[madeofpalk]

> We used to make websites because it was fun and at a point we lost the way

I know this is just some little tongue in cheek joke, but I can't help but vehemently disagree with this.

Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.

[jdietrich]

>Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.

The early internet was incredibly frivolous. Commercial activity was completely banned on ARPANET and NSFNET. SSL didn't come along until 1995. There was a brief but significant period before the first browser wars and the dot-com bubble, when lots of people were interested in this new internet thing but nobody knew what it was for.

I don't want to return to those days, but it's hard to overstate the extent to which the internet was just a toy for geeks.

[madeofpalk]

Do you reckon the person who made the site and the claim was around back on ARPANET?

[StavrosK]

I got online around the turn of the century and it was still frivolous. Hell, I contributed to some of the frivolity with my crappy personal teenage webpages.

EDIT: Now I made this[1] to make it easier to publish these kinds of frivolous sites.

[1]: https://hearth.eternum.io/

[wutbrodo]

I'm not sure that's true. The internet has largely shifted away from using customizable www sites for personal expression in the way people used to. Much of this activity has now moved to Facebook et al.

[madeofpalk]

I'm not sure that's true. People still have personal sites they use. Hell, I would argue that there are more ways for people to express themselves online now, and the raw number of people doing this is has massively increased.

"Commerical internet" existed 'back then' as well.

[wutbrodo]

Yes, obviously people still have personal sites, and obviously there are more raw personal sites. But for the average internet user and thus the modal exposure to the internet, it's become substantially more one-way, outside of the aforementioned centralized channels.

[kalleboo]

I made websites "because it was fun". To begin with I didn't even have hosting so it just lived on my harddisk. Even when it went online I couldn't even think of content to put on there, it was just cool linking pages together and stuff.

[emodendroket]

They did in the sense that the kind of person writing this was once doing it for fun instead of a job.