X appears to be juicing MrBeast’s views to woo the YouTuber to the platform, pushing video upload into users’ feeds as an unlabeled ad::undefined
Fuck, remember webcomics?
Achewood, Diesel Sweeties, Cat and Girl, Penny Arcade, Cyanide & Happiness, Joe and Monkey, Questionable Content, Dresden Codak (always updated way too infrequently), Dinosaur Comics, Gone With the Blastwave, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, The Perry Bible Fellowship, When I Grow Up/WIGU/Overcompensating, Married to the Sea, hell, even CTRL+ALT+DEL left us with Loss. I could go on, there’s definitely more.
…but I don’t like to talk about what happened with SinFest.
A lot of these sites had advertising, but I don’t remember any of it being so off-putting that I felt the need for an adblocker. Honestly, at this point, I don’t even recall if adblockers were a thing yet in 2000-2005.
So much content in those early aughts. I’m still waiting on a Complete Achewood. Damn you, Chris Onstad!
I was always a little disappointed I never was able to get a “I’m the guy who sucks/plus I got depres-sion” shirts.
I actually bought things from their ads because I wanted to support them. Those days are long gone.
They mostly advertised other comics and merchandise from other comics, if I recall correctly.
Also, Adblock originally released in 2002, and Adblock Plus came out in 2006.
I do recall one of the reasons I respected webcomics ads was they weren’t ones that were animated, blaring music, or asking me to try to play a mini-game by clicking on something that specifically can’t be caught by your mouse.
I still read the order of the stick, even though it updates glacially: https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html
It’s so good. Starts as a goofy DND joke strip, develops a ton of pathos.
What early 2000’s webcomics taught me is there were a lot of really great writers out there with some subpar art skills.
When the writing is so good, you don’t give a shit that it’s all stick figures.
EDIT: I almost forgot. With some of them, the best part was watching them go from stick figures to genuinely great art. Penny Arcade is a great example. The originals were so badly drawn, and it went from bad art to an artist literally having a style all their own.
Some of them were actually pretty good artists; occasionally you’d see them do other stuff and it’d be genuinely good on an artistic level.
The whole stick man, lumpy face, primitivist thing was just an “in” aesthetic (while also being conveniently really quick to produce).
I’m happy to see that Something Positive is still going strong. Dude is a great person and it’s fun to see his parenting come out through the comic as I catch up and now relate to some of that more than I did before.
Hell, I’m about to go and edit my original comment and make links to any that are still around. Looks like a lot of them are!
Here’s the link for Anders loves Maria.
One of my absolute favorite webcomics is Peter and Company. I didn’t realize this, but the website lists the first strip as being from 2005 and the latest being from last month.
