A 200-character text post was not 10KB. Tons of useful information was available in pure text. Also, most webpages were loading in far less than 500ms on a new

A 200-character text post was not 10KB. Tons of useful information was available in pure text. Also, most webpages were loading in far less than 500ms on a newer modems, 56k. More importantly, a lot of pure-text pages were focused on providing dense information that you would read for minutes. The load time was negligible in comparison. Today information density on the web is the opposite.