman Leibov was the first person to start a journal in Russian. His first entry was "First attempt at writing. Let's try it in Russian ... how funny!" He put about zero thought into it, because there's no way he could have thought those words would go down in history.

Soon after, LJ became a bit of a cool hangout for Russian intellectuals, and soon after that, half of all Russian bloggers were on it. The Russian word for LiveJournal (which looks like two overly flamboyant K's) even became shorthand for blogging, such as Google is to searching for us normals. It became so popular that in 2009, a Russian company called SUP snatched LJ out of California, planted it in Moscow, and fired everybody in the States. For a while there, a spy living in Russia would be presented with a home page entirely in Russian, and he'd have been right to assume that the Commies finally did it, goddammit.

iStock/Lichtmeister Photography Productions

You may think that this was a win for the Russian livejournalists. But the main appeal of the site was the fact that it was based in the U.S., far from the Kremlin. You can see why users were suspicious. This was right before the 2008 presidential "elections," and a lot of Russian users weren't praising Putin's abs. Although there was some turmoil internally, ultimately, they felt it was an acceptable change. Now, roughly half of all users are Russian (five million), and in 2013, a leading LiveJournal dissenter named Alexei Navalny was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for "embezzlement." Man, there was a disturbing amount of sarcastic quotes in that paragraph.

Now, LiveJournal's Russian homepage no longer has .ru at the end, and back in the States, no one really uses it. Aside from one crazy guy ranting about how he can't believe a Game Of Thrones slot machine exists.

Twitter.com/GRRMspeaking

Bring yourself back to 2000. You had just spent 30 minutes downloading a pixelated version of the poster for the new X-Men movie, and now all of a sudden Mom calls from downstairs to get off the line so she can make a call. After she's done, you sneak back on the computer to hear this sweet, sweet chorus of a successful connection. Or maybe an alien's uncontrollable diarrhea.

This should be marked as an ASMR video.

If you can believe it, there are still people in America sitting through that shit. In a 2014 earnings report, it was revealed that AOL still makes the most profit off its subscribers, which apparently, somehow, still number in the millions.

Washington Post

About two percent of American households are still paying for AOL dial-up, and while the numbers have been in decline, you can't deny their staying power; the average subscriber has been with the company for about 14 years. Meaning a whole bunch of users accidentally signed up from one of those CDs and are still paying the bills. As recently as 2009, there were apparently six million subscribers.

Washington Post

Now, I don't want to come off as elitist. I totally get that some people are stuck in the boonies or otherwise don't have access to GOOGLE SUPER FIBER XFINITY. But at an average of $20 a month(!), you can probably pick up a decent smartphone on contract and get 100x the internet speeds. Sure, you might miss some references in old Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan flicks, but at least you can play Pokemon Go.

Computer lab at school was pretty much a free-for-all when the teacher wasn't looking. No one gave a shit about learning how to type when there were flash games to play and web forums to browse. Some of the most popular I remember were Newgrounds and eBaum's World, hosts to popular viral phenomena like "All Your Base" and those animations where a bunch of stick figures killed each other. We were weird, OK?

Looking back, it's pretty obvious that some of those sites were what you would call "content curators." This is another way of saying "We steal everybody else's stuff and then make money." eBaum's World specifically had its fair share of sketchy content policies. They routinely lifted photos and other content from rival sites like Albinoblacksheep and just slapped the eBaum's watermark on it. Which was a lucrative endeavor, it seems, raking in $5 million a year.

9gag

It came to peak insanity in 2006, when USA and FOX announced that they were working on a TV show called eBaum's World. It was a little unclear what it was going to be about, though. It's hard to tell from the press release if company executives even knew what the internet was, because it's the most desperate way I've ever seen someone in a suit claim they were just like me.

USA Networks/eBaum's World

Basically, USA wanted to make Tosh.0, but dumber. It must have been so radical that studio execs couldn't contain it, because the show never aired. Or maybe it was because they realized they couldn't just broadcast 30 minutes of clips stolen from other shows and call it a wrap.

It kinda went downhill from there. The company was sold in 2009, and according to a ranting blog post by the site's creator, Eric Bauman, the new owners walked in and simply told everyone to get out. Bizarrely, he also included a photo of the new CEO driving away in his van, which doesn't really prove anything beyond the fact that, yup, he legally owned it, so who cares? Ultimately, Eric got karma'd. After years of making too much money from stealing from the work of others, he had the balls to say he was treated with "zero respect." Sorry, Eric, but no one can save you from drowning in the world's thickest irony.

Artist's rendering.

Chris is bringing Cheer Up!, a new adult party game, to Kickstarter this year. Follow it on Facebook for updates, or download it for FREE today!

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