Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.
It was a different place, but worked ok.
Sounds like you’re forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn’t fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.
The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren’t the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc…
The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn’t figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.
That’s why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.
There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.
