Why was the late 90s and 2000s the golden age of the internet?

[Bubble99]

Why was the late 90s and 2000s the golden age of the internet?

The late 90s and 2000s was best time for the internet way better than today where the modern internet is really terrible by handful of monopoly websites.

The late 90s and 2000s the golden age of chat rooms, message boards and everyone yes everyone every person making their own website.

We lost this today by the modern internet that is terrible by handful of monopoly websites today.

 

[AL2TEACH]

The late 90s and 2000s was best time for the internet way better than today

Yep, it seemed to be raw, wild and untamed then, lol.

 

[poorcody]

Back then you used to see "IMHO" everywhere. It seems so quaint now.

IMHO, the internet today is much much richer in quality information than it was back then. The problem is it wasn't just the high-quality stuff that came along. If you stay out of the muck, it's still a great experience. That's true in real-life too. Judgement is more important than ever.

---
"America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle... It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world." -- from 1989's inaugural speed by George H.W. Bush

 

[Bubble99]

Yep, it seemed to be raw, wild and untamed then, lol.

We can’t talk about politics here but people did not yell and scream or get mad like people do now. And people did not talk much about it in person like today.

I don’t remember political websites back then.

I think most conspiracy stuff and political stuff in the 90s and 2000s was mostly AM radio.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

We can’t talk about politics here but people did not yell and scream or get mad like people do now. And people did not talk much about it in person like today.

I don’t remember political websites back then.

I think most conspiracy stuff and political stuff in the 90s and 2000s was mostly AM radio.

Dude, there were tons of political websites back then. It just hadn't bled over into every other part of the internet.

 

[Bubble99]

Dude, there were tons of political websites back then. It just hadn't bled over into every other part of the internet.

I don’t remember family and friends back then talking about politics like they do today.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

I don’t remember family and friends back then talking about politics like they do today.

Family and friends weren't on the internet. Only us diehards back then. And by the mid to late aughts, social media was still mostly innocent and more for sharing with family and friends.

 

[IvyKing]

We can’t talk about politics here but people did not yell and scream or get mad like people do now. And people did not talk much about it in person like today.

I don’t remember political websites back then.

I think most conspiracy stuff and political stuff in the 90s and 2000s was mostly AM radio.

You obviously didn't spend much time hanging out on USENET, where flame wars were going full blast. Truth be told that USENET preceded the internet being opened to the "general public".

Search engines were in their infancy back in the 90's, so we didn't have the SEO's dictating site design and people felt more comfortable doing things their own way.

It's likely that a lot of the people showing up on forums had experience in being members of moderated forums such as what was on Compuserve.

 

[Silencio]

Usenet was the main game in town for disseminated discussions back in the 1980s. You tended to have mostly academics taking part, as academia was the core route for most people to get on the Internet back in those days, so discussions in most newsgroups were of a very high standard. I was on rec.sport.baseball in the late 80s and could contribute nothing as the posters there discussed nascent advanced statistics. I recognize many of those posters' names in MLB front offices and baseball media to this day.

Someone infamously spammed all the newsgroups with an ad for a law firm around 1990 or something, and the seal was broken — things really started changing for the worse after that. The WWW made the Internet more accessible for average people by 1995–1996, for good and for ill.

There were a fair amount of conspiracy theorists and crackpots lurking around the fringes of some of the newsgroups and IRC chats, so that's always been a part of the landscape. It's just that the trolls and rage-baiters have taken control of the Internet and thus the rest of mass culture because it's proven to draw attention and generate profits.

 

[Mousse]

No pop ups, no ads, no spam. And Google hadn't become evil.😉

 

[avheatherim]

The good elements of that 90's internet have been choked out by relentless data mining/tracking and monetization.

 

[boswald]

The good elements of that 90's internet have been choked out by relentless data mining/tracking and monetization.

The worst part is we let it happen.

 

[IvyKing]

Usenet was the main game in town for disseminated discussions back in the 1980s. ....

Someone infamously spammed all the newsgroups with an ad for a law firm around 1990 or something, and the seal was broken — things really started changing for the worse after that. The WWW made the Internet more accessible for average people by 1995–1996, for good and for ill.

The spamming was done a pair of green card lawyers, which led to a number of memes. IIRC, at that time, Usenet was still being propagated mainly by UUCP (kremvax anyone?). It was AOL giving access to Usenet that led to the eternal September problem.

One of my favorite memories was correcting Henry Spencer - done in factual way and getting an acknowledgement. Another was interacting with George Scithers who was the editor for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

Before the widespread use of the WWW, the typical usage for internet access included FTP, Gopher, remote login and email.

 

[boswald]

Usenet was the main game in town for disseminated discussions back in the 1980s. You tended to have mostly academics taking part, as academia was the core route for most people to get on the Internet back in those days, so discussions in most newsgroups were of a very high standard. I was on rec.sport.baseball in the late 80s and could contribute nothing as the posters there discussed nascent advanced statistics. I recognize many of those posters' names in MLB front offices and baseball media to this day.

Someone infamously spammed all the newsgroups with an ad for a law firm around 1990 or something, and the seal was broken — things really started changing for the worse after that. The WWW made the Internet more accessible for average people by 1995–1996, for good and for ill.

There were a fair amount of conspiracy theorists and crackpots lurking around the fringes of some of the newsgroups and IRC chats, so that's always been a part of the landscape. It's just that the trolls and rage-baiters have taken control of the Internet and thus the rest of mass culture because it's proven to draw attention and generate profits.

I still have mIRC open to this day. Nobody ever joins anymore, but you never know. It's not like it takes up a ton of memory.

 

[boppin]

Hi there,

Honestly, I don't think so, because back then most websites where only displayed correctly by using Microsoft Internet Explorer. And those Frame based websites where sometimes very confusing. The only thing I would miss is the <marquee> tag. Dead simple.