I was there, but barely. Sites were generally labors of love regardless of accuracy or credibility. There were cold hard facts and hard science. There was also

I was there, but barely. Sites were generally labors of love regardless of accuracy or credibility. There were cold hard facts and hard science. There was also a substantial amount of wild theorizing about UFOs, parapolitics, or bigfoot, but almost all of it was presented in this basically honest way. It was just people putting up information that interested them. There were political sites but they were mostly straightforward and honest, even the extreme ones. If a site or forum was for Nazis or Leninists, it said so. Ads and other clutter were more minimal. This was before the dynamic web so documents were just hypertext except for a few forms and little basic widgets. A condensed description of the early net would be: uncluttered and mostly honest. IMHO three things killed this information (relative) paradise: spam, gamification, and manipulative propaganda techniques. These are listed roughly in order. Spam came first and killed all the open federated systems like usenet, free blog comments, trackbacks, etc. Anything not gated became deluged by spam. Email almost died too but in the end was too valuable to abandon, but it was "saved" largely by being taken over by a small number of providers with the resources to fight spam. To this day running your own mail server is a big PITA. The next blow was gamified social media and the algorithmic timeline. Social media started to eat the open web quickly, but social media itself was still mostly neutral until social feeds started to be driven by engagement maximizing algorithms and popularity started to be gamified. Humans started getting trained to optimize the content they create for the algorithm, and since that is optimizing for engagement that means divisive, sensational, or click bait content wins. The algorithms have basically nudge theory trained us all to be tabloid copy writers. Last came firms like Cambridge Analytica and their ilk that view the net as a way to do con artistry at scale. Now you can't even trust that the content is real at all or that the "people" posting it are honest or are real people. I also call this "spam 2.0". Spam 1.0 was the same message blasted everywhere. Spam 2.0 is spam personalized by AI and content mills.