If I recall right, you used to pick a music directory, and whatever you had there would be indexed and made available to all for downloading. Everything you downloaded would go into that directory as well. Once you find a file you wanted to download, you didn’t download from a pool of people like with bittorrent, but from that one specific user.
If you click on a username, either while searching or while downloading, you could browse everything Napster had indexed. If people didn’t configure Napster right, you could browse their whole C:\ drive. Good times.
Wow, that sounds awesome. Now I'm sad I missed out on this!
Admittedly, what I like about Spotify is how easy it is to share music with other people and discover music from my friends just by looking at their profiles or what they're currently listening to.
There are even certain livestreamers I follow specifically for their taste in the music that they play in the background.
Yes, all the things that people posted here. And, in addition, you could chat with the user. It was so interesting to connect with someone purely through shared genre love. And then to ask them questions about what they liked that you didn't know about. There was nothing else like that serendipity.
I miss random synchronous chats with strangers, but I think I liked them because the stranger pool was a lot less creepy. I'm not sure I would enjoy them now.
FWIW, someone I met doing random AOL profile searches in the mid-'90s and I are still online friends. We both liked the Dave Matthews Band and played varsity tennis, and this met my minimum chat requirements. Now we are both former journalists working online, dealing with bipolar disorder and the recent death of a parent. The internet might be weird sometimes, but that (and a random story of getting a web development job because someone had the wrong email address for the person they were actually trying to hire) will always go down in my "Internet wins" column.
I miss it in a nostalgic way too. Obviously we’re all >20 years older now and I don’t think I’d even have the time for it (I barely have time to read HN most days.) But yeah, the fact that most normal people online were doing it then meant you could really connect around shared interests. Nowadays, I assume if you’re talking to strangers you’re a weirdo or looking for something creepy because “A/S/L?” was creepy. Part of the reason I feel the internet is safer for kids these days, they’re only talking with real life friends for the most part or engaged in a voyeuristic behavior (celebs, influencers, etc)
FWIW, I have a couple friends like that. We bonded over some musical interests of our teens and occasionally check in on each other although most never met in real life. Maybe that’s still happening in game chat? But I can’t imagine something like yahoo chatrooms still exists.
