Early Installment Weirdness / Websites

• The Agony Booth started out with a few fairly long, infrequently published recap-plus-snark treatments of fairly obscure, terrible movies, with a handful of screencaps per page, mostly written by the site creator. As the site gained a cult following it developed an expanding stable of writers and a broader portfolio of subjects, covering everything from notoriously bad B-movies to flopped blockbusters to offbeat television series like Mister T, with an increasing emphasis on more involved, humorously detailed critiques of every scene, multi-author recaps, and clever captions for the more frequent screencaps. Then, seeking a more mainstream audience, around 2010 it evolved again, deemphasizing the long text recaps in favor of video recaps and essays, usually in the form of ongoing, named segments from recurring contributors.
• Maddox's early articles were usually much shorter than his current ones. He also wrote about random things like making sandwiches and replacing the moon with a giant robotic monkey head, and he regularly complained about his older brother.
• Early articles from the SCP Foundation (making up most of the first 1000 entries, although some are newer or rewritten) are frequently different in style and tone from the currently accepted 'standards', as they were written before said standards were generally agreed upon. Compare SCP-173's article, for example, with almost any of the others'. The general rule of the wiki is that you don't edit another author's work unless the article is in danger of being deleted, and since many of the early authors are no longer on the site and the surviving SCP's are fairly popular, that means they're unlikely to be altered any time soon.
• Wikipedia: Looking at early drafts of this website's articles, it's hard to believe it's the same website:
  • Articles were far shorter, and they didn't even have links to other articles. There were no categories or images. Also, they initially used CamelCase to create wikilinks instead of brackets.
  • Also, stricter policies regarding "fair use" reduced usage of copyrighted material. And the standards of article quality are now much higher, something frequently brought up in Featured Article Reviews (where articles which were considered among the best are analyzed to see if they aren't worthy any more). It's easier to illustrate when an FA gets demoted and re-promoted to show how things changed.
  • Early articles didn't have wikilinks, categories, images, or footnotes. Very early articles (dating back to 2001) actually used a CamelCase wikilink style akin to what TV Tropes uses instead of the now-widespread markup used on nearly every other wiki.
  • Early articles often contain non-standard formatted lists, and contain links (to at least redirects, if not remaining articles), that would never be created now due to lack of "notability".
  • Until 2003, the site's address was wikipedia.com, not wikipedia.org.
  • Unregistered users were even allowed to create new articles until an incident in 2005 resulted in article creation being restricted to registered users only.
  • Trivia sections were ubiquitous in Wikipedia articles until 2008, when site policy shifted toward purging indiscriminate lists of facts.
• Diva Dirt only had two writers when it first started out and was very biased in its writing. Both Melanie and Erin would Accentuate the Negative a lot in their articles and headlines as well as mostly focusing on WWE. When more writers came to the site, it expanded to include independent wrestling and eventually MMA too. These days the personal opinions of the writers are confined to the columns and are much more formal and neutral.
• Gaia Online was originally a very little known Animesque roleplaying community with a list of links to anime fan sites and such, and the site's earliest graphics were inspired heavily by Ragnarok Online. It also used to have a dash in the url, go-gaia.com, but the dash, the RO-inspired graphics, the link list, and the emphasis on a roleplaying community were all dropped as the site grew. Today, it's more of a social networking/social gaming hub, although roleplayers are still welcome, by all means.
  • One of their most prominent Cash Shop item types, Evolving Items, also looked very different when they first arrived. Evolving Items are items that start with a few poses, the first "generation", which is gradually replaced by later generation poses according to an update schedule, until the item reaches its conclusion, where all of the previous generation poses the item comes with are unlocked as well as the final generation poses. In the beginning, these Evolving Items chronicled the growth, or evolution, of a creature or plant of some kind, and didn't really have much of a story beyond that, aside from the growing plot surrounding the hosts of the weekly Evolving Item Report. Things changed in a very big way at some point, and the Evolving Items now almost always have a backstory and tell some sort of story themselves.
  • On the subject of said report hosts, there had initially been a Running Gag in which every week, their avatar would be changed to reflect whatever they'd been doing. After Timmy was turned into an Evolving Item himself, this was dropped and Dr. Singh's avatar just stays the same.
• Neopets has evolved considerably since starting out in 1999. In addition to growing Lighter and Softer over the years (it was originally targeted at college kids), it has also seen considerable Art Evolution that has completely changed the design of more than a few species. (One of the most notable being Bruce, which was originally a picture of Bruce Forsyth before changing to a penguin-like creature.)
