A Goblins Ode To The Old School Internet

As we build Goblins out and think about the platforms we want (and almost more importantly, don't) want to emulate, figured I'd pay homage to some of my favorites:

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)

For me, The era of AIM was peak internet for me. Some random thoughts here about it, in no particular order:

• I believe SmarterChild was one of the first AI/chatbots. About three years ago it inspired a marketing campaign I ideated for a friend’s AI voice assistant.

• I miss the days of writing AIM away messages like *~*iF i CoUlD rEaRrAnGe ThE aLpHaBeT, i’D pUt U & i ToGetHeR*~*.

• Passive aggressive away messages/AIM bios were absolutely the original subtweet– seeing a friend give shout outs to a list of initials and not seeing yours listed because y’all had an argument earlier that day in homeroom? Brutal.

• One of the things that still makes me wince is remembering when some girls in middle school created a screenname and catfished me into thinking I was talking to some kid in my grade. Obviously developed the biggest crush on him because we were chatting every night and then weeks (months?) in, I was brave enough to walk up to him at school and make a reference to our chats, only to find out he had no idea what I was talking about. Horrible personality-building moment.

Neopets

Someday, when I have more free time, I want to write a dissertation about how Neopets was (as far as I know) one of the earliest examples of cryptocurrency. I’m still salty that someone hacked my account when I was ~14, but they probably did me a favor because I never would have quit otherwise.

I still basically look for any and all excuses to talk about Neopets (ie: this blog post). There was something so comforting about the world map and all the various things you could do. Faerie quests, the advent calendar, collecting your interest at the bank, zomg. That shit was so great.

Doll Palace

I'm not proud of the amount of time I spent on these virtual paper dolls. I recently played around with it again and… same thing. Whyyy do I still find these things so fun?

Alleria? Valeria?

I legitimately wish I could remember the name of this site but it was a text-based medieval roleplaying forum. I loved it so much that (also, skip to the next section if you don’t want to full-body cringe) when we had to do a presentation in high school on our favorite hobby, I wore a cloak and talked about text-based roleplaying on the internet.

I think my classmates were probably so impressed by how publicly uncool I was that it sort of looped back around to “this girl gives zero fucks.”

LiveJournal

Back in ~2015 I was searching for “punny Halloween costume ideas” when up popped a photo of myself in high school wearing a handmade dust bunnies costume. The photo credit linked to my high school LiveJournal, which was apparently public, which made for an equally hilarious and mortifying realization.

While I was never great at keeping a written journal (despite my many false starts), I semi-regularly updated my LiveJournal so it’s a painfully cringe documentation of who I was across three years of high school. Jump to twenty years later and I may or may not keep a private LiveJournal where I journal about building Goblins.

Comparing the two recently reminded me that I need to implement Moods on my current one. LOOK AT HOW MANY EMOTION OPTIONS THEY HAVE!!!

gURL.com

As someone who didn’t have a big sister, gURL.com was where you got answers or learned about things that weren’t going to be covered in CosmoGirl or Seventeen. No matter how weird, gross, or stupid a question felt, it was almost always addressed somewhere in gURL’s editorial content or forums.

That non-judgmental sharing of knowledge is something I hope to emulate at Goblins.

Myspace

Tom felt like such an unproblematic founder. He was everyone’s friend upon sign-up and didn’t do creepy, exploitative shit like so many current founders. I aspire to be like Tom.

Myspace Top 8 was one of those evil-genius features that we absolutely used to be socially petty and passive-aggressive, right alongside AIM away messages (see above). Also, the amount of time I spent figuring out HTML to code a custom cursor that trailed little black stars around my profile? 100% worth it.

Toontown

This one feels like such a fever dream but gosh it was a fun game. You were a character that threw pies and cakes at robots. That’s about the extent of what I remember, except for how horrible it felt when a high-level player ran out of an elevator just as the doors closed, leaving you behind to inevitably get defeated. The birthday and wedding cakes were the most epic weapons in your arsenal.

In my defense, I also tried to play EverQuest, but our family computer apparently didn’t have the processing power to run the CD I bought at Walmart because it looked like I was playing Minecraft.

Old School-Ish Shout Outs

Farmville

I was obsessed with this stupid game. My college roommate and I used to set alarms for ungodly times so we could harvest crops in the middle of the night. When I was in San Francisco for 500 Global’s Demo Day, I stayed across the street from the Zynga office and to this day their logo still makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

My GPA probably would’ve been several points higher if it weren’t for the 4am watermelon harvesting. Unsurprisingly, my love for dopamine games still has me in a chokehold because I’m currently on level 9,605 of Candy Crush.

OG OkCupid

I feel like this was the pinnacle of good online dating. From there being no character limits on filling out your profile to the ability to keyword search across profiles, it was the best way to find people you might connect well with.

It wasn’t that the resulting dates were significantly better back then, but the process of finding folks and messaging them was significantly more enjoyable. Now building Goblins, I realize that the Venn diagram of people nostalgic for OG OkCupid and folks who identify as neurodivergent is basically a pancake stack.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the old school OkCupid elements are ones we want to weave into Goblins because that was an age before everyone was at the mercy of algorithms and swipe stacks. It’s also one of the cautionary tales of enshittification at the hands of Match.com.