this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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It was good in the places you could trust and bad in others. Say, going over a familiar web ring you wouldn't fear anything. Going via links in a good web directory you would be cautious, but not too much. Looking for pr0n you would do a hard shutdown after a couple of suspicious popups.
I still prefer that time, because it was real, now you see what others intend for you, if not going out of your way, and then you saw whatever you happened upon. It's like a downgrade from a real thing to a plastic toy one.
I also miss that web design, because it mostly didn't conceal the fact that you are using hypertext. Buttons looked native or "like native", ads were in banners in specific places, areas of text were clearly separated. Good typographics.
You didn’t have to be looking for porn – it was super common to run across CP or beheading videos in random niche interest forums posted by trolls. So many times I saw something I did not want to see when clicking for a knitting pattern.
e: I have psychological scars from that Dan Pearl video – for a while in the mid-aughts, it was literally unavoidable unless you stopped using the internet entirely.
On the forums I visited there was an area where new users were allowed, intended for describing who they are and why they should be allowed further.
But generally - I think I might have seen something like that, but without registering it in my memory.