• Facebook. In its earliest form, it was completely restricted to a handful of colleges, and intended only to be used for socializing on college campuses. Even when it was more broad, you still had to choose which school you belonged to and have someone else who went to the same school verify that you actually did. Not having someone verify you meant your account would be deleted after a while. It also didn't have status updates for the first five years of its existence, and even then all status updates were in the format of "(name) is _____" until a later update dropped the "is" to improve status update flexibility. Facebook didn't even add the "Like" button that has since become a part of its current identity until the year after that.
• YouTube videos from the first few years end up looking odd, since the video makers often reference UI features that YouTube has since changed: you can no longer "five-star" videos since they changed to thumbs-up/thumbs-down in 2010, and the description has moved from the right to underneath (which means people pointing while saying "link in the description" are now pointing in the wrong direction).
• Vat19 used to create and sell DVDs before becoming purveyors of curiously awesome products.
• TV Tropes:
  • Pages used to be very different: trope pages had very few examples (possibly due to the site just starting out and not enough examples having been added yet), and the like, and actual details on how the trope happened were a rare luxury rather than a requirement.
  • This Very Wiki used to list normal, YMMV, Flame Bait and Trivia examples all together on work pages until mid-2010. After that there was a period of a few weeks where both YMMV and Flame Bait examples were completely banned from work pages and could only be listed on trope pages, but it quickly became obvious that this wasn't going to work out and resulted in the current format of separate YMMV (and later Trivia) pages, with Flame Bait examples staying restricted to the trope pages (and sometimes not even being allowed there either).
  • We used to have Troper Tales on this site too, which was tropers telling stories of times they experienced tropes. Unfortunately, people started telling sexual stories, even on the pages for nonsexual tropes, to the point where the whole thing was banned and is now widely considered an Old Shame.
  • TV Tropes's very own Trope Pantheons, in its early days. Characters were usually picked for godhood based on memes and/or popularity with fans alone, regardless of whether or not they were actually a good example of the tropes they were picked to represent. Profiles could be bare or just rife of memes and then it was passable. The Disgraces existed, and bashing them was considered an okay thing. However, over time, bashing the Disgraces became so unfavored that it was removed altogether and the participators became sick of shoehorning memes or bare-boned profiles, so most profiles were reworked to make sure characters were actually fitting examples of the tropes they lorded over. A good example to compare the weirdness of the Trope Pantheons? Back in the old days, worship of Haruhi Suzumiya was pretty common, as she was considered the ultimate Trope Goddess. As the series' popularity dwindled, people felt less inclined to glorify Haruhi, and she and the other main characters now collectively occupy a deity spot together.
  • This Very Wiki's standards for what is a trope and what isn't have changed considerably from when the wiki was founded. Since the late 2010s, quite a lot of tropes have been disambiguated or otherwise declared to not be a trope after all, including "character has a specific sexuality or gender identity", "character uses a certain weapon", and the appearance of specific animals in works (usually under the "Everything Is Better With..." style of naming). To give you an idea of how different things used to be, in 2009, there were individual trope pages for specific eye colours (not even rare cases such as Supernatural Gold Eyes, but common eye colours).
  • There was also much more leniency on the names given for tropes in the past. This resulted in the site having past trope names that were often very in-jokey and relied heavily on a user's understanding the reference to know what it meant. Some of these old names include Crocker Tea Breaker, Did Not Eat the Mousse, Isn't It Sad, Gundamjack and George Lucas Throwback. Not to mention the many tropes that originally used The “Character Name” format (e.g. The Mario, The Vanna, The Oscar, and so on). Many of these tropes name have since been replaced with ones that are less esoteric, and what few still remain mostly stick around due to how ubiquitous they are with the site and its identity.
• Not Always Right was considerably different early on:
  • A lot of the early stories were simply one random line spoken by a customer (or the occasional "grab bag" consisting of several randomly-culled lines from assorted customers), instead of longer anecdotes.
  • Some of the earlier stories were copied wholesale from other sites, most often Rinkworks. Eventually they settled on only taking original, user-submitted content.
