[lkrubner]

But people didn't rely on search, as much, back then. I belonged to a few forums, and I'd visit one or two portals, almost every day as my starting point on the Web, and from there people would be recommending things, and I'd follow that. All through the 90s and into the early 00s, it was sites such as Everything and Digg and Slashdot that drove all traffic. Search-as-in-Altavista was ineffective, so people didn't rely on it. We all relied on certain forums, and those drove traffic in a more organic way. Of stuff we have nowadays, Reddit almost recreates that old world, but Reddit now operates in a context where online traffic has concentrated into 2 sites: Google and Facebook. There is no way to escape the current context, that traffic is now massively concentrated. There was a certain freedom to the 90s, in that no site could reliably capture even 1% of the Web traffic, a situation that we idealistically thought would last forever.