Dollar Tree being only a single dollar on everything.

I didn’t know Dollar Tree existed further back in the years like the 80s. But, I didn’t discover the store until like late 2000s. That store was a godsend for my then mostly broke ass. Sure the quality of products could’ve been better and the food selection could’ve been better, but they were there for me and others who’re strapped on budgets.

And it was a good 16 years while that lasted. It is a little annoying at times to shop there and know it is no different than Dollar General and Family Dollar. But it could’ve been worse.

  • titanicx@lemmy.zip
    5·
    1 day ago

    I’m back in the 70s and 80s we had but we called the dime store. Where a lot of the products were only a dime and then they raise the price to quarter and then raise the price again to 50 cents. And then eventually we ended up with dollar stores. But I mean overall they’re all the same junk some good some really really not. But I know when I was younger and poor the dollar store was always fantastic for whatever I needed. Hell even now for things that I can use I still go there and pick it up even though some stuff is $1.25 or more. It’s still less expensive than a lot of other places.

  • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
    11·
    3 days ago

    There was a brief moment when broadcast television networks just put their shit on the internet for free. Like you just had to go to their website, and then like the whole catalog of Scrubs or something was just there to watch.

    • flamiera@kbin.melroy.orgOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      I heard about that in the 2000s when they did that.

      And that was a solution to the piracy ordeal they were fluffing about. But then they got rid of the shows being put online, just so they can bitch about piracy years later.

    • Analog@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      So much this. Please let politics be boring again.

      Instead of trying to make idiocracy happen faster than previously believed to be possible.

      I really miss having the delusion that MOST people were good, just more susceptible to media influence and bullshit.

      Fuck, I really miss that. What a good response, thx!

      • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        2 days ago

        There’s a reason “may you live in interesting times” is a curse.

        Though I’m not sure the current times are really that interesting. More like terminally stupid.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Wow I hadn’t actually realised this had changed, but of course it has.

      I remember watching “beyond 2000” as an 80s kid. A TV show about the inventions and stuff, what life would be like, it was so amazing.

      Now we all know the future will just be more oppressive than it is now.

  • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.socialEnglish
    1922·
    4 days ago

    The early mass-adopted Internet, where every company aimed at kids had a website with free games, where everyone who wanted to share about themselves or their interests did so in their own little corner so you could rabbit-hole your way through the link trees, most stuff was non-monetized or had easy-to-block ads, and no tracking of your behavior was really happening.

    • glimse@lemmy.world
      114·
      4 days ago

      People who weren’t online at the time can’t possibly imagine how truly awesome the Internet used to be.

      I miss separate websites.

        • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          217·
          3 days ago

          Yea. These people always fantasize about personal websites. There are still a lot of those outside of the mainstream websites.

          I would rather a guess that it’s way more than the early days of the internet, but it seems like the most amount of effort these people can put is to whine about the good ol’ days.

          Reminds me of MAGA folks.

        • glimse@lemmy.world
          10·
          3 days ago

          You used to visit websites. News aggregators weren’t a thing so you’d visit the different sites focusing on different things. Search engines actually worked so you’d constantly be stumbling upon passion projects by highly knowledgeable people. You’d also find geocities sites teaching you how to go Super Saiyan, it was the wild West.

          Instead of reddit and Lemmy, there were hundreds of niche forums. Maybe this is just me but human connection was a LOT easier. The internet was mostly populated by tech-savvy people who were excited to be online

          Memes as we know them weren’t really a thing. They existed but you’d reply with them when they were relevant. People didn’t really “post” memes and no one was making the mass-market garbage that fills the Internet today.

          I could go on a tirade on the last one because I truly believe memes were a significant factor in the downfall of internet culture

    • Fit_Series_573@lemmy.world
      33·
      4 days ago

      Every Cartoon Network show having it’s own free games on their website was peak computer room time for me in elementary school. Fun fact: If any of you remember the Amanda Show from the early 2000s, their website AmandaPlease.com was up til 2017. It was a true nostalgia moment to remember to look at once in a blue moon as a chuckle to old website styles.

    • fizzle@quokk.auEnglish
      31·
      3 days ago

      All this stuff is still around, you just ignore it in favour of things like lemmy which are better at stimulating dopamine production.

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
        12·
        3 days ago

        All this stuff is still around

        This may be true, but,

        you just ignore it

        is an unfair claim. It used to be easier to find unmonetized small sites and blogs. I know some still exist, but I can’t help but wonder how many more are buried out in the web, unable to be accessed by newcomers because those who run search engines have different interests than their users.

  • paultimate14@lemmy.world
    30·
    3 days ago

    StumbleUpon was what I personally cite as the peak of the internet.

