[ccajas]

I was one of the many millions that got introduced to the internet via AOL. In the days of MySpace I just entered stuff on Google, and found many different forums related to my topics of interest. Or before that time, it was HotBot, Altavista and Lycos in that order.

The most social things I could think of in the late 90s, besides chatrooms and IM, were simple bulletin board systems (with the branched hierarchy style of posts like Reddit or HN), guestbooks (one-way shoutboxes, easy to spam links), or webrings.

Webrings were a cool concept because it ties in people with a common interest, but without being tightly dependent on where your site is hosted on. Your site or blog could be hosted anywhere, you'd just have to copy and paste some code for the link and button to lead you to the directory.

Similar ideas propped up in other communities, like fandoms of a fictional work, where they linked other websites of the same fandom via buttons with a unique design.