Web rings... Geocities "villages"... shitty amateurish home pages built from raw HTML with little spinny mailboxes and animated flags... crude jokes, crude websites, often based on someone's ISP free website space.

(I have saved a link to one memorable such site about a motorcycle hill climb event and the site is titled literally "Beer N' Titties". Still available on the wayback archive.)

I recall reading and referencing an AWFUL lot of junk on the freedom loving internet in the 90s through the mid 2000-oughts. It was really difficult to source non-bullshit.

PLUS. Recall the innumerable spam chain letters that (usually) senior citizens and those with lesser cognitive powers would keep going through many chains of forwardings? I'd have to service my mother in law's PC and I'd run into gargantuan emails that were 95% soandso@yoohoo.com reply to's.

I believe that today's social media captured significant shares of the old lady forwarding pictures of cats crowd.

I don't like how things are today, but I'm not certain that the internet of yore had much quality content either.