THE NET WAS ONCE FULL OF IN-JOKES, NOW EVERYONE IS IN ON THE JOKE

I was talking to a friend recently about how hard it is to remember what the Internet looked like in any given year. Sure, everyone of a certain age has memories of Lycos and animated GeoCities gifs and endlessly buffering videos, but can you picture exactly what the online experience was like in, say, 2003? Before video streaming, before social media, before Wikipedia, what exactly did we do online?

My memory is that the Internet was full of in-jokes or at least that's the way it felt for me at the time.

In 2003, I was news editor at the Gateway, the student newspaper at the University of Alberta, and my colleagues and I spent a lot of time holed up in our drafty office putting together the twice-weekly paper until the wee hours of the morning. We found a lot of ways to procrastinate, and one of the best ways to do this — besides drinking beer — was sharing hilarious online videos that, prior to social media, made you feel like you had some sort of inside track on coolness.

One of our favourites was Homestar Runner, a Flash animated cartoon series created by a pair of brothers from Atlanta with an absurdist sense of humour. Its characters, with names like Strong Bad, the Cheat and the Poopsmith, spoke in highly quotable non-sequiturs. Strong Bad, who always wears a red wrestling mask, boxing gloves and no shirt, quickly became the main character of the series and the most memorable episodes were when he'd respond to real viewer emails, often creating new characters and spinoffs in the process. My personal favourites were Teen Girl Squad, Trogdor and Come on fhqwhgads (a catchy '90s dance hit-inspired song about someone who signed their email by randomly bashing a bunch of letters on their keyboard).

We watched these episodes over and over again, to the point where we could blurt out lines for easy laughs and that smug feeling that comes from being in-the-know.

When I started writing this, I asked my Facebook friends to share their favourite Homestar Runner episodes and realized, by the sheer volume of responses, just how popular it really was. Nowadays, social media makes everything instantly shareable, and almost every tweet or cat video has the potential to go viral. But back then, sharing something new amongst your friends made you feel like you had some sort of inside track on coolness.

I kind of miss that.