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Rage bait attention seeking absolutely was a thing back then, it was just severely limited and localized.

We need to just ban advertising. The free with ads model is toxic to humanity.

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).

I think those old forums dedicated to discussions and interests are still there. The internet has been urbanized and now most people live in large cities, but some people still live in small towns in the countryside.

The fediverse is similar enough for me :)

Pardon me, but Friendster was for friends - Myspace was for tricking people into listening to Nickelback.

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".

I'm so old I remember webrings.

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

On the early days of the internet, I found a website about a comic I like. I emailed the person who made the website. I told them that I liked the site, and I sent them a game that I'd made (which had nothing whatsoever to do with the comic or their site). They tried the game and said it was fun...

That kind of interaction can never happen any more. Money has ruined it. Scams and monetization, everywhere, making everything into manipulative toxic sludge.

The Internet was even better before 2001. Around 2002 is when paywalls started becoming a thing along with the increased enforcement of the DMCA.

Feels like we're all old men whose country was conquered

There were also "no girls on the Internet". Everything was gatekept, every space was some sysop's petty feifdom. Racism ran rampant, so pervasive as to be almost invisible.

It wasn't uniformly better.

We can't, and shouldn't go back. Ever forward.

Women used to post sexy photos of themselves just for the joy of getting a few people's attention.

It's a bit more nuanced. Trolling and ragebait absolutely was a thing, but there was still a certain sense that it was just part of the Wild West nature of the internet. Someone posting racist garbage on a phpBB would be a minor irritant that would catch a bit of flak but be otherwise ignored.

These days it's entire office blocks full of professional trolls armed with advanced analytics, profiling systems and AI paid to push political agendas. And the most frustrating part of it is that despite the fact that everyone knows this to be true, it's still working anyway and we have elected officials of ostensibly Developed countries repeating obvious bullshit they saw online.

It really doesn't need to be this way.

At any time, we can decide to open our own blog for $9 a year. At any time we can choose to ditch algorithmic socials.

If we don't like them, we don't need to use them, and just switch off.

Well... the type of stuff we long for are still around, it's just that we don't visit it as much anymore. Lemmy is a perfect example of this - it's around, it's better, but people still default to Reddit instead.