what i grew up with
I tried to remember the websites, tech, trends and creators I primarily grew up with from about 2006 to 2014. Itās definitely aging me and some of it planting me firmly in Germany, haha. Some of these still exist, but are extremely different now.
I grew up withā¦
- The PS1 with Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, and some Lara Croft demos
- CRTās
- The Lissy chatrooms
- The PonyClub forum
- Getting sent chain emails
- Powerpoints with elaborate jokes and what would nowadays be considered memes being sent via email
- MySpace
- ICQ, MSN, Knuddels
- Jetztspielen.de especially Bomberpengu
- Nintendo DS and Nintendogs
- The original Motorola Razr (I didnāt have one :()
- DieAussenseiter
- Smosh Music videos
- Charlie the Unicorn
- Gronkh
- YTITTY
- Ray William Johnson (=3)
- coldmirror
- iPods
- schĆ¼lerVZ and werkenntwen
- piczo websites (I had one!)
- FarmVille
- Sharing Fortune Cookie message or horoscope as a status on Facebook
- Howrse, Bitefight, Virtual Pet sites
- Square screens
- Tumblr prom, SuperWhoLockians, constable-frozen
- 9gag
- Nyan Cat
- The mustache era
- Duck face
- Gangnam Style
- The Wii
- Fruit Ninja, Doodle Jump, Temple Run, Jetpack Joyride, Subway Surferā¦.
- Tap the Egg games that promised something would hatch but it never did
- Writing or scratching your League of Legends username into the school desks for people to add you
- Minecraft alpha, and the Minecraft versions of songs on YouTube
- Hacking together some Minecraft multiplayer by opening ports on the router and using LogMeIn Hamachi (this literally bricked one of my wifi receivers once)
- Using TeamSpeak
- The beginning of WhatsApp and Snapchat, and the first premature, bugged selfie filters (especially the dog filter)
I arrived at this because I thought about what shaped my political views the most growing up (Tumblr) and wanted to reference the culture on it while I was 14 or so as if the other person surely would know what Iām talking about, then realized the other person I was talking to would have been FOUR at that time!!!! so I didnāt bring it up.
But yeah, when I was a child I didnāt have a phone, later had a dumbphone that could call and text and thatās it. One of my friends back then communicated via a walkie talkie because we were never super far away from their house. I got my first smartphone in my late teens. The most popular people started having an iPod Touch some time earlier and everyone gathered around them between classes to watch them play games, later on they had iPhones. My first smartphone was a Samsung when they still had BadaOS on it and not Android - it was awful š
I wonder if anyone else remembers PonyClub - it seems to have been scrubbed off the internet and I canāt even find a Wiki page somehow. It used to be this monthly box for horse girls with horse accessories, books, PC games (this is where the StarStable games started!) stickers and toys, and it had its own members-only forum. I wish there was more saved from that era!
responses
Reply via email
Published 06 Mar, 2025