alt Hacker NewsThat was the golden age of the internet. What followed was the total enshitification. Now, I barely use the internet. As a kid I could get lost on it for hours, there was so much discovery. This was before every link tried to sell you something or steal your information from you.
Being a nerd growing up in a rural area with access to the internet was a godsend to my teenaged years over the 1990s. So much discovery and fun. Video games weren't uber-competitive, yet. The early 1990s was amazing as most of the pre-commercial web was geeks with special interests, college kids, and nerds (including JWZ's proto-blog). My god, there were people like me out there! And they were grown up and living good lives!
There was bad/terrible stuff on the internet, too. For several years in the mid-to-late 1990s, the top IRC channels listed in alphabetical order were CSAM listings prefaced with special characters (eg 11111111!!!!!terriblechannelname). You'd eventually stumble onto some racist pages and, tame by modern standards, pornography. But it wasn't part of any organized corporate or nation-state agenda. Nowadays the internet feels like a tourist-trap where everybody is trying to take advantage of or sucker you.