[doug_durham]

An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

[TFNA]

The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.

[nine_k]

Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.

Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)

[manytimesaway]

The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.

[doublerabbit]

In the golden era the care wasn't there. I didn't care someone said something offensive. You just kind of shrugged and moved on. It shouldn't be said but hey they did; report & ignore. That's why 4chan is 4chan, Encyclopaedia Dramatica et cetera.

Political correctness eventually tainted the internet as then if someone's values were hurt, drama would roll around only fuelling the troll further. This later led to gatekeeping and entitlement; Tumblr as example.

The internet has now made everyone so sensitive and now most want to broadcast their feels upon social media or whatever, you end up with elitism of groups and communities who think they know best.

[magic_hamster]

For most of the 80s and 90s people didn't care about being online. It was kind of the opposite of gatekeeping, people immediately labeled computer users as geeks, nerds, socially inept freaks, etc. These labels took decades to wear off.

Even if some curious minds got past the stigma, they still had to have an actual reason to go online which for many people just didn't exist until e-commerce and social networks became a thing. And then they had to learn how to use computers. This still wasn't gatekeeping because literally anyone could put in a minimal effort and go online, but effort is the key word here.

It became truly effortless with smartphones and touch screens, but this also reduced interaction to likes and tweets, and users became content consumers to be exploited with ads. This is where we are today.

[stackghost]

>An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.

Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?

[isabelc]

Me and all the other poor Kmart shoppers in the 1990s got free Internet access from their "Bluelight" Internet access. Don't know if this was everywhere, but it was a think in the US.

[bigbuppo]

It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.

[Mezzie]

I had a Geocities page in 1995. I was 6 years old. (I also remember how people were kind of freaked out when they realized us kids were on there.)

I lived in rural MI and neither of my parents had a 4 year degree. I wasn't the kid of someone at MIT or in the Valley. We weren't an impoverished family, but we were somewhere between middle and lower-middle class. We were by far some of the lowest people on the web totem pole, socio-economically speaking, but access wasn't out of the question for people who didn't come from a lot of financial/educational privilege.

[bitexploder]

AOL existed…