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Between SEO and Googles own bullshit finding information online feels like trying to find the milk in a supermarket or the exit in a casino, designed to make you pass through as much bullshit that's completely unrelated to what you actually want as possible.

nothing was monetized.

Lmao.

Yes and no. It's important to remember that people lied and wanted to rage: but it was annonymous and we knew everyone was full of shit so it didn't matter.

I can literally never use Reddit again but all.my search results keep taking me there

Everyone lamenting this needs to check out neocities, or even get into publishing your own website. Even if it's on a "big evil" service like GoDaddy or AWS, whatever. As long as it's easy for you. Or learn to self host a site. The internet infrastructure itself is the same, but now we have faster speeds, which means your personal sites can be bigger and less optimized (easier for novices and amateurs to create). People still run webrings, people still have affiliate buttons, there's other ways to find things than search engines, and there's other search engines than the big ones anyways.

There are active communities out there that are keeping a lot of the old Internet alive, while also pushing it forward in new ways. A lot of neocities sites are very progressive. If you have an itch for discussion, then publish pages on your website in response to other people's writings, link them, sign their guestbook.

Email still exists. I have a personal protonmail that I use only for actually writing back and forth to people, I don't sign up for services with it aside from fediverse ones. People do still run phpbb style forums, too. You'll find some if you poke around the small web enough.

A lot of these things are not lost or dead. They just aren't the default Internet experience, they're hard to find by accident. But they are out there! And it's very inspiring and comforting.

YouTube wasn't around for half of the mid-2000s.

I remember Google search being in beta

Facebook only barely an idea mid 2000s?

Most of my friends had ditched MySpace for Facebook shortly after highschool and I graduated in 2003.

I always look back to the 1960s visionaries and their charmingly naive ideas about the future use of computers.

I suspect that if they could have seen the actual future they would have become plumbers.

I remember when the internet was only for nerds.. before it was ruined by the high school cool kids and the jocks

I'm so old I remember webrings.

The fediverse is similar enough for me :)

It feels unsustainable, right? Like the value of of this tsunami of advertising has to be inflated, especially with bots/agents taking over traffic. People’s tolerance for junk isn’t infinite. At some point the illusion has to crack, and the advertising bubble will pop and burn the internet/app ecosystems down, hopefully…

Why do people never mention anything other than YouTube? DailyMotion is trash now but was around then. Veoh was another good one. There were so many other video streaming platforms before YouTube's reign. Some forums still exists. Before Spotify, there was several music streaming platforms also and I'm not talking about LimeWire. playlist.com was legit before and GrooveShark was the Spotify before they decided to kill it off because couldn't profit. So many cool things before capitalism ruined them (e.g. Skype).

Gemini is trying to bring that back.
Although it may not be technically the best approach, the 56k vibe is there.

The corporations could not get their heads wrapped around the internet at first. They needed to deal with nerds and computer geeks to get anything done. These same people that they had kicked around and laughed at for being useless now had to be brought into boardrooms for product discussions. Then the dot com crashes happened and corporations learned that all of those people were not Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. All of these gave the internet an extended era that felt a bit like the "Wild West". AOL internet was a commercial product that got mauled constantly because it hired average skilled programmers, the really ingenious programmers were the ones developing Instant Message based "punters" and program crashing email "bombs".

It ain't years it's months ago...