The lack of ads. Were there ads? Of course there were. A reasonable amount with reasonable placement. Websites still functioned as intended without content being progressively more blocked on your screen, and they rarely required interaction to deal with them. Nowadays, if you can get a site that's not paywalled, the text field is so small you can only see a sentence or two between the bullshit.

It being much less busy with the general populace and corporation

Salad Fingers and Flash games. Always a fun time. Diablo til 1AM then ripping the power chord out suddenly when mom screamed, "Go to bed!". Power chord was also ripped on jump scare videos. Lazy daisy in a lemonade swimming pool and I blow smoke out my ears.

AOL chat rooms with strangers. Meeting my step-sister online first. Learning what a stuck up bitch she was as early as the response, "glasses?????"

Downloading crazy shit on Limewire. Ruining computers. Also my mom sitting up for hours on message boards, for boy band fan clubs. Me getting a Livejournal and making friends with a lot of shit that in retrospect was wildly inappropriate for a teen. Also making up shit about my brother in Livejournal that my family would read and act upon. Oops. Sorry bro.

Also that angry note he left me after taking the blame, "I know what websites you've been to you 'Playboy' you."

Anyway, I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.

Being young.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next "rank". Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you'd have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.

@Provider YouTube gives adsense money for the effort. Your written guide on some trashy 90s website or Medium doesn't. The only people who write tutorials nowadays, are the ones that are getting payed by corps for muh SEO. That is why all guides start with "What is X?" instead of giving it straight to you.

It used to be much more decentralized, peaceful, not-for-profit. No systematic tracking (No GA.js). No affiliate/Google Ad infestation.

Individual users had their own small, cozy, hobby websites, not for monetizing - purely writing about whatever they were personally interested in, not trying to increase page views. A lot of good, pure, text-based websites, which perfectly worked without JavaScript nor cookies. Early webmasters were able to type clean HTML directly and fluently using a plain text editor, not depending on centralized platforms, so page load was super-fast, not bloated.

Individual users themselves owned the Internet, so to speak; were not owned by centralized platforms.

I loved all the creative free geocities and angelfire websites other people made for their cyberpets and fandoms.

I miss the HTML chats. It was like a whole world to explore.

It was very user generated. And the search engines facilitated that, giving you very diverse results. This was long before the utter decline that is the current "authoritative" sources boosting. Now we're all herded into a few large web sites and social networks. It's a very sad state of affairs.

Off the top of my head, I miss that games used to have LAN play built in, and you could use apps like Kali to play ipx games over the Internet with a built in community

I miss msn messenger so much.

I miss Usenet.