    It was a website where you made an account and selected what categories of things you were interested in. Then click the button and it would take you to a random piece of content on the internet related to that. I remember thinking at the time it was like Pandora, but for the whole internet rather than just music. Eventually it got bought and shut down.

    Mint would be another one. A free, ad-deiven website with optional premoun features that allowed you to easily link all of your financial accounts. It would automatically categorize transactions, but you could manually change them and change the categories themselves. It worked great back in the early 2010’s. Then Intuit bought it and it slowly got shittier. They reduced the visualization options. Eventually a few years ago they shut it down to try to get people to move to a different, paid product. Personally I moved to HomeBank, an open-source self-hosted solution. But it means I need to manually import everything.

    • mech@feddit.org
      11·
      3 days ago

      For someone with ADHD, StumbleUpon was like a button that injects dopamine into your brain.
      Really fucking addictive

      • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 days ago

        I was so pissed off when that company bought stumbleupon and trashed it. I hunted and searched for an alternative and nothing was ever the same. It was a huge death blow to the internet I loved. 😭😭😭

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
    223·
    3 days ago

    Season cliffhangers.

    Young people will never understand me in 1990, banished up to my parent’s bedroom to use their TV because they had a movie on downstairs, watching William Riker calmly say “Fire” on a borg cube containing HIS CAPTAIN, and then the music du-du-du-du-duuuuu and the words “to be continued”

    And then having to wait an entire goddamn 3 months to find out the outcome.

    Ending seasons on cliffhangers was magical. It’s still attempted sometimes today, but in the age of binge-watching and in some cases years between seasons, most shows just wrap up one season arc and start a new one. Kind of sucks.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
      53·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, once Netflix and other streaming companies discovered exclusive content it all went to shit.

      The entire point was to have content distribution separate from production, and available in one place.

      • flamiera@kbin.melroy.orgOP
        20·
        4 days ago

        Streaming was supposed to ‘replace’ cable television, because people were fed up of forced commercials, unavailable content and restrictions on cable television.

        Well, streaming got maybe some of that corrected. However, it has turned itself into a hydra where the content is here, there and over there with price tags on every service. Ads are now forced onto us but we now have “control” over them, I guess (if you don’t ad-block).

        So it’s like cable television all over again.

        • madcaesar@lemmy.world
          4·
          3 days ago

          The whole streaming thing is capitalism in a nutshell.

          1. It forces innovation that creates awesome thing

          2. It’s never happy with the amount of money it makes, so it keeps pushing harder and harder until the awesome thing turns into shit, and on its way of turning into shit it pulls up the ladder behind it so new competitors have a harder time competing.

        • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          It’s definitely been warped and beaten, but I at least appreciate that it’s a far more open system than cable, and thus there are ways to escape the worst of it for those who try. I let my Netflix sub expire, and instead have turned to library apps and PBS - there’s still far more content than I’d ever finish.

          • [鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            3 days ago

            No idea if they still have them, I don’t live in NYC anymore. NYC, even Brooklyn is expensive as hell, rent was going up. My parents barely managed to borrow money from close friends + some savings to be able to afford a house in Philly, where I’m now. The last time I’ve been to the library was… idk 4-6 years ago… I literally only go to libraries to use their computer or like I wanna skip school and chill a bit there so I don’t get home too early.

            When I was younger, I remember borrowing comics and stuff… I never actually wanted to read “books”.

            I was facing a lot of issues…

            On one hand, I barely know enough Chinese to read a Chinese book (except like a childrens book, which is just cringe for me, yes I know very hypocritical since I was a kid myself)

            On the other hand, my English wasn’t remotely good enough to read an English book.

            So like comics were the only thing I could read.

            As for the DVDs, I didn’t pick them, my parents did. And it was interesting enough for me, so I just watched it anyways since there wasn’t much to do. Early days I wasn’t allowed much computer time / internet time, when I did have more access, I wasn’t knowledged enough to find free stuff to watch. So its just TV shows in Mandarin from those DVDs. It probably helped with expanding my Mandarin skills for a bit longer, because like it soon atrophys when you don’t use it. I haven’t really spoken Mandarin for like… 15 years. Except rare circumstances when there was a Mandarin-speaking classmate. I kinda remember the pronunciations, but I’m gonna have to think in Cantonese, then convert it to Mandarin… so there’s a bit of a lag, sort of.

      • BanaramaClamcrotch@lemmy.zip
        1·
        3 days ago

        I used to live off the video game equivalent of the video disk delivery service…. I forgot what it was called, but that was the shit where basically you could “rent” a game but keep the game as long as you wanted unless you cancelled your membership. That was the shit.