The early Internet, I don't know, I wasn't there. The early web certainly wasn't full of scams. It was mostly made of stuff like the strawberry pop-tart experi

The early Internet, I don't know, I wasn't there. The early web certainly wasn't full of scams. It was mostly made of stuff like the strawberry pop-tart experiments, recently resurfaced on HN: https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/ https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/ . That was at the higher end of quality, and there was plenty of commercial stuff (think company websites, not eBay yet), but it all had that same spirit, which is so rare today. (HN has a bit of that spirit, which is worth putting up with some crap to get even a small dose of in these troubled days.) There was a major discovery problem though, which led to things like webrings and the birth of search engines and spam. Maybe not in that order.