History EarlyInstallmentWeirdness / WebSites

** 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 [[Administrivia/ZeroContextExample actual details on how the trope happened were a rare luxury rather than a requirement.]]

** 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 SupernaturalGoldEyes, but ''common'' eye colours).

* Website/{{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.
* Website/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).

* Website/{{Crunchyroll}} originally showed pirated fansubs of anime, before eventually going legit and becoming a source for official streaming.

* Website/{{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.

* Website/{{Wikipedia}}:
** Looking at early drafts of Website/{{Wikipedia}} 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.

** There was also much more leniency on the names given for tropes in the past. This resulted in the site having 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 [[MidBattleTeaBreak Crocker Tea Breaker]], [[GuiltByAssociationGag Did Not Eat the Mousse]], [[DemotedToExtra Isn't It Sad]], [[GrandTheftPrototype Gundamjack]] and Not to mention the many tropes that originally used [[JustForFun/OneMarioLimit The “Character Name”]] format (e.g. The Mario, The Vanna, The Oscar, and so on). Many of these tropes name have since [[Administrivia/RenamedTropes been replaced]] with ones that are less esoteric, and what few still remain mostly stick around due to how [[GrandfatherClause ubiquitous they are with the site and its identity]].

** There was also much more leniency on the names given for tropes in the past. This resulted in the site having 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 [[MidBattleTeaBreak Crocker Tea Breaker]], [[GuiltByAssociationGag Did Not Eat the Mousse]], [[DemotedToExtra Isn't It Sad]], [[GrandTheftPrototype Gundamjack]] and the many tropes that originally used [[JustForFun/OneMarioLimit The “Character Name”]] format (e.g. The Mario, The Vanna, The Oscar, and so on). Many of these tropes name have since [[Administrivia/RenamedTropes been replaced]] with ones that are less esoteric, and what few still remain mostly stick around due to how [[GrandfatherClause ubiquitous they are with the site and its identity]].