I didn’t give permission for them to draw me like this.

To be fair, file structure navigation became more of a pain in the ass when Microsoft decided to rework their start menu to feed into their fucking store/web browser. It’s not a hard fix but tablet natives wouldn’t know any better. At work I still end up accidently searching the web sometimes when im searching for a file that wasn’t important enough to pin. I know basic file structure the modern UIs are just trash and not designed for local users.

For better or worse, content moderation was almost nonexistent. Of those 100s of forums and websites you could see just about anything. The degenerate and shock culture thrived as much as all the other random stuff. People can still find terrible things out there today but now there’s real effort to police and control the platforms. The big players don’t let the REAL terrible stuff on their systems. Rotten.com is always what I reference there. There used to be porn, TV shows, and movie, on YouTube. Copy right was a suggestion and free use was everywhere for homemade music videos and downloads. There was also less effort to protect children. There are still issues today but widely the internet is at least devided into more age appropriate spaces. Those spaces get invaded but it’s not nearly how it was. In the 90s or early 00s you were either assumed to be an adult or just as a kid tossed in with the general population. There was generally no avoidance if you were a minor like today.

That’s not to say the protections that exist today are perfect. It is more so that they exist at all and at least for appearances effort is made.

It kind of had a flea market / bazaar vibe. It really was that old west feel.

There are SO many levels of Terms of Services that help keep the modern internet clean that we just didn’t have back then. Before monetization. These days, you have your ISPs, search engines, and web hosts all working to keep things clean at a secondary level before you even get to the website. Rotten.com can’t exist today as easily because it’s to find a host that would allow it’s content. Then it would have to be searchable, not end up a blacklisted domain on forum websites, and also have protection from digital attacks, and it’s content would have to be regulated to make sure it doesn’t break laws to get shut down.

Back then, rotten.com was as easy to find as asking jeeves, or yahoo to show you a dead body. The whole internet was that. No laws no shared mortality.