>>15822035>End of 90s internet:A wild west. You could find pretty much anything in the clearnet. Conspiracy theories, guides to build bombs, guides how to make drugs, mp3s, warez, gore, cp, everything.
You just needed to know the URL from the specific host as the only means of "searching" for content was Yahoo, a manually curated (!) index of websites with various categories (all legal of course) For more specific stuff you had an insane abundance of forums, covering every interest and hobby, legal or illegal. Those forums were the place where all the nerds of their specific interest came together. The tone was always respectful, trolling didn't exist and everything other than friendly conversations regarding the topic was frowned upon. If that didn't work out for stuff you looked for, you'd hop into IRC and ask around there. IRC is a bit like discord, only with 1337 haxx0rz instead of troons.
Of course it was painstakingly slow: a 5mb mp3 could take 15min to download. Warez were splitted into small 3-5mb rar files (yes, winrar existed) which were stealthily hosted on uni servers by some nerds. Big fun downloading a game consisting of 55 rar files with the last needed file 404ing, rendering the whole endevour useless.
You could also download viruses and trojans to pester your PC illiterate colleagues and friends with, the stuff was legit and none of it had any malware affecting your system (unless you ran the stuff on your machine, of course)
I'd say that thanks to the higher hurdle of getting into the internet (you'd need a PC, which were very niche and a provider and then some knowledge how to set up a modem with the correct values, unless you were an AOL or CompuServe faggot), the whole medium was homogenous. Everyone learned tons of things, no one has had ill intentions towards the other, because we were all part of some revolutionary medium and seen each other like that.
Then normies came and ruined everything. This includes the vast majority of (You)