• In the early days of the photoblog "Humans of New York", photographer Brandon Stanton would include editorial comments on his photos much more frequently, and he would customarily mark each photo with the date that it was taken. Many of the blog's early photos aren't even of people in New York, but are just casual posts about Brandon's daily grind as a photographer. Nowadays, the blog is probably best known for its candid street interviews, and Brandon practically never gives comments on his photos unless his subject doesn't offer a statement of their own.
• Crunchyroll originally showed pirated fansubs of anime, before eventually going legit and becoming a source for official streaming.
• Reddit didn't introduce subreddits (specific areas of the site themed around certain topics) until 2008, 3 years after the site's launch.
• Twitter was originally conceived as an SMS-exclusive service, which explains the persistent tweet character limit of 140 characters, until eventually adding a web interface and eventually an API for developers to make third-party apps with. Likes/Favorites, retweets, #hashtags, and even tagging users with their @-usernames were not official features for the longest time. This is in contrast to modern Twitter, which has since added a slew of features that have made using Twitter exclusively via SMS less and less feasible, and they even doubled the character limit to 280 in 2017, which may as well mean the outright end of SMS Twitter. The web interface itself has noticeably changed a lot too, with the basis of the layout we know today being made around 2012.
• Froghand:
  • The original purpose of Froghand was to write about Web security, exclusively sticking to that topic for four months, before branching out in August amid difficulties in writing the Scavenge from the Torrent Wasteland article. There hasn't been a single security-related article since August 12, 2016, though the BUAFYs still heavily mention the topic.
  • Mentioned in the 10,000 Update Special:
    I realised that, at the heart of security, it's the same principles over and over again, and there's only so much you can talk about before you get into the really deep, gritty, and boring stuff. So then I made a few experiments with reviews of a shitty game (Yandere Sim) and a visual novel that I found so endearing that I'm still consciously thinking about it three months later (The Cherry Tree High Duo Reviews), and then I cut the Scavenge from the Torrent Wasteland abruptly due to a lack of stuff to talk about. I then realised, during the course of writing that article, that my future did not reply in sarcastically talking about things which people already knew about, but instead for covering angles that nobody could look up with a simple Google search. I instead went away from the same old opinions and went into shiny new ones, with the wide world of the arts - video games and books and visual novels and anime and cartoons, oh, what a great world it is!
• The earliest Slender Man creepypastas on Something Awful established that the Slender Man's face looked different to every viewer (in some versions, it was the face of whatever the viewer feared most), and this tended to translate into him appearing faceless in photographs because the camera capturing him wouldn't have a mind to interpret his face through. In part due to misinterpreting this lore, later works went with him simply not having a face at all.
• Renegade Rhetoric, a Character Blog for Cy-Kill from Challenge of the GoBots, had two early oddities in regards to the posts describing the events of episodes from a non-existent second season of the cartoon.
  • The very first post devoted to fictional Challenge of the GoBots episodes, originally posted October 17, 2015, described multiple episodes at once and with most of them discussed for no longer than a paragraph. Every other fictional episode discussion would only be one episode per post and would have more detailed descriptions of the episode's events, lasting at least a few paragraphs.
  • "The Hawks of Space", the first fictional Challenge of the GoBots episode discussed by Cy-Kill to be a two-parter, consisted of only one post, when all subsequent two-part episodes would have both parts' events described in separate posts.
• The first sapient species to appear in Serina are the fork-tailed babbling jays. Unlike later sophonts, they don't get a narrative with named characters. The article about their extinction also hammers the point home that their sapience couldn't save them and they were all buried and forgotten, whereas later sophonts' extinctions are described in a far less pessimistic manner.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum (Due to the fact that it started off as a way for Jay and Acacia to make fun of the Lord of the Rings badfics that were popping up after the films were released):
  • In one early mission, Aragorn's name is misspelled, and nothing happens. Later missions would establish that misspelling a character's name generates a little creature with that name.
  • Early missions had agents making fun of or wishing death on the fanfics' authors. Later, the PPC would make a rule against author-bashing.
  • In one early mission, the agents mention needing to kill all the Original Characters, and another one has them mention needing to kill a Mary Sue's pet. In later missions, killing an original humanoid character who is not a Mary Sue is frowned upon, and while pets may be killed, it's not mandatory.
  • One early mission refers to a male Mary Sue as a "Marty Sam". Later missions would use the term Gary Stu.
  • A Running Gag for the series is that typos change reality (for instance, if "wine" is misspelled as "whine", it whines like a mosquito). This didn't happen initially.

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