Everything was somewhere in between slashdot.org, ytmnd.com, and 4chan.
The nostalgia is entirely wasted on anyone who lived through 90s internet. It was cool because I was 12 and getting to drink from the information fire hose was a daily adventure. But it had all the same garbage politics, slop content, and horndog users of the modern internet.
The biggest difference between then and now is that Then Internet was considered a kind of counterculture (which meant 90s Reichwing Radio DJ Rush Limbaugh screeching like a stuck pig every time he heard about a new fad or meme he didn’t like) while Now Internet has your Rush Limbaugh tier content and your Chinese Rednote apps bumping into one another in the same oversized wave pool.
redwattlebird@lemmings.world 1 year ago
You never had to create an account to view anything in the website.
Mindless scrolling was not a thing because links were mostly nested.
It was also extremely easy to chat with perverts on mIRC, the Yahoo chat thing etc. Speaking of chats, all of your chat logs were stored locally on your PC as text files rather than on a cloud so you could delete them if you wanted.