[salawat]

How do you think web rings worked exactly? Before SEO, you'd land on some person with a niche interest's page who'd generally know of someone else in that niche space. Those two would link to one another, effectively syndicating each other.

It wasn't until everyone started fighting SEO-wise that you ran into the issue of fraud pages of nothing but links and sketchy ads that were the byproduct of reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm of the time. In fact, before SEO, there really wasn't that much of a niche for "Social Media" proper. A creator's web page and web ring were basically the social networks of the time, and arguably much less addictive or prone to scraping in the sense most back and forth was BBS/IRC/Email/Forum.

I remember the first time I overheard someone pitching SEO while eating lunch with the lunch pool from the office. If I were more the type to barge in at that time I'd have called them out as the fool they were being for corrupting a seachable index. Little was I expecting at the time that engineering indexes was the New Big Business and that the Web I knew was in the process of being obliterated and replaced with the shark infested botnet and data hoard-i-tron we have today.

Imagine a world without ubiquitous IP geolocation. One without rampant browser fingerprinting. Without everyone and their brother wanting you to subscribe for a recurring revenue stream. Without widespread collusion amongst industry actors to embed DRM circuitry or backdoors into every General Purpose piece of hardware under the sun.

It was a completely different world and tone to computing. It was your tool, and it was there to empower you; not to shovel crap through your bloody hardware whether you wanted it or not.