[giantrobot]

> On the early internet, it was all personal sites.

Personal sites maybe but people wrote about stuff they liked. There were thousands of sites that just covered some niche topic or what today would be called a fandom. Sure there were sites that were just someone's journal about themselves but easily just as many semi-authoritative topic focused ones.

The Internet Archive has a number of scans of old "Internet Yellow Pages" books and Wayback archives of DMOZ and Yahoo!'s directory. Take a look some time, for any given subject there's tons of sites listed with tildes in the path.