alt Hacker News1999 was Dialup for me. The modem said "56k" but didn't actually connect at that speed, it was more like 4.4KB/sec max.
The biggest thing I grabbed then was an overnight bulk-downloading session from animewallpapers.com, made possible by using GetRight. It had a download queue, as well as the "GetRight Browser" which presented the links on a html page as files to select, or other html pages as directories to view.
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56k was bits, your 4.4KB was bytes, which is 36k bits. That was a pretty typical real world speed for dialup around 2000.
I remember a few years prior to that - I have faint recollections of dialling into BBSes or paying by the hour, so you'd want to plan in advance for what you might do on the internet while connected. A BBS often tracked what you uploaded vs downloaded, so unless you had something to share, you needed to be mindful of what you grabbed.
"56k" meant 7 kilobytes per second as a theoretical max. So 4.4 was ok. Everything with networks is done as bits, I think honestly for marketing reasons now