[marginalia_nu]

> What strikes me most is that those people from 90th were putting their creativity into something only handful of people will ever see, they were effectively shouting to void.

Well you had visitor counters and guestbooks. There was obviously no expectation to go "viral" and have millions of visitors, but it felt social in a different way. More like a small cozy neighborhood, less like a train station.

[mysterydip]

I made a website for my amateur games at the time, with the requisite visitor counters and guestbook. I was fortunate enough to find an archive somewhere, and saw someone who worked at a library had come across my site and left some encouraging words. For me, that was the best part of the web back then.